AMSTERDAM – DMSA, the Dutch DMA, plans to launch a bimonthly magazine, “In Sight”, next month to tell a controlled circulation of 12,000 what the Dutch DM industry is up to.
“We need to be more extrovert about what we are doing and to tell more people about it,” DMSA managing director Dr. Frits van Dorst explained. “We want to give issues like education and lobbying more public exposure.”
The target audience is far larger than the industry itself – the DMSA newsletter goes to 1,200 members – and is aimed at politicians, academics and executives at major corporations.
“This won’t be shameless propaganda,” van Dorst said. “We plan to make room for criticism from those opposed to direct marketing, like consumer organizations. We expect to build up our list over the next couple of months.”
DMSA is hiring a professional editorial staff to put out the magazine and will only act as publisher. But it does expect to promote conferences and other events, area the organization is expanding.
A three-day event devoted to what van Dorst calls “telecommerce” will be held in Utrecht in April with the precise date yet to be fixed. “We expect a lot of telemarketing companies to attend.”
Organizers of the new show include DMDSA, BBP, a major Dutch business publisher, and Jaarbeurs, the Utrecht conference center. KPN, the largest telecom in the Netherlands, is a key sponsor.
Van Dorst does not expect the new show to reach the dimensions of the traditional autumn conference and exhibition held in Maastricht, which he called the “mother conference,” but thinks he will attract 700 paid conference attendees and perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 visitors.
“We think it is important that the telebusiness industry has its own party. People like to be together and people in the telebusiness are different from those in DM agencies and DM companies.”
Van Dorst also said that a sales promotion conference is also in the planning stage, this one to be held at the Amsterdam conference center.
