All industries evolve. Things change, develop, improve. Direct Marketing is no different to any other sector, and the major change of the last ten years has been the growth of information technology. Is this a good thing?
For me, the jury is still out. The first mailshot I organised, circa 1985, involved buying some labels, writing a letter, getting it printed and putting it through a franking machine. Post was king in those days. It seemed more worthy than other direct channels, and certainly more controllable. It required thought, and took time. Nowadays, on a bais level, armed with a few email addresses, you can whack out the same thing in a matter of minutes.
B2B direct marketing is not always massive. Most businesses are small, and most mailshots are in the hundreds, not the thousands. Of course there are big mailings, but there are not many companies that do things on a large scale. The temptation to DIY, on the cheap, has resulted in a commoditisation of the market. Marketing 'departments' are expected to achieve big things from their desktops, almost instantly. A database is no longer a difficult thing to build. Email addresses can easily be collected and stored, DIY style. And using them is so easy. This ought to be a good thing, but I am afraid it is not.
You can buy email addresses for peanuts. No one seems to worry too much about what they are, or who is going to open them. My inbox is full of all sorts, from the quick and dirty to the expensive and sometimes misguided. The science of direct mail has been transformed by the technology into a hopeless free-for-all. We all talk about web sites as the shop window, and making everything interactive, but the interaction is often not very satisfying.
I saw a job being advertised this morning for a Social Media Marketer. The new holy grail, I suppose. We are leaping on the next big thing before we have really conquered the last one. We have not used the new technology well. We have managed to discredit and marginalise what we now think of as snail mail. It is almost an irrelevance today...still there, but somehow old-fashioned and comparitively expensive.
In this recession, data quality will suffer everywhere. It was not great to start with to be honest, but there will be next to no investment in it at the moment. I feel a bit like John Major. We need to get back to basics. Good data, good creative input, clear objectives and professional execution. If not, in another two years, we will all be Twittering around like lost souls, wondering how life got so complicated, when really DM is simple.
As a Marketing Director, perhaps of the old school like yourself, I absolutely see your point. However, my company is employing a school-leaver (son of one of our employees) to clean up our data. The creative execution of our emailers is professional and very good - perhaps not great, but then direct mail was usually a poor cousin of advertising - certainly to the creative department of the ad agencies. All emailers are part of integrated digital campaigns - with website, blogs, social media and free content easily available etc.
It's a digital world, there is change, but the fundementals remain.
Mark
Hugh Bessant
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 18 Nov 2009
Total Posts: 323
