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Creative directors are known for being forward thinking, and those Direct assembled in New York last month for our annual agency roundtable were no exception.

Today's on-the-go consumer is a truly different animal from the target of the past, noted our moderator, agency veteran Emily Soell. The validity of the good, old-fashioned letter as a medium to reach that audience was debated, as was where the next generation of DM creatives will be found.

“If you can get kids excited about creating these ideas and then working them for response purposes, then I think you've got a home run,” said Wunderman's Joel Sobelson.

But our participants also showed a healthy respect for the history of the business and those who developed the techniques that are still in use today. Innovators like copy-writing legend Bill Jayme and his contributions to the world of direct were noted, and all of our participants chimed in to share stories about the people and places that gave them their first big break.

The worlds of direct response and general advertising are blurring, the panel agreed, and DR agencies are poised to take the lead.

“For so long, the general agencies have been selling the essence and personality of a brand, and now we're very much in an era where you have to sell the product at the same time,” said Grey Direct's Holly Pavlika.

“What advertising these days is truly brand only?” agreed Martin Macdonald of Rapp Collins Worldwide. “‘Just do it’ is in fact a call to respond.”

SOELL: What or who gave you your first break, to get you where you are today?

SOBELSON: Doyle Dane Bernbach is where I began my career, working with people I really didn't realize were as talented as they were, and as groundbreaking in what they were doing. And that really was the entrée for me into understanding what we were able to do with words and pictures. I bet all of us around the table remember the first thing we've ever done and seeing it in print or on the screen. It was ‘Hey, that's pretty cool. And I could make a living doing this.’

PAVLIKA: I was going to be a journalist, and I got caught doodling by a psychology professor and he told me to take an art class. I had a fine arts professor who told stories about New York, and I [was hooked], so I put together a portfolio of three-dimensional fine art sculptures. I lucked out and got hired by a guy at a sales promotion agency who liked to support starving artists.

MACDONALD: Actually, Bob Kupperman hired me at DBD in Los Angeles when I arrived in the states. I had been working in Edinburgh for four years before that.

WEITZ: After Carnegie Mellon and the Rhode Island School of Design, I was up for a job at Revlon and [one] at Ogilvy. Hmm, cosmetic packaging or direct response advertising? I remember calling my dad, who was at JWT at the time, and asking which job I should take. He asked, ‘Which made the offer?’ and I said, ‘Neither yet.’ He said, ‘Well, then, there's nothing to talk about.’ Two days later O&M Direct called, and that was my first break as a direct design marketer.

SAIZ: There was a woman at Bergdorf-Goodman named Jamie Webster. I had no experience. I didn't have a portfolio. During the interview when she asked me for my book, like Gomer Pyle, I said I hadn't written one yet. (Laughter.) She said, ‘Well, your portfolio.’ I was dumbfounded. She said, ‘Well, do you have an envelope on your lap with something in it you had brought for this?’ I just had two or three little freelance [pieces] I'd done for Westchester Magazine. They were fashion articles and the only reason I tried them was they didn't have anyone writing fashion for them at the time. She was very kind. She gave me some briefs and some illustrations and said, ‘Why don't you take these and come back in a few months and I'll help.’ She offered to mentor me. I took them home that night and worked until about five or six in the morning. I dropped the stuff off the next morning with a security guard at the store and plopped. My alternative at the time was a dishwashing job at Schrafft's, because it was a very bad market.

SOELL: Schrafft's dates you. (Laughter.)

SAIZ: It was right before they closed. I was pretty desperate. I had rent to pay. It was a classic Cinderella thing. They called me the next day and had me come in and meet with the president of the store. They hired me and I didn't know what I was doing. I truly didn't. And I do remember my first ad. It was a ceramic turkey platter, a 300-line ad in the Times. It was challenging. But she was extremely kind to offer that at all, and had no idea how desperate I was for the job.

SOELL: You know what strikes me? There's nobody here except me who started in direct. In the last 10, five and two years, for me anyway, in direct there have been some profound changes. What do you think have been the big changes?

SAIZ: I'll toss out a question. In the last 10 or 12 years has anyone else seen a decline in testing and creative testing?

