When I first started marketing in the 70s, I didn't know the term "direct response," but asking for the sale and tracking the results just seemed logical. The Fortune 100 corporation I worked for didn't agree... their "image" might be tarnished by my "salesy" marketing... it was "unprofessional!"
I've made a career of direct response using every kind of media, including the Internet since 1993, and have created over 7200 campaigns. Marketing -- and markets -- are never static; they are in a constant state of flux and change. Even the universe in a qualified, segmented in-house mailing list changes from mailing to mailing, offer to offer. That's why in direct response every new campaign is considered a "test," and no matter how great the response, we are never satisfied. For me, yesterday's best is tomorrow's test, and I know I can always better the previous "best" results. That's part of why I love marketing!
Great marketers are always discovering and learning new ways to reach over, around, under and through the clutter to get their message heard -- and responded to. Flying "under the radar" is often the best way to do this, but there is no textbook to teach outside-the-box thinking. It only comes from experience, and in marketing experience only comes testing campaigns and tracking your results.
Other posts have pointed out the mistake of identifying marketing with advertising. I think a bigger mistake made in the article was lumping "old" media in one pile, and all the Internet marketing in another. All media are simply different channels to reach your audience, hopefully in a place where they'll hear and respond to your message. The fact is, people are psychographically different when driving their car and listening to the radio, at home watching TV, flipping through a magazine or checking their email. You and I move through different states of mind and awareness during our day, and that mindset determines whether we are more (or less) receptive to messages coming through specific media. They all have advantages -- and disadvantages -- and are all effective. Combined, they can truly synergize a message and explode results.
Sometimes your marketing has to take a longer view as well. For example, in national campaigns, direct response can effectively use advertising and PR without measuring immediate sales, because the purpose is to create the awareness within the market. Using articles and press releases to create backlinks is essentially the same thing. If you measure your success by how many sales a single article brings in instead of the cumulative goal, you could very well give up just as you're on the brink of explosive growth.
What we measure -- what we consider "success" -- is also important. Direct response campaigns can be one-step, but often multiple-step campaigns not only have greater sales results, but create a "bank" of customers and prospects that you can tap again and again. Too many businesses only rank their immediate sales, and don't consider lifetime customer value or building their list as important in their tracking metrics. For one client I built a list of over 52,000, doubling their catalog sales. By their metrics, the campaign was a failure because they were only interested in counting sales through their shopping cart!
Ideally you want to have both sustaining frontend sales and active list-building for relationship selling and backend sales. We accomplished this "golden ring" of marketing with the Cash Flow Generator infomercial, which had enough front end sales revenue to make it self-sustaining. It became the longest profitable lead-gen infomercial ever, generating hundreds of thousands of qualified leads. Because most lead-gen campaigns -- even online -- incur front end costs, that is enough to keep most businesses from actively pursuing them. However, most businesses don't ever do anything with all the leads they get organically, much less leads from their active marketing.
If I had to choose between the two, I know I can create quantum growth faster and at less cost, turn a startup into a multi-million dollar company in months rather than years, and dominate my markets faster and easier by building and mining a good list than by trying to constantly create new sales conversions from new prospects. But it takes a longer term view of the marketing process than most business owners seem to have.
No, new media hasn't killed marketing. Measuring results isn't something new. The Internet has not replaced "old" media and it sure hasn't turned bookkeepers into savvy marketers. If anything, the Internet has dramatically expanded our marketing opportunities and made all this much easier and less expensive. Marketing -- real marketing -- has not only embraced and adapted to these new channels, but also the language and methods of using them to effectively earn the audience's responses. And marketers are already looking over the top of this mountain at the next peaks, the next innovations, the next opportunities to reach their markets in fresh, new ways. I couldn't imagine a greater time to be in marketing!
