Direct marketers gather facts. We start with facts, collect new facts as we go along and we never forget them.

Facts can be anything relevant from history to LTV. When we notice gaps in our arrays of facts, we fill them. We test to gather facts about facts.

We don’t ignore a fact because we don’t like it and we never, ever, commit major bucks or resources to an untested concept.

Perhaps the most important fact is the simple cost/benefit analysis that tells us if our program has a chance to be successful.

If our government did things this way, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. It’s not too late.

Instant Program Guaranteed to Save the Economy
What does this have to do with Direct Marketing? Simple: as the economy goes, so goes DM.

We’re screwed, thanks to the idiot legislators saddling us with overwhelming debt and unfunded obligations. If we continue doing what we’re doing, we and future generations will be terminally screwed.

What we’re doing now is clearly wrong. We must stop accumulating debt. Debt is killing us. Then we have to figure out how to pay off the debt we’ve already accumulated as quickly as we can.

Fortunately, that’s easy, so easy that we could solve most of this mess by tomorrow at noon.

All we have to is announce that we’re going to drill for our own oil and gas, build more refineries and start building hundreds of nuclear energy plants. This would:

· Send the stock market soaring.
· Create millions of jobs.
· Generate so much revenue for governments that we could start paying off the debt, eliminate deficits and cut taxes to the bone.
· Open the country for business and investment … again.

In the long run we would be assuring our own energy supply and we could stop sending billions of dollars to people who hate us.

Any company can feel free to create an unsubsidized business to develop the wonders of alternate energy sources. If there are markets for them, the company will do very well without our help and if there are no markets for them why would we subsidize them anyway?

For the last, oh, ten years or so, it seems that a lot of creative departments have been just copying creative briefs and running with them – verbatim.

A perfect example is this thing that came attached to the top of my Citibank MasterCard statement.

I can imagine the boss at Citibank (or MasterCard; who is this from, anyway?) “Use this space when it’s blank to tell them we appreciate their business and if we can make their experience more rewarding, they should contact us. But don’t get all artsy fartsy on them.”

Stilted language like this is fine for a brief, we know what it means, but it lands with a clunk in the brainpan of the customer. It’s robotic, platitudinous, self-serving (we instead of you), impersonal, meaningless, a content-free zone. It’s not signed, not even with a logo.

“make your experience” … what experience? What the hell are you talking about?

“more rewarding” … than what? If you can make it more rewarding, just do it and drop me a line. Surprise me. Delight me.

“do not hesitate” … you mean “don’t hesitate” or “feel free to” or perhaps a “please” in front of either.

“contact us” … how? And who are you, anyway?

It would take a direct mail creative person about 10 minutes to make this meaningful. Otherwise, they should just put a Sudoku puzzle in any available blank space.

We quit the DMA 6 or 7 years ago. The foot soldiers were great but too many of the mucky-mucks were insufferable snots. When a members’ revolt evicted the top guy, I hoped some sort of sanity might start seeping in.

Emily Dickinson was right. “Hope is the thing with feathers.” 

This week the DMA wrote to ask us to rejoin. Good idea, but, alas, the execution is a deadly direct mail package resembling the “we’ll almost pay you to subscribe” mailings from Time Inc. magazines.

Are we going to rejoin the DMA? Not yet. We’ve discovered that somehow we manage to get along just fine without the DMA. At least I think we do. There may be a compelling case for membership but I can’t imagine what it is and, apparently, neither can the DMA. Here’s what the mailing looks like:

Ghastly, ain’t it? And it’s from the association that represents direct marketers.

There’s no teaser at all on the OE, not even a hint of the freebie worth, apparently, $470. And there’s no hint anywhere in this package of what it might cost to reup. It’s probably a lot more but let’s say it’s $2,000/yr for an agency our size. Over three years, we’d pay $6,000. In other words, the DMA could easily afford a much better package than this.   

Two sheets of paper, each printed one side only, are the guts of the mailer. All the printing and imaging are in a sans serif face. (Sans serif body copy is hard to read and reduces readership.) In a list of seven “benefits”, the $470 Fact Book premium is #1; benefits #2 and #3 are concerned with speaking at DMA events. Nothing in the list of benefits is explained in any detail at all.

· Waived charges for speaking proposals? When did they start charging for that? How much? 
· Agency-specific intelligence? Such as what? An example or three would be great. 
· One Special Interest Council seat? What on earth does that do for me? 
· You’d think they’d talk a bit about the Fact Book, even show it. A $470 premium is a big deal but they treat it as if it was no more important than a free pencil.

