To me the term “Direct Marketing” (DM) describes the tactic of annoying as many strangers as possible with junk, in the hope that a tiny percentage might be interested in buying your product.

Like most people I spend a good deal of my time trying to avoid getting on and removing myself from marketing databases and failing miserably.

For instance, I once foolishly bought a ticket to Villa Park online. I now get regular Christmas cards from The Villa despite being a Hull fan! Which frankly is an unwelcome reminder of the 0-3 defeat we suffered that day.

I take great pleasure in being rude to telesales people too. I like to explain just how low down on the food chain they are and give them career advice about contributing positively to society rather than doing the evil work of a brand that are paying them a pittance in order to interrupt my dinner.

The UK’s Direct Marketing Association (DMA) will tell you that when done “properly” DM is a cost effective way of generating business and that it is their mission to “protect the consumer” from unethical, unscrupulous or ignorant practitioners, which is all very noble.

However, email, with it’s near zero delivery cost, has presented the perfect DM channel and it is just those sorts of people who have moved in – or ‘spammers’ as they are now known.

Interestingly, the law says that before you can send a person a commercial email, they need to have given you explicit permission (opt-in). In my case that would be when I accidentally ticked the wrong box during an online purchase.

However, offline the opt-out rule still applied. That’s where consumers have the right to tell brands to stop bothering them. Which, assuming legislation mirrors the people’s wishes, suggests we are all less tolerant of online DM than offline DM campaigns.

But as any professional direct marketer will tell you, permission-based databases, accurate targeting and above all personalisation will always be the critical factors to DM success, on or offline, not the machine gun approach of the spammer.

These days consumers under 25 communicate more via social networks than email and social media is set to be the dominant online channel. Thanks to its viral distribution potential the rewards of marketing via social media can be immense.

However, the chances of collateral brand damage from a clumsy direct marketing approach is also increased with empowered consumers able to extract social media revenge.

So DM will have to become subtler, if it is to make hay in a world becoming very resistant to crude commercial messages.

The good news for DM is that targeting can be more accurate given the wealth of personal information social networkers make available, yet ‘databases’ cannot be bought. Brands have to create their own, by building fans and followers for example, which will take time and resource.

Despite the DMA’s efforts, for me the term “Direct Marketing” has been tarnished, as so many amateurs have deployed it in an unprofessional way.

Perhaps it needs rebranding but it will definitely need to become a lot less annoying if it is to prosper as a marketing discipline in this digital age.