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The Think Tank panellists

Martin Troughton is marketing director at Anglian Home Improvements. He co-founded HPT Brand Response, later acquired by WPP.

Julie Constable, senior consultant at Agency Insight, was a consultant for 10 years at AAR and previously worked at Craik Jones, Rapp and Wunderman, as well as BSkyB.

Mike Dodds became CEO of Proximity London at the start of this year after a 12-year stint at OgilvyOne, latterly as CEO.

Gail Dudleston is CEO of digital agency twentysix. She joined the agency in 2005 from WWAV Rapp Collins North.

Tony Lamb is head of data development at Royal Mail. He was previously head of technical development at Wegener DM and an MD of Conduit Business Information.

Ian Bates is creative director at Entire. Clients include Boden, Next Directory, Tourism Ireland and P&O Cruises. 

Avril Tooley is account director and partner at design agency Brand Opus, joining in January 2007.

Perception is everything, as every marketer knows. And in perception terms, direct marketing is a paradox: it thrived despite a poor image among consumers because, for the most part, it is inherently useful to them. For clients, DM's ability to target consumers directly and cut out the middleman has been the appeal.

Take a recent Sunday Telegraph report on Sky's Smart TV, a service that promises to revolutionise advertising by targeting it at consumer group depending on their demographics. The article struggled to explain the concept in layman's terms, until the consultant involved eventually came to an acceptable definition. "It's just direct marketing, really," he said.

‘Direct' has come a long way if TV advertising is looking to switch its fundamentals from mass market to targeted and discriminatory. But is this seismic shift reflected in the term ‘direct marketing'? The phrase has some pretty heavy baggage, being synonymous with direct mail, a channel that is diminish-ing in importance in the digital age. The IPA's Bellwether Report still insists on separating direct marketing and ‘internet' spend, ignoring DM's multi-channel reality.

Do this month's Think Tank participants believe a rebrand might be the solution? The idea is not so preposterous, when you think of how market research became much more compelling when it evolved into ‘consumer insight' in the late 90s. "Most people I speak to believe there is probably a perception problem, but are not sure what to do about it," says Mike Dodds, newly installed chief executive of Proximity London. If DM's perception is as an offline discipline, it is an unfair one. "Most DM agencies have a broad portfolio of media they operate in," Dodds says. "We always talk more about how we reach someone or get a response, using whichever medium is appropriate."

That DM practitioners - be they agencies or suppliers - have converted to digital is not in doubt. Whether word of this has penetrated client consciousness is another question. "There's a heavy end to digital marketing - site build, web optimisation and the rest - that DM agencies are not perceived to be doing well at," says Gail Dudleston, chief executive of digital agency twentysix.

Dudleston produces a printout of Wikipedia's definition of DM, which talks of sending messages to consumers using direct mail, telemarketing, email, faxing, couponing and DRTV. "Someone needs to update that," she says.

Entire's creative director Ian Bates suggests, tongue not quite firmly in cheek, that direct mail rather than direct marketing needs a rebrand. "We are talking about how we can take market share from other channels, rather than complaining about how much volumes have decreased," Tony Lamb, head of data development at Royal Mail, responds. With statistics from Nielsen Media Research proving that less mail is being thrown away unopened, there is a positive story to tell.  

Pushing the boundaries

DM's Wikipedia entry and the IPA's conservative view of direct are unfortunate, says Martin Troughton, marketing director of Anglian Home Improvements. "The IPA survey has created a whole category - internet - that is just a subset of DM. Direct has always been media-neutral, but we've allowed the new-media element to usurp it and that whole category to be taken away from us."

As a former DM consultant at agency intermediary AAR and now senior consultant at Agency Insight, Julie Constable admits that she once classified direct and digital agencies separately, but not any more. "Clients are just looking for solutions to their business problems and don't mind where a big idea comes from. Today, there's a collection of agencies which could deliver that in many different ways."

And there's the rub. When everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody, as WS Gilbert once wrote. A hundred and fifty years later, marketing agencies of all descriptions are making inroads into digital, and distinctions are blurring.

Individual direct marketers have crossed the Rubicon, taking DM principles with them. Dudleston worked for 14 years at WWAV Rapp Collins before switching sides to co-found twentysix. "But then some pure-plays are more like web design agencies and don't understand customer data and the user journey," she says. "What we've tried to do is look at digital with DM eyes to enhance the experience of the customer journey."

