By Charles Ping, Marketing Direct, 01 January 2008, 00:00am

Charles Ping: Numeracy could be DM's saviour

Time flies when you're enjoying yourself. That's what they all say, although it's quite possible for "busy" to be substituted for "enjoyment" when sitting at a desk.

As I exit a role that I've had for 14 years - years that in my mind seem to have been wedged between only five Christmas holidays - it's probably as good a time as any to take a glance in the rear-view mirror of life and see if the past can teach me anything of what could be of value in the future.

The first is the general poor grasp of mathematics by a large range of people in business. Recent figures suggest that our 15-year-olds are the worst at maths in the developed world. My hunch, based on personal experience, is that the lack of agility with numbers goes back further than that. But it's generally a skill that direct marketers, even the creative ones, have mastered - after all, numbers define the success or failure of a campaign.

At a time when the internet, which is a fundamentally numbers-based environment, is playing a large part in all marketing, it's a strange conundrum that numeracy isn't considered as important by many as visual literacy. In my opinion, this gives direct marketers an opportunity to influence the agenda.

The second observation is that the industry is getting older. Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part. Simon Hall set up what is now Proximity in his late 20s. John Watson must have been at least on his third agency by the age of 30 and he still shows no signs of slowing down.

You now need to be at least 35 to be disgustingly successful, which may please some readers, but personally it gives me little consolation.

The final observation is that even woolly, brand- led corporates have seen that the future of marketing is heavily dependent on segmentation and we, as DM-literate people, know that segmentation is driven by good quality data. This is as true for the behavioural data that is spewed out as a by-product of website tracking as it is for traditional DM data about identifiable individuals. The information might not be neat and tidy and won't be all in one place, but that's the area that gives me the greatest excitement for the future.

I hope that readers of Marketing Direct share my enthusiasm.

- Charles Ping is a consultant and former head of CRM at Guardian News and Media. Email: charles.ping@haymarket.com.