In the press - Opinions and press coverage
A meeting of disciplined minds
28th March, 2008
Christmas, picture the scene: a lovely lush paper envelope arrives beautifully scripted, addressed, and carefully stamped. Opening the letter it begins with my name, handwritten. Followed by a Xeroxed round robin of unbelievably bad quality, about most of which I have no clue (um, who's now better?), signed off with a cheerily penned "hope you're well and will visit us soon". Someone once gave me a gift book of similar round robins, written (well, copied and pasted) by a journalist from the Guardian. Seems they're old hat, an accepted if wince-making dying part of the only-at-Christmas great aunt twice removed's life outside their immediate family.
Several years ago this kind of just-plain-wrong circular started appearing in my email inbox too. Someone who'd moved to the nether regions of the world desperate to make sure I am fully up to speed with nephew twice-removed's recent conquest of some trivial ailment. Impersonal, topped and tailed to make it look like they really cared. But not so much as you'd be fooled.
There really is absolutely no excuse to bring this form into the commercial world. And yet, for the last few years, email marketing has been precisely that.
It started out just like direct mail - mass-printed, topped and tailed if it was of a more sophisticated bent. Amex perfected the art of reaching every human being now and yet-to-be born with an 'exclusive' offer. By the time email started looking like a potentially commercial medium, the world of DM was already thinking about segmentation, response measurement (not just coupon fulfilment) and honing of messages to create the best possible response rates. Email bureaux came into existence to extend the DM industry online, offering to blanket everything with an @ with an offer and a call to action. Email bureaux actually underpinned the sector while digital agencies were exploring giving users different coloured interfaces and arguing philosophically about cookies.
In this parallel industry, based on creativity and innovation rather than simply delivery, digital agencies started building communities through websites, forums and Newsgroups. Some of these communities, created for brands like Snickers, Peperami, Artemis Fowl and others, engaged people through great interactive content and encouraged their users to spread the word through emails, either through straight calls to advocacy or through inviting their friends to join the fun. The problem was that these engagement activities were essentially very low volume, triggered by other users rather than automated as part of some broad and broadcast strategy.
However, these digital creative agencies were learning about how to interact and create relationships, and were beginning to maintain these relationships through repeated outbound contact – and measuring the effects. In fact, while email bureaux kept churning out the mass email newsletters, getting it has to be said very low response, digital planners and creatives started thinking about how to use email as another way to create engagement. In 2003, Tesco broke new ground through the use of the online and in-store data they held on their customers to create new relationships based on segmentation. They started to examine the delivery of a CRM strategy through digital means. It was groundbreaking (their digital marketing still is), so much so that my agency decided to convince their agency's strategist to come and work for us.
We thought we were onto something big. We knew that email was becoming an acceptable medium for commercial communications. It was no longer the only thing about the internet that everyone knew how to use, it was (as a few agencies had proven) a distinctly relationship-oriented channel. We invested heavily in building a team that understood targeting through segmentation. We already knew how to generate permission from qualified leads for future contact through fun, if ephemeral, interactivity and many creative agencies had been doing it since 1995 with websites that became world-famous quickly but died when the client got promoted or moved on. We invested heavily in developing a discipline about relationships that we thought might last longer because it was based on creating permanent relationships with customers.
To support it all, anti-spam laws came in that meant consumers were, after a fashion, protected from indiscriminate marketing. When they had to opt in it meant we could gather a little information about their preferences, something previously only done when tailoring web content. It gave email a legitimacy and an excuse, but still most sent emails that more or less said "Happy Christmas, let us tell you all about us".
At that point, in 2003, we looked around for an email bureau that could deliver the emails we wanted to send and handle the brand new - so we believed - idea of tailored content and proper segmentation. We couldn't find one, having searched high and low, here, in Scandinavia and the States. We built our own from the ground up out of frustration. Actually it wasn't the world's best bit of kit, but it did teach us a great deal about segmentation and on-the-fly re-segmentation, about the value of deeper and richer data, and about the problems of venturing into IT (every time we corrected some problem we just tickled another bug). In the end we found that others had gone down the same path, and one or two email bureaux had been persuaded to widen from facilitating round robin newsletters to segmented broadcasts with tailored content. We hired our first email service provider roster, switched off our machines and breathed a sigh of relief.
The ability to segment, to provide content based on rules based on assumptions or behaviour or experimental learning, meant we needed planners. Not digital planners, information architects or writers of creative briefs; we needed planners who knew about data and data mining, customer insights, touchpoints and cycles.
So in the last couple of years we have built up a huge bank of knowledge about targeting, engaging and retaining customers through websites, email and online communities. Campaigns like the Virgin Holidays eCRM programme that netted between 14 and 26 pounds for every pound spent, or the work that Nickelodeon does, or the work that Peugeot or Citrix does... And we've realised something important. Important and, it has to be said, totally and completely obvious. What we're doing is exactly what the Direct Marketing industry has been doing for fifteen years.
Until fairly recently I really believed that digital was the one and only future for marketing. Although I still believe that the future's agency supergroup will be headed by digital rather than advertising specialists, I'm not so dumb (ah, hindsight) to think that digital can do this alone. The future of marketing is, I believe, all about the development of relationships between brands and their customers. The relationships driven by understanding, by analysis, by good planning. But while digital agencies may well have come to a level of appreciation of this way of thinking independently of other marketing disciplines, it cannot go much further without incorporating the massive body of work that has gone before it. And in fact, in order to make best use of the many ways relationships can be developed with consumers, digital cannot be the only media used.
Mercedes recently did a stunning piece of print that put the brand in its customers' hands in a touchy feely way that communicated more than any words or virtual environment could possible manage. Outdoor advertising, ambient media, point of sale, sponsorship and any other channel play often essential roles in creating a multi-touchpoint brand experience. Most importantly, while digital is clearly extremely supple, responsive, cheap and personal – more so than any other mass-communications channel – the DM industry holds a vast wealth of understanding of how to interact, how to segment and how to test and hone. This store of knowledge must be tapped by digital marketers so they get the very best advice that is available to their clients.
The only real problem is that simply transposing DM planning skills into a digital environment doesn't work. Likewise, the project management structures demanded by digital cannot work within the traditional DM agency environment. My own view, and I may well be biased(!), is that there are a few digital agencies that do really understand interactive relationship marketing, who do really get retention, but even fewer DM agencies that genuinely get digital.
So while DM agencies attract the relationship marketing budget, and digital agencies own the eCRM means, there needs to be partnership. We are not, after all in competition; we should be working together on our clients' behalf to further their commercial goals in order to deliver our own. Agencies from both sides of the fence need to understand how to work with each other to get the best out of the pooled disciplines. Holding hands really isn't that hard - we do it with several agencies, none of which are related to us. All of us know the round robin is an outmoded concept. Now will someone please tell the great aunt before next Christmas?
Direct Marketing International