Write short notes on Direct Mail as a Medium of Advertising and Role of Advertising Agencies.

Direct Mail as a Medium of Advertising:

Direct mail is a method of sending sales letters by post to the prospective customers is order to convey the message with a personal touch. Direct mail includes sales letters, circulars, booklets, catalogs, bulletins, price lists etc.

These are mailed directly by the advertiser. Letters are sent in order to draw the attention of the customers towards the product or service by providing detailed explanation in a convincing manner. If personal touch in form of words is added in the letters, such letters become more effective. Direct mail is possible if there is selective group of customers. For example pharmaceutical company can easily find out the doctors for direct communication with a view to provide them information regarding products. It would be expensive and time consuming to advertise consumer products. This is more useful for advertising products to a selected category of identifiable persons.

Role of Advertising Agencies:

Advertisers and media owners directly deal with one another. Advertisers are the buyers of the media space of time and media owners are the sellers of the media space ,or time. The role of the media owners is to prescribe rates of the ad depending on the size, duration, design etc. The role of advertiser is to select a particular medium and after negotiating set the terms and conditions with the media owners.

Now-a-days, on behalf of the advertisers advertising agencies have come up to carry on the functions of advertising. There are a lot of agencies that handle all types of advertising work i.e. agencies even select the media for their clients. Agencies are also called media experts or specialists and they provide expert services to various companies. Because of the skill and expertise of advertising agencies, large companies take the services from these agencies and pay them a fee or commission. If they ask these agencies to prepare the layout, design etc, of the advertisement, they have to pay an extra amount excluding the commission.