“Direct is digital and digital is direct” . . . or so says the USDMA at their annual forum. Ok, so now what? Or to put it another way, so what? Claims like this are best analysed by a two part test: 1) asking who stands to gain by making them, and; 2) testing whether by accepting them they cause you to act differently. Assert this same maxim to www.akqa.com and you are unlikely to have them revise their business strategy (which incidentally is already laser-focused on digital outcomes) in the stark realization that the goal posts have just moved. But they and those like them aren’t the ones making the claim. So who really is and why? If the two are the same then why are some digital purists so disdainful of DM and so dismissive of its practitioners as old-hat? Why are some DM practitioners so keen to ingratiate themselves to digital buyers by convincing them that the two are the same? Precisely because they are not. And regardless the debate is banal. It fails the second test. What matters most, and quite possibly only, is outcomes and the strategies to get them. And marketing, in all its forms, is not the home of strategy or even much its executor any more. So spurious claims about what’s what will only result in spurious arguments about who cares. If there is any big point to be made then it is this. That the Digital Revolution will follow the same rules as the Industrial one. There will be winners and losers. You can already speculate on who’s which. But for marketing as a whole to be a winner it has to earn its rightful place back at the table of corporate decision makers. That will take more than maxims.