PAVLIKA: It's not across the board, I think it's a mix. We have clients that are still doing very traditional direct marketing testing where you change one thing and then change another thing.

SOBELSON: I'm probably the newest member of this direct club. As of three years ago I was in general advertising, so I don't have the perspective. But in the past three years alone, I've seen a shift or a merge between general, brand and direct advertising. We have clients coming to us and saying, ‘My general advertising isn't paying out, how can you help?’ We can take care of the brand at the same time we're selling. With budgets being what they are, you can't afford to just do general advertising.

WEITZ: I think timetables also have had an impact. I think clients have become aware that the pace in direct is so much different from general. They can get sometimes the same kind of brand awareness for a lot less fee hours, a lot less media dollars. A lot falls on the direct shop that traditionally would have fallen on the general side.

MACDONALD: Maybe that's the trend. We bring a lot of general guys in to partner with people who've got the absolute rock-solid direct expertise. There's a Wall Street Journal report that said 42% of marketing dollars were being spent on general and advertising as we defined it 10 years ago; two years ago it was less than 12%. So what's that telling you? The idea that you can build brand while driving response is becoming very much [a factor].

SOELL: Everything affects the brand. You can either enhance the brand or demean it with your advertising. It used to be that in direct we didn't care. We wanted to get the sale, get the call, the membership — we didn't have to pay attention to the brand. I recall Chase Manhattan Bank saying to us, ‘You know, we don't care if you get response if you bring the brand down. We are spending so much money on our brand that we will only accept response when it enhances brand.’ And we went, ‘Whoa, that's something new.’ How much sensitivity do you have to what really drives action? Can we do general advertising's job? Can they do ours? Are we interchangeable now?

SOBELSON: I don't think we're totally interchangeable. There's still a need for general advertising, but to be able to understand both disciplines is truly an edge. Still, a lot of times general advertising brands go dark because they don't have the budgets. Then the burden falls to direct to carry that brand message at the same time we're pushing sales.

PAVLIKA: I think it puts a tremendous amount of pressure on us as creatives. We had a client just this week that we told when we dialed up the brand on the DRTV it might affect response. We had done a spot prior to that that was pure DR and sure enough, there was a difference in response. Now they're saying, ‘Let's go back to the brand spots and put a big slate at the back that has all the traditional direct marketing things and whatever.’ You have to make a decision on what's really important to you.

WEITZ: Clients can't make up their minds about how to prioritize things, and that's a big problem. Sometimes brands don't have the dollars to do the big media. We worked on Compaq for a while before HP bought it out. They really had no brand awareness out there at the time. The brand came from the print direct we were doing, and it really substituted branding for that six months.

PAVLIKA: It's been interesting. We've had clients that want to buy direct responses rates, they want it to be a media spot and they don't care if the response rates are there.

SAIZ: It's cheating.

PAVLIKA: It is cheating. And you sit there in the room saying, ‘But I have to care. This is what I grew up on, this is what I do.’

WEITZ: But do they care in the end? That's what I've found. They say they don't care, and you can document it, but they do care, and you're still held accountable.

PAVLIKA: You have to find that fine line where you give them what they want while at the same time staying true to what you know.

SAIZ: Twelve or 15 years ago, if you were to ask virtually any group of adults in this country a name of a fitness equipment product, Soloflex would have been first on the list. At that time, Soloflex did nothing but DRTV and it surpassed old, established brands like Rawlings, Spalding, Wilson. I recall working with a new client where we were pushing DRTV as their brand mechanism to make the buy altogether more efficient. We'd say, ‘You have the right message, and you can take advantage of this medium to accomplish everything that Soloflex did.’

