Although at times the writing is uninspired and somewhat self-serving (the first third, for example, can be skipped), the authors make some interesting points about how advertising and DM have evolved in recent years. Traditionally, advertising was used as “air cover” or to “soften the market” by marching into the marketplace battleground with broadly distributed messages aimed at piquing the interest of consumers. Direct marketing, then, followed advertising, and targeted those interested folks with offers to convert that interest into actual sales.
Advertising was considered “top of the funnel” and direct marketing “bottom of the funnel” (referring to the purchase funnel). Advertising was supposed to hook them and direct marketing was supposed to get them onto the boat. Advertising affected their attitudes while direct marketing affected their behavior. You get the point.

As the authors argue in their piece, these days there is no such thing as a linear purchase cycle. There is no predictable, projectable flow of consumers from one stage (Awareness) to another (Interest) to another (Desire) to another (Action). Consumers today can go online and research brands and products on their own terms as opposed to those of marketer’s. And they do it much faster than before.

Where I disagree with these fine gentlemen is in the assertion that the two disciplines are the same. They are not. I agree that they are intertwined and that they no longer can work sequentially (but rather must work concurrently). I agree that direct marketing must play a much larger role in the marketing of a brand or product and that the role must be played throughout, not just at the end. But the same thing they are not.

The article discusses new roles for direct marketing (other than the traditional “closing the deal”). Direct marketing can improve a brand’s ability to listen to a consumer, react to the consumer, and learn from the consumer. Direct marketing allows a brand to personalize experiences and respond to a consumer’s needs more quickly and personally. Direct marketing allows a brand to take the conversation to the one-person level. All these activities and interactions contribute to the consumer’s perception of the brand and are therefore branding.

What the authors fail to address (and perhaps this is because they don’t want to get into this
conversation in public) is whether brand advertising per se is needed anymore. In this environment where (a) brand-consumer interactions are multiplied and accelerated, (b) more and more of those interactions are controlled by the consumer rather than the brand, and (c) consumers increasingly turn to peers and other “civilians” for information (and the truth) about brands, do we really need traditional brand advertising?

Traditionalists would tell you that people feel good about Nike or Apple because someone (marketers) told them how to feel. That they are good products, yes, but that all the goodwill surrounding strong brands was started by a marketer showering the masses with messaging painting the picture they wanted to be seen; telling the story they wanted to tell, the way they wanted it to be told.

From where I’m sitting, though, all that and much more can be accomplished by direct marketing, and it can be done in a more measured and managed manner, resulting in reams of actionable data that can be further leveraged in support of the brand. Perhaps that’s what the authors mean when they say that branding and response are the same. But I would say it differently. To me, branding is now just another function of direct marketing. Because doing brand advertising without a direct marketing framework these days feels irresponsible and dangerously disengaged from the real goal of all this money being spent: building the brand’s business by selling more.

The data comes from TiVo’s StopWatch, available since February of this year, which measures second-by-second viewership from a random sample of 20,000 TiVo units. Two months of data were released (April and May) and the results, while preliminary, are telling.

TiVo

It seems that commercials at what Steinberg calls “opposite ends of the spectrum” did well against the fast forward button. One is “bare-bones direct response” and the other is “high-production-value movie ads.” The data on movie ads are tenuous, in my opinion, given the small amount of those ads on the list of least fast-forwarded. On the direct response side, however, the data are more convincing.

In the month of May, for example, three of the top five least fast-forwarded spots were DRTV ads. I’ll spare you the somewhat-less-than-kind words Steinberg used to describe direct response ads.

Todd Juenger, from TiVo Audience Research, says that the information is still too new to draw strong, sustainable conclusions. In fact, you can’t even break down the data by demographics. Still directionally it’s suggestive. Mr. Juenger suggests that direct response ads do well “because they are easily understood.” He also points to the relevance of the message as an important consideration, although I struggle to link lack of message relevance to fast-forwarding when the sample is random.

Based on this, some agency media buyers expect agencies to offer more bare bones information in advertising, suggesting an approach closer to that of text-based online paid search ads.

It will be interesting to see what the future releases of the TiVo data show, but for now at least, my interest is piqued.

