News

When will the penny drop? While the digital craze has spiced up direct marketing, it certainly does not signal the death of traditional channels.

Is it me, or is there a bit of a calamity going on about the imminent and unavoidable death of direct marketing as we know it? Again.

Many trade magazines, this august journal included, have devoted copious column inches to the current 'hot topic' - namely, that traditional direct marketing is on its last legs and a new pretender to throne has arrived in the form of 'digital'. Many leading industry luminaries tell us that no one opens envelopes anymore, but they happily click their way through email after email.

Sorry, but to me, that just sounds like someone spoiling for a fight. It all boils down to how you define what we do, and I, for one, don't want to return to the bad old days when all types of communication were separated by a discussion on the channel deployed. As an industry, we've worked very hard to ensure that direct marketing agencies talk to their clients about press and TV; we'll just use them differently to our colleagues in ad agencies.

And therein lies the rub when it comes to discussions about digital. It is also merely a channel; a very broad one, but a channel nonetheless. It can be used to do many wonderful things, and good direct marketing is only one of them.

There will always be agencies that can specialise in the digital space to create original answers to marketers' challenges, and there will always be direct marketing. No direct marketing agency can proclaim to be able to exploit the digital channel in all its possible ways. That said, they should and must be able to harness it to its full potential in developing direct marketing strategy. Direct marketers who only deal in digital are simply confining themselves to one channel, just as their forefathers confined themselves to direct mail.

Of course, there are many who are guilty of not understanding digital and its potential, and are simply bolting on a department to an existing business model. That never works.

Instead of building walls and differences between different specialists, let's work together to grasp the direct strategy of the future - one that will no doubt contain both paper and pixels.

Chris Whitson, Planning Partner
Stephens Francis Whitson