Tag Archives: promotion

Mag Nation introduces Undies Monday promotion

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Magazine retailer Mag Nation has announced a promotion that encourages consumers to enter its stores in their underpants for free magazines.

According to the company’s CEO and ‘chief magazineologist’ Sahil Merchant, the ‘Undies Monday’ initiative is aimed at reflecting the brand’s playful nature.

“The world is way too serious and lacking of genuine free lunches. Given we like both, we have come up with an antidote which we like to call ‘Undies Monday’,” said Merchant in a post on the Mag Nation website.

Consumers are encouraged to walk into any mag nation store just in their underwear and receive any magazine, book or stationery item of their choice up to the value of $50 for free.

The promotion is good for one appearance each person, ends at midnight on 29 March (or “earlier at our discretion if we determine that Undies Mondays will lead to our ruination”), and does not count if people strip off in the store (“You have to walk in, in your undies”). Consumers must be over 18 to participate.

“Undies do not include swimwear or gym wear… genuine undies/lingerie only! If you enter in your birthday suit, we will not serve you. We don’t want anything to do with that!” explained Merchant.

Streets repeats Gold Class promotion

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Streets has reinstated its Magnum ‘Free Gold Class upgrade’ promotion for the third year running.

Streets Magnum is continuing its offer of a free Gold Class cinema upgrade worth up to $17 with every purchase of a specially marked Magnum pack.

The company indicated the campaign was successful in 2008, with sales growing 14% during the promotional period. This year the offer will be available on all Magnum ice creams including supermarket multipacks and single serve ice creams sold in convenience stores and service stations.

“We are thrilled that Magnum has teamed up with us again on the free upgrade campaign. The promotion gets bigger and better every year and, from our perspective, it gives more and more Australians the opportunity to enjoy the fantastic Gold Class cinema experience,” said Caroline Ryan of Village Cinemas.

People living in regional Australia who don’t have access to Gold Class are offered a VIP Gold Class Getaway for two that includes flights to their nearest capital city, five-star accommodation, a Gold Class cinema experience and spending money.

“A lot of people are finding things a bit tough at the moment and Streets Magnum wants to help Australians find ways to enjoy some ‘Royal Treatment’ in their everyday lives,” said Andrea Martens, marketing director of Streets Ice Cream.

Sitting back and watching the cash roll in

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Catchy blog title isn’t it? And no, I didn’t write it just to get your attention. It’s absolutely true and relates specifically to our strategies for marketing to existing customers.

We’ve all seen those terrific cross-sell and up-sell opportunities on websites. From iTunes to JB HiFi and Coles, many of us find these tactics valuable to our everyday marketing activity. And there’s a good reason why. We’ve all heard it before – it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than attract brand new business. It’s true, but let’s get back to the specifics of tactics…

Cross and up-sell campaigns are everywhere online and they come in various forms. Here are some of the more common ones:

  • “If you’re interested in this you might also consider XYZ” – the similar products recommendation style,
  • “Other customers who bought this also bought (insert snazzy product name)” – The go-with products style, or
  • “We have a special deal this week for (insert too good to resist offer)” – The hot-offer style.

It all sounds pretty easy doesn’t it? Watch what people are interested in and make an offer they can’t refuse. But few of us are carrying out highly sophisticated cross and up-sell marketing strategies because it typically takes a huge amount of time and effort to get it right. Matching the perfect offer to the right prospect in a good time is a complex task. And while personalised product recommendations are proven to consistently improve sales, conversion rates, overall average order value and customer retention, many of us don’t know where to start. So how do you maximise the opportunities out there without having to employ new staff or place enormous strain on your existing team?

Here’s a short summary of dos and donts for you to consider the next time you and your team decide to tackle the important (and very fruitful) audience that is your existing customer base.

Forget the spreadsheet!

Sadly, the most basic approach employed by many companies is to use the old spreadsheet to manage cross and up-sell opportunities. Unfortunately for the merchandiser or product manager this means they’re tasked with setting up the spreadsheet to manually highlight affinities between product purchases. This is a very time consuming process, especially if you have thousands of product SKUs. And even if you have a diligent process (and person) in place, the whole spreadsheet can be instantly out of date as products and stock levels change on a daily basis. This can make the whole process quite unbearable and ineffective so it naturally doesn’t get the attention it needs and quickly loses momentum.

Let the customer shape cross and up-sell opportunities, not the marketing staff

Don’t fall into the trap of relying on your in-house marketing team to decide product affinities. While you may think that you’re on the money with customer needs and wants you’re probably not, unless you have real-time analysis and information at your fingertips every day.

Your customers will prefer different products at different times. These choices will change frequently throughout their entire relationship with your business, so it’s next to impossible to extract relevant data about trends and purchasing preferences manually. Thus making accurate marketing decisions for cross and up-selling very difficult.

It’s also easy for data to be misinterpreted and inaccurate analysis drawn by different marketing professionals. One person may believe a recent spike in sales to be driven by the sudden cold weather, while another interprets the data to reflect an annual, seasonal spike at end of financial year. Human interference makes it hard to ensure your next campaign is based on the very real behaviour of your audience.

Make sure you’re on the money

If you can see which products are being viewed and bought together and by whom, then you can use this brilliant information to drive the various recommendation processes. More importantly, you can then automate this process so that changes in market and product preferences are documented on a daily basis quickly and accurately.

Finding opportunities to cross and up-sell to customers is really not that difficult. And it’s one of those rare cases whereby once you’ve taken on the new approach, you really can just sit back and watch the dollars roll in…

Valuable beyond your wildest dreams

Done properly, as part of an overall online marketing program, professionals executing smart cross and up-sell tactics can expect to see the following results:

  • approximately 8% increase in sales for recommendations on the product page,
  • 6% for recommendations in the shopping cart section,
  • 3% on the order status page, and
  • a whopping 8% by adding relevance to email campaign offers (as opposed to around 2.5% for a normal broadcast email).  

I might add that some businesses have seen an increase of 15% in cross-sell and up-sell success in their call centres, all because they’re using the very real behavioural data available online immediately.

This final point then brings me to the question of matching the right offer to the right prospect – but that is part of another story for later on.

The new Ps –? Passion and Philanthropy

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Hands up all who think the world is a fine and dandy place where everything is as it should be?

Thank you, Mickey Mouse, I expected no less from you. For the rest of us, however much the eternal optimist we may be, we realise that all is not as it should be.

We find ourselves confronted with an increasing number of worthy causes demanding our attention. But what if there was a way that to save the world that makes as much sense to our capitalist (professional) natures as it does to our altruistic ones?

