The obvious advantage of utilising Door Drops is that you can reach every household in the UK, making it possibly the only mass medium still in existence.
This flexibility makes every client's door-drop campaign refreshingly different, with endless promotion and targeting possibilities from delivering 2,500-25m households, from Bognor Regis to Inverness.
With both precise geographic and demographic targeting, this flexibility can also be followed through to creative, delivering anything from free samples and promotional coupons, to brand message flyers and detailed product catalogues.
In the last 15 years, there has been a formidable change in the advertising world. TV, radio and press have fragmented so much that the choice has increased into perplexing proportions. In contrast, in the direct marketing sector door-drops have almost become consolidated with the free newspaper industry and Royal Mail door-to-door services holding the majority of the market.
Despite the effects of the new legislations recommended by Postcomm, which will start to come into force, mass coverage will no doubt still be available in the short and long term.
TV, radio and press, although much more expensive than door drops, can still be cost-effective media if they hit the right audience, but seemingly this is becoming harder and harder to achieve.
Proportionally all these media costs have increased over and above inflation, despite diminishing reach, whereas door drops have seen smaller cost increases with improved reach and effectiveness.
From econometric models, many of our clients have claimed door-drops to be performing as well as or better than TV and encouragingly there have been many advertising budgets shifting from press to door-to-door.
Once a leaflet has been delivered physically through someone's letterbox the householder is obliged to at least glance at it, even if, at worst, it is only to discard it. Independent research indicates that more than 85% of people at least glanced at leaflets through the letterbox with more than 42% of people claiming to read all/part of the leaflet.
Some people are of the opinion that door-drops may annoy the household but consumer tolerance levels are changing. Recent research conducted by the DMA has shown that consumers find door drops generally 10% more useful than they did seven years ago.
Even TV viewers' tolerance of ads are slowly eroding. Back in 1992, 31% of people agreed that they enjoyed TV ads as much as the programmes, this figure has now dropped to 23%.
Door-drop recall levels are also astonishingly high. Research shows that one door-drop can provoke the same recall levels as multi-channel TV ads.
Prompted door-drop recall levels are regularly in the mid 70% and unprompted recall can be as high as 37%. Again with press, which although it is a much-valued commodity, many ads have a very small window in which to catch a consumer's eye.
For example, if we take average readership of a weekly free paper as 18 minutes and a weekly local paid-for as 30 minutes and divide by the average number of pages, a reader will spend an average of 24 seconds on each page. It is actually more likely that this time will be spent reading specific sections in more detail and some pages will be completely overlooked.
Today's media reach is closing in and becoming smaller and smaller, but in terms of door-to-door as long as people have a letterbox it will always be a captured audience. Door-drops were once used as a "fill-in" and tagged onto the end of a marketing campaign. Today, the industry can proudly boast "coverage", "reach" and "results".
It is not surprising that recent years have seen the door-drop industry grow, with an influx of clients successfully testing and integrating door-drops into their marketing mix. A decade ago, 39 of the top 100 advertisers used door-to-door -- today 81 of them use door-to-door.
Re-educating clients and agencies to forget old perceptions has been a continual and challenging job for the DMA Door-to-Door Council, but as the medium is easy to test, opinions are changing.
I am sure over the next few years its profile will increase and will not be overlooked so quickly. The average UK household receives eight door drop items a week, compared with 16 items per week in France, 19 in Germany and as many as 28 in the Netherlands... and growing.
Europe has found that despite delivering more items, consumer response is still proving higher than most other forms of advertising.
Mark Young is chairman of the DMA Door-to-Door Council and also managing director of the Leaflet Company.