Grabby Image Theory is invaluable to all direct mailers not just because it helps us all get higher response rates, but because it emphasises once again just how strong and accurate the three Fundamental Laws of direct mail are.   

The essence of those laws is that the true area of understanding of what happens in direct mail is the psychological, not the sociological, and Grabby Image Theory is nothing if not psychological

During 2005 researchers at the University of Wales in Bangor released findings that show that each of us experiences around 3500 adverts a day – which is around one every 15 seconds.  There is more about this in the Factors Section on "Overload Theory"

One of the key points from this research was that under 1% of all the adverts and announcements seen can be recalled without prompting by the next day. 

It is quite clear from these figures that if you want your advert to make an impact you have to start by catching attention.  If you don’t catch attention, nothing much happens.   But it is also clear that we are all so used to handling the overload that we are already past masters at screening out that which we don't want to see.  During the past fifty years much of the work of people who create advertisements has involved trying to find ways of ensuring that this particular advert is one of the ones that becomes part of that tiny minority that gets through the filter system.

Also in 2005 researchers at University College London added an extra dimension to the debate by showing that once the brain has started to focus on something (an advert, a road sign, a teletext page, this article), it has a greatly reduced ability to focus elsewhere for a short time afterwards.   In other words when you turn away from this page your brain will struggle to take in the very next thing you see or hear.  It takes a moment for the brain to re-tune.  This is known as “attentional blink”.

This part of the research has been ignored by many advertisers - but when it is considered it makes rather frightening reading, because it suggests that most advertising fails either because we have been overloaded on adverts (overload theory) or because most of us are still thinking about something else when the advert hits (attentional blink). 

Traditionally the way around this problem has been to grab the recipient’s attention with something exciting (what New Scientist has called “a Grabby Image”) and then intersperse your advertising material between such images.  The idea is that the Grabby Image will grab your attention, take you through the attenional blink, and then ensure that this image - and hence this advertisement - will be the one that gets added into the tiny list of adverts that you remember. The Grabby Image can be a sexy young lady, an entrancing vision of a holiday location, the picture of a famous person, or even (in the minds of many publishers) the front cover of a book.

But unfortunately the Grabby Image itself brings forth more problems.  For, although the Grabby Image can overcome the problem of taking our attention away from whatever we were looking at before, we now give ourselves the same problem within the advert as we faced when starting the whole process of trying to grab attention.   The brain has got excited by the Grabby Image and so tends to take no notice of the advertising message that immediately follows it.   If we remember anything afterwards we remember the image, not the product or service.

Now that might be all right if we are trying simply to drop a seed into the mind, such that the next time we think "I want a new car" the Grabby Image that is associated with the car manufactured by this advertiser, springs to mind.  But it doesn't quite work like that.

In fact, according to the UCL team the whole traditional approach of advertising (grab attention, then sell the product) falls apart before it even starts.   

But this is not the half of it.   The research team at Bangor also showed that the way we pay attention to adverts is related not only to what we have just seen or heard, it also relates to our emotional response to the situation.  They found that if you are doing something intellectually demanding (like reading this paper, or trying to work out who is related to whom in an episode of Midsomer Murders) and then you get interrupted (for example by an advert), the attentional blink can lead to a strong emotional dislike of whatever interrupted you.   

In other words when you are trying to resolve a conundrum (“is she the niece of the bloke who got killed in the woods 20 minutes ago?” or “if all this stuff is true it sounds like all advertising is doomed to fail, so what am I supposed to do?”) you don’t want me popping up in the middle shouting, “Buy your mailing lists on-line at www.hamilton-house.com”.  In fact not only is the advert likely to fail, it is also likely to create an adverse reaction to Hamilton House Mailings such that you will reject the notion of using that company in the future, even though you have by then forgotten this advert.

It is not really the attentional blink that leads to an antipathy to the brand itself – it is our attempt to overcome the it through the Grabby Image that has led us to a dislike this advertiser for interrupting us in such a rude way.   

Of course not all advertising is equally bad in this regard – telephone advertising and internet pop up’s are among the ones most likely to develop exactly the opposite reaction to that which we want, although placements in movies, radio advertising and television adverts all have an element of interruption in them.

