The '5 to 10' effect - a potential reason why a lot of digital marketing is still mediocre?

A recent reference to a piece of music research by Dweezil Zappa - the son of legendary Frank - made me think that a similar principle maybe applies to digital marketing as well.

The reesearch refers to people's ability to recognise how well a piece of music is played. An average person - most of the head-nodding iPoders on the train, who enjoy music but know very little about the technical aspect of playing it - are quite capable to distiguish between a novice and a competent musician.

So, on a scale of 1-10, they can spot the difference between 1 and 5. Past 5, though, most of the quality-defining nuances, the phrasing, treatment of time - all the small, quirky subtleties that distinguish between good musicians and great musicians are lost on them. They are 'tone deaf' to things between 5 and 10, particularly to smaller incremental differences between the levels.

It makes me think that this is exactly what is happening with many of our clients now when it comes to digital. Having discovered digital marketing relatively recently, they behave like someone who has discovered a new genre of music: the enjoyment is on the generic side, focused on the middle ground, through the recognition of the most obvious manifestations of it: the conventions of the category.

They are still deaf to subtleties of the genre, its most sophisticated heights drowned in the noise of 'what everyone alse is doing'.

Yes, there are sophisticated 'listeners' out there, but still rare. As in any other endeavour. The sad thruth is that digital marketing is now a fairly mature discipline, with various 'flavours' of virtuosity that could be appealing to different brands. The problem is that clients responsible for digital marketing - often new to it - are not always adept to recognise them. So, they end in the same head-nodding spot as everyone else.

The hope is that the 'long tail' paradigm will soon find its application in the agency-client world as well - offering plethora of choice of different flavours of virtuosity - and appropriate matchings to specific products and services. Or brand personalities. For that, we will need more clients able to distinguish between 6 and 8. Not just to crank things up to 11.

Why email needs DM

Been asked recently about relentless rise of email and a possibility of it to cannibalise traditional DM. I think this is an interesting qestion that requires a bit of nuancing.

If the question is 'is email going to totally replace DM in the future' my answer is no. The old marketing adage is 'easy in, easy out', meaning that in many instances prospects and customers that came through email are the most likely to churn. And it still doesn't work for cold charity recruitment. Believe it or not, but higher CPA is sometimes actually a more desirable objective.

If the question is 'is email going to replace DM for certain purposes' the answer is yes, particularly for (e)CRM, as it is easier and cheaper to personalize through email. In other words, email works very well for customer service and loyalty comms.

I see DM and email as two complementary tools that together punch much better than if used separately. It's in the interest of email effectiveness to preserve DM.