Call it the cutting edge in marketing products. Call it an innovative new technique for sales. Just don't call it junk mail. About 35 Communications majors learned this lesson last Friday, as the Richard D. Hammond Career Program in Direct Marketing drew them to the Annenberg School for Communication to learn about the future of direct marketing. The conference specifically focused on databases, telemarketing and the Internet. The program was a stop on a national tour that aims to inform students about and interest them in direct marketing, according to speaker Henry DiSciullo, president of Names in the News, a direct marketing firm. "It's not an exaggeration to say that direct marketing is at the cutting edge of marketing today," said Communications Professor Joseph Turow, who introduced the speakers. "Today, the frontiers of marketing are on line." A different expert from within the industry taught each of the program's four segments. The first speaker, Ellen Wasserman, an executive with advertising agency Ammirati Puris Lintas, gave an overview of direct marketing. She defined it as "an interactive system of marketing that uses one or more advertising media to effect a measurable response at any location." DiSciullo and Joseph Colletti, national sales manager of Database America Companies, spoke jointly on the topic of database marketing and personal privacy. Rudy Oetting, a senior partner of Oetting & Company, Inc., discussed the role of telemarketing in direct marketing. He said the majority of jobs in America are somehow related to telemarketing -- even categorizing stock brokers as telemarketers because they primarily conduct business over the telephone, though he said most brokers would prefer to avoid the label. Many students expressed particular interest in the final segment, which discussed Internet marketing. Andrew Sternthal, a recent graduate of Indiana University who now directs new business development at the Internet music store Cdnow.com spoke about doing business on the Internet. "A lot of people think that the Internet is flaky, that it's not a real business," said Sternthal. "But it's real and it's here." The crowd, a mixture of upperclassmen, attended the event mostly because of its impact on their potential careers. "I came to get a better understanding of the direct marketing process and to help me in my job-seeking process," said College senior Alyson Tesler. College junior Cameron Schmitt said he attended the program "basically because my resume is pretty barren." He called the lecture a good general overview of opportunities in direct marketing. Many of the Communications majors said they would like to have more of these kinds of programs for undergraduates. "At Penn, the Communications major for undergrads is very broad," said College junior Sarah Leshner. "They should have more of these things for the different segments [of the major]." College junior Jennifer Lang agreed. "Even though none of this [direct marketing] directly pertains to what I want to do, it gives me ideas about what else is out there," she said.
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