Thanks. I’m glad ıt was helpful.

Good luck!

- Greg

Thanks for your reply. Of course I know that you don’t mean to knock Direct Marketing

Ajoy

Great story. Thanks.

Btw. Just to be clear, I don’t in any way mean to knock direct marketing. It’s absolutely essential.

- Greg

Interesting post. However, I have some thoughts that I’d like to share…

There is safety – and also comfort – in numbers. So the more people you touch through advertising, the better off you are.

As a Direct Marketer – I have always spoken to a tightly targeted, narrowly defined audience. And what has it resulted in? Small audiences have got me small numbers! Sure – the responses coming in give you a different kind of a high – but they pale in comparison to the muscle of high budget advertising.

I remember doing a traffic generation exercise for the branch of an international bank – they had many branches in this country. We focused on one branch – did an intensive exercise in that locality and drove traffic into the branch. How many people? Around 100 in one month. The branch people were thrilled. And just a month later – the bank launched a new product/brand – and spent millions in advertising that brand throughout the country. The sheer muscle of those dollars spent – the number of insertions etc. made our entire Direct Marketing (Traffic Generation) activity seem to pale in comparison. No wonder we, the Direct Marketing arm of a large agency, would always refer to the parent company as Big Brother.

To quote another example, albeit different, I remember helping a company revive some of its dormant retailers/customers. And I asked the Sales Manager to allocate a team of 5 tele-callers to call these dormant retailers and revive them into transacting. The Sales Manager- quite new to this company said just one thing – if you want to show results – hire 20 tele-callers – show 4 times the response – and then you will get noticed! In hindsight he was right! People notice waves – not ripples.

In fact the one word that I always come across is “scalability” – which means that people are saying to me – the margin you earn does not matter as much as how scalable you are and therefore what numbers you can bring in.

I have to therefore, grudgingly accept the fact that advertising will get you the visibility – not because of the medium or the message alone – but also because of the money/muscle that has goes into it .

I cant recollect who said it – but he said it right – “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”.

Ajoy