Dan Kennedy on Direct Response vs Traditional Advertising

” A very common experience from people who come over from the sales side is a sort of spiritual conversion from ugly, cold prospecting, manual labor, unwelcome guest at the door…to marketing and use of media in place manual labor. I never really didn't do direct response. I have sales experience and very quickly figured out that I didn't like cold prospecting. I didn't like having to literally or figuratively batter down the door and play the classic numbers game. I did a brief stint in traditional advertising, at a small advertising agency, and very quickly figured out that you can make money that way, but the clients can't; which is one of the reasons that you see all of that done by bigger, dumber companies more than by small companies. A big-name owner of a big-name agency told me that if you've got a decent-sized account, you want to keep it for a while. At least two calendar quarters, because it takes them that long to figure out nothing is happening. They can't evaluate on a day-to-day basis. I very quickly determined that that's not the way I wanted to play the game. I became a student of direct response pretty much on my own. I really identified that the folks doing mail order-which we now call direct marketing-had a very, very different approach than everybody else. In the traditional advertising world, one of the first people who I made a point of getting all of their stuff and studying it was David Ogilvy. Ogilvy, although he built a full-service, full-scale ad agency was constantly telling his people that the only people who knew what the hell they were doing, were the mail order guys. That sort of led me now, “Okay, let's study the mail order guys.” I was certainly influenced by Halbert and a number of other really great, direct response copywriters. But, I've been entirely DR-direct response-since 1975, and pioneered a few thing of my own; although, the fundamentals and the principles of this do not change, it is still really about applying tested and proven mail order methodology to non-mail order businesses. The overwhelming majority of commerce of all kinds is driven by direct mail. Everything from the credit card industry to the apparel industry, to the information business and local service business is using direct mail. The fundamental principle of my approach to marketing is let's make sure we're talking to highly-interested, highly-motivated, very appropriate prospects for what it is that we have to offer, who will have a high level of interest the minute we show them ourselves. Do a decent job of selling to them, instead of trying to reduce everything we do to 146-character tweets and no video longer that 3.8 minutes, and no sales letter with words more than 2 syllables, so that everybody can pay attention to it. “