Who uses direct mail anyway?

As you could probably imagine. I'm a big fan of social media. I think it's one of the great equalizers and allows even the most meager budgets to extend far into the donor/consumer market. That being said, I also love seeing new uses of old media. So show me a creative use of a billboard or a great TV spot (like the Nike one that has all of the soccer players imagining what happens if they screw up the next play) and I'm in love. That being said, last week I got this in the mail.


It's a piece of mail soliciting a donation but what's interesting about it is that it has a nickel in it. Maybe I'm a sucker for cheap gimicks but I opened it and learned, much to my surprise, that a nickle was more money than the government now gives per patient to fund cancer research (thanks for the info Memorial Sloan Kettering). I get a ton of junk mail and even more spam, and frankly, I never, ever open them but low and behold, I opened this piece of mail. I opened it because it did something very simple: it triggered my curiosity. Now I'd be lying if it compelled me to give (I didn't) but it did get me to open it, and that's a lot. I think the question we need to ask ourselves as marketers is, how can I trigger my donors/consumers curiosity? Everything now is all about how marketing is dead and the world is totally driven by consumers going out and finding specific pieces of information but what gets them to find these specific pieces of information? Curiosity.

How can we make people curious? What blocks their curiosity? And then, once they've given into their curiosity, how can we inspire them to act? That needs to be our driving mantra, our reason to exist. The media doesn't matter, at the end of the day, it's all the same.

(shit, I went though an entire post without cursing once. I must be getting old.)