After 3 decades in direct marketing, 2 full-blown recessions and 1 pandemic, GRS Associates Ltd is now one of the last remaining advocates of traditional database compilation and maintenance methods.

Of course the marketing industry should be open-minded to new technology and evolve accordingly, but it would appear that today’s insatiable appetite for ‘fast, cheap and easy’ has replaced the original concept of enhancement and improvement, with the evidence now starting to show through the big claims that have accompanied flawed attempts to revolutionise a once thriving industry.

Only so much technology can be employed before it becomes ‘corner-cutting’.

Only so many corners can be cut before quality becomes compromised.

And only so much quality can be compromised before something becomes unfit for purpose.

We are exhorted to “get with the program” because “everyone is doing it” and “it’s the next big thing”. Nobody genuinely understands more than GRS how the disruption of the last few years has produced such a devastating effect on our industry, but when the short-term damage control measures become default or favoured practices, the future of direct marketing looks decidedly bleak!

Gone are the days of telephone research and record-by-record manual list cleaning as the standard. Instead now, aggresive data mining applications just simply scour the internet ‘scraping’ or ‘harvesting’ contact names favouring quantity over quality and making a mockery of most data protection laws. This very flawed process also has limited scope for gauging the recency of the data being gathered and ends up collecting a combination of the good, the bad and the downright useless.

To compound the problem, the absence of effective quality control leaves such databases littered with all manner of errors from basic spelling to fundamental layout to wildly inaccurate and mismatched fields.

So much database content is simply poached from other sources, repackaged and then rebranded by a growing number of resellers that seem to spring up everywhere, resulting in the circulation of the same tired old prospect names which overwhelms those prospects while short-changing the list buyer.

At GRS we still believe the human eyeball makes all the difference and this remains pivotal to our business process. Whether or not our view is broadly shared by list buying clientele, only time will tell…