THE REVENGE OF DIRECT MARKETING
For people like me that are old enough to remember how simplistic the advertising scene once was, today’s ecosystem may seem shocking. Well… it isn’t! I can reassure you that to people like me, today’s environment is not only absolutely fascinating but also very familiar in a way. Let me explain. In the late 1990’s and early 2000, the media scene was predominately TV (cable and aerial), with some promotions (physical contacts with customers), a bit of PR (mostly social responsibility) and depending on the industry, a bit or a lot of direct marketing.
I happened to spend 14 years working at Wunderman and it was absolutely brilliant. My life was full of targeting tactics, testing different creative executions, enriching company data with external databases, studying consumer reaction and figuring out ways to increase the consumer response. But despite the fact that we were sitting at the same table with the “traditionals” we were always somehow “the advertising underdogs”. We were the freaks that were not just selling creative, but babbling about targeting, data, ROI, sales, redemption of offer, etc., etc…
Clearly times have changed. We are not the freaks anymore. We are those who understand, those who can integrate, evolve, explain, coordinate, measure and understand the analytics. Everything is familiar, we done it before, now it just got easier, quicker, and at a larger scale. Just ask any direct marketer of the 90’s about today’s ecosystem and this is what you will get:
- Big data? —- Got it!
- Targeting and programmatic? —- Doing this for ages!!!! Now technology just makes it easier and scalable.
- Cross device? —- No biggie! We have been de-duplicating databases all along!!! Easy.
- Engagement, ROI, sales —- of course! What else? It has always been about that!
All these are not new, at least to the likes of me – advertising people that had the chance to also be direct marketers. We are absolutely thrilled with the capabilities that technology now offers to clients and agencies. Because now, everything is direct marketing. Every campaign has sophisticated targeting; can differentiate creative execution by medium and target with no hassle; can enrich media through 2nd and 3rd party data; can identify consumers in different devices and serve the same message across devices. And all these can be measured and optimized. So we live in the era where the advertising “freaks” are finally welcome. And slowly but surely the world understands that these people were not freaks at all, they were just ahead of their time…
