In many ways, marketing through the medium of audio is similar to direct mail because the best results come from pieces designed to speak to each listener, a personal message meant for a single ear.

Harry Walsh, a freelance copywriter who once worked for Ogilvy & Mather, put it this way for direct marketing:

The tone of a good direct mail letter is as direct and personal as the writer’s skill can make it. Even though it may go to millions of people, it never orates to a crowd but rather murmurs into a single ear. It’s a message from one letter writer to one letter reader.

For audio, the tone should be as direct and personal as the scriptwriter’s skill can make it. Speak from one person to another, from your mouth to the listener’s ear.

(Hat tip: Denny Hatch at Business Common Sense.)

Pat Fallon and Fred Senn are co-founders of Fallon Worldwide, now a subsidiary of the French-based Publicis Groups S.A. Since its founding as Fallon McElligott Rice in 1981, their advertising agency has defined and refined the concept of creative leverage “for companies that would rather outsmart the competition than outspend them.”

Chapter 8 of their book, Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity into a Powerful Business Advantage, tells the story of their marketing campaign for BMW. A collaboration with Hollywood, the campaign turned its back on traditional television and used a series of short well-executed online movies to market the BMW Z3 sports car in late 1995 and early 1996, well before online marketing was accepted as a new and effective marketing medium.

Thirteen years later, marketing online is no longer revolutionary but all too often irritating or boring — and ignored.

If you’re looking for an engaging way to reach your target market online, consider a limited series of podcasts that brings your product or service alive through the most intimate medium, audio.