Offline Post The Hope Of Online Plan

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday November 14, 2000

Dorothy Kennedy

Many a slip 'twixt letterbox and CD-ROM, writes Dorothy Kennedy.

The history of direct marketing over the Internet has been fraught with consumer angst, merchant disappointment and more weirdness than Groucho Marx could have concocted in a month of Sundays. Market offline for online customers, market online for online customers, build that brand, pour your marketing budget into banner ads and pump them into all the popular Web sites, spam a million email users. Nothing has worked consistently, and some things, like random direct e-mailing, have never worked at all.

Deep in the haze of exhaust fumes that is Leichhardt's car sales belt, Donald & Donald Advertising (D&D) is mixing the old with the new to thrash some fresh cash for its clients, who hail predominantly from the automotive industry.

In August, it joined forces with the local subsidiary of the Florida-based Direct Mail Express, DME Australasia Limited, forging a new entity which it claims will have an annual turnover of $100 million. DME brought to the table its proprietary software and Internet marketing programs, with which D&D plans to beef up its direct marketing capabilities.

Mark Carmichael was DME's managing director and is now director of D&D Advertising. He set up a DME office in Australia in 1997. The first two years were focused primarily on database marketing the direct-mail side of things, he says. In the next few weeks, Carmichael will be concentrating on a campaign that will employ a hybrid of online and offline techniques that has apparently been successful in the US.

Basically, advertisers get together to produce a CD that is mailed to a bunch of consumers. (Carmichael envisages an initial mail-out to at least 250,000 households known to have computers and CD-ROM drives.) Ideally, from D&D's point of view, the recipients will then load the CD into their computers, jump onto the featured advertisers' Web sites and have their activity tracked by DME's software. The customer information is then delivered back to the advertisers.

Tricky? Convoluted? Old-fashioned? A sure-fire loser? Not so, insists Carmichael. He reckons the concept worked for McDonald's, which ran a CD campaign in the US that hooked people through to its Web site with the promise of a free burger. In another US trial, Carmichael says, 68,000 disks were activated from a mail-out of 85,000. Admittedly, there was a very strong offer a new home, he thinks, was being given away.

Follow-up surveys were sent to the 68,000 respondents, and 60 per cent of them replied. Of the 40 advertisers featured on the CD, 38 backed up for the next CD. The average time that recipients spent logged onto the CD was a staggering 27 minutes.

But how will he persuade Australians to get the blasted CD out of the letterbox and into their CD-ROM drives in the first place? While she agrees that this is going to be tough, Carmichael believes that a solid offer, outlined in an accompanying letter, will do the trick. ``We're hoping for a very high response rate," he says. ``We would expect 40 per cent on the first mail-out."

Whether or not D&D can pull it off, the Readers Digest-style promotion indicates that direct marketing is still on closer terms with snail mail than email. You may be able to do a Web-based marketing campaign with less expense than a mail campaign, but a mail campaign will outperform a Web campaign, Carmichael says. Viva la postie.

dorothy-kennedy@hotmail.com