The DMA was nice enough to invite the DMNews team to their midtown office for lunch today to meet with new CEO Larry Kimmel. I had heard him speak before but we had never met in person.
He talked plenty about how the DMA plans to go about serving its members in the best way possible. One of the terms he used to describe how valuable direct is to marketers was “Quantifiable reliability.
After musing a bit about how in his early days in direct he played second fiddle to the general ad guys who pontificated about what should work, he said that on his first day in his new role, he talked one-on-one with many of the DMA’s 36 board members and wrote an open letter to constituents asking for feedback on what the organization was doing well and what it could improve on. His first steps, rooted in quantifying the issues facing both the DMA and the industry as a whole, seem like a reliable first step.