MACDONALD: When I switched [to direct], my friends in the general world said ‘What are you doing?’ I had spent too much time in meetings explaining to clients why there were no actual results from the $50 million they had just dropped on an image campaign. If you can show measurable results quickly, you can sell the clients anything. The joy of direct is this business of being able to test a number of executions against a number of targets and see which one works best. So you get creatives who generate lots of work that gets produced, which makes them happy, and you get clients that end up with a choice. And when you find the one that works, great. Younger, smaller companies are [more] willing to simultaneously build the brand and you drive direct response. For a new brand in Texas, [we've created] a TV spot that has humor in it and a branding device. It's very hard-hitting and makes fun of the competition. But it's done in a humorous way, and that seems to make people like this new company we want them to call. [The spot is] for electricity, so it's something [people] may not be interested in changing. The classic direct response techniques can be raising brand awareness and getting the cost per sale down, all those numbers. You end up getting to be more creative with this. It's very challenging. I definitely have a more difficult time in this creative world. We do some brand-only work, but I've got to admit, there's no fun in it. (Laughs.)

SOBELSON: You think people are willing to pay for this? (Laughs.)

PAVLIKA: I remember in around 1987 we did the first direct response print ad at American Express. The general agency had a coronary, because what if it worked? You can't do branding and [sell] in the same spread. That could denigrate the brand.

SOBELSON: While we're all believers that it can be done, I'm finding some of my clients are still not believers. I have a huge financial client that has a branding group and they also have a product group. The product group are the folks who are driving sales, so they're the ones who want to buy the direct marketing. The branding group are the people who hold the brand sacred and [say] ‘You can't do that, you can't use the logo that way,’ whatever. I find within that company, the product group is getting more and more powerful. They are really driving the marketing, and that's a new phenomenon. I think the clients are really starting to get the message that it can be done.

PAVLIKA: For so long, the general agencies have been selling the essence of a brand and the personality of a brand and now we're very much in an era where you have to sell the product at the same time.

SOBELSON: That's true, because the only thing that's differentiating the product is maybe the brand equities and value. So we have to use that as best we can.

MACDONALD: What advertising these days is truly brand only? ‘Just do it’ is in fact a call to respond.

SOBELSON: Packaged goods companies are starting to get more and more involved in relationship marketing. It's hard to get a relationship marketing program going for macaroni and cheese. Whose going to want it? But we've taken it to a brand point with one of our clients, Kraft. They have a major relationship marketing program, where we're able to have the brand help sell all the products, cross sell, upsell, true relationship marketing. And that seems to be the paradigm that's working for us at this point, working across all the media.

SAIZ: Putting a lot of brands into those programs under one umbrella seems to be the formula. We did some work on Kraft 10 years ago, a little program called ‘Simple Answers.’ The economics required participation from multiple brands, under this guise of helping and understanding your needs and looking at moms as people who have a life beyond the kitchen, with multiple brands working [together]. You can't go out there with a single product.

SOBELSON: No. We use multiple channels. The backbone of the Kraft program for us is a custom-published magazine. It's the proof that this program exists, it's the hard copy, rather than just the online component.

WEITZ: Now, this is allowable. It could not have happened five years ago, Now clients are insisting that brands and products commingle with each other. They might put Dove and Lever together in a mailing. Historically, they never did that. They were separate and you kept them sacred. Now they're allowing us to package things differently and maintain loyalty against the whole brand, not just a particular product line.

MACDONALD: Beyond that, we're ending up in situations where we're doing work for two different, unrelated brands. We're advertising simultaneously for the launch of HDTV, and we're doing it for our client DirecTV, and we're doing it for Samsung. It's actually building the brand for both of them. It's an interesting scenario. You end up working with that agency. We're not only working with our sister branding agency but with clients who have non-sister branding agencies. We all have to play, me and the creative directors, the planners, because the clients are pushing that. For me, it's kind of fun.

PAVLIKA: I think you have an advantage with a general agency background. It helps when you get into those conversations with the general agencies because you can talk the talk.

MACDONALD: There's not a single direct response expert I've come across at Rapp who doesn't want to contribute or help the brand. The creatives were always about brand.

SOBELSON: We always go into the creative department and [say] we're going to raise the bar. It's easy to say that, but if you don't show people where the bar is, you're not talking about anything. And I still go to meetings with [people saying,] ‘Above the line, below the line.’ Lester [Wunderman], God bless him, says, ‘There is no line, don't you get it?’ There's a lot of work to be done.

PAVLIKA: And why are we called below the line, when everything we do [has an impact] above the line?

