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Guerrilla Guide: Direct mail, telemarketing, internet and TV

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Geoffrey McDonald Bowll (pictured with junior art director) is MD of The Starship, a Melbourne-based ad agency. Besides running mainstream campaigns since 1991, he has conducted hundreds of marketing and advertising research projects for major corporates.

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Shorter ads, punchy promise, weird but memorable taglines, strong website and telemarketers to take calls. You’d be puffin muffins to do it any other way.

I’m in the office, it’s 10.03am. Mat walks in, tosses my mail at me, walks on doing the same for the rest of the crew. Some people get half a dozen letters and A4 brochure things. Others get one or two. Somebody in Creative gets a thing that flies around the room when you open the envelope. This happens every day. Someone from the office goes down to the Australia Post branch and gets our mail. Same thing is happening in every office in Australia, every working day.

I open mine. Of my three A4 things, two are ‘real estate for sale’ notices. There is also a big brochure from a mailing list company, three direct mail letters with a DL and letter in them, one thankyou note for something I shouldn’t have done and finally one cheque from a very nice, but slightly old-fashioned client whose system spits out cheques instead of direct debits – our only client who still uses them.

All paper. All could have been done electronically. All, except for the cheque, basically unwanted. The whole office’s lot weighs about half a kilo. Not much of a tree – hardly a sapling really. Plus a few ounces of phosphorous and chlorine to bleach the paper white. A few ounces of nickel and cadmium and ferrous oxide to colour the pages. Some kilos of greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide etc. – to generate the power to smash that little tree up and crush it into paper, to power the Mac that did the graphic work, to power the mobile phone of the agency suit who talked to the marketing managers for two hours about the strategy…

What strategy? It’s direct. You just send out enough of them and some suckers will buy, you’ll maybe even crack over the magical one percent effectiveness mark, to justify you doing it again three months later.

I bleat on in this column about strategy all the time. About the Big Idea. About changing the mindset of an industry to have impact. To get results. But I waste my time when I talk to direct mailers because they don’t work on that wavelength. They are happy to do the mediocre, just because it works, just.

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