Drayton Bird is a a true legend, having been named one of the 50 living individuals
who have shaped today’s marketing, and one of the 50 most important individuals in
UK advertising during the previous 25 years. He is praised highly by David Ogilvy as
knowing “more about direct marketing than anyone in the world.” He has authored the
international bestsellsers: Commonsense Direct & Digital Marketing, How to Write Sales
Letters that Sell, and Marketing Insights and Outrages.
RIC THOMPSON: I’m looking forward to picking your brain on this. Having chatted with
you briefly, it should be a lot of fun. Let’s be honest. The top Internet marketers in the
world today are relative newcomers to the direct marketing world. I got a chance to chat
with you. You have been in this business for decades and have seen the transformation
from direct marketing, print and, shall we say, old school to using the same exact
techniques on the Internet. Of course, that’s where most people’s attention is drawn to
today. Unfortunately, too many people forget where it all came from, which is the offline,
pure direct response marketing. Do you have any thoughts on that?
DRAYTON BIRD: I do, actually. About 12 years ago, somebody asked me if I would
talk about retailing on the Internet. I said yes because I always say yes, even if I know
nothing aboutDrayton Bird: the subject. I knew nothing about the subject. I did some
research. Eventually I did a talk called the Grand Bazaar. I said, “I’m going to compare
the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, which is the oldest retail establishment in the world, with
Internet marketing.”
If you look at historic retailing and selling principles, what direct marketing is all about is
applying those principles in a different context. I was in India a few years ago, and I was
being interviewed on the news in New Delhi. The interviewer said, “Would you agree
that Internet marketing is direct marketing on steroids?” I said, “Not really. If it was, it
would work a bit better.” It’s accelerated direct marketing.
All the things I spent my lifetime doing—for instance, testing one headline against
another to see how well it would do, testing one approach against another, or testing
one illustration against another—that used to take weeks. Now I could have an idea in
the morning, and by lunchtime I would know if I was on the right track or not. That’s the
most exciting thing about it. Another thing struck me since it really started growing.
I remember that I was talking at a Cisco conference in Amsterdam a few years ago, and
a man said to me, “I’m getting 10% response to my emails.” I got very excited. Tell me,
how many people get 10% to their emails now? Very few. All forms of marketing are
investments. If you asked Warren Buffet what a good investment is, he would say, “One
good investment is something that is undervalued.” At that time, email was undervalued.
It’s still undervalued as a form of communication compared to the post, so everybody
jumps on board. They create their websites and do their landing pages, as I do. That’s
what I was doing this morning. They do very well. The more people get in on the act, the
harder it gets to produce results. When I was discussing the possibility of talking to you
today, I was reminded of having to talk to some people at American Express.
They were the top marketing people in New York 20 years ago. I said, “I’m really
worried about what you’re doing because you’re sending out an awful lot of material that
is very badly directed. You’re talking to everybody with the same tone of voice.” To me,
the difference between good marketing and bad marketing, now that you can vary your
messages, is that you don’t say the same thing to everybody.
You say the right thing to somebody. That’s the difference between really good
marketing and not so good marketing. I subscribe to many different services. Like
everybody else, I get lots of emails. I would say that maybe once every three months,
somebody actually sends me something that says, “Can you tell me something about
yourself?” That surely is the beginning of wisdom.
We go through our lives trying to persuade people to do things. Never mind marketing.
We spend our lives trying to persuade our colleagues, employers, employees, friends,
relatives, or anybody you care to name. We try to persuade them to do something. The
process of persuasion always begins with me saying something to you that you find
impossible to disagree with. It will do even better if it is about your favorite subject.
Your favorite subject and my favorite subject are our sweet little selves. Something
about me will always attract my attention, but if you haven’t bothered to find out
anything about me, it’s going to be much harder for you. I think a lot of people are
doing a lot of things on the Internet that are what I call confetti marketing or spray gun
marketing. They shoot stuff out all over the place, and if enough of it sticks, they’ll make
some money. That’s it.
They don’t worry about all the people who are increasingly getting fed up with receiving
irrelevant material. That is my view of what people should be thinking about today. I
think it must have been 22 years ago when I used to handle the American Express
account around the world. There I was, standing up on my hind legs, saying to all these
people saying exactly what I’m saying now about the Internet.
RIC THOMPSON: You started off the call talking about a lot of folks who don’t focus on
that second way of making profits. How does this all tie in?
Want even more tips and tricks? This article was just a small portion of an hour-
long interview. And this interview was just ONE of 24 top interviews conducted by
Ric Thompson for Internet Marketing TNT. If you’d like to get your hands on ALL 24
interviews, simply click here and check outInternet Marketing - Very Important Profit
Systems.
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