Discussion

By Dr Joe Webb on Oct 13, 2008

The two execs are clearly in the camp of digital printing, sometimes in the form of hybrid documents. But they are also in digital media as the primary means of supplying information and gathering sales leads, and print is the means of responding to that process, just as print was used as a response to an information request made by phone, as it was years ago. The tie-in is natural for them. Of course, they are direct marketers, so they think that way.

The direct mail industry of the 1970s saw this coming and they started to change their association name from DMMA ("Direct Mail Marketing Association") to DMA ("Direct Marketing Association") as toll-free phone ordering and highly automated order entry and management systems became available, and the mailing list business benefited from improved methods of maintaining, cleaning, and merge/purge strategies of list management, and as television began to embrace direct marketing ads.

They don't care how they get to their objectives, and do what works for them at a moment in time. The direct marketing industry is constantly testing their response mechanisms. They measure their costs, response rates, and values of those responses. They are the industry that gave us the concept of placing a dollar value on customer relationships over time, and not individual orders.

Are we participating in this strategic decision of how to mix media in the correct proportion, or are we just waiting for the request for quotation to see what they think we can provide to them? There are numerous ways we can plug in, one being managing the lead generation and response process for direct marketers.

By PrintPlace.com on Oct 17, 2008

I think print can adapt just by referencing digital material. I think in some ways, incorporating digital with print would be somewhat of a relief for magazine and newspaper editors who run out of room for a story for an issue of their medium. I subscribe to eight magazines, and almost everyone has special bonus stories or features on their Web site because they’ve run out of magazine pages. And frankly, it’s cheaper to do it that way. I’ve used postcard marketing to draw people in to a product, and direct them to our Web site for more info. I think it’s safe to assume that at least half of postcard recipients are going to be in front of a computer at some point during the day, so taking the postcard with them to the computer to remind them to look up more info makes sense.