TMW #197 | Indirect marketing
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Indirect marketing
The fundamentals of direct marketing ā right person, right message, right time ā are under attack by the dominant email clients and mobile operating systems.
I took my first steps into the Martech industry over a decade ago when I started working at a direct marketing agency. What I really liked about direct marketing was the ādirectā part: Knowing your customers, planning comms journeys based on their unique needs, being able to speak to their circumstances, and a closed feedback loop to measure the success of our efforts.
By the time I got into direct marketing, the discipline had been going for some time ā first as direct mail, and later as email marketing, which became the predominant channel. Looking back further to 20 years ago, the email marketing landscape looked drastically different ā just look at the top email clients from then compared to now.

During the last twenty years, Apple and Google havenāt only come to dominate email clients; they also now dominate the web browser and mobile operating system (OS) markets too. And this consolidation of power has had a massive impact on direct marketing, as these companies have increasingly intermediated how we activate first-party customer data.
The importance of first-party data has also increased considerably in the last twenty years. The GDPR set off a chain reaction of privacy regulation across the globe that culminated in the slow death of third-party cookies, leaving first-party data as the āoilā that fuels businesses in the 2020s and beyond. It has also made consumers much more protective of their data and conscious of how they are being tracked in the digital world, birthing a slew of tools aimed at helping consumers stay in control of their data.
The dominance of Google and Apple, combined with the new privacy landscape and tooling, has created the conditions for Big Tech to unilaterally set many of the rules of engagement for direct marketing to the point that it is not nearly as direct as it used to be.
The dominant platforms across email clients, mobile OS, and web browsers now obfuscate, categorize, and summarize direct marketing messages whilst minimizing tracking and empowering usersā control over their privacy and notifications. And they do it as they see fit. Donāt get me wrong; some of these things are necessary for the sake of privacy and the overall email experience. But they all work against direct marketersā ability to target the right person, at the right time, with the right message.
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Stay Curious,
Keanu Taylor
Make sense of marketing technology.
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Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.