DO-NOT-CALL REGISTRY Marketers resort to mail, e-mail

About half of America's households have registered on the list.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Along with legal challenges by telemarketers, the government's do-not-call list is creating a fresh wave of business for other direct-marketing methods.
For one thing, dinner times free of calls to plug siding or timeshares are going to mean more home-repair, resort, refinancing and credit-card pitches stuffed in the mailbox, industry experts say.
A major southeastern Pennsylvania direct-mail company, CC3, is already seeing an impact.
"For October, November and December, our volume is up even more than last year, in part attributable to the economy coming back a little bit, and in part to the movement of communication from do-not-call to direct mail," said Don McKenzie, president and chief executive officer of CC3.
McKenzie doesn't consider those envelopes that bring things other than personal letters or checks to be junk mail.
"We feel that is very unfair," he said. "Research shows consumers prefer mail over telemarketing."
Direct mailers were affected by the recession, sagging advertising spending generally and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. And they were hit by the anthrax scare that, in late 2001, had some people using surgical masks and gloves to handle anything that arrived by mail.
That industry storm was already passing as the economy showed signs of reviving, and fears of mail-borne attacks faded.
Regulations battle
Nearly 54 million telephone numbers have been registered on the government's do-not-call list, in a nation of 105 million households.
"So it's about half the households in the United States," said Michael Petsky, chief executive of Petsky Prunier, an investment bank that focuses on direct marketing and related businesses. "The beneficiaries of do-not-call will be direct mail and e-mail."
The telemarketing industry is battling the regulations, with an appeals court hearing scheduled for Monday in Tulsa, Okla. But advertisers get the message.
Whatever the legal outcome, the do-not-call efforts will mean more mail and e-mail, said Robert Bulmash of the privacy group Private Citizen, based in Naperville, Ill.
Direct mail will benefit the most, according to an October survey in the industry newsletter DM News.
Sixty percent of the readers polled who said they had been using outbound telemarketing said they would increase their use of other methods.
Asked what methods, 81 percent said they would use mail, and nearly 69 percent said they would use e-mail or online marketing.
Rising revenues
CC3 was already bounding back from the industry setbacks. McKenzie has reorganized and integrated what had been five separate businesses since he was hired as president and chief executive of the former Communications Concepts Group in 2000. The company has spent $40 million on technology and equipment in four years.
Revenues have risen 65 percent in the past three years, compared with an industry growth rate of 4 percent to 8 percent, McKenzie said. He said revenues increased 30 percent in the past year alone, to $130 million for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, placing CC3 among just a handful of direct-marketing companies with revenues over $100 million.
One of the largest, San Antonio-based Harte-Hanks Inc., a direct-marketing and shopper-advertising company with revenues of more than $908 million a year, hasn't predicted how much the do-not-call list will affect revenue, said Dean Blythe, chief financial officer.
"We don't think we have seen anything yet," he said.