It begins with an understanding of the changing nature of people’s expectations and what this means for brands.

Research points to the fact that during difficult times, people search for brands that provide them with meaning and a sense of hope rather than those that simply discount or focus on minimising the negatives. There’s an oft-quoted phenomenon arising from the cosmetics industry known as ‘the lipstick factor’– the simple notion that during recessions (and one might assume other periods of distress), people want to feel better about themselves, and will look for cheap and easy ways to do so. One result is a spike in lipstick sales.

So the question I have for everyone out there in marketingland is this: if people are currently looking for ways to feel better, what are you doing to make that connection between feeling better and engaging with your brand? I’m not talking about going the extra mile in customer service, or espousing the benefits of using or owning your product. These things now fall into the category of being hygiene factors (those things which don’t add anything by being present, but will lead to negative outcomes if they are absent, an idea first proposed by Herzberg).

No, consumers these days want far more from you. They don’t just want to know what your product does, how much it costs, or where to find it; they want to know what you stand for. The fact is that in difficult climates, most companies forget this last point and focus on the other three. But what if there was an opportunity being missed?

I’m hereby introducing two new Ps to the marketing vernacular: Passion and Philanthropy. While these two Ps are certainly not mutually exclusive, which of these two you emphasise will largely depend on the nature of your product and the industry in which you operate.

I believe David Gillespie so beautifully presented the case for passion in his piece ‘The Greatest of These’ (last month’s print issue of Marketing) that I’ll say little more on it; for those of you who didn’t catch it, David argued that love (or Passion) is what sets brands like Apple or Nike apart from their competitors. It’s clear and undeniable. However, they’re selling exciting products in an exciting industry. So what if you’re selling a less-than-exciting product like most FMCG brands? It’s ok, here is a safe place to admit it – your product may well be as boring as the proverbial batsh*t. How to proceed when Passion is a little harder to come by?

Cue Philanthropy. I won’t for a moment suggest that possessing Passion diminishes the need for Philanthropy; rather, I’m just proposing that Philanthropy can generate Passion and sentiment where they otherwise wouldn’t exist. Take washing powder for instance – ever bought into emotionally? Me neither. But what if, every time there was a disaster (think hurricane, earthquake, flood), you knew there was a team of people and vans operated by a washing powder company that would show up and take care of the inevitable loads of filthy clothes just to help out? With a capacity of up to 300 loads per day, that’s exactly what Tide’s ‘Loads of Hope’ program in the US does. Suddenly, your tediously boring product (despite the years of trying to get us excited about ‘whiter whites’, it ain’t working) creates emotional buy-in with consumers. It’s not trivial or tacky, it’s just a brand saying ‘hey, we’re going to help out by doing what comes naturally to us.’ And before you write it off as a cheap publicity stunt, you should know that they have a team of thirty vans dedicated to the task. That’s right, it’s actually a part of their branding strategy, not just a one-off knee-jerk reaction to what’s grabbing the headlines this week.

The other, often simpler alternative, is to leverage the philanthropic creds of an existing organisation. Where your product lacks passion or emotion, there are plenty of worthy causes who’d be happy to lend you some of theirs. In exchange for your support, they’ll give you logos, sponsorship opportunities, and bragging rights that can turn your brand from a household commodity into part of a bigger force for social revolution. Its a win for your brand and a win for humankind.

Times are a-changing, and this is just the beginning. You’ve all heard the story of someone who knew someone who had to have a university degree to get a job as a receptionist because there are so many qualified people out there companies are just expecting more and more from people. Well, take it from me: corporations and brands are about to get their comeuppance. The days are coming when consumers will ask you how you’re saving the world before they’ll even consider buying your loaf of bread or can of beans. Its already begun with the green revolution and its only going to grow from there.

My advice is to start thinking about what you’re going to say – and it had better involve at least one of the two new Ps.

Eds note: For more on the Lipstick Factor – watch out for the July issue of Marketing magazine, where Kate Kendall goes behind the scenes of the LOréal Group to get some answers.

Product placement in excess

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With the next wave of blockbusters about to be released courtesy of the US summer holiday season, we’re sure to see more glorious examples of ‘branded entertainment’. An unusual moment got me thinking about this the other day.

Ever stumble upon a new fashion, song, or trend as a youngster only to be met with a surprised look from your parents who claimed ‘we had that 20 years ago’? Well, imagine my surprise when an atrocious example of product placement jumped out of INXS’s Live Baby Live! being played by our resident art director the other day. In what is otherwise a masterpiece of 90s rock footage, the drummer skilfully maintains the beat one-handed while taking a swig of beer from a bottle held in his other hand (awesome skill, many points), before placing it back down beside him and very noticeably reorienting it so as to make the label squarely face the camera (pathetic, automatic loss of points). Now it probably wasn’t ill-conceived – we know musicians and drinking are as synonymous a concept as vomiting and carrots – but it was very poorly executed, which is why it stood out. Most importantly though, I was surprised, given its 1991 vintage.*

While the idea of celebrities endorsing brands in a more direct sense is by no means a new one, the notion of product placement in film has really only come to the fore relatively recently. This can be evidenced by the fact that every time a new blockbuster is released, all my non-marketing friends think I’ll be interested in having a conversation about ‘how bad that product placement stuff is getting’.

However, a little research shows that product placement traces its history back almost as far as cinema and television themselves. Better yet, it appears that Jules Verne’s epic Around the World in Eighty Days writing contained product placements as transport and shipping companies lobbied to be included. Apparently, that was just the beginning of a long line of obvious and not-so-obvious examples. Perhaps ET’s ‘Reese’s Pieces’ scene was the first to set the bar for product placement so low that Michael Bay (The Island, Transformers) could repeatedly trip over it some 20 years later.

I guess the difference that has made it a talking point is that in the last 10 years it has gone too far. Certainly the best evidence of this (and my personal favourite, which doesn’t make it onto that list) is I Am Sam. The PP in this movie was so unashamed it would be comical if it were not so deplorable. Here was a film that contained such a tear-jerking performance by Sean Penn, combined with such a nauseating level of advertising, that I found myself for the first time wanting to both cry and throw up simultaneously.

