After nearly 16 years of off and on consulting, the requirements for having fun and making a little money in the process revolves around one's credibility as a consultant.

This is not mine, but rather a question posed by a marketing leader of other CMOs and marketing executives throughout the US who are MENG members.

Have you ever taken on a marketing project you just couldn't get your hands around because nobody was clear on the objective or even what questions to ask?

Email marketing continues to grow unabated despite the down economy. Companies use email for retention, acquisition, PR and BtoB lead generation.

The answer is partially "no" because today's branding advertising sells product harder than ever drawing closer to the direct marketing approach. Few clients allow their agencies to simply position the product.

It comes about innocently enough from general agencies and large advertisers whose dropping sales are forcing them into the new world (for them) of the direct response strategy.

Suppliers to agencies, here's a disturbing question for you. When your agency contracts with outside suppliers, will the agency pay your bill if their client does not pay? The agency... right? Wrong.

The advent of the internet phenomenon has attracted many new players to the direct marketing space. This is welcome news to professional direct marketers. But there is one area that continues to frustrate us.

In the so called "good old days", the big communication challenge for direct marketers was to translate marketing objectives to database mainframe programmers.