'Mail has the power to reinvent itself as a very 21st century medium.' Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK, London, challenges assumptions about 'old' and 'new' media and shares 10 reasons why mail can lead the way in the marketing mix.
Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is technically a fruit, not a vegetable. Wisdom is knowing not to add one to a fruit salad.
It seems to me that there's a huge amount of intelligence employed in media selection. But not a great deal of wisdom. There are, after all, no intrinsically good or bad media – it depends on what you're trying to achieve.
In fact, the greater part of the value of any medium may be less to do with the medium itself than the degree of skill and imagination with which it is deployed – not to mention the way it’s used alongside other media, in complementing rather than duplicating them. That’s one reason why I dislike the use of the word 'channels' to describe different media: it suggests that all they do is inertly carry messages, and are interchangeable.
This is far from the truth. Not only is your message greatly affected by the medium in which it appears, but so is the audience’s response. So the value of a particular medium isn’t only a matter of who you want to reach – but also of what you want them to do.
Two more things. It’s tempting, but generally wrong, to try to attribute USPs to individual media: for instance TV is 'all about fame' or mail is 'all about response'. While this may look neat on a PowerPoint slide, life is rarely that simple. All media have relative strengths and weaknesses, certainly, but these are seldom clear cut. And they are never static.
Just as a new fruit may one day cause us to redesign the fruit salad, new media should cause us to rethink the roles we assign to traditional media.
Cinema is a good example of a medium that has successfully reinvented itself, in the process discovering new strengths. It's less and less used to convey information but is unmatched at its power to convey emotion.
As we aim to show at MMC, there's huge potential for mail to reinvent itself in the same way. Don't believe us? Here's 10 reasons why…