So what do we do?

Interestingly, faced with poor response rates, and/or the growing complexity of the world of advertising, many advertisers have gone into Advertiser Denial (see the article "Denial") and rejected the findings, or tried to revert to the simple announcement approach to advertising.  An advertising headline that says “XYZ Ltd announces the launch of the new XMB 882 retro engine lawn mower!” has a certain appeal because

1. it is dead simple in its approach – anyone can write an announcement
2. it is rather like the sign above a shop, such as Fred’s: the Barbers. You know it’s a hair cutting joint, and it is run by Fred.

This approach looks like it ought to work – you are telling them what you have got and being really straightforward – but as the basis for a campaign  to get you new customers it doesn’t work.   Normally this is because it doesn’t grab attention amid the 3500 other adverts on offer that day.  Overload theory overpowers announcement advertising.

It turns out that the research we have cited so far not only gives us a way of seeing how to develop response rates that are double those currently being obtained, they also explain why so many people have what appears on the surface to be an almost irrational dislike of direct mail.   Direct mail, as we know, has lots of benefits.  It helps keep postage costs at one tenth of the price they would be without commercial letter writing.  It helps keep the forestry industry in the EU going.  It is inexpensive and low in energy cost to produce, and for anyone who gets it and doesn’t want it, it takes but a second to pick up any direct mail you get and then drop it in the recycling bin.  But still people get worked up about it – because it is perceived as an interruption to life.  

You’ll see where I am going with this – direct mail is not an interruption when we let the normal filtering processes take their course.  But if we do allow filtering to take place then the chances are that our advertisement won't work.

So then we try the Grabby Image, and that doesn't work either - in fact it not only alienates people to our product or service, it also alienates people to the whole of direct mail.

But strangely enough just when we have reached our most negative point (and when many advertisers have turned away in denial) we are on the verge of solving the whole problem of increasing response rates.   Because if the use of a Grabby Image really does cause people to dislike direct mail we must ask, why is this?   What is the Grabby Image interrupting here?   

You see the point is, as we say in the 70% Theory, most people do feel they ought to look and read what is inside the envelope – but when they find it is an advert they get very slightly angry.   Not angry enough to rip the whole thing to shreds but angry enough to add another fraction of a percentage point in their feelings of irritation against direct mail.   Angry in the same sense that one can feel frustrated by having a pop-up advert appear while one is trying to access what looks like an interesting website.

In theory, sending any sort of direct mail advert out to these people can actually harm the image of your company – but what comes to your rescue is the fact that by the next day only 1% of all the advertising that has been seen is remembered - and yours won't be in that 1%.  So what happens in the annoyance is transferred away from you and your company to direct mail in general.

One way of doing long term damage is to send out something out over and over again.   A perfect example in 2006 when I am writing this would be Capital One who seem to have mailed me and everyone I know a dozen or more times in the last couple of years.   Another way of doing such damage is to personalise the mailshot but to get the details horribly wrong, as with one friend of mine who on turning 50 found that her daughter (aged 25) started getting letters from Saga.  Or another friend who suddenly started getting endless offers of cheap car insurance even though she had never owned a car.

So the strength of direct mail (that most people glance at most of the mail) is also its potential undoing (in that people get annoyed at being interrupted).   And the most used solution (the Grabby Image) invariably makes things worse.

And that conundrum tells us the way out, for during that moment of glancing at the direct mail for the first time, the recipient is not involved in any other intellectual activity – the recipient has chosen this moment to look at the mail.   And this is the key to everything – the explanation of why some direct mail can work so incredibly well.   Telephone me while I am at work or home and you are certain to be interrupting me because I am always doing something (watching TV, writing adverts, reading New Scientist – it’s a full life).  Stick an advert in a magazine I am reading and I by-pass it because I am reading the article.  Put an advert half-way through a TV programme I’m watching and I normally make a coffee, nip to the toilet, flip over to teletext to catch the latest football news or try and find my mobile phone which just slipped down the side of the sofa.   

But with direct mail, I choose when I read, both at home and at work.  

It is not the direct mail that is interrupting me, it is anything else that happens while I am reading the post that is the interruption.  Send me a letter and, at least for a few seconds, you have my full attention. 

