An interview with Maria Moynihan the festival director the Volvo Ocean Race 2009 which called into Galway during the summer of 2009. The overall economic impact was almost â60m Euros and in the interview Maria discusses the sponsorship support that the Festival got this year - she talks about the way that their media partners were able to achieve a return from a modest â300K in media support.

Also in this podcast Colm Carey ( pictured ) from The Research Centre talks about trends in qualitative market research.

Last Friday I met with Dr Martha Rogers who was speaking at a seminar hosted by SAS and the Irish Direct Marketing Association (IDMA) in the Merrion Hotel.

Rogers was quite persuasive in her assertion that crisis of short-term thinking is damaging business at the moment - she made a very interesting point I think in asserting that we should be carefful when we use the term response rates. Typically when we hear a report of a DM campaign we hear figures of targets for response rates from 2-50% but, as Rogers correcly points out, all campaigns have a 100% response rate - it's just that sometimes we only see part of that response. We need to pay equal attention to those that exhibited indifference or indeed hostility to our message as these may inflict more damage to the bottom line ultimately than any perceived short-term success. I got a chance to interview Dr. Rogers and will be including this in a DM special soon on The Persuaders Radio Show.