Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
Today we’d like to pose a simple question, is the following direct mail envelope from a broadband ISP an appropriate way of advertising the service? The boundary between ethics and advertising is often a difficult tightrope to traverse, with many pros and cons to consider. But we are increasingly seeing the competitive market produce promotions that dip deeper into a grey zone.
On the one hand, there is often plenty of merit in being a bit controversial and bending – sometimes even breaking – the rules in order to get attention, particularly if the greater publicity is ultimately more productive than not (we’ve unavoidably played our part in this today by highlighting it). The fact that the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is typically fairly slow and soft in its response, such as when breaches do occur, certainly doesn’t provide much of a disincentive to this.
On the other hand, it’s sometimes still possible to dive too far into unethical territory and that could have an overly negative impact. But figuring out where to draw the line can be difficult. Advertising that thus subscribes to the old P.T. Barnum saying – “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” – thus still runs the risk of attracting reputational harm, boycotts, and financial losses etc.
The focus today is, however, specifically directed toward Direct Mail adverts that come to your door. Getting advertising to work and be effective at this end of the market is a particularly difficult nut to crack, not least because the consumer subconscious has long since adapted to instinctively recognise routine junk mail and flyers. This is usually followed by the similarly subconscious act of automatically grabbing said flyers and sticking them into the recycle bin.
Suffice to say that advertisers have responded to this by getting a bit more.. creative. Over the past few years’ we’ve thus seen various questionable examples of promotions that appear to straddle the line. The latest one isn’t even particularly exceptional, but it is just one example of a tactic that we’ve seen used by a number of companies in recent times.
Example of the Direct Mail Envelope
The chances are fairly good that, upon scooping up such a generically designed brown envelope from your letter box – one that appears to be expressing some importance and thus urgency for your attention, your first thoughts might well turn to worrying about its content containing one of the usual bugbears (e.g. unexpected parking fines, speeding tickets, HMRC tax warnings or perhaps a doctor’s letter with that result you’ve been dreading).
The structure of how the envelope is presented does evoke the sort of approach typically used by various government agencies, but by this point, our readers will already know from the context of this article that it doesn’t in fact contain anything worrying. Similarly, you can judge for yourselves whether the letter itself really does contain “IMPORTANT INFORMATION“, which may be somewhat subjective to each individual (or maybe not).
The Letter (Personal Details Redacted)
So “IMPORTANT” was this information advert that the recipient informed us of how they promptly placed it in a bin of similar importance. Just to be clear, this is from a previously unfamiliar ISP, one that is merely harnessing CityFibre’s network (i.e. CF has nothing to do with the letter itself – that “Powered by CityFibre” wording merely references the underlying FTTP network they use).
Naturally, somebody receiving such a letter is clearly going to be more inclined to open and pay attention to it, but we’ll leave it up to our readers to decide which side of the line this sort of promotion should fall on. Is all fair in love and war advertising, or is this a bad approach to take. Each to their own. Readers are of course free to share with us any other examples of contentious Direct Mailings they’ve had.
Finally, there was a bit of a debate about whether or not to name the ISP who sent the promotion, not least because doing so might inadvertently give publicity to them and distract from the core message we’re trying to get out about advertising standards. The fact is that several providers are using a similar tactic, so what we might do is collect some more examples from our readers and then name a group of them, rather than just one.