• by Tom Hespos , March 3, 2003

If there’s one positive thing you can say about the evolution of direct response advertising on the web, it’s that we’ve stopped throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks.

Instead, we have the advantages of a buyer’s market and advanced tracking technology. So now we load up our high-velocity, laser guided bazookas with pounds of spaghetti at a time and we fire them at the wall. And when the smoke clears, we walk over to the wall to see what stuck. Then we pick up our bazooka and do the same thing again, except this time with angel hair pasta. Then we try it with egg noodles, lasagna and rigatoni. In the end, we come to a conclusion along the lines of “angel hair works the best.”

Where is the guy that walks up to the wall, sees the spaghetti stuck to the wall, and asks “why?” A good account planner could walk up to that wall, get a few key questions answered, and say “I think it was the starch content that made the spaghetti stick. Let’s try some spaghetti with more starch.”

I think a lot of the DR advertisers on the web are concentrating too much on the “what” and not enough on the “why.” Too many times, I’ve been asked by potential clients whether I could get them X number of new customers over the course of the year. They ask this as if I have a magic bag filled with 270 million customers under my desk that I can take out, and casually sprinkle a few thousand onto their ad campaign for them every day.

There’s a lot more to online direct response than what sites and what pieces of creative work the best. If it were as simple as optimizing creative, we’d have a formula that all of us could plug into our business plans. And we’d all be assured of success.

Instead of concentrating on the “what” so much, we should be concentrating on the “why.” As in, “Why would somebody be interested in purchasing this product?” or “Why do new customers cancel service after their free trial period?” or “Why are people with these specific characteristics better customers than people without those characteristics?”

As much as we’d like to believe that there is some magic combination of media environment, creative messaging and creative format waiting to be discovered that will drive new customer acquisition in unlimited volume at negligible cost, that’s not the case. Sure, we will find certain combinations of those variables that will work better than others, but concentrating on those variables alone only blinds us to a bigger picture.

We need to be able to see all the external factors as well, like perceptions of the product, economic forces, the effects of competitive marketing efforts, brand favorability and countless other factors that have some degree of impact on customer acquisition.

Finding “what” isn’t a problem. We have ad serving and tracking solutions to tell us that. Let’s save ourselves a bunch of time, money and trouble by investing in finding the “why.” We should be contracting for more custom research and web surveys. We should be paying more attention to what happens to customers once they’ve been acquired. And we should admit to ourselves that the three variables we’ve all been playing with these past several years are only three out of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of significant variables that affect customer acquisition.

Now, put down the spaghetti bazooka and find out why those three strands of pasta from the last blast are still sticking to the wall.