The charming suburb of Amsterdam called Ouderkerk a/d Amstel (the old church on the Amstel)  lies some 15 leisurely minutes by car from Amsterdam’s southern limits.  It was founded somewhere in the mists of the past but probably in the 1500′s.  It boasts the Amstel River, of course, a marina, several charming bridges, a picturesque “old Dutch” shopping street right out of the back lot of a movie studio, a synagogue and Jewish cemetery from the 17th century, and a small dm agency that has been a success for nearly 48 years, “vanden busken-the dialogue & branding agency”.   On a pre-Thanksgiving trip to the Netherlands, I was invited to meet the agency by its founder Pieter van den Busken, and learn a little about the market.

Pieter is now semi-retired and devotes time to helping maintain the global Interdirect Network of small interactive agencies he helped establish.  There are now 28 agencies with  offices in 31 countries in a confederation that spreads ideas and skills around the world, thus speeding up the transfer of knowledge.

The agency, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2011,  is run by the second generation of van den Buskens, Caspar and Arnaut, from a single story glass-walled building on the edge of a canal that looks like it was built last year, but which is over 30 years old.

Like everything else regarding marketing, their workload make-up has dramatically changed during the last 5 years, now being 40% online work compared to 5% only 5 years ago. Direct mail has become a much smaller percentage of turnover, and thus physical work.  In fact one of their long time clients, a publisher, has reduced mailing volumes in the last 4 years to about 30,000 pieces, from 1 million!   In short, a traditional publisher, the industry sector which together with finance constitutes the core of a postal system’s customers,  has migrated their marketing nearly totally to the digital on-line realm.  This is quite typical of most of their clients.

In the coming weeks, we will highlight some of the van den Buskens’ work in this space and in the newsletter.  Watch this month’s newsletter  for a synopsis of the state of direct marketing taken from a recent survey of 125 companies by the Dutch DMA. To whet the reader’s appetite, the screen capture below is from a campaign the agency did in German and Dutch for a Wales tourism promotion office.  The viral campaign invited visitors to the site to sheer one of the Welsh sheep one would see on a holiday in Wales, to share the game with others, and to register for email information from the tourism agency.