While essentially a research-related article, I found it valuable for marketers in general to consider what Neveril writes in the context of marketing communications. He writes that it is common in his field to find dissonance between what people tell you about themselves (and what they do) and what they actually do.

He proposes that in order to cut through all the “clutter” of a description of what a person thinks about the brand or their desire and intent to purchase it, for example, we can discover the real person by focusing on actual behavior. “Actions do speak louder than words,” he writes.

The article goes on to recommend three practical approaches to gathering behavior data, defined by the elapsed time between the behavior and its recording. The best approach, he concludes, it recording the behavior as it happens, which is usually associated with ethnographic research. The reason it’s the best approach is because the researcher doesn’t need to rely on the consumer’s memory, but rather the data are recorded in real time.

In the end, Neveril reminds us that past behavior remains the best (albeit imperfect) predictor of future behavior. He writes “if you want to know how your customers will behave in the future, don’t ask for more of their opinions; just take a look at their behavior.”

I submit that direct marketers have known and leveraged this for generations. In direct marketing, it doesn’t much matter if a consumer claims to have that elusive “purchase intent” or if they are in the “consideration stage” of the purchase process. What does matter is if the consumer takes a measurable action.

Only when the consumer exhibits a behavior can a direct marketer safely measure and predict future actions. Think of it this way. Instead of asking a bunch of consumers if they’re interested in Brand X, let’s measure how many respond to an offer for more information about Brand X. In the first case, we’d know what consumers said about their interest in the brand. In the second case, we’d know consumers actively got off their butts and acted by saying “hey, I’m interested, please send me more information.”

I would argue that more valuable is the second instance where there is actual hard (quantifiable) data about hand-raisers. That’s one of the beauties of direct marketing. There’s little need to do research in the traditional sense of the word. We just test in market with real environmental variables in place. What works we keep, what doesn’t we don’t.

Paraphrasing Neveril, to know what’s going to happen, just do what direct marketers do and look at what’s happened before to determine what will happen in the future. When that’s not available, don’t ask consumers what they think they’d do. Make them an offer and see what they actually do.

That means looking at the existence of response centers (calls and emails) that are Spanish-enabled, putting in place databases that can handle ethnicity and language flags, ensuring that metrics are in place to measure Hispanic efforts separately and fairly, etc. Pay attention even to things like ensuring that stores to which you’ll drive Hispanic traffic are properly staffed with bilingual employees. You get the point.

From the May 2006 article in Target Marketing magazine by Gustavo Grüber, former Chair of the DMA’s Directo Council, comes the following advice to not lose sight of the back-end processes when implementing direct marketing programs for the Hispanic market. Below is my adaptation of the list of process and procedures that Gustavo suggests:

• Train data entry staff and set up database fields properly to deal with compound names (like first name “María de Jesús” and last name “de la Cruz”) appropriately and not end up with bad data (like first name “María” and last name “Jesús”).
• Set up bilingual response centers that can respond to calls or other inbound contacts (e.g., email) in the same language that they were sent and that we promised to consumers. Also, prepare for longer call times (Hispanics tend to be chatty and to seek trust by “getting to know” the rep on the phone, lengthening calls) and emails.
• Accommodate longer pay cycles that are more appropriate for a large section of the Hispanic population that are not as in tune with the importance of timely payments and credit ratings as the general market consumer. Also offer COD or other cash-based payment options for those who prefer to pay cash (or don’t have a credit card).
• Design Spanish-language or bilingual bills for Hispanic consumers. Many Hispanic households are multigenerational, and the person ordering the product may prefer Spanish while the person paying for it may prefer English. Bilingual billing solves this. At the very least, Spanish-language billing closes the loop of the full in-language experience for the consumer.
• Adjust metrics accordingly to account for differences in the Hispanic market. Responses may be lower than general market benchmarks but conversions may be higher (or vice versa). In some cases, the front-end ROI calculations may show lackluster results, but longer-term calculations like lifetime value may be superior.
• Be patient and persistent with Hispanic market programs. Hispanics are for the most part newer to direct marketing programs, so they may take a while to adjust. That newness may also drive a lot of testing and refining of programs because there are few benchmarks or historical learning to leverage.

The full article, if you’re interested, is available here.