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The folks over at BurstMedia just released some new information on internet usage that I thought you'd find interesting. Highlights include...
* More than half of respondents (57.1%) to the survey say that the internet is their primary source for information on products or services
* Men are more likely than women to say the internet is their primary source (61.9% vs 50.3%) while people 65 and older agree much less than half the time (41.7%)
* Besides the age and M/F differences, use of the internet as the primary source for product/service info increases with reported income going from a low of 50.6% to a high of 69.2% for HH incomes of more than $75,000
* TV is still the most effective at capturing attention by almost half the respondents (49.8%) followed by the internet (22.3%), magazines (11.8%), newspapers (10.3%), and radio (5.9%)
There is more information on internet use including video, but I'll stop right there because it reminds me of a conversation I had with the head of a digital agency a while back. He said to me: "I believe that each medium should be used for what it does best: TV for branding and the internet for direct response."
I like to take it a step further and say that the internet is the only direct marketing channel that can brand, too. I still believe that TV is the best vehicle for reaching the widest audience possible with a branding message. Magazines still provide some usefulness, but advertising in newspapers is a complete waste of time. Radio still serves a purpose because what else are you supposed to do when you are sitting in traffic? XM and Sirius have commercials on some of the major channels. Direct mail... well, that strategy should be kept under a garbage can lid with the rest of the mail pieces, unless you are trying to target a certain age or income demographic.
I think we should start paying more attention to age and income demographics when deciding on marketing channels, because I don't know about you, but that age reference is very enlightening. It is too bad they didn't provide an age distribution because I'm sure the youth of America are not sitting around too much watching TV. My own kids are growing up on TiVo and can't understand why we can't skip through the commercials when we watch live TV. My 4-year-old daughter has NEVER watched TV without TiVo and in fact refers to television as TiVo.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
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Comments
Eric,
As a "mail guru," I couldn't agree with you more that, in a majority of cases, direct mail should NOT be used for branding. That dooms it to failure.
It is interesting, however, how many marketers are using direct mail (along, of course with online media options) to drive important prospects to their sites. Even when their objectives are purely response-driven, they are actually pre-branding before visitors log on.
Posted by: Lee Marc Stein | 04.24.06
Lee,
Thanks for the comment. I think direct mail for the right target audience and demographic is the right tool and you are correct that when it is coupled with online, it can warm the door for conversions. In fact, at an online brokerage firm, we ran a winback program that integrated direct mail, email and telemarketing to a select group of former customers. The DM did in fact warm the door to this carefully selected target segment that we had a lot of demographic and usage data on because they were former clients. However, we stopped trying to acquire prospects via direct mail many years ago. DM can still be effective, if it is to a select group of customers.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
Posted by: Eric Frenchman | 04.24.06
As an aside to Eric's four-year-old...and kids growing up with TiVo:
The other day, my nine-year-old was remembering a dream she had had the night before. She couldn't recall the dream's beginning, she said, because she thought at its start that she was actually in the middle of another dream, and then she switched over to the more interesting dream mid-showing, "you know, like TiVo."
Posted by: Ann Handley | 04.24.06