Kitcatt Nohr Alexander Shaw

Do you remember the first email you received? I do. It was like getting a letter from the future. Of course, I’m a lot older now, and my short-term memory isn’t what it was. But I’m not sure I could tell you much about the contents of the last email I received. Or, indeed, who sent it to me. If the sender is reading this and still waiting for a reply, I apologise.

My point is that today’s novelty is tomorrow’s mainstream. Email outstripped direct mail as the most frequently-used form of addressed media some time ago. However, like vinyl-lovers in a digital age, a few of us quietly nourish an embarrassing passion for the old format, which one of my wittier colleagues refers to as ‘offline interactive’.

There is more to our infatuation than some secret gum-licking fetish. We understand that integration is about orchestrating the unique capabilities of different channels to elicit the desired emotional and behavioural response from the consumer. And we know that direct mail brings some quite unique tricks to the convergent communications circus.

Say you’re a charity. Your core supporters are quite literally dying off. You need to reach a younger audience. Quite sensibly, someone suggests social media. Inevitably, Malcolm Gladwell’s name gets mentioned. And before you know it, you find yourself having to target influential video bloggers who will be your core connectors.

These people get hundreds, maybe thousands of emails and tweets a day. Do you join the queue in their in-box? Or do you side-step it with a highly-targeted, beautifully-crafted piece of physical mail? That’s what the RNLI decided to do. And that’s how they reached 11% of the UK’s 15-20 year-olds using just 12 direct mail packs.

Maybe you’re a supermarket. You sell amazing food. But the very fact that you’re so good means that many shoppers are just a little in awe of you. So you engage two of Britain’s favourite cooks to spread the word that everyone can enjoy good food thanks to you. Key to your strategy is to inspire viewers to try sure-fire recipes made using your produce.

Do you sit back and wait for your broadcast message to get through? No, because this is a disbelieving age and people trust their peers more than they trust The Man. So you also target foodie bloggers. But foodies are people of principle. They’re not going to recommend a recipe they haven’t tried themselves.

If you’re Waitrose, you send them the recipe. The ingredients. Even the baking dish. And you invite them to test-drive your culinary creation the night before the TV breaks. The result? Over 50 bloggers try the recipe and blog about it, reaching 50,000 of the most evangelistic foodies in Britain.

Of course, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, electronic media are ‘hot’. They carry live, constantly refreshed content. By contrast, direct mail is as cold as yesterday’s leftovers. It’s frozen in time the moment it exits the enclosing machine.

However, a piece of direct mail can also be what author Bruce Sterling calls a ‘spime’. This is an ugly-sounding word for an object whose value and utility is enhanced by virtue of being connected to a world of networked information. For DM to enter the kingdom of the spime, all that’s missing is a technological bridge from the page to the screen, and the data that lies behind it.

The PURL or ‘personal URL’ is one such bridge. Another, even more intuitive one is the QR code. With these technologies, direct mail is no longer the frigid step-child of Caxton but the hot and frisky daughter of Berners-Lee. There, I’ve got myself all excited. I think I need to go and lick an envelope.

An edited version of this article originally appeared in Contact magazine