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The Silent Merger Of
Advertising & Direct
Marketing
By David Hanson, Pres. H2M
Forget consumer created content. Forget about the effects of Tivo
on network ad revenue. Forget about all the
sexy new tactics being trialed and simply
stop to realize the future of marketing has
already happened and it was the unheralded
silent merger of advertising and direct marketing.
To this day, most people think only of direct
MAIL when they hear the word Direct. And
that’s understandable.
Mail used to be the de facto delivery vehicle
of Direct Marketing, therefore DM came to
be known simply as Direct Mail. But now with
addition of the interactive medium called
the Internet, Direct has sewn itself seamlessly
to (brand) advertising without a dropped
stitch. I have to admit, I love the emotion
and imagery of brand advertising, but I equally
love the thrill of seeing real-time conversions.
Talk about the thrill of the hunt. I like
to look at it as the brand advertising is
the bait, and the Direct response vehicle
is the snare.
On an operational level, I’ve
found it to be a real challenge internally
managing the talented people who produce
both advertising and direct marketing for
us because for so many years the two disciplines
have been treated completely separately.
Advertising and Direct Marketing up to this
point in time have indeed been separate and
distinct strategic disciplines. They are
not merely tactics. Also, where advertising
essentially has no rules, and in fact breaking “rules” is
often beneficial for calling attention to
a message from out of the mass of overbearing
commercial clutter, direct marketing has
defined rules that you break at your peril.
One of the most significant differences between the two disciplines
is the emphasis on copy over art in Direct Marketing. In Direct, copy
leads design; never the other way around. In general, a Direct Marketing
campaign will have more copy than an equivalent advertising campaign.
Today, we at H2M can’t even conceive of a marketing campaign
without both the advertising and direct marketing
disciplines interlaced into a potent concoction
that provides advertising’s
emotion and awareness power and direct marketing’s trackable
efficacy to bear. And today, it is more cost
effective than ever to provide marketers with these tools under one
roof. The difference lies in our industry’s
ability to recognize the schizoid attitude
and separation between these, up to now,
separate disciplines, and begin training to bring the talent who produce
both forms together to a common understanding and passion for their
combination.
It’s time marketers and marketing firms quit chasing all the
new tactics and techniques and come back
again to the reality that marketing is a
human endeavor, one to one, from one brain
to another. There are no magic bullets, there
is only good products and services brought
to a market through hard work and discipline.
The real future to capture, as Peter Drucker wrote, is “the
one that has already happened.”
dave@h2m.biz
© 2003-2006 H2M Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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© 2003-2006 H2M Inc. All Rights Reserved
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