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I recently received a pitch from Google, inviting me to try their new Adwords Express program. The pitch began like this:

 “Did you know that 58% of Americans search online to learn about products and services they’re thinking about buying? Wouldn’t you love your business’s message in front of the people who are searching the web for what you’re selling, right when they’re searching for it?”

How did Google deliver this message to me?

• A banner on one of my favorite marketing web sites? Nope.
• A text ad on Google when I searched for “advertising”? Wrong again.

I found it in my mailbox. Not my email box… my actual mailbox. In a paper envelope, delivered to my by the United States Postal Service. It looked like this:

Google, the new-media goliath whose GMail program is one of the nails in the Postal Service coffin… uses old-fashioned snail mail to reach out to new clients. Google used an actual printer to put ink on paper, stuffed it in an envelope, and had someone deliver it to my office.

Marketing guru Dan Kennedy, who also received a letter from Google, had this to say:

“Even the company that dominates online advertising is unable to rely on online advertising to get its new customers… And by the way, they didn’t just mail a simple postcard and tell folks to go online to get te sales letter or watch a video or whatever; they enclosed a 2-page piece laying out their full sales presentation.”

Here’s another example of “new media” companies using “old media” to bring in customers: a recent one-hour episode of the ABC-TV show Castle had commercials for:

• The iPad 2
• Microsoft
• Droid Razr smartphone
• Nook Tablet
• Att Wireless/iPhone
• Kindle Fire Tablet

Amazon, maker of the Kindle Fire, has millions of email addresses on file, along with an enormous amount of information on the purchasing habits of each customer. They can, and do, push the Fire every time someone logs onto www.amazon.com. They can, and do, email their customers to promote the Fire.

The marginal cost to Amazon of either of those approaches is close to zero. In addition, they have lots of other inexpensive online and mobile ways to target customers.

And yet, as holiday purchasing decisions were being made, Amazon opened its virtual checkbook and wrote a nice fat check for a commercial on… The ABC Television Network. The same ABC Network that brought us Howard Cosell, Harry Reasoner, and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.

So did Apple, Microsoft, and AT & T Wireless.

Maybe they know something.

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Email Phil Bernstein here.

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I recently met with a mattress retailer who was struggling with his advertising. His two-store chain was relatively new.

He told me that twenty years ago, a very successful mattress dealer in his college town had voiced his own radio commercials. He had decided to duplicate that dealer’s approach — starting every commercial with a story and “easing into the sales pitch.”

It wasn’t working, and he couldn’t figure out why. I asked him to send me some examples, and the next day three commercials landed in my Inbox. It didn’t take long for me to spot the problem.

Each commercial was sixty seconds long, and each started with a story. As I played the first one, I watched the timer on the audio clip. The story lasted more than 30 seconds. At the 34-second mark, the owner abruptly ended the story and launched into his pitch — the store was having a mattress sale.

Two decades ago, when the owner was in college, that approach worked well. In 2011, he wasn’t seeing any response at all.

What’s changed?

We’ve changed. And the internet’s changed us. As early as 2002,  BBC News reported on what the Net has done to our attention spans:

The addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds – the same as a goldfish.

“Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things,” says Ted Selker, an expert in the online equivalent of body language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

“If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating,” he told the BBC programme Go Digital.

Author Sally Hogshead, writing in Jeffrey Gitomer’s recent book Social BOOM!, had this to say:

Nine seconds! That’s just long enough to read one tweet. That’s all we get before before our customer’s brain makes a decision to either stay focused or relocate to a new topic.

Before Al Gore invented the Internet, customers were willing to wait for you to tell a story and “ease into the sales pitch.” In 2011?

Your customers are goldfish. You’ve got nine seconds.

Get to the point.

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Email Phil Bernstein here.

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Radio ad maven and fellow blogger Rod Schwartz had this to say recently to direct-response radio advertisers:

If your product or service truly serves a worthwhile purpose, and provides a valuable solution to a significant problem…

And if your commercial message immediately engages a prospective customer, speaks authentically to a felt need, and genuinely resonates with that person…

…you will find it unnecessary, even counterproductive, to bludgeon listeners with endless, mindless repetition of your toll-free telephone number.

Why?

Because – surprise! – the person who really wants what you’re selling will remember you and will make the effort to find you and do business with you.

As a listener, I share Rod’s distaste for commercials that give the phone number ad nauseum. But I have a feeling that the folks who do these ads — the best of them, anyway — have a good reason they do it this way.

The best direct response marketers in all media — radio, TV, direct mail, etc — test the heck out of their copy. And there are only two things that matter to them in a campaign where the call-to-action is a phone number: number of phone calls, and number of sales that result from those calls.

My guess — and it’s only a guess, because I’ve never had a chance to ask someone who’s done the testing — is that they repeat the phone number so often because when they do it less often, they get fewer phone calls and make fewer sales.

There’s some logic to this, because in many cases the phone number is unique to the campaign, and can’t be found in a phone book or on Google. The product might have a web site, but it may not be related to the radio campaign. And if the customer decides to find the product in a store, that’s not the “direct response” the campaign is designed to elicit.

The most sophisticated marketers may be tracking results by station, by time of day, and by show. They may also be experimenting with, and tracking, other aspects of the copy and the offer

If the object of THAT campaign is to get people listening to THAT station to call THAT number, they need to do everything they can to make sure the listener remembers that number and calls it, rather than trying to track the product down elsewhere. Giving the phone number over and over again is one way to accomplish that.

The direct marketer’s job isn’t to entertain listeners, or make good radio. His or her job is to sell product. My somewhat-educated guess is that they pound the phone number for one reason: it works.

But I’d love to know for sure. If you do direct-response radio work for a living — the kind where the only response that counts is a phone call to a specific number — and you’ve carefully tested a variety of methods, here are the questions of the day:

1. How many times does the phone number need to appear in a :60 to generate the maximum number of calls?
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2. What happens when you deviate from that formula?

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Email Phil Bernstein here.

Like what you’re reading? Sign up for Phil Bernstein’s free advertising and marketing e-newsletter here.

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