Where will it go to from here? The problem is that movie budgets are blowing out, and PP is one easy way to both gain funding and simultaneously extend promotion of the film via co-operative marketing ventures. This would lead me to otherwise expect to see a marked increase in it over the coming years, except that we’re currently living in a climate where the marketing budget is ‘under review’ (that’s a euphemism for being decimated). The main problem with branded entertainment (that’s a euphemism for product placement – it makes you sound more educated) is that it is just that, a branding tool, so we may see it stagnate for a while. Of particular favour at the moment are advertising and sales tools that deliver a strong call to action and easily trackable results, so I say gone will be the multi-million dollar branding exercises like GM’s $US3m investment in Transformers (although, in their particular case, this may be because they currently can’t afford to replenish their office toilet paper supply, let alone fund that sort of expenditure). Yes, they’re in the second instalment of Transformers, but that was all set up pre-GFC.

Perhaps as a result of falling budgets, we’ll see the quality of movie effects decline to the stage where they’re all equivalent to the pre-release unfinished version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine which was circulated in pirate form over the internet recently. Then, as things recover, the level of product placement will become so bad that even good souls like myself will begin to consider that they’re entitled to pirate it because the ratio of ads to content outstrips free-to-air TV.

Lastly, there is one more option: agencies and marketing professionals can draw their own line on the sort of gratuitous, irrelevant, or otherwise unwelcome product placement behaviour that treats the audience like idiots. They can confine themselves to ‘natural fit’ placements before consumers vote with their feet against offending studios and brands. Or wait – if the placements are that subtle and we can’t tell, should we be more concerned about how subversive it’s become?

Wow, I must be tired. Excuse me for a moment as I nick off to grab a Red Bull – just what I need to clear my head before I consider the other side to this argument.

* Perhaps due in some part to the fact that prior to the new millennium I probably displayed more interest in my pushbike and whether or not I was gaining any more facial hair than I did in analysing branding exercises.

M&Ms break up in new campaign

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Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG) has launched an interesting integrated media idea for M&M’s latest campaign – M&M’s colour break-ups.

According to the company and its client Mars, the once happy gang of five M&M’s colours – Red, Yellow, Miss Green, Blue and Crispy – have had a falling out and will now be sold separately. As part of the campaign, if consumers find an M&M’s ‘Break-Up’ pack with mixed colours inside, they have chance to win prizes.

The campaign creative was produced by Clemenger and features a cover flipside in Famous that look as though it is an editorial piece on the ‘10 Most Shocking Break Ups Ever’, including Brad and Jennifer, Madonna and Guy, Britney and Justin and, in the number one position, M&M’s Yellow and Red.

It also features a series of TVCs and includes an online element.

Guerilla Guide: Briefing ad agencies

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I’m sitting in a city café and it ain’t as simple as ‘white with one’ anymore. Skinny cap, soy mocha, skinny soy latte in a mug with the handle facing south. So many variations. People have too much time, too little to do. Here I am ordering a boring old skinny latte, which means cow’s milk… what an environmental sin! Fancy buying the juice of a methane-producing polluter… Do I try to fit in and order a soy drink? Bugger it. I hear soy gives you cancer anyway. Plus I’m already the odd one out: I’m the only person I can see who’s not wearing a tie.

Opposite me is the client, a major player in the finance industry. She’s very bright, very professional, but struggling with her role today. She asks me if I take on briefs. I’m appalled at her forwardness… (Sorry, had to try the joke, but pathetic, I know.) She ignores me, like the entire world population who are under 30, and goes on to explain her dilemma. They are having trouble penetrating the teenage market. Seems teenagers think and respond completely differently to anyone else in their customer base. Amazing. (It is always quite a problem for those in mass marketing. How do you keep a level of brand consistency when the message has to be radically different? But I digress again…) I should mention this is a professional organisation we’re discussing here. While they represent older, conservative, mostly white men, their core target market (for members) is younger, hipper and, like every group today, they are trying to be non-gender specific, non-racially biased.

We go though her understanding of the mindset of the target teenagers. We discuss the findings from a few focus groups they’ve just run. Then she pulls out a folder – it’s neatly blocked together in colours per issue – under headings like ‘pricing’, ‘psychological impacts’, ‘media use’ etc. She squirms, from what I’m guessing is embarrassment. It’s so big I start to feel faint. (Like those folders you get handed on a two-week live-in course.) Maybe I need a glass of water. I catch the eye of a waiter…

I’m hoping, as you do, they don’t really want us to take this all in and come back with something sensible. But, yes, they do. Yes, she expects us to wade through hundreds of pages of tightly typed notes to understand her brief. I think, as I smile and go slowly pale, that it’s got to come from above. This isn’t her. This anal, control freak stuff must be from senior management. I tell her I’ll email back my understanding of her brief, before I send it on to the creatives. That will save her time/money and stop me losing a few from jumping out the window into oncoming traffic.

There’s a point in life where you want to be professional, and there’s a point in life where you have to say, “This is over the top”. Two hundred pages of detail for a job that’s only worth a few hundred grand is a waste of a couple weeks. All it says is one of two things. Either you need another job ‘cause you’re so bored you actually have got time to put together a folder like this, or you need another job because someone in your organisation thinks you need to put together folders like this to brief somebody.

Which brings me neatly to the issue this month. Agency briefing. What works, what doesn’t and what costs you double as much for half as good?

Clients briefing an agency can vary hugely in their approach. From the ‘Just tell us what you think’ as they pass you in the street types, to the very serious this is the brief types who have 23 pages of closely typed thoughts just on the buying process – neither of which is exactly ideal. To get it out of the way, high cost briefings (assuming you’re paying people by the hour) are those that give way too much detail, that send creatives down unnecessary paths that waste time and/or that change frequently.

One of the roles of agency people is often to train clients into what makes a good brief for their agency. This is usually part of the ‘bedding down’ process, followed by all agencies and other creative groups, where you take a client and educate them about your systems and processes under the guise of getting to know them, but that is itself deserving of an entire article.

The public doesn’t care what your brief is

Don’t kid yourself that your cause is the cause of the general public. Their key causes are food, gratuitous entertainment, saving the globe and world peace. Yours only rates a mention if you’ve managed to grab their attention and hold onto it long enough to register on their personal radar. So don’t brief like it’s about you and your cause. Brief when you’ve worked out what it is that will work for the public. What is it the punters want from your widget?

It helps if you make up your mind

“My God, I’ll have to know what I want. And what we need as a company? All we really want is sales in December that are 15 percent better than last year’s, but that makes us sound shallow and this is a national, annual campaign, so maybe I better rethink what it is we want…”. If this is you, don’t panic. We in Adland expect you to be uncertain about it. “Seventy-nine percent of agencies claim clients (yes, you) use the briefing process to establish their own strategy, while 55 percent of clients say that briefs often change after the project begins.” (Paul-Mark Rendon, Marketing Magazine, Canada, September 2006)

Sometimes it’s best to make other people debate it

This paragraph could have been headed ‘leave it to the agency’, but that would have been saying agencies know all, and they just don’t. ‘Getting other people helping’ is a better thought. People who ask tricky questions and debate issues with you at briefing stage are way more valuable than those who just nod and come back in a week with crap. This heavy duty thinking is often the role of the accounts manager (or ‘strategy planner’ in a big, pretentious agency). It’s their job to take a crap brief and distil it down to a message or strategy/concept the creative team can get their heads around and respond to.