The fact that all marketing agencies now claim expertise in digital makes DM's branding harder to establish. "With all this crossing over, no one understands your unique role," says Avril Tooley, account director and partner at branding specialist Brand Opus. While market research was clever to reposition itself as customer insight, Tooley says, "you still do market research to get insight. So direct marketing is the function, it's the action of what you do, but it needs to say what it does". ‹

Is the looseness of the term ‘direct marketing' its strength? "If you're a client and someone comes to you with a good idea that will bring you response, you'll listen to them," Lamb says. "You won't care how it's pigeonholed."

Dodds (above) believes that to abandon the DM label would "show a lack of confidence and we should be confident about direct marketing as a discipline". But if a full-scale renaming is not the solution, is redefining the answer? "There's something in the conception of a direct campaign that is uniquely different to that of an advertising campaign," Bates says. "That it's a misunderstood craft creates a problem for the name, rather than the name not being fit for purpose. It is direct and it is still marketing." Bates's agency Entire feels so strongly about the matter that it has launched a website, www.whatisdm.co.uk, to encourage debate on the issue.

The need for self-promotion

While no one expects a prime-time TV campaign extolling the virtues of one-to-one marketing, Troughton points to campaigns such as the Newspaper Marketing Agency's series of ads, including Haagen Dazs' ‘Lose Control', showing how newspaper advertising can build brands. The Radio Advertising Bureau did a similar campaign in the past for radio.

Whether direct marketers would cough up for a similar initiative is a moot point, but there is consensus on the need for some effective PR that reaches business leaders. The DMA produces the weighty report ‘Economic Impact Analysis', quantifying the contribution DM makes to the economy. Royal Mail is working with its agency Proximity London to get mail's message out to senior marketers. "It's about how the channels are complementing each other rather than using one channel in isolation," Lamb says, "from TV for brand awareness, to websites for data capture, to personalised digital print".

Yet the feeling is that the ‘proof' message must come from a more independent source - a London Business School survey, Dodds suggests, extolling the effectiveness of direct communications. Tooley believes such research should go further. "If you're the discipline that embraces payment by results, then you need to prove that," she says. "But you also need a view of where you see yourself in five years' time, irrespective of the media and the technology around you."

The IDM is the one trade body that has successfully repositioned itself, Dodds suggests, to nods of agreement. "It spotted the digital trend 10 years ago and went on to offer the only accredited digital training around," he says. "The IDM's Digital Diploma in Marketing reinforces the synergy between direct and digital. The only effectiveness awards in our area are hosted by the IDM, and effectiveness is what's going to make direct more attractive to marketers."

The DMA made a concerted effort this year to reposition, not itself, but its flagship awards into the digital arena by including six dedicated categories to digital response marketing. Bates argues that by extending the criteria for entry to work above- or below-the-line "that made people do something", the DMA has diluted the essence of DM. "You could enter a Levis TV ad, and as long as you could prove an increase in sales, you were a winner. Where's the targeting, the trackability in that?"

But the widening of the DMA award entry criteria is welcomed by the other panellists as a step in the right direction. "You can see what the DMA is trying to do," Dodds says. "It's repositioning to include all media that has a direct effect."

Bates regrets DM's absence of representation in the upper echelons of client organisations. But in the client boardroom, where arguably the bullets fly thickest, the discipline of direct marketing still has all to play for. Troughton says that at the level above marketing director, there is "no interest" in a supplier's provenance. "I present sales and leads," he says. "My bosses are not interested in how I generate them."

The elevation of Ogilvy Group vice-chairman Rory Sutherland to the presidency of the IPA, the first direct marketer to hold that position, could be significant PR-wise. When Troughton and Dodds worked together at Ogilvy in the mid-90s, Sutherland, their creative director, reportedly said: "Advertising is a collection of great media in search of an idea; DM is a powerful idea in search of a great medium. The internet is that medium."

A letter to Sutherland from our panellists, congratulating him on his appointment, would start with a request to recast direct marketing within the IPA's Bellwether survey. It would then seek his leadership to promote DM as "marketing for grown-ups", as Troughton puts it. "A conversation with direct marketers is a commercial conversation in a way that talking to ad agencies and digital shops isn't," he says. "And if you're not interested in a return on investment, then what kind of marketing director are you?"

A compelling positioning for DM, indeed. 

Repositioning DM: Our Think Tankers' blueprint

1. Commission an independent report by the London Business School on the effectiveness of DM and a vision
for its future

2. The term ‘direct marketing' may be fit for purpose, but its evolution into the digital arena needs recognition through a promotional campaign similar to that run by the Newspaper Marketing Agency demonstrating how newspaper ads can build brands

3. Recruit Rory Sutherland, the new IPA president, to help promote DM in the boardroom as "marketing for grown-ups" - the commercially minded marketing sector