Unlike the days of Mad Men, today’s Great DM Agencies employ direct marketing professionals who happen to have an area of expertise. The expertise is a focus, but the larger understanding makes the focus relevant and successful.
Creative solutions begin with knowledge – perhaps it is historical performance data, perhaps research—and seek to implement larger strategies, which have been designed to achieve still larger objectives.
The creative director who doesn’t understand the objective, and hasn’t collaborated on strategy, cannot effectively lead a creative solution that will leverage the success drivers (described in the last post) to greatest effect. Neither can the art director, the graphic designer, nor the copywriter create the messages and images that resonate if they do not understand who they are speaking to, and how that segment of audience has reacted to similar messaging in the past or is likely to react to the offer in the future.
Direct Marketers with a Specialty
Great DM Agencies employ creative experts that can absorb the lessons that data has to teach. They can collaborate on and implement the strategies that analysts and strategists formulate, with tactics that support them. And they are engaged in, and reactive to, the subsequent performance of their campaigns.
And why not? Because the converse of those industry studies mentioned earlier is also true: solutions driven by analytic strategy are twice as likely to succeed as “blue-sky” solutions. And what creative professional wouldn’t want to tip the odds in their favor?
The days of Mad Men are long gone. We cannot view the profession through the lens of our individual disciplines. The stakes are too high. Cost increases are stunning. Client “loyalty” is an endangered species. Chasms separate the behaviors and attitudes of the generations of audience.
We must all be direct marketing fundraisers with specialties, but direct marketers first.
Fundraising creatives take heed: our words must sing, our images must inspire, the delivery of the offer must be compelling. But ignore the numbers and spreadsheets that our strategy partners wave at us, and we reduce our chances of success.
So you see, Don Draper, actually it is a science, of sorts.
-John Thompson
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