The agency needs to understand the job

First and foremost, it’s your job as a client to make sure the agency understands the job. (This is not your only responsibility. Your other key one is approving great creative.) Frankly you shouldn’t be working with them if they don’t understand your briefs. If you’re not sure they understand fully, ask some sneaky questions, like “What is your take-out from what I’ve said?” Or “How do you expect us to be positioned in a year from this brief?” etc.

Don’t be intimidated by suits/creatives

They give you forms to fill out, make a fuss about the content and go over details you didn’t think mattered. It’s all part of the ‘take us seriously, we’re professionals’ bullshit they throw at you to justify their retainers/nice cars.

We can blame anything on the brief in Adland

It’s so much easier than saying, “We didn’t come up with the goods.” Common comments are “the perfect brief is pure fantasy, like putting a rainbow in a jar”. Or, as Neil French (ex WPP creative head) once said, “Client briefs should be skipped altogether – taking things out is always better.”

The brief can be taken way too seriously

My most favourite quote has to be, “Forget just for a minute that you are briefing an agency. Instead, pretend you are standing on the bank of a river, about to build a bridge.” Taken, I kid you not, from the ‘Joint Industry Guidelines for Young Marketing Professionals’ in the UK, which includes marketers, PR people etc.

Mind you, I may be playing down the briefing process. Alan Doyle got it right by saying, “The key to effective briefing is to provide a simple insight that can be dramatised memorably” (‘Joint Industry Guidelines’). Certain information is crucial to any good campaign. So let’s cover what’s absolutely necessary in a brief.

Briefing basics – give this info to the agency

What’s this about?

What’s the actual job? Is it time to refresh the brand’s identity, do you need a new press campaign (because you’re sick of average in-house media jobs) or is your boss on your back to get better results? Whichever way, we all need to know why you’re doing it before you do it.

Who is it you’re targeting?

Demographics: who, how old, income levels, education, where they are, gender, relationships, jobs, etc. If you’re a mass marketer, like Coke, this could be as short as ‘anyone with a mouth’.

Psychographics: how they think, buy, behave, attitudes, perceptions, stage in life, political or entertainment mindset, star sign, hobbies, sports, etc. Again, this could be as short as ‘grumpy dumb people’.

Your company or brand’s position

Where you’ve been, where you are now, where you’re going and how you intend to get there.

What you need to achieve

Key goals and KPIs, time-frames, budgets.

Branding issues

What does the brand stand for (values, features/benefits), how is the brand portrayed (visually/audio/characters), previous recent creative (if they don’t know it) and any brand projections (future plans, if not obvious).

What hasn’t worked in the past?

Previous creative and media buys.

Why this matters

How this brief fits into the overall scheme of things in life, the universe and your career. Politics in your organisation – what does the big boss’s wife like? Is the finance department angry or happy about this sale and why etc.

Media thoughts

Media spend/rationale, if not being developed by the creative agency (always seek their input on this – media groups want to sell more space, costing you money. Better creative uses less, so costs less, saving you money.)

Focus

Core thrust/objectives of the brief – what is the key issue? If you say to a creative team that each one of these briefing points matter, they will be all over the shop. They’ll be doing work on issues to which no one will respond. They’ll waste days chasing moonbeams. Days you’re paying for. On the other hand, if you say this point is critical, this point is number two and the rest are just background you can ignore if you like, then that’s perfect. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t discuss things from a range of perspectives. But you must have an idea what it is you want back…

Present how?

Do it a bit face-to-face, and a bit written down. Make the written stuff just the basics and a couple of dreamy thoughts. Keep it under three pages. Background stuff (10 to 20 pages) is OK, but the more info, the more confusing the brief, the more costly it will be.

Avoid too much information

Information overload confuses and freezes creatives. Creatives will always say to you, “We need more information.” Background stuff is great, because it gives them an opportunity to work their head around an issue and this is important because the creative process takes days to filter through from a briefing to great work. And you must allow them to take this time, or you’ll get shit creative. And that process needs bits of information to chew on. But the danger is in giving too much priority to too many issues.

Briefing forms

There are lots of them out there. They are good to fill out when you’re a bit unsure and you want to look busy one morning. I’ve never seen one that fits all circumstances at all times and invariably the short briefing paragraph works better to focus creative efforts than a 20-point form from your head office in Luxembourg.

Bites at the cherry

Many of my best clients will ring in over a couple of days (or send a few short emails) with other thoughts on a tricky brief, as things occur to them. Better to pass on more information or your changing thoughts on focus, than get it a little wrong and leave it wrong. If there’s a bit of information that is critical, give it to the creatives. Don’t assume they’ll ‘get it’ by osmosis.

The reality

Clients are strapped for time and often don’t have anyone inside the operation with whom they can debate these points. And they do need debating. The onus is often on the agency to find the information. If the client can’t provide it, the agency ought to go out and get it. Yes, fill out the best practice briefing list but if you don’t know what one particular answer is that’s not the end. A good agency ought to be able to work with you on finding the answer. All of the above will take time, so cost you money. Get over it.

Rejection is good

Trust the agency who argues the brief. If they put in a decent body of thought, they are worth their retainer.

Limiting your outcomes by your briefing

Many great products don’t go mass market because they think their product is ‘exclusive’. I know factory workers who drive BMWs, millionaires who drive Falcons. What I’m getting around to is that many briefs assume things that are plainly wrong (but seem right to a passing observer), because their authors are in fact ignorant of how the world really works. Don’t limit your career/business by briefing too narrowly.

Hidden agendas

These always exist. Yours are most probably career advancement, making sales, building the brand and, most importantly, being noticed, so it’s easier to explain what you do at the gym when someone asks. Your real need, to give the brother-in-law some work, may never come up at all. Their hidden agendas usually relate to the politics of the boardroom, and/or who’s shagging who in your office or theirs. These agendas rarely cross-pollinate in a positive manner, but one can hope. I’m a big believer in ignoring most agendas, ‘cause if I worried about them, I’d never get any sleep.

