Those of us in advertising and marketing collectively have the power to move entire markets. And with all power comes responsibility. One area that needs our industry scrutiny is the overuse of direct mail and the resulting waste of precious natural resources.

As I write my bills every two weeks, I fill two wastebaskets with unwanted solicitations, mostly from financial companies. Two factors are contributing to growth in the unwanted stuff in our mailboxes. The nationwide do-not-call list is growing by tens of thousands of households per month, and massive dollars are being redirected from telemarketing into more and more direct mail. At the same time, changes in bankruptcy law have reduced risk to the credit card companies and increased the volume of solicitations to consumers. The result is a growing flow of junk in our mailboxes that wastes our time and natural resources.

Like most people, I hated the barrage of evening phone calls from roofing companies, finance firms, charities, window cleaners, and publishers. (I often wondered if the advertisers who used this technique gave any thought to the damage this technique did to their brand names.) As annoying as the telephone calls were, the growing avalanche of direct mail is starting to worry me even more. As responsible citizens on planet Earth, do we really want to use our resources in this way? And as marketers, do we have a responsibility to carefully marshal our resources and to judiciously use each channel of communication to its best advantage? Shouldnt we leave as little waste as possible?

Dont get me wrong. I am not against the use of direct mail. Used appropriately, it can be a powerful tool. It is just plain awful marketing that bugs me, and this leads to incredible waste of our most precious natural resources.

As I write this article, I am preparing for a meeting with a small national manufacturing company that is looking for new advertising counsel. They just completed a very large national direct mail program to support sales leads for their dealership network with disastrous results. The program cost $250,000 and netted 250 leads and 30 new customers. This means that inquiries cost $1,000 each, and customers cost $8,333 each. The company makes about $600 in profit per customer and needs to be finding them for less than $300. Oops. Even taking out one-time creative development costs from the equation, each new customer cost over $4000. Clearly, this was a flop.

What is sad about this is that any professional in our business would have looked at the initial strategy and predicted failure. This was a case where direct mail was not appropriate for accomplishing the goals. There was no mailing list available that was targeted enough to warrant the very high per-contact cost of direct mail.

The advertiser was a victim of his own misconception of the power of direct mail. Before the tactic of direct mail was chosen, this advertiser should have evaluated all possible channels of communication available to him. This was a case where a combination of targeted national cable combined with a really strong dealer referral program on the Web site most likely would have yielded the results needed for the same test budget. And the advertiser wouldnt have sacrificed a single tree in the process.

Direct mail has been oversold as a marketing tool, and it is time to start thinking about being far more judicious when we choose this medium. With the emerging Internet and the newly found television interactivity, direct marketers have better, more socially responsible ways to meet their goals. Those of us who make choices every day in the use of media channels should be more thoughtful about the impact our choices will make on future generations.

With all this, I am not too worried about the current glut of junk mail continuing. There is sort of advertising eco-system in place that will slow the process in a few years. The more people sign up for the do-not-call list, the more calls that will go to those who havent yet signed up. This will increase their unhappiness. This will increase the rate of sign-up for the do-not-call list. This will increase the amount spent on direct mail which will further fill our mailboxes. The more filled our mailboxes become, the more diluted the response rates and the harder it will be to make mail pencil out. So ultimately mail volume will drop.

Lets help it along by only choosing this medium after a careful evaluation of all alternatives.