Why direct mail doesn’t get the respect it deserves

I’ve always hated the term “junk mail.” As direct marketers, somewhere along the way we got a bad rap. No one ever refers to television commercials as “junk TV” or newspaper ads as “junk newsprint.” How is that fair?

I hope it’s not just because part of my career is in direct mail, but I like to think that there’s still an incredible viability and a unique place in the market for written communication. Hey, online is great. But there’s also an undeniable tactile pleasure in getting a piece of traditional mail. Mail lets us use more of our senses than any other medium, if you include things like sampling. So far, they haven’t figured out how to stimulate all five senses over coaxial cable.

As much as we want our brands to be relevant to people, people want to be relevant to brands. It’s a mutual relationship. Nobody reads advertising copy; they read what interests them. That’s the challenge of advertising, and it always will be: How do you make something interesting and compelling? Are we pushing our message at people, or are we trying to pull them in with something that interests them? Are you talking to people about what they want to hear in a way that’s entertaining, exciting, and personal?

We can do that in a much more intimate way now, partly because of new technologies that have changed the way we think about putting a DM campaign together. But despite all the new technologies, the basics of marketing don’t change, just as they haven’t changed for 6,000 years. My grandfather had a small tailor shop in Philadelphia. If you came in once, the next time you came in, he greeted you by name, and he remembered what you ordered. In essence, that’s the same thing Amazon tries to do with all its personalization, so there’s really nothing new. A lot of the more successful personal marketing that takes place is an attempt to recreate that more pastoral, small-town era.

Even with all that talk we’ve been hearing lately about ROI and accountability, we still don’t know how much a piece of intelligently written mail affects brand attitudes and awareness. We need a more comprehensive calculation of cost per lead. Because we’re not capturing it in our measurement, direct mail is providing a benefit for which it’s not getting credit.

If we really want to be taken seriously, we need to start thinking about direct as more than just a response medium. There’s such a hard line in many people’s thinking: broadcast can only do this, print can only do that, mail can only do this. We’ve traditionally seen mail as more of a sales stimulus than a brand building tool, but it’s time we developed an accurate measure of the undeniable benefit that mail contributes to a brand’s value.

George Tannenbaum (gtannenb@digitas.com) is executive creative director for Digitas, a digital- and direct-marketing agency with headquarters in Boston (www.digitas.com). Clients include AARP, General Motors and Intercontinental Hotels.