Value for money

How to get it is by thinking about what’s needed first, briefing accurately (note it’s called briefing) and then letting go of your baby and allowing people to actually be creative – that’s basically what you’re paying for.

Paying for briefing

If it’s an ongoing relationship, then you’ve already sorted out how the money works and the agency is either formally charging you for taking a brief or you’ve somehow agreed they’ll hide it in other costs (like everyone else in the world does). If it’s a pitch, taking a brief and more so, responding to a brief costs a fortune. If you are a half-decent company you will suggest a payment for the exercise. This normally won’t cover much more than the coffee and croissants run, but it goes a long way to being taken seriously and getting a far better response from management/creatives than those companies who feel (because they don’t get paid to put a pitch to Coles Myer or NAB) that they shouldn’t pay others to pitch. Most agencies nowadays charge by the hour. Like your lawyers. If you asked them to do 50 hours of work, would you expect to pay for it?

Budgets

Give people budgets. Some wankers believe in keeping it to themselves and think that saying something like “tell us what you think we should spend” is clever, like it will magically make your agency ask for less. But all it does is make things too hard for the agency, so you go to the bottom of the pile. Grow up and trust people. The agency is trusting you – they’re investing good money/time in answering your brief.

Sex is quicker with people you know

The better you know each other – agency/client – the less detail you need to give them each time. It can get down to basically a nod and a wink in a dark alley. “Oh, we can finally do the chocolate range. Usual budget. I need something for the board to approve, say next Friday?” That might be it as a brief from a very familiar client.

Guerrilla Guide: Selecting an agency

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I’m sitting spinning on my ‘director’s’ chair, drumming my fingers, scheming up something evil I can suggest to a client, to rip more precious lucre from their customers’ plastic accounts. And I’m wondering what lunch might look like, who I’m having it with. I’m bored, of course.

It’s a condition that lives with you night and day when you’re over 40 and have been in the same business for more than 10 years. There are hundreds of thousands of us ‘executives’, unexcited, but competent, out there in the ‘burbs, making up the decision-making class, wondering what little adjustments we can make to our lives to let a bit of spice in. I stare at the phone, thinking, as one does, if I had the right number, and knew whose name to drop, I could speak to George Bush or Vladimir Putin in 10 seconds. I wonder what changes to our existence I could manage, if I said just the right thing…

Like a Volvo coming off the production line, praying it will end up in the hands of someone who can drive, the phone rings. I’ve obviously willed it to ring. I can now claim involvement in a miracle.

It’s a bloke. He asks me to tell him about Starship. I give him the usual 30-second ‘lift-stopper’. That’s what we do, who we handle. He tells me he’s been to our website, and that he’d like to come in to our office and discuss a project. I ask him for an idea of what it’s about, and he says a few sentences that explain his company, what they make, where they sit in their market and what they spend on advertising. We agree on a time to meet. The whole conversation takes about three minutes.

Oh goody. New business. I’m suddenly excited again. Something to get my teeth into, to think about. And that’s exactly how it happens. It’s not complicated.

This article is about how to make that choice, from someone who has pitched to hundreds of clients. (Sometimes they’ve made the right decision. Sometimes that’s choosing Starship. Sometimes the right decision has nothing to do with our agency.) This is not from a client’s perspective; it is, as the guy in the purple says, from the pulpit.

There are a few things to consider before you pick up the phone and ask directory assistance for the most phoned agency.

Agencies are full of salespeople

No one survives in agency land who can’t sell an idea to a client. So what they say/do is designed to get you hooked. It may be all eager and earnest, it may be very business-like. Or not. Just because they come across uninterested or ‘cool’ don’t think for a moment that that isn’t their act. It is. Take everything that is said or promised as a possibility only. Agencies are great at selling you the world and giving you Dubbo. That’s why the rest of society says we’re wankers.

People have to make money

Agencies are businesses. They are not retirement homes for ageing journalists or stepping stones for creatives on their way to Hollywood, however the individuals within them see themselves. You must make their time worth it, or they can’t work on your business. Accept that people with more brains cost more money – don’t buy on the basis of price alone.

What is it you really want?

Do you want to be known across Australia/the world as the girl who did X? Do you want to marry your boss’ daughter? Should the brand be number one in six months? Should you be able to take over your main competitor in a year because they are broken financially and physically? There are millions of goals. So many clients don’t explain what they really want. Six percent sales increase. To stay in Woolworths. To take the board’s eyes off my budget/performance. Decide on five or six that are realistic for your sort of money. Then find the agency that can do three or four of them.

Do you want them to be very busy?

Some people gravitate to the very fashionable hot team. But, keep in mind, these people are often hot due to one or two campaigns that may not be at all relevant to your industry or your needs. And the reason they are ‘hot’ is because someone let them do an ad or two that was really out there. Often it’s not the creative teams that are good, it’s the ability for their suits to sell the ideas on to a board – many agencies are very good at creative and have done great ads, but you’ve never seen them because no one had the guts to run them or put enough money into their air time.

Don’t ride a bad horse

What you want is a sparky horse you have to pull back, that scares you, not one you have to kick all the time to get going. It’s so much easier to say no, whoooooah, than ask for the impossible from a bunch of untalented dickheads.

Creative kills media every time

Keep in mind this very simple fact: really stand-out creative costs way less to do the job because you don’t have to run it as often for it to be noticed. A media group will tell you success is all in the media choice. This is bullshit. Yes, effective media is paramount to getting value for money, but if the creative isn’t much good, no one will care. You will spend far more on media to get the same effect. Which serves who? Yes, you betcha, media buyers/sellers and the media itself.

Must they know your industry backwards?

Sometimes this is paramount, but rarely. Generally, if an agency knows a little bit about an industry, that’s enough.

Do you want competent work or work that breaks the mould?

Sometimes the trick is to keep yourself in with the board. That may mean conservative, but nice, work. Other times, the only thing that may work in an industry is right off the wall. Choose on this basis, but understand that the people who did the really radical stuff for an agency may have left years ago. So ask who did it, when and where they are now?

One agency or many?

Most smaller companies are better off with one agency who does it all, for consistency reasons and because every agency/design group will think every other one’s work is shit for one reason or another. So if they have more than one, they get pulled left and right all the time. It’s like that with all professions. Dentists tell you what’s wrong with the other guy’s work. So do accountants, so do IT people…

What they do now versus what they could do?

John F Kennedy stole this line from a genius. “We judge ourselves on what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us on what we have already done.” Many agencies do great work that never gets seen, for whatever reason. Ask to see their rejected creative files.

