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With a mixture of sadness and excitement—I know, a paradox—this December installment of Inside Direct Mail will be our final print issue. That's the sad part. The exciting part is that IDM will continue to live on the web in the form of the Inside Direct Mail Weekly e-newsletter.
So while paradox number two probably just hit you in the face—a print publication about printed direct mail is going digital?!—reality was an even stronger negotiator. Common to every print publication on the planet, advertising revenue was down and the subscriber base remained flat. It'd be disingenuous to not mention those factors.
But just as we're not immune to the same economic stresses that IDM's audience—copywriters, direct mailers, direct marketers, designers, vendors, etc.—faces each day, we've reported that there can be some silver linings to an economic slowdown. It forces both the individual and company to reassess how they're working, where they're investing employee time and financial capital ... and possibly how they're building, rather than eroding, the business's potential for the short and long term.
We're shifting into build mode right now, for we realized that with the Who's Mailing What! Archive, we actually have an opportunity to leverage that specialized information—as well as the Directory of Major Mailers and the E-mail Campaign Archive—through an online portal that will be called DirectMarketingIQ.com. Scheduled to launch in January, this portal will feature IDM-related content and special reports (on both sectors and companies), open up search to all past IDM articles, and send out Inside Direct Mail Weekly to an audience far larger than anything print mustered.
The trick, of course, is to get it read. To create discussions. To build a larger direct mail community. To become a veritable resource center for anyone involved in the direct mail industry. To build both the name of Inside Direct Mail and our array of related products. That's our job.
If we do it right, it will give you more direct mail intelligence than ever before, along with greater access. That's something we can all live with, for a long time. So raise a glass with me to this final print issue of IDM as well as to its online future and direct mail in general (for more on that, please read our "The Future of Direct Mail ... Today" cover story).
So while paradox number two probably just hit you in the face—a print publication about printed direct mail is going digital?!—reality was an even stronger negotiator. Common to every print publication on the planet, advertising revenue was down and the subscriber base remained flat. It'd be disingenuous to not mention those factors.
But just as we're not immune to the same economic stresses that IDM's audience—copywriters, direct mailers, direct marketers, designers, vendors, etc.—faces each day, we've reported that there can be some silver linings to an economic slowdown. It forces both the individual and company to reassess how they're working, where they're investing employee time and financial capital ... and possibly how they're building, rather than eroding, the business's potential for the short and long term.
We're shifting into build mode right now, for we realized that with the Who's Mailing What! Archive, we actually have an opportunity to leverage that specialized information—as well as the Directory of Major Mailers and the E-mail Campaign Archive—through an online portal that will be called DirectMarketingIQ.com. Scheduled to launch in January, this portal will feature IDM-related content and special reports (on both sectors and companies), open up search to all past IDM articles, and send out Inside Direct Mail Weekly to an audience far larger than anything print mustered.
The trick, of course, is to get it read. To create discussions. To build a larger direct mail community. To become a veritable resource center for anyone involved in the direct mail industry. To build both the name of Inside Direct Mail and our array of related products. That's our job.
If we do it right, it will give you more direct mail intelligence than ever before, along with greater access. That's something we can all live with, for a long time. So raise a glass with me to this final print issue of IDM as well as to its online future and direct mail in general (for more on that, please read our "The Future of Direct Mail ... Today" cover story).
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