There’s an odd branding issue in this. A few years ago the DMA decided to be The DMA and it’s in their DNA, I guess, because their website’s URL is still www.the-dma.org . On the other hand, maybe they had to insert a “the” into the URL because plain old dma.org belongs to the Dayton Microcomputer Association, dma.com takes you to Del Mar Avionics, and dma.net dumps you at Digital Marketing Associates.

But now, at least in this letter, the “the” is out. Note how and where “the” disappears in this mailing and how its absence makes the language awkward:

· “Without DMA, you’re just not getting it.”
· “If you’re not in DMA, you’re missing out.”
· “Agencies have changed since you left DMA.”

The “the” isn’t needed when DMA is an adjective as in “DMA Membership”. But when it’s a noun, the missing “the” is a real clunker, as if an Eastern European ESL student were speaking: “Agencies have changed since you left Direct Marketing Association.”

The letter is signed by a vice president. It should be signed by the President. The vp’s signature is in black ink which looks scratchy, downscale. Blue ink, and there is blue elsewhere on the signature page, would look a lot better.

I think I know what happened. A committee got its hands on this mailer. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

I hope this campaign works. With or without our little agency, we all need the DMA. 

P.S. The package was addressed to Mason & Geller Direct which we haven’t been for a couple of years. We’re the Lois Geller Marketing Group now.

Once again, sumptuary taxation rears its ugly head.

Sumptuary taxes are taxes designed to change behavior. That’s the theory. In practice it never works and always dumps an intolerable load of unnecessary problems into society’s lap.

Historically, two types of products excite boneheaded do-gooders to impose sumptuary taxes: tobacco and alcohol. The taxes (almost always excise taxes) are staggeringly disproportionate to the cost of the product being taxed. A package of Marlboros in New York City will cost about $11.50, retail, by the end of the year. The actual cost of producing a pack of Marlboros is less than a dollar.

Let’s stick with cigarettes a bit.

The argument is simple: “Smoking is bad for you so you should stop therefore we will tax cigarettes until smoking gets too expensive for you.” Sounds lovely, but it doesn’t work. The gap between the real cost of the product and the retail price is so great that a black market instantly arises and cigarettes are cheap again.

When taxes get prohibitive, the side effects of our own stupid experiment with alcohol Prohibition kick in. (Al Capone rides again!) In the case of cigarettes, black marketers acquire product to sell in several ways: hijacking, smuggling, holdups, counterfeiting overseas and then smuggling, burglary. The crooks’ acquisition cost is very, very low. Counterfeit Marlboros and Salems, mostly from the Far East, taste awful, are much more dangerous and cost American jobs.

These days, we have an additional side effect: Al Qaida smuggles cigarettes around the country and uses its profits to fund terrorism. This happened in, for instance, Detroit when an Al Qaida cell made millions from its state-to-state smuggling operation. Various other criminal gangs have picked up on the idea and are merrily making big bucks in super-high-tax states.

The net effect is that smoking goes on with minor dips in the number of smokers. The underground aspect of smoking acquires the panache of rebel behavior which appeals to kids.

Smoking is bad and must be stopped? A lot of things are bad. Grow up.

Oh, we need the additional revenue to pay the social costs of smoking-related disease: cancer, emphysema, heart disease, etc.? That’s probably hogwash for the simplest of reasons. Smokers tend to die young. Non-smokers who live into their eighties and nineties cost us a lot more than people who die young. This doesn’t mean smoking is good; it means that the increased medical cost argument is probably baloney.

Here in Florida, the retail price of cigarettes doubled last year from about $2.50 a pack to a little over $5.00 if you buy cartons. That makes slightly more sense than New York City’s sledge hammer approach. The problem is that the new price has no effect at all on smoking. People who smoke continue to do so. A pack a day smoker will now pay $1,825 a year for cigarettes, about $912.50 more than last year.

In order to cover the increased cost, the smoker will not spend money on other things: Starbuck’s, a weekly night at the movies, a monthly dinner out with the spouse and the kind of impulse purchases that fuel our DM industry. Not a big deal, except that now an additional $912.50 is removed from the useful part of the economy and funneled into the maw of useless government. And that’s all that happens!

