Will they ever "get it"?
In the Media and Advertising section of today's New York Times you'll find an article entitled " Yes, It's a Spoof, but It's Also Selling Something". In it, the writer describes how "spoofing" or "genre-jacking" is all the rage in advertising these days. According to the article "Straight direct-response pitches hardly ever work anymore..."
Hmmm, tell that to this year's winners of CMA Awards, International ECHO Awards, Caples Awards, or Cannes Festival Awards in their respective DRTV categories -- or anyone who practices the discipline. The article further asserts via mass Creative Director Ted Jendrysik, that "Direct response advertising as a genre is especially appealing to parody because it's 'so cheesy'." Now, in fairness, the article and its pundits think they're referring mainly to the "slicer-dicer" informercials popularized by late-night "schlockmeisters" Ronco and K-Tel.
However, the fact that he lumps those infomercial-makers in with everyone else by generically referring to the genre as "DRTV" and "Direct Response" demonstrates a significant lack of savvy in today's more direct-oriented media-scape. (See my very first post in this blog.)
In fact I had to laugh when, later in the article, the writer describes a campaign for MSN Search, a competitor of Yahoo! and Google. A viral campaign for the site (direct response, no?) pokes fun at late-night infomercial kings like Tony Little. "In its quest to compete with Google and Yahoo, MSN wants to be seen as 'big and bold' [and presumably cheesy] as the infomercial kings."
After the site was launched, MSN's agency sent email messages containing links to the site to a select list to get attention for the campaign. Shhhh, don't tell them email blasts are considered Direct Response. Let's just keep that between us.
