I came to direct marketing in the mid-1980s from publishing, when direct mail was rocking and rolling and data was king. Somewhere along the way, energy levels became lackluster, data lost its value and the once high-margin list business became a thing of the past. We could blame Sept. 11, the anthrax scare, postal rate increases, privacy concerns, the Iraq war, a sluggish economy or even exchange databases in the catalog and publishing industries.