But if I think that the mail is going to be interesting and relevant to me and I find that it is not, I am annoyed.  If I get sidetracked by the Grabby Image and then there is an attempt to pull me back to the advert, then I am confused - and probably annoyed - by all this jumping around when I am ready to give you my full attention.

Yet even here there is a solution.   Firstly, it is important not to try to con the recipient in anyway, by suggesting there is a relationship that there is not.   One of the biggest cons is sending a  mailmerge letter that purports to be personal, (“I’m writing to you today, Mr Attwood, because I know that you are interested in the possibilities currently offered by the New York stock exchange…”).  We’ll come back to this later.    

Secondly, you need to say something that really grabs and holds attention right at the very start, and which overcomes the attention blink problem.   Both are possible.  In fact, both are quite easy.  In fact, it’s rather surprising that so many people have gone into Advertiser Denial when the answers are out there – and wouldn’t you know it, I am even going to try and explain why this is so. 

Suddenly direct mail has a huge advantage – it is in the forefront of the recipient’s mind.   Everything is running in favour of the advertiser – indeed the advertiser has to work quite hard to screw all this up.

The Grabby Image highlighted by New Scientist doesn’t work because the brain then blanks out the product information that follows it - and that confusing process then causes confusion in the reader's mind, and tends to turn the reader against the whole process of direct mail.  

So now we ask, how do we go about creating direct mail that does grab and hold attention?

The answer is simple – we don’t use a Grabby Image that is unrelated to what we are advertising.   And unrelated here has two meanings.  First jumping from image to text is troublesome because it uses up too many resources in terms of brain power, and that turns people off.  Second, the way we try to grab attention must be directly related to the product or service we are selling.

Which means if the advert is primarily text based then we need to replace Grabby Image with Grabby Text, but make that text really related to the topic in hand.

Text has the great benefit of conveying huge amounts more information of a specific nature within a few words than any sort of graphic imagery can.  And it has a much greater ability to integrate the advertising message into the “grabby” bit of the message.  

Of course other media can do this, but because of the massiveness of information held within text, it turns out that text is a much more effective way of overcoming attentional blink.  This is because our memories are hard wired to handle text.   I won’t bore you with all the details – there are a million undergraduate psychology text books out there that cover the ground, but in simplest terms you and I and almost everyone else possesses three memories.   Very short term allows us to take in letters en masse without reading them individually, and so make words.  Short term allows us to hold those words in sequence and so make sense of the whole sentence even if it is 30 words long.  Long term allows us to remember events from the start of the novel (or of course the movie) by the time we get to the end - we don't remember each detail but we get the overall context and meaning.    

Text is thus an incredible shorthand for phenomenally complex ideas.   It allows us to express only the bits of information we want.   If I start writing to you, “A horse goes into a bar” you already have an image of the crazy situation.   The horse, the bar, the barman.  What sort of horse?  A bar in town, or a bar in a western movie?  Is it crowded or empty?  What’s the barman doing?   You make it up – I’ve just used six words and that whole image is there.  Only text and speech can do this, and text allows you to speak to your audience much more cost effectively than speech.

So text can take the readers on a journey in which we grab attention with a question or an enigma or a benefit of interest to the reader, and then take the reader along a route which answers the question or enigma or expands on the benefit, in such a way that information about the product is inherent within the answer (thus avoiding any attentional blink).  That way attention is retained, there is no annoyance at interruption – no switching off because of what went before.  Even better, the details of what we have said pass neatly from the very short term memory, to the short term memory and then ultimately into the long term memory.   People read enough of your advert to see who you are and what you are selling, and to overcome most emotional problems, and then buy the product, or at the very least, remember your advert as opposed to anyone else’s.

Free analysis of your mailshot

This article is written by Tony Attwood, Chairman of Hamilton House Mailings Ltd.  If you would like to discuss the writing or design of your mailing campaign, or indeed a single mailshot, with Tony, without cost or obligation, just call 01536 399 000, or email Creative@hamilton-house.com   You can also send Tony a copy of your latest advert and he will call you back with his thoughts on how your response rate could be raised - again without cost or obligation.