When I became a copywriter in the late 1970s, direct mail wasn’t popular — considered an ugly stepchild of beauiful color magazine ads and funny TV commercials.<\/p>\n
I never once tried to push direct mail on anyone or argue that it was somehow better than those TV and magazine ads, preferring to write sales letters only for companies that already wanted and believed in sales letters — a practice I continue to this day.<\/p>\n
But today’s blogging and social media gurus are different. <\/p>\n
They are not content to offer speeches, books, and consulting services to companies who want to try these new media.<\/p>\n
The social networking evangelists feel compelled to stand on a soap box and proclaim to the world that Twitter, Facebook, and the gang are the greatest thing to happen since sliced bread.<\/p>\n
And, they take pains to explain how social media is making all that “old hat” stuff — like TV commercials, radio spots, magazine and newspaper ads, and direct mail — obsolete.<\/p>\n
To do so is foolish for several reasons.<\/p>\n
First, your evangelist faith in the power of new media is largely unproven.<\/p>\n
Yes, there is a growing number of success stories.<\/p>\n
But these are still isolated.<\/p>\n
New media is NOWHERE as proven as conventional marketing methods like direct mail and space advertising.<\/p>\n
Second, smart marketers know it is not a case of choosing one over the other. They use any and all media that works, in combinations that get the best results.<\/p>\n
But new media evangelist seem hell-bent on making their Kool-Aid pre-eminent and deriding all that came before.<\/p>\n
Third, social media may be beneficial. But the metrics for it are nowhere near as strong and established yet (and perhaps may never be) for traditional direct response.<\/p>\n
In social media, peple often make logical cases for why campaigns work (e.g., with 8,720 new blog subscribers, I am getting a lot of exposure for my ideas).<\/p>\n
In DM, we KNOW the campaign worked or didn’t work (e.g., I spent $10,000 and generated $35,670 in sales).<\/p>\n
So let me ask you….<\/p>\n
If you are a new media evangelist, what compels you to be so contentious with and critical of us old-school direct marketers?<\/p>\n
Why does what we do offend you on so many levels?<\/p>\n
Do you think it’s more important to be trendy, hip, cool, and current … or (like us direct marketers) to make the cash register ring?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I became a copywriter in the late 1970s, direct mail wasn’t popular — considered an ugly stepchild of beauiful color magazine ads and funny TV commercials. I never once tried to push direct mail on anyone or argue that it was somehow better than those TV and magazine ads, preferring to write sales letters […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}