There are about 3,000,000 smokers in Florida, not counting tourists. They probably average something like a pack a day. That means that the additional taxes on cigarettes will divert a minimum of $2,737,500,000 (2.7 billion dollars!) from the real economy and hand it off to the drunken sailors running Washington and Tallahassee.

Smokers must be punished for their antisocial behavior? Trust me, they are.

$7 a gallon gasoline.

Cap and trade, which the House has already passed, will have zero effect on the environment but it might reduce behavior the government doesn’t like, in this case driving. Crooks, thieves, muggers, and hijackers will still have plenty of gas … free gas. The rest of us will divert money from elsewhere in our personal budgets to pay the criminally extortionate taxes.

Right now in Florida, a gallon of gas costs about $2.75. Twelve thousand miles a year at 20 mpg needs 600 gallons which, right now, cost about $1,650. In 2011, at $7 a gallon, the same gas will cost $4,200 a year, $2,550 more – $7 a day more. Seven dollars a day times 6,000,000 drivers is $42,000,000 a day (over 15 billion dollars a year) diverted from the useful economy to the completely useless moron-managed economy.

You don’t want to know what cap and trade is going to do to your house. Just bend over.

The effect on DM?

We’re screwed. Nobody will have any money left to buy anything we have to sell. Buy gold, get a shotgun, vote the bastards out.

Once again it seems potentially amusing to compare and contrast the administration of Direct Marketing with the administration of the United States of America.

As you know, direct marketers ask sensible, relevant questions and nobody gets upset when we ask them. We get yelled at only if we don’t ask questions, and if we keep not-asking we get shown the door.

Direct marketers carefully consider all available evidence. We don’t hide it, paint it over, lie about it, excuse it, spin it, erase it or slice and dice it ad absurdum.

And we don’t bet the farm on new ideas; we test them to see if they work. Opinions don’t matter.

Questions, Evidence, Tests matter. Simple.

When we leave the logical realm of DM, we have to reboot to adjust to a world in which the rule is that the more important the issue, the less rigorous the questioning. Worse, just asking a question is an invitation to a personal attack.

What issues don’t get questioned? Government healthcare, massive deficits and debt, rapidly expanding government intrusion in our lives, public service pensions, abandoning allies, butt-kissing enemies, and the dreadfully stupid cap-and-trade fandango all come to mind. But they’re not biting us in the ass, not for a few months yet, anyway.

Right this minute, though, (mostly Mexican) illegal immigration is biting us, biting hard, and millions of Americans are irate because of questions not asked, like:

1. Why does the Federal Government flat out refuse its constitutional duty to secure our borders?
2. Arizona stepped up to protect itself with a new state law. Regardless of what is actually written in the law, the left (including most of Congress as well as the Presidents of the USA and Mexico) speculates that cops will racially profile anyone who looks like a Mexican. Since that’s specifically against the law, any cop who did it would be fired and probably sued. So racial profiling is a negligible risk. How does that unlikely risk compare to the ongoing reality of swamped schools, overrun hospital emergency rooms, rampant crime and a border wide open to terrorists?
3. How is it possible that Napolitano and Holder had opinions about the Arizona law without reading it? If they’re interested, it’s here: Senate Bill-Arizona
4. Which Democrats in Congress stood to applaud the President of Mexico when he lied in criticizing Arizona’s new law? Why was the hypocrite not escorted out of the country for his flagrantly outrageous behavior?
5. What is so awful about Mexico that millions of its citizens flee to a foreign country? There is no logical reason Mexico can’t prosper. All evidence points to a problem that is entirely political. Mexico is run by jerks like Calderon.

6. How do the 15-20,000,000 illegals in the US affect the immigration chances of people trying to get here legally from the world’s other 190 or so countries? Are illegals jumping the line and is that fair to everyone else?
7. Mexican, like American, is a nationality, not a race (just look at a photo of the nearly all honkie Mexican cabinet), so how can it be racist to be against illegal immigration from Mexico?
8. There is a virulently racist organization in this fight. It’s a thuggish California-based group called La Raza, Spanish for The Race, a misnomer Hitler and Goebbels would have loved. Why do our leaders and media coddle this bunch?
9. What is the scope of the attendant problems of illegal immigration: diseases, terrorists from the Middle East, drug smugglers, rapists, murderers, thugs, drunk drivers, etc.?
10. What is the financial plus/minus score of illegal immigration? The plus is the opportunity to exploit Mexican workers. Yuck. Minuses include billions of US dollars sent back to Mexico, huge social, medical, welfare and education costs, destroyed farms especially in AZ.
11. Why do we allow people to conflate legal and illegal immigration so that being anti-illegals means being anti-immigrant? New York’s nanny mayor, for example, can’t seem to tell the difference. Could we make it clear that America is a country of immigrants, we love immigrants and we want more – legal immigrants?
12. Is the left trying to keep us from solving this problem in order to eventually increase the size of its constituency – selling out America for political gain?
13. The current and most recent past Presidents of Mexico (the honkie-esque Calderon and Fox) demand that the US treat Mexican citizens illegally in this country with kid gloves and what amounts to amnesty and welfare. Mexico itself deals with other countries’ citizens illegally in Mexico quickly and viciously followed by immediate deportation. Why do we pay attention to anything Mexico’s two-faced thugocracy says about this issue?
14. What is wrong with our own media when it comes to this issue?

