With television commercials reaching the saturation point and hard times putting ad agencies on strict budgetary diets, Madison Avenue is looking for new and more cost-effective ways to court ad-weary consumers. Now that the cost of cassettes is less than $2 each-and some 70 percent of all homes have VCRs–a small but growing number of advertisers are sending video pitches by mail. “This is definitely the wave of the future,” says Eugene Secunda, a marketing professor at New York’s Baruch College.
The latest surge in video mailings began last summer when Pontiac and Chrysler mailed more than a half-million cassettes to peddle their minivans. Recently, Estee Lauder sent out about 250,000 copies of a 2 1/2-minute video romance promoting its new SpellBound perfume. So far, the companies say, consumers have responded positively. But how will they feel when they start coming home to mailboxes full of videos? As some strapped mailorder firms could testify, it may not be long before the commercials end up in the same place as so much other junk mail: the garbage heap.
