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Hard as it may be to believe, DMA06 isn't the only fall event worth attending. Another is the Promo Live conference, produced by Direct publisher Prism Business Media.

A direct marketing chauvinist, I felt like I was entering the enemy camp when I went to it last month. Brand and promotion advertisers are the ones who don't know which half of their advertising works, right?

But it might be time to update that view. For starters, I learned that DMers and promo people speak the same language (if with slightly different accents).

For example, Pamela J. Batlis, who runs the MarketKeys agency, urged listeners to focus on “behavior, not stated intent.” DMers have known that for millennia.

And Laura Patterson, head of VisionEdge Marketing, noted that for brand marketers, “predictive metrics are the final frontier.” Nothing new there, either.

Granted, some of the promotions I heard described were right out of “The Magic Christian.” In one, consumers were lured to a mud pit containing sticks with monetary values on them.

(Hmm. In Terry Southern's classic, people climbed into a vat of heated cow manure to find the money sprinkled into it.)

But others were inspired. For instance, Kellogg's offered free jeans to women who lost weight after eating Special K, and gave them another pair every time they shed a few more pounds. (Of course, the DMer in me wanted to know more about the follow-up.)

Meanwhile, Momentum Worldwide CEO Chris Weil said in a keynote talk that marketers should focus less on tactics and more on integration.

Can promotion and direct marketing be integrated?

Why not? The goal of both is to get consumers to do something. (Businesses, too, although the promotion people I met don't seem to focus on them so much.) And they often use the same media, including e-mail and direct mail.

What's more, there's a thin line between the strategies used by both.

Most DM promotions are built around price and premiums. In the end, it's the offer that counts.

But some try things like sweepstakes (at least the circulation people do). Sweeps vendor Don Jagoda Associates has been at DMA events in the past.

Then there's the technology, which looks the same even if it serves slightly different ends. One exhibitor, Festival Media Corp., has an ordering/reporting system that uses demographics and census data to help you select events. It's similar to list ordering tools I've seen.

I had fun at Promo Live. And when I felt overwhelmed by new things and people, I sought out the familiar faces at Walter Karl's booth.

Yes, they were there, too.