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Direct Mail In The News
In this brave new world of web-based advertising and guerrilla marketing, the humble direct mail campaign could be easy to overlook … if it weren’t for politics!!! But direct mail, a/k/a direct marketing, has always had the Rodney Dangerfield effect of getting no respect. Maybe it’s the postal stigma … who knows? But I remember when I was a young academic at St. John’s University educating the youth of America about the wonders of Marketing, the Direct Marketing Association sought professors from across the country to become more involved in the industry by providing seminars and grants to professors who dared to go where no marketing sophisticate would dare to go back then! But enough about the old days...
Lately direct mail has been in the news in a big way. It’s not my habit to get political on this page (my parents always warned me about discussing politics and religion!), but I couldn’t pass on the big flap over Obama’s direct mail campaign in Ohio (for background see
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-campaign_5sfeb24,0,4350622.story)Why has this become such a huge deal? Short answer: direct mail matters (if it didn’t, the candidates wouldn’t use it and they certainly wouldn’t fight about it)! And it does work. The data speaks for itself. That’s why all those professors in the early eighties were doing research and creating evaluation models for the industry to track effectiveness. The San Francisco Chronicle gives some historical perspective and reminds us that direct mail first really started showing us its effectiveness with Goldwater back in the sixties (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/25/ED96V5A41.DTL). Fact is, while direct mail usually doesn’t get the headlines—because it’s not the glamorous marketing tactic (like advertising and the internet)— direct mail is always a big portion of most major political campaign budgets, in part because it lets the candidates make the kinds of very targeted appeals (and claims) that they just can’t do anywhere else. You see those folks at the DMA really did know something about their brand. And, oh yes, it’s always easy when you keep marketing in mind!
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