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Anthrax attacks post huge threat to ad sector
By Jeff Bercovici
For creators and purveyors of direct mail advertising, the nation's new security crisis could scarcely have taken a worse form.
Now an industry that counts on people to open unfamiliar letters has to face the reality that many people are terrified of what they might find inside.
Some direct marketers are even worried that terrorists will find a way to infiltrate their operations and use them as a delivery system for a germ warfare attack of massive proportions.
What makes it worse still is that, up until now, direct mail had been something of a bright spot in an advertising market that has been slumping on most fronts. Direct marketing spending has been projected to increase nearly 5 percent in 2001, according to a Veronis Suhler forecast. Whether that will continue to be the case is now in doubt.
At the least, direct marketing executives say they're going to have to make significant and perhaps painful changes in the way they do their mailings.
Much will depend on whether the current hysteria has the effect of making large numbers of people afraid to open their mailboxes, says Michael Chinnici, president and CEO of New York-based Chinnici Direct.
"Obviously it's in the back of everybody's mind. It's like, do you want to be in a tall building right now?" says Chinnici.
He predicts that the fallout from the anthrax scare, to the extent that there is any, will not be immediate, in the form of advertisers yanking mail campaigns, but will come over the long term.
"If responses are down, that means people are not opening the mail," says Chinnici. "That will then have an effect on how much mail goes out."
Yvonne Furth, president of Draft Worldwide, says she is hopeful that any apprehension people feel about strange mail will run its course quickly.
"I don't think you can minimize personal security, but ultimately you need the mail just like you need to ride on airlines," says Furth. Like Chinnici, she says clients have not yet shown any inclination to bolt in the face of the anthrax panic.
"It will be a matter of the DMA [Direct Marketing Association], the U.S. Postal Service and we who are in the direct marketing business coming up with ways of making people feel secure."
The DMA has gotten a head start on the problem, issuing a set of suggested guidelines to its members yesterday on how to handle security concerns.
Among the suggestions: using envelopes printed with logos and return addresses instead of blank ones, conducting a security audit and postponing business-to-business mailings for the time being, as many corporate mailrooms are backed up with unprocessed letters.
Another suggestion reads, "Evaluate your campaign approach and consider that personalization is temporarily less likely to increase response rates."
These measures may help defuse fears, but they will not be without cost, says Lawrence Kimmel, president of Gray Direct, New York.
The reason that mailers use blank envelopes instead of clearly marked ones is that they typically produce a higher response rate, says Kimmel, whose company provided its clients with a white paper on the issue yesterday.
Similarly, fat envelopes generally get better responses than thin ones but now might be expected to arouse more suspicion in recipients.
Kimmel predicts that business-to-business mailings will be more affected than business-to-consumer ones, with companies more worried about being targeted and concerned about the well-being of their mailroom workers.
The germ scare will speed up the rate at which companies switch over their solicitations from mail to email, he says, cautioning, however, that the two are not equivalent.
"If you don't know what you're doing with email, it's not a panacea."
October 16, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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