These are just questions. Maybe there are good answers but I doubt it. Almost nobody asks questions like this, not even the soi-disant courageous “speak truth to power” press. The few people who do ask get excoriated. Meanwhile “The American public has been kept in the dark on this whole issue.” God bless Channel two in Atlanta for this: Investigates U.S. Border Security

There is a neat solution to the problem of illegal immigration. We could trade our highly educated, energetic, focused and oh-so-precious progressive lawyers, academics, politicians, media people, activists, etc., for Mexicans who want to live here and become Americans. We’d acquire hard-working, pleasant people and Mexico would gain the services of an army of forceful thinkers with big ideas to help fix their broken country. We can worry about rescuing Mexico from our elitists later.

In the meantime, what are the answers to the questions? We may never know. One potential reason comes from British journalist Melanie Phillips, author of The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power. In an interview, she said:

“ … in this supposed age of reason, there is such an implacable refusal, over a wide and disparate range of issues, to acknowledge the authority of factual evidence over opinion, or distinguish truth from propaganda and lies, or differentiate between justice and injustice, victim and victimizer.

“More than that, this phenomenon is confined to the supposed custodians of reason, the intelligentsia; and some of the most prominent of these often-militant “rationalists” propound assertions that are demonstrably irrational.

“Even more striking is that this repudiation of reason is associated with the most fashionable and progressive causes — anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, environmentalism, moral and cultural relativism, multiculturalism, scientism.

“Yet they promote not just irrationality but a return to primitivism, pre-modern levels of social disorder, and the persecution of dissenters.”

In other words, as we compare and contrast the administration of Direct Marketing with the administration of the United States of America it is important to remember that facts don’t matter in the administration of the US of A. Only the fact-free opinions of a savage elite matter and we question those at our peril.

DM News online has a bit called GLOVES OFF and last Monday (May 17) the topic was “Is Direct Mail Dead?”
Two executives,
Scott Grimes – CEO and cofounder of Cardlytics – and Dan Smith – SVP of marketing, ClickSquared – took more or less opposite sides.

Smith wrote “No. Direct Mail is not dead.” and closed with “Direct mail might not make sense in all situations, but it remains an integral part of cross-channel marketing.” Reasonable answer.

Grimes’s contribution needs a closer look. First, here’s a line from the Cardlytics website that more or less describes what his business does: “Merchants present customers offers directly within their online banking pages.”

Now here’s his take on whether or not direct mail is dead. The bullet points between his paragraphs are mine:

Yes. Despite direct mail’s reputation as a marketing standard, its effectiveness has always suffered from a number of practical limitations. Essentially, marketers are in the dark regarding the efficiency and ROI of direct mail, even though its cost – in terms of time, money and labor – is significant.

· Every marketing discipline is ineffective in some way because of practical limitations. That’s why we have so many different disciplines.

· Marketers are in the dark regarding the efficiency and ROI of direct mail? No. It’s the exact opposite, down to the last nickel if we care to track it that far.

Through transaction marketing within banking, as well as other emerging channels, direct mail has finally met its match as users are deriving tangible benefit from reduced expenses, improved targeting and tracking capabilities and ease of redemption.

· Sounds as if transaction marketing within banking is the leading emerging channel.

· Direct mail has finally met its match? Well, that might be true for things that can be sold successfully through transaction marketing within banking to people who don’t mind being interrupted while they’re banking. Impulse items, I imagine. Anything more complicated might need a link to a website or, heavens, direct mail.

Launching a direct mail campaign requires significant up-front expenditures for design, mailing lists and printed materials. Marketers hope to recover these investments over time. Besides being expensive, lists and databases quickly become obsolete, have significant duplication and are prone to error.

