AGENDA: The pleasure and the pain of new communications

By DRAYTON BIRD, Marketing, Thursday, 11 June 1998 12:00AM

When enthusiasts first explained the Internet and all that jazz to you, what did you expect? I certainly never knew my friends around the world were so eager to shower me with bad jokes. It’s a nightmare.

When enthusiasts first explained the Internet and all that jazz to

you, what did you expect? I certainly never knew my friends around the

world were so eager to shower me with bad jokes. It’s a nightmare.

Mind you, I was intrigued by the new Russian pornography service so

thoughtfully brought to my attention. How, I wondered, does Russian porn

differ from the good old US variety mostly offered? Do they do weird

things to each other with borscht? Does each model unscrew to unveil a

slightly smaller one? Nothing so ingenious. It is what they call in the

motor trade ’badge engineering’. Apart from the name ’Russian’, the

delights that unfold seem identical, right down to the tasteful

descriptions.

I appreciate there is a rich tradition in business whereby nobody ever

studies the past because that way we can all squander money repeating

the same mistakes every decade. However, this problem of having too much

stuff to plough through every day - direct mail, memos, e-mail - is not

new. In the late 1300s an agent of Signor Datini, an Italian merchant,

complained that ’we spend half our time reading letters or answering

them’.

No great surprise there, because Datini was clearly the partner from

hell.

Between 1364 and 1410 he exchanged 156,549 letters with his

associates.

For a number of years he had 10,000 letters zipping back and forth all

over Southern Europe annually. I learned that from Worldly Goods by

Professor Lisa Jardine, a very entertaining read based on the obvious

thesis that in the Renaissance rich people were just as vain, flashy and

grasping as they are now.

At the time, it was thought the new invention of printing would make

life easier, just as people expect great wonders from the Internet

now.

In some ways it did, and in others it didn’t. Every time a new medium

emerges - radio, the cinema, TV - the experts tell you it will render

one or more of its predecessors irrelevant. Yet usually nothing of the

sort happens. We seem to have an insatiable appetite for messages of all

kinds.

The big thing about the Internet to me is that it is a perfect direct

marketing medium - especially if you sell to the right sort of people;

ie those rich enough to have PCs. The Gap has enjoyed huge success. Its

Internet sales last Christmas were exceeded only by those of their most

successful store on 34th Street in New York, and now it is starting a

separate Internet business (see page 12).

I am a classic late adopter, but I have finally succumbed to the

Internet’s charms. My colleagues and I have just spent six months

putting together a Web site, www.draytonbird.com, which tells you

everything you ever wanted to know - and probably a lot you don’t -

about direct marketing and related subjects. It’s all free - and you can

even win a rather predictable prize, but watch out for the usual inept

onslaught on your budgets. We do take ’no’ for an answer, though - and

I’d appreciate your comments.

Drayton Bird runs the Drayton Bird Partnership.

This article was first published on Marketing