MACDONALD: The very term is a little derogatory. I had somebody once tell me we were the ‘bottom of the parrot's cage. Those people you pull up from under a rock.’

SOELL: I've heard ‘the ghetto of advertising.’

SOBELSON: When you worked in general, before you understood what direct was about, didn't you have the feeling that those people [in direct] were doing something that was tacky and denigrating?

MACDONALD: Honest to God, I worked as a reporter and got a job in an agency that was small enough that it did everything, and my first job was writing a wall-heater brochure. It was direct response. I just thought you did whatever came across your plate and I was so happy to be making more money than I had as a reporter. I don't care too much about award shows because I think they've gotten a bit crazy, but the bowls are just as big for a piece of direct response. A Gold Cannes Lion is just as shiny for a DRTV spot or a piece of mail as it is for a 60- second branding spot, so why should you differentiate? And the money is flowing this way. In the past, there was a money gap — creative staff in direct, except for those at the top, didn't necessarily make as much in general.

SOBELSON: I've been touring around the country lecturing to a lot of the mass communications schools about what direct marketing is about, especially from a creative point of view. I find after I give those lectures I'm getting resumes, I'm getting people coming up to the office. We're finding our people out there at the younger level, quite anxious to work in direct marketing.

SAIZ: I've done stints of necessity in Chicago and Columbus, OH, [which are] much tougher places to recruit. So that's what compelled me to go to the schools and do some proselytizing and speak at some of the colleges.

PAVLIKA: I think it's necessary. In direct marketing, we all know as much as we do because we learned from the mistakes we made. Where does somebody go and learn what's been done before?

SOELL: I teach the single direct marketing creative course at the Fashion Institute of Technology. It's given only once, in the spring. It's a requirement to be a direct marketing major. It's given in 15 weeks, one day a week, from 9 to 12. That's it. In 15 weeks, I'm supposed to teach direct mail print, TV, radio and Internet. I know I could give an entire year on each of those subjects. And these kids go out into the world thinking they know something.

SOBELSON: It's still about the idea. If you can get kids excited about creating these ideas and then working them for response purposes, then I think you've got a home run.

SOBELSON: I'm finding when you go through these beginner books and portfolios it's not just about ads and other tactics, which is really interesting.

PAVLIKA: But you know, even if you look at some of the award shows out there and how they describe the [direct] category, they haven't got a clue.

SAIZ: When I went to Chicago, I got recruited to work on the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing Tempo Awards. They had a dreadful decline in entries for a number of years and the work was horrible. I suggested that they needed to combine what the Echoes are with what the Caples are. There are people who grouse under their breath at both those shows every year, partly because you know the stuff that wins for its creative is not necessarily accountable to the results, and vice versa. They instituted that and marketed [the awards] better and it had a direct impact on the number of entries. It was a very simple system of scoring. Every piece had two creative scores (concept and execution); and two marketing scores (strategy and results). I've always thought that's the only way to have an award show [in direct marketing]. We had creative and marketing awards in every category. But the only things that went into best in show combined both. It gave people a great amount of accountability and a lot of praise.

SOELL: That's how you raise the bar.

SOBELSON: Exactly. This summer when I was in Cannes, I gave a presentation about 40 years of creative ideas, about the ‘idea’ within marketing. I did a lot of research to find some direct work [that would] support the fact that there were ideas before 1999. There was some terrific stuff, but those samples are few and far between. I could find a lot in the United Kingdom, but for some reason [not as much archived in] the United States.

MACDONALD: Even when I saw the Cannes awards in New York last year, it wasn't very well displayed. We need a really good presentation [method].

SOBELSON: You just put your finger on something. I'm sure we've all [needed] to send samples of our work for a new business pitch or whatever, but I haven't broken the code yet on how to display good direct creative work.

MACDONALD: It's much harder than a storyboard. Direct mail in particular.

SOBELSON: We started videotaping these things so you can understand the order [of how to open direct mail pieces].

PAVLIKA: (Laughs.) Do they open on this side or do they open on that side?

