Stand tall, direct marketers: Your time has come.

After years of being kept “below the line,” out of the proverbial front office and VIP suites, direct finally got its ticket to the big game.

Why? Because the owners and managers of marketing have finally come around to your way of thinking. The trade press has been full of news lately about the changes that media of various kinds are making so they can demonstrate measurable results.

Yes, it’s true: Traditional media are finally getting the importance of ROI for their advertiser clients, something that direct marketers have always been adept at doing. Oddly enough, you have your digital colleagues to thank for most of this. By demonstrating how effectively a brand can track and measure the impact of its marketing, digital technology has helped push accountability in advertising.

So we witness the outdoor industry working on a program for 2008 that will provide traffic counts and track eye movements as people drive past billboards. And television, which has long tracked its numbers through logs kept by a few viewers, is ramping up its investment so that it can translate those numbers into product purchases.

What they don’t yet understand, though, is that it’s not so much what we do, but the way we do it. At its heart, direct marketing is about testing and measurement and using the results to improve the next round of execution. ROI isn’t a bell or whistle for direct; it’s the very rationale for the medium.

In a world of client-driven need to demonstrate ROI, direct fits the bill. Whether print or digital, we can be confident we’ll be around for a long time to come.