Some commentators believe that the swing to more measurable media such as direct marketing is a temporary and cyclical characteristic typical of recessionary times, but given the other change factors at work, and especially the convergence of brand and response advertising, it seems likely the trend to DM will continue in better times too.
Despite the dynamism of the direct mail sector there has so far been relatively little use of celebrities in this medium. One recent exception is for esure featuring Michael Winner. This could be to do with the fact that famous people are generally much more wary of allowing their image to be used in print advertising materials per se and rather more willing to do so on television which they see as a more aspirational medium. And it may also be to do with the relatively poor image of 'junk mail', which celebrities may wish to disassociate themselves from. We can but hope that, as the users of direct mail take advantage of increasingly sophisticated databases and get their customer relationship management skills much more finely tuned, the scattergun approach to the medium will be replaced by much more tightly targeted and appropriate rifle shots.
Experiments in responding to sales leads with individually tailor-made and produced one-off car brochures costing British Pounds 40 each have proven more cost effective than using the traditional one-size-fits-all catalogue. If the creative quality of the pieces mailed to customers continues to be enhanced by improved production values, affordable because of the improved responsiveness resulting from greater accuracy, then celebrities may be more prepared in future to allow direct mail to be included in their contract for usage.
The increase in the use of interactive media for commercial communications purposes will be facilitated by new technologies. Already 80% of households have a mobile phone. As a result there has been an extraordinary explosion in short message service (SMS) or texting, a medium that some people say was invented almost by accident. Sixteen billion text messages were sent in the UK alone during 2002 and the growth rate looks to be almost exponential.
As the UK mobile phone market approaches 100% initial market penetration, the next generation video phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are arriving and are already gaining share. It's likely these will incorporate more sophisticated biometric security features such as fingerprint reading, voice recognition and iris scanning. This will make them highly personalized portable teleshopping devices with credit account facilities and thus there will be the potential for brand advertising with an instant purchasing response channel. We have already seen the use of celebrities such as David Beckham, with his reported British Pounds 1 million Vodafone deal, in promoting these new generation mobile phones and their instantly recognizable faces are perfectly suited to the screen size constraints of the new medium. There is a very significant growth in the penetration of personal computers both at the office and at home. TGI data show that the number of households with personal computers has risen from 29% in 1995 to 60% in 2003. As a result, growth in internet usage is also rapid and by about 2006/7 roughly 80% of all UK households will be online.
This has led to a whole new communications channel, that of email. The widespread success of Hotmail is attributed to 'viral marketing', giving it over 40 million users in less than three years, courtesy of the 'Get your free Hotmail' notice and link at the bottom of every Hotmail email sent by users. In January 2002 the number of emails sent between households was 550 million, exceeding the volume of postal items by some 300 million, and as the bandwidth increases people are circulating pictures, music and movie clips. So-called 'viral advertising' has taken off as a result of this and brands such as John West Salmon have benefited enormously from the free circulation of their commercials on the internet.
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1. Don Ameche was one of the leading men of 20th Century Fox
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