Newsletters

I have just been writing my first www.Yourtomorrow.co.uk newsletter that will be sent to all registrants on the website and competition entries. I have found this difficult because I have a thing about unnecessary, and often very boring, advertising. It seems to me that there is a role for advertising to inform, to let people know that you have something they might want; it helps find a match between a customer and a supplier. But these days we are bombarded with so much repetitive advertising that it can become at best a distracting noise and, at worst, an annoying irritant.

I used to love watching the Tour de France cycle race, enjoy the scenery they rode through and be totally amazed by the cyclists' stamina. But this year, my hour's nightly viewing on ITV4 was really spoilt by the constant advertising of products, for which I had no interest or need, being constantly repeated again and again and .... How often has a film that you are enjoying been spoilt by being interrupted, just at an exciting or romantic moment, by tedious advertising? Surely the advertising professionals realise that they are annoying at least as many people as they are informing. It becomes more than just informing people when the same ad is shown several times in the same programme night after night.

People seem to be even more sensitive about unsolicited e-mails, so my Newsletter is trying to avoid being just another interruption. I want to make it interesting with news worth reading. I want to tell people about our new products and gift ideas. I want it to be amusing! But perhaps that sets too tall an order. I don't want people to see the newsletter arrive and just press the "unsubscribe" button without even opening the message, as I would!

Indeed I have also commissioned a small press advertising campaign trying to tell people about Yourtomorrow and the fact that we have a range of gifts that are not available in the high street. But that has forced me to recognise that the boundary between reach (the number of people who see the advert) and ensuring that the maximum number see it and becoming boring and tedious is very difficult to manage.