News

Direct marketers need to look at the bigger brand picture and realise that managing existing customers is just as important as recruiting new ones.

The last time I went to Wales it was awful. Pitch-dark, muddy and dangerous underfoot. Believe me, if you think you’ve had a bad week at work, you’re lucky you weren’t working in the slate mines at Blaenau Ffestiniog in the old days.

Online travel operator Ebookers has appointed Stephens Francis Whitson (SFW) to work on its prospect and customer marketing programme.

Ebookers has hired Stephens Francis Whitson, the direct start-up backed by VCCP, to handle its customer relationship management.

DMA (UK) stalwart Wanda Goldwag's assertion about talent in the direct sector - that agencies are in the midst of a skirmish over skills with their more glamorous advertising counterparts - is echoed by experts keen to hear the industry being more proactive about extolling its virtues.

Ask a few outspoken, dyed-in-the-wool direct marketing agency stalwarts what they think of their advertising counterparts, and you might get a stout defence of this sector, or a colourful rebuke of the other. Traditionally, the term 'junk mail' has been used as a stick by adland to beat direct marketers with, while many direct practitioners consider branding shops too woolly for their own good, and never the twain shall meet.

So, with my new-found loyalty back at KillerShark, I've been on the new business trail again, and appear to have landed a peach of an account that'll hit my targets for a few months, to say nothing of keeping Annie in the manner in which she's, scarily, getting very accustomed.

VCCP start-up Stephens Francis Whitson (SFW) has been charged with developing a pan-European customer management programme for golf club manufacturer Callaway Golf. The pitch was handled by The Haystack Group.