SOELL: Listen, here's a horror story. I'm sitting on a bus and someone is sitting across from me opening her mail And here is a package of mine. (Laughter.) Now, I want you to know this is a package I took such pride in. It was one of those brochures that you were supposed to read like this, and then open, read, open, read. I'm watching her and she opens the envelope and looks [askance] at the letter and she takes the brochure [and pulls the whole thing open]. And then she just [crumples it up] and stuffs it in her bag. Now there was reality.

SAIZ: Do you remember Bill Jayme? Bill Jayme was a copywriter and he worked pretty much from his porch in Napa somewhere. My boss introduced me to him in 1982 and I always wanted to be him when I grew up, because back then I had calculated what he made. He was brilliant. He did the lion's share of his work in publishing, and for a little single package back in the 1980s he was getting $25,000 to $40,000 plus 5 or 10 cents sometimes for subscriptions over the control. He also declined more [work] than he produced. He produced 35 to 40 pieces a year, and was making well over half a million dollars in the late '70s, early '80s. He was a guy who for me epitomized all the interesting things about direct. Fast forward, and in the early '90s there was a Sunday New York Times Magazine with his face on the cover. It was a really wonderful feature article. The thing that struck me is I went into work the next day at an agency — not to be named — and went around asking people if they had seen it. What shocked me wasn't that people hadn't read the article, but that people didn't know who Bill Jayme was — and this was a direct marketing agency.

SOELL: He wrote this [classic] letter for Psychology Today magazine with the outer envelope line, ‘Do you close the bathroom door even when there's no one home?’

SAIZ: His practice with a direct mail package was to first think through the offer and its critical components. The first pen to paper was the order device. And that's very hard to tell creative people to do that. [To many,] the order device is a throwaway. If there's something our business could use a little bit, it's a Bill Jayme-like way of thinking and discipline.

MACDONALD: Why did he start with the order device?

SAIZ: He believed that if you could crystallize what mattered about the offer there, that everything could back out of that and get retrofitted to it. He wasn't just talking about mundane data capture. He was talking about how you firmly express this offer. The same way with PSes. I don't know who discovered first that the PS mattered, if it was Bob Stone or somebody before that. But Jayme was a guy who labored on those details. The letter is the next-to-last thing people open when I look at young people doing mail.

MACDONALD: So are people still reading the letters in the fast-paced ‘hurry, hurry, nobody ever reads a double-page spread, let alone a letter world’?

SAIZ: A good letter, yeah. What astonishes me is I still see people who continue to write letters with seven-line paragraphs. The whole point is to get somebody from the top of the page to the middle in a heartbeat. The chance of their completing something [is slim]. Suppose your boss comes in and says, ‘You've got a whole page in the Times — and guess what, it's all type, so start thinking’? The same guys who would have a little trepidation at that melt when you give them [the same task] and say do it as a letter.

MACDONALD: David Abbott said if they read the first 10 words [of a letter] they'll read all of it.

SOBELSON: I always believed in that too, and at one point I was saying, ‘What are we doing letters for? I just don't get it.’ But what happened is, I started to understand how we're segmenting offers and targets better so those people are a lot more interested once you've got them engaged. The right person will read it. The person who is interested in the offer will really involve themselves in it.

PAVLIKA: But they scan first. We've had a lot of clients over the past few years who have actually spent the money to do focus groups on creative. Every single focus group says, ‘Oh, I love it because there's bullets over here on the side. I like it because there's subheads I can scan.’ Some of this is traditional stuff from years and years [of testing].

SOBELSON: You've got to get art directors involved in letters. Because people are scanning, you've got to use some art-direction techniques to get people's attention.

SAIZ: But even just the idea. What's this letter about? You can just change names and logos on 98% of all the letters for a credit card you get from anybody, and it's a hose job. It's just a game of clichés and clichéd thoughts. Now, the brilliant ones result from thinking them through and finding an idea. It's like a political campaign — what's the sound bite here? What's the lead story? What are we trying to push?

PAVLIKA: Years ago, when I was at McCann, I told my partner I'd like to take a crack at writing a letter. I spent hours trying to write the opening paragraph and gave it to him and he said, ‘It's pretty good, but you've really got to grab them [right away’. It really gave me a respect for my writers and what it takes. That opening is the hardest thing to write. I think more art directors need to try to write something and vice versa.

