Sometimes direct marketers use media such as door hangers, package inserts, radio, television, magazines, newspapers, E-mail, web banner ads, pay-per click ads, billboards or transit ads. And along with Ad Age, “In 2005, U.S. agencies generated more income from marketing services (that include direct marketing)rather than from traditional advertising and media.

Under the law, it is prohibited for telemarketers to call people who had registered themselves on the list. After the list had operated for the period of one year, over 62 million people had signed up.

Couponing is traditionally used in print media to elicit a reaction from the reader. A typical example is a coupon that the reader cuts out and presents to a super-store check-out counter in order to avail of a discount. Coupons in newspapers as well as in magazines cannot be considered direct marketing, for the reason that the marketer incurs the cost of supporting a third-party medium (the newspaper or magazine); direct marketing intends to circumvent that balance, paring the costs down to exclusively delivering their unsolicited sales message to the client, without supporting the newspaper that the consumer looks for and welcomes.

Another type of direct marketing has occurred of the market prevalence of personal voice mailboxes, as well as business voicemail systems. Due to the ubiquity of email marketing, and the expidenture of direct mail and telemarketing, voicemail marketing presented a cost efficient means by which to reach potential clients with the warmth of a human voice.
Mistreatment of consumer marketing applications of voicemail marketing resulted in an large quantity of “voice-spam”, and prompted many jurisdictions to pass laws regulating client voicemail marketing.