Shit well shot

If an agency thinks a client is reasonably dumb, or they are pitching to a committee of four or five, they will dress up the ideas to the max to make sure they like them. The ideas themselves could be so lame it’s not funny; but if it’s well art directed, anything looks good. Insist on hand-drawn roughs with ideas – any agency can make anything look good.

Skills base

Do you need certain skills, in media, etc. – or mass market stuff? The tools of the trade have really changed for marketing in the last decade. You may need strong resources in the digital and media space – someone with capabilities in video, blogs, podcasts, etc. They are often very different skills, but still can come from the same people. It’s more important if they are comfortable with your communication style – if they only do big powerful ads and you need a soft sell done with long copy, ask yourself if they can change their headset?

Don’t get fooled by the promise of big name creatives (who may never work on your business), marketing ‘sophistication’ (I hate jargon – it’s used by various professions to pull the wool over the eyes of their clients), many offices, or ‘international alignments’ etc. They are like mobile phones or cameras that have so many features they can virtually make you breakfast – do you really need to pay $10,000 more per month just to be able to see ads from London, when you could see them on YouTube for nicks?

There are many agencies who boast big, impressive client lists, which only have them because their owners in London or New York signed a worldwide contract. Think Nestlé, IBM, Ford etc. Thus, they do not have the talent that won the account. Don’t let a big client’s logo behind the receptionist’s desk fool you.

Fit with your company

They must fit your culture more than anything. If they don’t understand you, they’ll never get your brand. Go with people you can really talk to.

The agency must also fit the stage you’re at. A big corporate with 20,000 employees can only use a little agency for top of the heap stuff like corporate TV or little jobs for small divisions. They can’t get all their stuff done by a small company, there’s no capacity. Likewise, a big agency will ignore a small company like you ignore an ant. Decide if you want to be a big fish in a small pond or whether you’re happy being one pretty fish in their glass bowl. It’s about balance – can they do our work? Will they care?

Don’t jump too quickly

People often throw the baby out with the bathwater – most agencies are dying to put their grubby hands all over your baby/brand. Often just to prove their ideas are better than the last people’s – you need to make sure you know what is sacred to your brand’s existence and what is transitory. Would Macca’s change its logo to blue? Would you let them do it if you were marketing manager?

Two or three bites of the cherry

Sometimes a good agency doesn’t get it first time around. If you really like them, tell them what you think isn’t working and see what they say. If they are grown-ups, they will probably come back with some other ideas or a new approach.

Dumping the old gang

This needs to be done carefully and with diplomacy. Many a split has been caused by poor basic communications or even accounting on either side. This is something that can usually be easily fixed. (And many a creative group has mysteriously lost all your artwork after a nasty break-up. Whoops – the server fell over!) Know first that you are sure, and remember never to jump out of a plane without a parachute.

Process for selection:

  • check their website
  • choose about three or four to see only (the more you see, the harder the decision will be and the more of everybody’s time you waste)
  • ring and make an appointment (the first few are usually free)
  • brief in the project/pitch details
  • offer a small sum for their time – say $5000 to be taken seriously for a small pitch, $50,000 for a Telstra (it will still only be 10 percent of their costs, but you will sleep better)
  • give them two or three more meetings and about three weeks to do the pitch
  • see them in 90-minute windows – do not let them drag it out
  • see only one or two a day – you will be exhausted otherwise
  • take another week before you decide who to chase up – sometimes ads take days to register, even on you, and
  • negotiate a deal.

What would you do?

If I was choosing an agency, whether for creative, a design job, a media buying group, it doesn’t matter, I’d decide what size I wanted and what kind of work/talent skills I was looking for. Check their sites. I’d ask the most interesting three to pitch, just with rough drawings of ideas or media strategy – not completed negotiations – and a three-page proposal. I’d judge them on the quality of their ideas and how accurately they met that exact brief. Then I’d give the best two of them one little job each. Maybe a magazine ad, maybe a media buy… whatever.

Given that went really smoothly, I’d negotiate with the one I liked best on rates and retainers. And not actually decide until I’d finished that whole process.

Principles of direct marketing: Tried and true?

by ON
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There I was, sat staring at my blank PC screen, wondering what to write for this column. So, like everyone nowadays, rather than have to think for myself I turned to Google. I searched ‘direct marketing’. Reassuringly, ADMA was listed first (well done, Rob), then a small consultancy in Queensland (which is obviously better at search engine optimisation than the rest of us!), then B&T magazine. All interesting enough, but not much fodder for an article.

I then tried ‘direct marketing principles’. Bingo! ‘The 30 Timeless Direct Marketing Principles’ by US industry legend Bob Stone. Now this is what we all need – some hard and fast rules, developed in a market entirely different to ours, from a time before the internet and mobile phones existed. Perfect.

Despite all that, some of Bob’s principles are perfectly sound. It’s hard to argue with “people buy benefits not features”. And we each accept that “all customers are not created equal. Give or take a few percentage points, 80 percent of repeat business for goods and services will come from 20 percent of your customer base”.

That last one gets me every time. Everyone agrees with it, yet there is still an illogical obsession with customer acquisition. Doesn’t make sense to me.

So, Bob’s still on the money with some of his principles.

But I must take issue with this: “Maximising direct mail success depends first on the lists you use, second on the offers you make, and third on the copy and graphics you create.” I agree that these are the three drivers of success, but this has often been interpreted that creative doesn’t matter as long as you get the targeting and offer right. And I just don’t buy that.

It’s like throwing a bad dinner party. You invite the right mix of friends to make for an interesting evening (the ‘list’). You entice them with a gourmet menu featuring the finest ingredients money can buy (the ‘offer’). And then you blend all the raw prawns, steak, vegetables, and fruit together into mush and serve (the ‘creative’).

Doesn’t make for a top night, does it?

So while it’s true that great creative sent to the wrong list will fail, the opposite is also true; junk sent to a great list will fail.

Creative isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have – just like smart targeting and strong offers.

This doesn’t mean self-indulgent creative. The best direct mail succinctly nails the offer and leverages the targeting by making a personal connection with the reader. Great creative springs from the targeting and the offer rather than gets in the way of it.

OK, back to Bob’s principles. Here’s number 28: “A TV support commercial will increase response from a newspaper insert up to 50 percent.” What? Proof that integrated campaigns actually pull better than stand-alone direct marketing? Don’t tell the old school, but even one of their champions recognises that multimedia thinking makes sense.

Wouldn’t the world be a great place if media planners got on board with that (or ‘media-neutral channel planners’ or whatever they’re calling themselves at the moment)? As a start, wouldn’t it be great if they actually recognised direct mail as a medium and included it on schedules! We can but dream.

