This was the question put to me at a meeting of the East Midlands marketing elite as we gathered for our monthly meeting at the Toppled Bollard – Corby’s best known hostelry.

I launched into my speech by proclaiming that the originators of brilliant direct marketing campaigns generally employ 50 per cent genius, 40 per cent guts, 20 per cent irrelevance and 10 per cent dyscalculia.

My point is that with direct marketing it is easy to slip into the middle course so that one never takes the risk of either offending a reader or being accused of wandering “off message”.

But the problem is that such an approach tends to result in a certain level of blandness. This doesn’t matter when the product or service on offer is exciting, stunning, remarkable, overwhelming and better still, unique. But sadly we don’t always have such items to advertise.

When the product is one that is up against others of the same ilk then (I believe) we need take a different line – a line that of itself grabs attention, and makes the reader think, “?!?!” or words to that effect.

Certainly I can say that the most effective adverts I have written have wandered off the central highway, and had those who commissioned them shaking with a mix of disbelief and fear as they contemplate showing my work to their bosses.

Of course it is quite possible to write direct marketing adverts without going to such extremes, but still, a little frisson (which my dictionary helpfully defines as “an almost pleasurable sensation of fright”) doesn’t go amiss to my mind.