DMA Launches New Tech Council

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has announced that its former "Marketing Technology and Internet Council" will be reborn as the DMA "Marketing Technology Council" (MTC).

The Council's mission states that it will serve as ‘a resource that represents, educates, and communicates the benefits of technology-enabled marketing, creating the most efficient and effective marketing processes that deliver superior shareholder and customer value.’“

The MTC plans to reach out to the membership, create a dialogue, and help them to understand how to solve their marketing technology issues so their marketing processes will work more efficiently. Technologies involved include sales force automation, enterprise resource planning, marketing operations management, marketing automation, data quality, digital asset management, marketing resource management, and customer relationship management technology.

The old MTIC was a doomed, rudderless disaster. The new MTC may fare better; it will be doing a session at DM Days in New York this month on understanding and implementing a marketing technology plan. Let's see if it can provide not only guidance but leadership (and a little vision, maybe), which was absent from its predecessor.

The odds are dicey, though. In the list of technologies, if "ERP" is meant to stand for order management and fulfillment, then why didn't they label it something more appropriate than ERP? And if they do mean ERP, then where is order management (and why is ERP a "marketing" technology)? One assumes "marketing operations management" relates to campaign management, no?

And where is the Web in all of this???? Conspicuous by its absence, I'd say!

If the Council itself is confused and wobbly on its own foundation, how can it bring clarity to the marketplace and the user community?

Frankly, if this were a stock, I'd short it.