Tony Spong, head of direct marketing, sales promotion and integration at marketing business consultancy AAR asks were direct marketing ends and digital marketing begins
I meet with hundreds of agencies at AAR – over 140 in the last year alone. Two words dominate our conversations, “integrated” and “digital”, with integrated often used to bolster the agency’s claim that they do both direct marketing and digital. However many of my clients find it all very confusing. So to clarify where direct marketing ends and digital begins, I usually begin by considering the long history of written communication.
Paper first arrived from China in the 12th century, but it wasn’t until the 1400s that it was mass-produced. So when Gutenberg adapted an old olive press into a moveable type set, the ingredients for the printing press came together and in 1452 he produced the first book – the Gutenberg Bible.
However, in those days the general populous was unable to read, and the travelling “raconteurs” were the key to getting stories out to the masses. The market was there but the distribution infrastructure was not. The situation was improved by towns and cities sponsoring book fairs to attract budding authors, collectors and scholars. Each fair produced a catalogue of all the works to help people search for what they wanted. I like to think of it as a sort of medieval website, full of rich content with a search button built in.
After the first newspaper appeared in the UK, we had to wait until 1746 before the next and probably most crucial breakthrough when Samuel Johnson began to produce the definitive Dictionary of the English Language. To supplement his income, he produced the most popular “blogs” of his day under the names of The Rambler and The Idler which were distributed by hand or appeared in newspapers, starting a trend for fast, accessible information that has remained in the forefront of the communications world to this day.
In establishing a common language, Johnson helped create an explosion of public engagement and interaction via the printed medium. With the creation of reading rooms, book clubs and other social networks, the world began to come together.
Just as books once belonged to Latin-speaking monks in Gutenberg’s time, the possibilities at the start of the digital age, at the end of the 20th century, were accessible to a select few because computers had their own language. But as with Gutenberg, the technologies started coming together, providing the raw materials for Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the internet in 1991.
The first blog appeared in 1999, which whilst admittedly a little faster than Johnson, arguably fulfilled the same purpose. The digital revolution had started, and people were beginning to catch on. And when Bill Gates established a more accessible platform with the creation of the Microsoft empire, things really started to gather pace despite the dot-com bubble bursting in 2001-2002 because the infrastructure was not ready.
The similarities between the way digital and direct communications came about are unarguably similar, but how is this relevant to us in the marketing world? Did the correlation between Gutenburg and his printing press, and Gates with his Microsoft explosion, really have an impact on the way we market our products today?
Well, sort of. The digital world isn’t like any other, it is far more environmental in its capacity to create an almost 3D and quite literal “virtual world” – one of its most endearing features as a marketing tool. And whilst there are obviously new possibilities in the digital world, many of the things we ask of this new medium are not new. The human need to communicate with others has been there for millennia, the digital age is simply the next step on that journey, allowing faster, more accessible information sharing – the 21st-century equivalent of Johnson’s blogs.
I think the question that this article poses is impossible to answer. However, while we have retailers who sell only paper, and we have newspapers and packaging of every shape and size, the question, “Where does direct marketing end and digital begin”, will remain defunct. Do we ask, “Where does direct marketing end and paper begin”? Of course we don’t. Direct marketing will only stop when you stop doing direct marketing, no matter how all-encompassing the digital age may appear.
In the same way that Gates helped create a dot-com world, his efforts would have been in vain if Johnson had not already paved the way for him. People are already rooted in a common language, so all Gates and Berners-Lee had to do was sell the same package, in a different medium.
Clients want to know, “What new rules of direct marketing have you written since digital arrived?” That should be our focus because clients still want and need to do direct marketing. We still get those briefs and, yes, much of it is in the digital space and, yes, many digital agencies can’t do direct marketing. However that’s because they don’t want to do direct marketing. They are in a different space altogether as Johnson, Pepys and co were in their time.
People are hungry for new experiences, and by offering these new experiences, marketing agencies have continued to satisfy this hunger. Yes, the opportunities with digital marketing are very different to those of a direct campaign, but the fact remains that one cannot exist without the other.
Finally, because of digital, the way we do direct marketing will change, some of it may even be rooted in tried and tested techniques. I hope to see rules broken and lots of innovation but above all an end to this confusion. Sometimes the best way to go forward is to go back.