Overall, most of Bob’s principles still hold true, despite the fact that they are mostly based on catalogue marketing in the US. He also has a canny knack of dropping in some snazzy percentages to add a dollop of science. Take number 26: “A print ad with a bound-in card will outpull the same ad without a bind-in up to 600 percent.”

Brilliant, but what does ‘up to 600 percent’ mean? Five percent better? Fifty percent better? Five times better? Still, like most punters, once I see some impressive figures thrown around with confidence I’m sold!

The bottom line is that principles are just that – principles. They are start points for DM thinking, not definitive rules that guarantee success. Taken this way, Bob’s top 30 gives every direct marketer a head start in how we should approach our work. You just need to apply the common sense filter of how well these principles fit your market, product and customer.

So what are you waiting for? Google – and Bob – are ready and waiting for you!

Extracts reproduced with permission from ‘The Past, The Present and Future of Direct Marketing’ by Bob Stone in Beyond 2000: The Future of Direct Marketing by Jerry I Reitman (ed).

Guerrilla Guide: Direct mail, telemarketing, internet and TV

by ON
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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.

I’m kind of pleased to say that the tacky end of direct is slowly dying. And it’s dying because the public wants it to. The public sees the writing on the wall.

Still, some direct is really taking off. Direct emails are booming. So are direct phone calls (as long as the caller is not Indian). Direct TV is doing nicely. Direct from the-website-to-you is booming. But direct where the wastage is high, where volumes are sent instead of clever ideas, where segments are too large or where ratios of return aren’t high? The way of the dodo.

And, yes, we always read about the doom of an industry in these types of magazines. People are always predicting the demise of outdoor or the ruination of TV because of ‘fragmentation’, whatever the F that is, but I can feel the mood swing against poor quality direct mail more than I’ve ever felt any predicted demise before. People bristle on the neck when they see wads of paper being delivered to their homes. Does it show yet in the DM industry figures? I doubt it, but smart marketers are adjusting their use – demanding way more from their suppliers, particularly their creatives.

Sheer waste

This is because, as grown-ups on a crowded planet, we need to be able to put aside ‘in balance’ sheer business arguments and look at things in a mature fashion. We cannot in all seriousness condone huge waste for the sake of a few short-term dollars. (Well, the public can’t and that’s your biggest problem – doing something the public doesn’t approve of is death. Think of what sheer waste says about your brand, your attitude to the future…)

But in the long-term, as with the use of nuclear fuel, the pros for continuing along the established direct path do not outweigh the cons. We need ‘value adding’ like we’ve never seen it before. Where are the true thinkers in direct? Why aren’t they doing more?

I liken it to the nuclear debate because it is such a strong example of similar short-term dumb, accountant-style thinking. Run, like many Australian political arguments, by people who have a vested interest in the outcome, rather than by someone who’s taking an objective view of the issues.

Nuclear fuel could power us as a planet-load of people for a few years in total – maybe 10. As a percentage of our total fuel needs, maybe for about 30 to 40. (Ziggy Switkowski’s figures – I was at a lunch recently where he spoke about it.) For those 30 years we would benefit from slightly fewer carbon emissions. But for the next million years-plus someone would have to look after that spent fuel (uranium has a half-life of 300,000 years. Its nasty bit shrinks by half each 300K, meaning for a tonne to shrink to a kilo – which is still dangerous enough to kill everyone in Sydney – it would take around three million years).

Let’s look at human history a bit to get this into rock solid perspective. We do not know why the pyramids were built. We don’t know much about their secrets, even how they were built. We only started to be able to read the hieroglyphics on their walls in the 1920s because an Italian called Stefan Rossini managed to translate them by luckily connecting them with a dead language, Sanskrit. The point is, they were built only five to seven thousand years ago. And we know nothing. How can we expect people to look after some concrete bunkers in 200 years let alone 200,000 years, if they’re getting no benefit from doing it? As if they would? “Oh, we’ll just make sure no one goes in here, because an ancient God called Ziggy Stardust told us it would be bad juju”. Imagine trying to get that past a parliamentary expense committee? And keep in mind, the pyramids don’t leak into the ground water and kill everything on the planet.

You can’t justify shit direct mail anymore than you can justify 30 selfish years of easy, brain-dead power to the timeless infinity of being. Make no mistake, we will be judged as those who killed off our entire species, should we get the next couple of years wrong.

So I’m not going to waste more paper on the subject. I’m going to concentrate on those aspects of direct we can comfortably gravitate towards.

Emails

Becoming the groovy environment-conscious directee’s weapon of choice, emails are cheap to send out – normally free, got to love that. Can be cheap to put together, will often generate better returns, faster than any other method. You can literally have an idea this morning, brief the creative team, get some artwork up inside of an hour or three, send them out and get sales back the same day. And you can measure what category of customers responded to what creative, so you can change the story/emphasis regularly to do a better job. I challenge you to think of anything that comes close to being that effective dollar for dollar.

It will really boom when the Federal Government changes and/or Telstra or a consortium decides to spend the four to five billion dollars needed to upgrade our lines to optical fibre, like any country worth noting. But, there are the interests of TV to take into consideration and who would want our people having another viable media option? Certainly not the Packers or the Murdochs.

  • To do emails well, stay very flexible. Be prepared to adjust your creative according to what is going on in the world market at the time – topical is very powerful – if there’s been a big bombing or Peter Costello has just resigned, or whatever, use the news of the day for maximum effect.
  • Be right for the time. It is an instant medium. If you’re sending out to Australia at 8am, mention coffee or cereal, not wine and roast dinners.
  • Be cyber-oriented. It’s not a stuffy old letter typed on a manual typewriter in 1956 by Elmer G Letterman (ask your 60-year-old direct agency copywriter, or look it up on Google). Use short words, SMS shorthand.
  • Use original pictures. Anyone using obvious stock shots gets a much lower response than real shots. Think MySpace. Moving footage of real people doing silly things gets huge results. It’s good now to hit high-income customers or business, and will be very popular for the masses when we get real broadband.
  • Don’t use jargon. I know you corporate marketing types out there can’t help yourselves. God knows jargon is your only defence against the accountants in corporate land, but the public doesn’t respond well to jargon. They have too much going on in their lives to worry what you’re on about, so they just move their short concentration span eyes to another less painful subject and you lose sales.
  • Customise campaigns – make sure the gender is correct, the prizes worth winning, the tone of the note right for that audience, the fact you’ve contacted them before, it’s been on this subject etc. Your IT/database people can tell you these things, but you have to be nice to them. Try buying them a cup of coffee and not sniggering at their haircut.
  • Rejig things if they are not working. Don’t run hundreds of thousands out to people, you’ll only piss them off if you’ve got it wrong – do a 1000-person exercise, wait a few hours, check responses, change it, change it again, eventually get a good level of response, then roll it out.

