summ( )n

Before the creative gathering in Delft, I had one more meeting, in the office of Van Den Busken Dialogue and Branding agency. A rare case, but I didn’t take any pictures (can’t remember why), so to keep the visual look and feel of this blog consistent I have to use a helping hand of the Google maps.

I was invited to make a presentation combined with a game for the InterDirect, a network of independent direct marketing agencies, and this was my first meeting with Pieter van den Busken himself, the founder and currently a chairman of the network. Pieter is one of those rare people whose biography is also a history of the industry they work in (and often shaped – like Henry Ford for automotive or George Gallup for public opinion polls. Ok, we don’t call DM (direct marketing) a BM (Busken marketing)… but may be we should, at least in the Netherlands. it’s interesting to notice that the meaning DM is constantly changing – it used to mean ‘direct mail’, then ‘direct marketing’, and now ‘dialogue management’. The same business, yet ever changing, I was told.

Pieter turned 70 last year, but he is as ‘workaholic’ as always before. We had a great conversation (including with his two sons who currently run the Dutch DM agency he founded many years ago), and made a deal. So now it’s time for me to figure out what is