Jolie O’Dell

 This Sunday’s sermon is about loving thy neighbor and doing unto the late adopters as you would have the even earlier adopters do unto you by banishing the attitudes of “geekier than thou.” Amen.

Tuesday, my itinerary takes me back to San Diego, where I will be attending at least one very full day of Response Expo, a direct response trade show currently in its second year.

Direct response is an interesting sector of advertising at the moment. Previously considered “dirty” by branding experts and general agencies, it is now being adopted as big shops set up DR divisions and tout the efficiency, measurability, and possibility of the direct response approach.

Agencies that have always dealt exclusively in direct response are now at a distinct disadvantage. Most of them are smaller shops. Most have never properly researched and developed new media channels. Unfortunately, new and evolving media, including Internet and mobile, provide some of the most expedient response, sales, and conversion channels for consumers.

But, you preach that line for so long, and the DR shops don’t want to hear it.

I’m going to the show as a free agent of sorts to comment on the state of the direct response industry and explore the reasons technology adoption rates are so low.

For my money, I think direct response marketing is a fantastic form. I also think that DR and technology go hand-in-hand, more so as our culture becomes increasingly wired. So, what is it that prevents the use of newer technology in many direct response campaigns? And why are DR agencies’ new media efforts (generally speaking) so behind the times, so misconceived, and so badly executed?

One theory is that DR is an industry plagued by tech-related fear and misconception about how new media works and what it’s for. I’ve heard SEM completely discounted because an agency head had received reports of highly inaccurate and inflated click fraud rates.

On the “misconception” side, there are the crowd of late adopting marketers who will hear about, misunderstand, and attempt to exploit any kind of technology that appears in the flotsam and jetsam of our digital worlds. I’ve seen email, SMS, and podcast-based campaigns that were criminally abusive of users’ trust and personal information, all because the CEO didn’t understand the permanence and impact of digital B2C relationships. I also recall an entrepreneur who created a group of “forums” to generate positive buzz for his legal-services empire. Unfortunately, he had employees create around 80% of the posts, and the forum design exactly followed the template of his companies’ web design. Users quickly put two and two together on that one, and there’s no worse PR than failed black-hat PR.

Also, I think part of the problem is the low technology adoption rate among DR marketers as individual users. They are typically the latest of the late adopters, outstripping even retirees and Floridians. I’ve met far too many who discounted the impact of social media, calling it unmeasurable and reputation-damaging (One agency owner said, verbatim: “I don’t want to have anything to do with Facebook!”), largely because they had never used social media themselves. Never having used social bookmarking, one agency CEO allowed herself to be convinced that blog indexes and bookmarking sites were nothing more than repositories for porn and racist humor. And god help the non-bloggers who don’t understand the value of moderated comments for their agency or company blogs. God help the land line die-hards who don’t understand that younger people actually DO want to move money and make purchases via mobile.

But time after time, experience breaks down fear. I learned to love technology because I grew up with it. I played, like, original King’s Quest. The first document I ever printed was on that green-and-white stripey paper. I was the seven-year-old who knew DOS and would rather deal with a C: prompt than a bicycle most days. Of course it’s going to be fear-free for me to adopt new technology; all it would take to break down the fear in others is to have them develop a depth and breadth of personal experience with new media forms.

However, elitist attitudes on the part of us who DO “get it” (here’s looking at you, Robert Scoble) have the opposite effect. Certainly, they keep the bleeding edge a purist playground for only those deeply in the know, those who can decode the mashup of tech and marketing terms, those who are so committed to tech evangelism that interaction with the flesh-and-blood, bricks-and-mortar “real” world rapidly dwindles. But those attitudes do nothing to really push late adopters along. They further inflate the misconception that it takes some kind of magic to be able to “do” technology, when we all know that’s simply not true.

Case in point: SEO. The overwhelming majority of SEOs are self-taught. The Internet abounds with resources for those willing to learn about optimization; I found this out when I started my first SEO project. My agency hadn’t done any SEO for their website. They thought they couldn’t afford it; however, their site wasn’t ranking in the top 100 results for any of the targeted search terms. So, from total desperation, I lied. Relying on the encyclopedic range of data available online, I told them, “I can do SEO.” A few weeks later, I’d surprised myself by getting the site in the top 10 Google search results and achieving noticeable page domination by ensuring that the home page, news items, and blog entries were all featured in combination for most queries. Web traffic increased, and the new site supported our new business efforts as it never could have before.

The point is, I wasn’t afraid; I’d been using all kinds of technology since fetushood; and I understood that tech, while it can be an art and a science, is far from magic.

So, rather than insulating our own egos by telling late adopters “You wouldn’t get it; it’s a geek thing,” we could do ourselves, users, and marketers a huge favor by changing the tune to “If you can learn it, you can do it” instead.

I do wonder, if we as new media geeks could, on a large scale, put more technology in the hands of marketers-as-users and show them that tech takes knowledge, not magic, where would marketing be within a year or two? It’s an exciting prospect, and isn’t that something worth finding out?