Permission marketing is the only way to go, especially in Oz where we have privacy laws, which I have to say are an abomination in their current state. But that’s another whole article, and overdue I’m sure.

A recent Kingston University (UK) study found the following ‘amazing’ results: higher response rates correlate with more appealing subject lines, more images, a higher monetary offer, more appealing incentives and, shock horror, are inversely affected by the length of the email. In other words, make it topical, offer lots, keep it short.

The same study, which covered 371,072 individuals and their responses, found a click-through rate of only three percent in outbound emails. So don’t feel so bad if yours aren’t getting a much better return than that.

Television

My favourite direct. Worked with decent creative, a well-designed, easily navigated, heavy-selling website and a room full of telemarketers to close the deal, damn near nothing can beat it as a way to get vast volumes of sales at full margin. (Never forget – retail is invariably a discounting medium today.) We have a client called iSelect, which does this so successfully that the Libs, who want to float off Medibank Private for a mint, have established a government department to try to kill it off. iSelect has grown 100 percent per annum, week on week, for the last three to four years using this approach, and now accounts for some 10 percent of the private health market.

Traditionalists use long ads – late night TV is full of them. The ab slicer. The butt shrinker. The big-breasted blonde with the perfect white teeth and the vacant eyes. Sitting next to the meaty guy with the perfect hair (they always remind me of Fabio, I don’t know why…) who makes her look like Einstein. This is because they are normally Americans pushing these products and Americans are really bog stupid. (Anyone who lets George Bush Jnr run their country into the ground over two terms deserves the world’s ridicule.)

If you hire a decent ad agency and use a bit of creativity, you can have the same effect over far less time, so you can afford to run ads in higher rating shows. This gets heaps more sales than the traditionalist approach because there are only so many deadbeats that are up at 4am in the morning. And they are all stoned or whacked sideways from party drugs and very few of them have any money left.

Websites

Run some decent Google to get ‘em there. Or even mainstream ads if you can afford it. Make it simple to navigate. Nice big buttons for dummies. Make the deals seem wonderful. (Understand that we are all time-strapped except on Sunday arvos, so they don’t have to be the best deals, just the easiest to buy.) Throw in a set of steak knives. Organise delivery. Make sure you have a team of telemarketers for anything complicated. And Bob’s your grand-daddy, this is how direct works today.

Yes, slower than the full-on TV version. More manageable, cheaper to adjust, but more expensive per hit/sale than TV-powered. Much faster than direct snail mail and works intimately with outbound emails and other fuelling media. If you’re still going via retailers who stick it up your bum faster than look at you, then kick you in the head for wanting to be paid, think web.

Party plans

Yes, fun on a Thursday night. Yes, I want to buy strap-on everything. Yes, it’s as old-fashioned as black and white TV and very expensive per sale, but it costs bugger-all to set up and works a treat with the right product. And you have to be able to deal with all sorts of people, all of the time. But fun. Did I mention it was fun?

Quality direct mail

Direct post is still booming, but I feel it’s reaching a plateau. It certainly isn’t dead. It is, however, getting a rude shock and that’s good for any component of our society. It needs a few adjustments and to be able to justify itself to the community by regular demonstration of its own worth. To do this, it must strive for more flexibility. For sensible recycling uses for householders, like a cat food ad doubling as cat litter “Pissed off with expensive cat food?”. For much more use of die-cuts/post-backs/clever creative. For more integration of campaigns across websites, TV and radio. If you work things together properly, results skyrocket. And it needs much more customer involvement – for better returns, with less paper.

Phone calls: telemarketing

Still works in industrial sales. You don’t have much choice really; if you can’t ring potential customers, what’s the world coming to? Tricky to get past some receptionists who believe their only role in life is to kill commerce off at its grass roots, but this is where flirtation is king, where patience is a virtue and where good research beats dumb blundering every time.

Not so bad in domestic, as long as the offer is right, the punter has not put their name on the Do Not Call list, you are not working to set scripts, but prepared to ebb and flow the conversation according to the person’s mood on the other end of the line, and you are using Australians with normal Ozzie accents.

Webcasting

Apparently the way of the future. Audio and/or video live over the internet. The growth of webcast traffic has roughly doubled, year on year, since 1995 and is directly linked to broadband penetration. As broadband can deliver high-speed media offerings including on-demand video, Flash and video streaming, advertisers have also started to take notice, at least overseas where you can get it. With events like Live 8 and the 2005 London bombings, claiming 170,000-plus concurrent viewers, the opportunity for uptake is huge. As a new mass communications medium, webcasting is presenting both consumers and advertisers with fab opportunities to influence. You can have direct communication with your potential buyer, while they are motivated, paying attention and interacting with the commercial. Price is also another advantage; web streaming is considerably cheaper than television per hit.

SMS

Advertisers sending customers little messages that are fun. Great way to build up CRM with few downsides as long as it’s a two-way street and people enjoy them. With the growth of 3G and 4G comes a wonderful new resource – being able to send a picture-based message to a person when they are near your shops. I love the idea of hitting people at the right time with the right message. May be a bit annoying on occasion to the punter, unless they have opted in, but humour and topicality? Hot day, you get a note from 7/11, say 500 metres before you pass one, with a really fat, sweaty guy, dancing in a tutu, saying that it’s got ice cream/drink combos for $5? Not exactly direct, but send a rock video with a ticket message to a music lover? That is.

I’m sorry I’m so negative about direct post, but with sperm the worst of all pollutants and the globe dying under the weight of the virus we call humanity, I think we need to grow millions more trees, regardless of why they were planted. Nothing sucks up carbon like mature trees – a big gum or pine will put on tonnes a year, a newly planted sapling will only put on ounces. You do the maths. We should stop logging old-growth forests immediately. We should pay the paper companies to leave more of the farmed trees in the ground. And plant millions of hectares of new ones. Get the loggers off their chainsaws and onto some shovels. Probably go some way to fixing the obesity problem in the bush…

Next month I’m writing about marketing in the digital age, like I haven’t covered it enough in the stuff above. If you’re a ninemsn, a Yahoo!, a Google or somebody like that who could shout lunch, let’s do it. The editor and I are hanging for a good sushi, two bottles of saki or a new Honda.