· Recover investments over time. Hmm. Sometimes we recover 100% or more the very first time out and every time we mail out we acquire something more valuable: knowledge that helps us get better and better as we skip along creating a foolproof money-making machine for our clients. It’s fun. I imagine the same sort of thing happens in transaction marketing within banking.

· All worthwhile lists (databases, too) are updated regularly and don’t become obsolete unless the list owners want to commit business suicide. List renters frown at internal duplications. Among different lists, significant duplication can be a pretty good indication that you’re on the right track in list selection. You don’t pay for most duplicates and computers de-dupe in the blink of an eye. No prob. Prone to error? I don’t know about prone, certainly not in my experience, but errors do happen from time to time, and probably happen even in transaction marketing within banking.

Additionally, direct mail does not provide marketers realistic means of tracking who receives the offers – let alone who actually “opens the envelopes.”

· Well, not a 100% realistic means of tracking who receives the mailings. With simple list hygiene and CASS, we’re pretty sure of 95% or so. Not bad and as realistic as the Red Sox pitching problems.

In today’s digital age, direct mail is archaic, especially in the ways in which customers must redeem incentives. Mailed offers generally include physical coupons or promotional codes that need to be printed or remembered, a difficult scenario for a busy, digital consumer.

· I’m sure he meant that direct mail is seen by some as archaic. Not sure what redeeming incentives has to do with it (compared to the entire proposition) but it probably involves the ghastly inconvenience of slipping something into a prepaid envelope and dropping it into a mail box or calling a toll-free number or logging onto a URL or sending an email, even faxing. The horror.

Many efficiencies presented by emerging channels far outweigh direct mail in terms of giving marketers and customers what they want.

· Ah, to hell with it. Grimes can do what he does and we’ll do what we do. Good Luck to him.

This thing came in the mail the other day, an envelope and two glossyish sheets of paper.

The envelope had no ID on it except for a P.O. Box return address in Salt Lake City. My name and address showed through a wide window beside two big 0% items.
There’s no logo anywhere in the mailing and almost no suggestion at all of who sent it or, indeed, of what’s being sold.
The first sheet of paper promises all kinds of stuff and there’s a hint in line 15 of the letterish copy that some kind of card is involved, probably a credit card but that apparently antique term is never used.
Way down at the bottom in the footnotes there’s this: “1 More U.S. households have a Discover card than any other cash rewards card.” It wouldn’t be insanely unreasonable to assume then that this “card” offer comes from Discover although it is by no means certain.
This is undoubtedly a test by Discover to learn if their brand has any value at all. When things get that bad, it’s probably time to fold your tents and disappear into the night.
By the way, I’m preapproved for the card subject to one tiny matter, namely a review of my financial information – demonstrating once again that there is no difference between preapproved and not preapproved.

L.L. Bean is not into planned obsolescence. I bought shirts from them 30 years ago that are still fine; why would I buy any more? I don’t need them.

They’re a great company. They source terrific stuff, live up to their guarantees, offer wonderful customer service, ship right away. Their store in Freeport, Maine is a marvel. Their catalogs are lovely, sharp and easy to follow. Their website is fine: L.L. Bean Website

So what’s the problem? Well, nothing, if you’re an old guy like me. They’re perfect. But, much as I love L.L. Bean, I don’t need them all that often. I’m set.

So what? I’m 123 years old. I’m a guy. I don’t care if my clothes are in vogue. I’ve never known what’s in vogue, anyway. I’ve worn the same stuff since I was 8: blue blazer, button down collar – long sleeve cotton shirt, unpressed khakis, tightie whities, cotton socks and penny loafers. The immortal all-season outfit for geezers and (fewer and fewer) protogeezers.

So when Lois Geller, our agency’s President, wrote a short bit about how L.L. Bean was maybe getting a tiny bit stale, there was a firestorm of protest from L.L. Bean fans, including yours truly.

But Lois wasn’t writing about people like me. She was writing about the kind of people who wear shoes with Donald Duck toes, get tattooed, listen to what they think is alternative music, drink abominations like appletinis, drive Cube cars, really believe that America, the world’s oldest and by far most successful republic, has to change (to what? Zimbabwe?) and generally don’t think, act or look anything like geezers.

Sherry Chiger of The Big Fat Marketing Blog figured it out right away. You can read her take here: The Big Fat Marketing Blog