WEITZ: I think the most invaluable experience was working with Bill Trembeth, who had written the letter, ‘The American Express card is not for everybody.’ As a designer, I began to understand that there is a craft to letter writing. But Bill said to me, ‘If you have an idea it writes itself.’ Now, with the younger creatives, we have to teach the craft of letter writing. They have not been born and bred with long copy. The direct business and the impact of design is another story.

SOBELSON: One of the other things we've got to consider is, are letters played out? We've been experimenting with one of our major clients that lives and dies by letters to [convince it to] try something else, please. And we're starting to get some interesting results.

SOELL: You mean eliminating the letters?

SOBELSON: Yes, but using the information [from the letter] in another way.

PAVLIKA: You know, for a long time, CARE's control to donors was just a buckslip. You checked off the amount of money. No letter, no nothing. You couldn't beat it.

MACDONALD: We've tested post cards against letters with the same content and we've had a lot of luck with that. It's the same structure as an outer envelope. In some you'll find the plain outer goes gangbusters. If we do something on a post card that's a little bit different, [it works]. We did a thing for a [seasonal] electricity [campaign] where when you put the post card in the freezer the words appeared. Now, nobody necessarily does that and you could read the words without doing it, but there was a little bit of an involvement that gave you an experience.

SOELL: Let's talk about the consumer, because so much of what we're doing now is driven by their attitudes. We used to think, ‘If I can get your sweet spot, if I give you something that makes you know I understand you, then you'll give me permission to sell you.’ But today, we have a consumer who scans or says, ‘Just tell me what you have, leave me alone. I'm busy.’

SOBELSON: That's what it's come down to. You can communicate to people with graphic symbols and they get it. We have to respect our consumers' time, and we can't ask them to read a letter when we can communicate something and hit a sweet spot with a picture or a sound bite. That's part of the appeal to younger talent, that it's not only about letters. If you give me a great outer envelope, a way to stage that offer and make that connection, that's the key right there.

MACDONALD: You've got to give them something they can taste or experience quickly. Then when you've got a little more information about them, you can send them something more pertinent and then maybe there's time for a letter. In the initial communication you have to be pretty quick. But I still think they want to be engaged and entertained by an idea.

WEITZ: Mini is doing that really well, and it goes against all the odds of having very little time to scan our mail. They know their audience. That consumer is going to read a nine-page booklet on the new convertible. I'm a Mini Cooper owner and I get all the CRM, but even when they do magazine bind-ins and whatnot, it's engaging and entertaining. They have a different consumer, a quirky consumer.

MACDONALD: I think Mini is brilliant and I show Mini all the time as an example of great direct response work. When you go to the Web site, my favorite thing of all is that it kicks you off and says, ‘You've been in here long enough, get out and drive.’

SAIZ: You know what Mini's doing? They're putting into their communications what Southwest Airlines puts into their whole experience of flying. They're not afraid to relate to you.

SOELL: Is there one sentence that you say all the time to your creative people? Is there something that's your mantra? I'll tell you what mine is: Start where the customer is, start where the reader is.

MACDONALD: If it gets results, it can be as creative as you like.

WEITZ: The idea is not a 6-by-9. (Laughter.)

SOBELSON: Remember, you're a consumer. And don't get bogged down by the pressure. Take a step back and remember, it's only advertising.

PAVLIKA: Keep it simple.

SAIZ: I've never known if I was quoting Sam Goldwyn or one of the old Hollywood guys, but if you can't put it on the back of your business card, I don't want to hear it. And if that applies to a two-hour feature, it sure has to apply to any piece of work that we do.

• Emily Soell, The Sloan Group (moderator)

• Carole Weitz, executive vice president/executive creative director, Draft New York

• Martin Macdonald, chief creative officer/executive vice president, Rapp Collins Worldwide

• Aurelio Saiz, executive creative director, OgilvyOne

• Joel Sobelson, executive vice president/chief creative officer, Wunderman

• Holly Pavlika, executive vice president/chief creative officer, Grey Direct