Life is Personal! What we need and desire determines what we do about our lives. This selfishness drives our buying behaviour.

A while back, someone was mentioning how difficult it must’ve been to Google to make their home page what it is. Simple, fast, no glitz, no distractions …

That led me to think and realize a possible reason why.

Google is not led by advertising. The framework of direct response marketing drives Google’s business. The home page is what the world sees first and that neutral, simple and everyone knows what they want to do when they go there. Search.

What’s inside however is what each user to decide what he needs or wants to see. And that’s the worlds largest departmental store serving relevant links to places one is searching for.

You then have Ads powered by the same rational, relevance; similar to those posters and branded messages in department stores.

With technology that allows clients to pay only for those who accept the advertising messages… very very direct response.

And each layer is tracked, compiled, analyzed, contextualised, grouped and the insights fed back to boost the power of that search engine… (code word algorithm.) Simply put database led? Googles list is endless. Beta products, Referral programmes, preview and live demonstration. Don’t we trip on all or some of them and say hey that’s fantastic?

But then this is not about Google.

Ever wondered why one uses envelopes while creating direct mailing packages? Ever thought giving the fundamentals a thought before doing that advertising copy or visual that’s become common place? Ever went beyond typical advertising messaging to being true response messaging?

The quest to understand and serve the simple underlying truth is the billion-dollar industry globally. Direct Marketing.

Two long decades have gone by trying to make sense of this profession in this country and we’re still at the edges dabbling with it. Not even putting a sincere effort to understand this enigma. And we’ve not moved an inch. Some of the better initiatives I would say were done earlier in the past than present day.

How can we scale the heights without knowing the possibilities from both a micro and a macro level?

By the way, using ones name in a letter is word processing wizardry and NOT personalization!

It’s a shame that this second oldest profession has been relegated to being a mix of additional media options, and not to forget the “lines” and the “Degrees” that we seem to have absorbed as common jargon.

Rejoinder required... hypes of Cannes regardless. Direct Marketing is NOT direct mail or graphic design.