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.  This astoundingly high figure  includes not just direct mail adverts, adverts in newspapers and adverts on TV, but also ads on billboards, public transport, announcements on shop fronts, announcements on products, ads for different types of beer in pubs, posters on the underground, ads on the radio, ads in magazines, etc etc.  

Naturally we don't pay attention to most of these.  When I get my saturday newspaper I find it contains about six sections and several hundred pages.  Although I read a couple of sections in detail the rest I just flip through, passing by the adverts with barely a glance.  These ads count towards my quote of 3500 - as do the signs for various larger on the pub counter when I go into the pub to watch the football match on TV, and order by favourite tipple without any thought of even considering any of the alternatives - but those signs still count.   They register on my consciousness just for long enough for me to decide that they are irrelevant to my needs that afternoon or evening.

The research from Bangor also showed that under 1% of all the adverts and announcements seen can be recalled without prompting by the next day.  We’ll call this, rather obviously, the Overload Theory.

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.

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”.

So from an advertiser’s point of view there is the rather frightening situation 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 (emotional blink).  Stick your advert on TV and the chances are most of your viewers are still thinking about the end of the previous segment of the programme.

Traditionally the way around this 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.   But unfortunately although this 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 advert.   The brain has got excited by the grabby image and so tends to take no notice of the advertising message that immediately follows it.  

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.  (There’s an interesting debate to be had, which we will touch upon later, about what happens when an advertiser or an advertiser’s agency is faced with a situation in which it is pointed out that certain adverts don’t work or can’t work.   The usual response is Advertiser Denial, and it is a mechanism that has been used to keep much of the industry in stasis for many years. 

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 emotional 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.

Now if we return to Overload Theory and the fact that only 1% of all adverts and brands are remembered we find it is not just because we didn’t notice the advert in the first place.  It is also because we started to develop an antipathy to the brand itself – the emotional blink has led us to a dislike this advertiser for interrupting us in such a rude way in the past.  Of course not all advertising is equally bad in this regard – telephone advertising and internet pop up’s are among the worst, although placements in movies, radio advertising and television adverts all have an element of interruption in them.

Faced with poor response rates, and/or the growing complexity of the world of advertising, many advertisers have 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

a)      it is dead simple in its approach – anyone can write an announcement

b)      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 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.

So recognising that attention grabbing is now the problem advertisers then turn to the alternative approach – grab attention and then slip in the notice about the company.  But as we have seen the grab by image doesn’t work either because having had the attention grabbed the brain then switches off other information.  Indeed even if this secondary information (the name of the product) does get through it is just seen as a rude interruption. 

Faced with this double problem many advertisers then retreat into Advertiser Denial - a world in which basically they refuse to discuss the how’s and why’s of advertising.   I’m reminded of a company that called me in 2005 and asked me to advertise my company’s services in a yearbook they were about to bring out.   I posted details of this yearbook on the relevant news group and asked the readers if they had heard of the publication and ever advertised in it.  Quite a few had, but they all came back with the same response – “The yearbook is published and looks quite good, but I can’t trace a single sale back to my advert.”

A few days later the lady from the directory called me again, and asked me if I had now decided to advertise. I told her of my research and its results – no one I could find had had any success with adverts in the directory – and she was utterly stuck.   I was telling her that this form of advertising didn’t work in terms of sales – and at that point she said, “well I simply don’t believe it,” and put the phone down.  In short she went into denial.

Of course she didn’t have to react this way.  She could have said, “Let me send you some case studies – what you will see is that the way in which the advert is written has a huge impact here…”  But she didn’t.  As far as she knew there were only two ways to write adverts – the Announcement style and the Grabby Image style – and if they didn’t work then there was nothing much more she could say.

And so, faced by falling or near zero response rates and no proper theory as to why one advert works and another fails a lot of advertisers and their agents go into denial when faced with information like this.   The two most common ways of writing adverts don’t work, I tell them.  And they say, “well I don’t believe you,” and carry on as before.  No proof, no evidence, just a straight statement.  “We must be doing something right,” they say. “We sold 20,000 last year,” and that’s about it.  No thought about how much it cost to sell the 20,000 or whether an increase in response rate through an alternative approach could halve their costs.  Nope – we sold 20,000 so we must be doing something right.

I will return to this issue later – for I believe there are important messages lurking in the fact that so many firms simply ignore the evidence of their own statistics – messages that can benefit the rest of us who do recognise what the stats tell us.   But for now I want to travel a slightly different route – I want to move on to direct mail – which is after all what we are all here to discuss. 

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 an interruption and emotional blink theory has  already shown us that interruptions lead to negative views of products and brands.  But we must ask, what is being interrupted here?   Most people feel they ought to look and read what is inside the envelope – but when they find it is an advert they get angry.   Sending the advert out to these people can actually harm the image of your company – and the only thing that comes to your rescue is the fact that by the next day only 1% of all the advertising that has been seen is remembered.   To do long term damage you have to be sending out something very awful once, or just moderately awful quite a few times.  

And yet, thankfully it is within the very nature of direct mail which makes people get so annoyed with it, that we find the solution.   Most people – be they at home or at work – do look at most of the direct mail they get.   During that moment 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, 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.

The only negative left, as already mentioned, is the fact that some people get annoyed because they are opening the mail looking for personal communications, not bad advertising.   But 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. 

But to get back to the plot.   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 – providing the advertiser remains aware of the findings that are being outlined here.  (When the whole theory section is complete I will write a short summary of all the theories - but if in the meanwhile you are getting lost, there is a glossary section where the key phrases are summarised).  

In fact, all you have to do now is remember the theories, apply them, and write stuff that is quite engaging..

We have seen that the announcement approach to advertising doesn’t work because it doesn’t grab the reader’s attention.  But equally the grabby image highlighted by New Scientist doesn’t work because the brain then blanks out the product information that follows it.  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 – instead we use grabby text.  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 emotional 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 undergrad 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.    

Of course film and real-life scenarios played out in front of us can do this too.  But text is 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 and the barman says…” 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 ten 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 emotional 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, 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.