Mountains of Arizona
Sunny 71 Degrees
3:27 p.m.
I had to chuckle when I got a Christmas catalog from Amazon in the mail the other day.
Who would have thought the big ecommerce giant would reach people with direct mail. It’s almost as funny as Google® Adwords mailing out postcards years ago to get new customers.
But it’s only funny because of the way our minds have been trained.
When something’s “hot,” everyone is supposed to run there. The gurus make courses about how to navigate the terrain, the advertisers show up in droves and start pouring money into the system.
It’s darn easy to give money to Bookface or LinkedINandTunedOUT or the TweetMachine. But if you can do it, so can everyone else. And that’s why these places are such a noisy mess. It’s so bad in some of them I’d rather not even be SEEN among the junk that is served up in exchange for cash. But it’s easy. So prices are rising, regulations are growing and the normal arc is playing out until some new platform comes on the seen where the masses can go to pay for attention.
It’s way calmer if you go where people aren’t going. I like direct mail because the mailbox isn’t very crowded these days.
It’s slow, it requires LITTLE to NO daily attention and there’s no one telling you that your ad campaign doesn’t “comply” with some arbitrary set of rules.
It’s easy to follow the masses, but SURELY there are ways to reach the people you want to serve that don’t involve having to jump in with the crowd.