Life’s about to get a lot more expensive thanks to the skyrocketing cost of government.
Government debt is about four times what it was last year and growing so fast that sooner or later our children are going to issue licenses to hunt us down.
Taxes of all kinds and at all levels are zooming as government entitlements grow like kudzu.
Politicians (is there a dirtier word?) are voting on unread bills for earthshaking legislation on healthcare deform and energy folicy, either of which would add costs unimaginable in our country’s previous 233 years. Combined, they’re one-two death punches.
In the meantime, direct marketers have to figure out how to survive for the few years we have left before the birth of the new and Constitution-free America. Here are some tips:
· Nobody’s going to have much money, so carve out a niche as the lowest cost provider of whatever it is you provide. Price and other cost-reducing offers will be the only things that matter.
· Avoid states like California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey. People in those places won’t have money for McDonald’s, if they even have a McDonald’s.
· Forget about accepting credit cards. There won’t be any. Mugabe-like inflation will make it impossible for banks to run that part of their business. Take checks only and walk them to the bank. Don’t ship until they clear.
· Rethink your web, email and TV strategy. Those things need electricity and we won’t have much of that.
· Start a barter club.

We’ve got about a year, two tops. Good luck.

I love The Smile Train. You’ve seen their ads; they’re irresistible.

Once you donate, they send you nice letters asking for more money. The most recent was an unfortunate attempt to make the letter look like a personal note from a friend. They used a stamp and that handwriting font for my address and their return address in New York City.

The whole thing kind of fell apart when the lettershop mailed gawdknowshowmany in San Antonio, 1500 miles from New York. Naturally, the Post Office had to cancel the stamp and … well, here it is:

I’ve never had much faith in the idea of trying to make a mailing look like a personal letter from a friend. People know that it’s not, anyway, because it never looks quite right, and, when they open it, they immediately sense that someone has been trying to fool them.

I‘ve always suspected that people who try this kind of thing are somewhat ashamed of direct mail. To hell with it; be proud of who you are and what you do. Put something on the OE that sells, a benefit, an image, something heartwarming – anything that makes the recipient want to tear the envelope open and get to what’s inside.

The stealth approach is just a waste of expensive selling space.

Why it’s important to make sure your lettershop
understands what you’re trying to do II.

This came in a mailing from Jos. A. Bank clothes store where I bought a suit and some shirts a few years ago:

Too many waste-of-time emails slipping through the spam filter. Let’s try to get rid of the first four and see what happens.

Hotels.com, Cherry Moon Farms and HSNWeekly obfuscate, tippy toe and generally make it a pain in the ass. Dell makes it simple. Yeah Dell! And a pox on the rest of them. Here’s the lingo they use.

Hotels.com

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We’ve all known for a couple of decades that Letterman gets his jollies pandering to the giddy trendoid-nitwit wing of the American experience. He seems to think he’s a “progressive” and maybe he is. But actual human beings find him an embarrassment, like a cousin who steals undies from a convent.

He doesn’t amaze us but CBS does. In theory, the company is a business and its business is selling time to advertisers, including direct marketers.

Imagine a direct marketer working with the premise that it’s a good idea to shame all Hoosiers, really irritate at least half the potential audience in the other 49 states and get half the remainder to cringe.

Surely CBS’s stockholders, if they exist, aren’t laughing.

This faux letter appeared in Sunday’s New York Post as a full page ad. GM probably didn’t want us to read it because the design people did everything they could to make it unreadable: wide type, justified, sans serif, gray. No direct marketer would ever have approved this.

The copy is astonishing, almost a parody. The ham-handed contributions of a committee are distressingly obvious. The client and agency must think we’re idiots. CAPS AND STRIKETHROUGHS ARE IDLE THOUGHTS.

To Our Customers: SINGULAR Customer WOULD BE BETTER. New Owner WOULD BE BETTER STILL.

While a lot is changing at our company today, one thing is not: our commitment to you, our customers.

We want to assure you that your GM warranty will continue, whether you already own a GM car or intend to buy a new one. Genuine GM parts will be supplied. WHY THE PASSIVE VOICE? IT CAN ONLY BE THAT GM HAS NO IDEA WHO WILL SUPPLY THE PARTS. GM-trained Goodwrench technicians will perform service. Simply bring your vehicle to your GM dealer and you will receive service. THIS IS CONVOLUTED TIPPY-TOEING. “perform service … receive service.” WHY NOT JUST SAY “Bring your vehicle to a GM dealer and GM-trained Goodwrench mechanics will look after it.” GM IS HEDGING ITS BETS. BY THE WAY, WHAT HAPPENED TO THE “Mr.” IN FRONT OF “Goodwrench”?

If the dealership you usually visit will be closing, TOO LATE. IT CLOSED MONTHS AGO AND IS NOW A USED CAR LOT we sincerely apologize and regret that it has affected you. OH STOP. THE GOVERNMENT FORCED THE CLOSINGS. YOU HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. OH, WAIT, YOU ARE THE GOVERNMENT NOW, RIGHT? We stand ready to serve (A “you” WOULD BE NICE HERE) with one of the largest dealer networks in America. Please visit GM.com/vehicles/dealer for information on dealers in your area. We pledge to make your next GM experience a remarkable one. NO KIDDING. THE EXPLOSION OF THE HINDENBERG WAS REMARKABLE, TOO.

At this critical point in our history, we cannot afford to lose your business. Or your trust. You have our word. WE HAVE THEIR WORD ON WHAT? THAT THEY CAN’T AFFORD TO LOSE OUR BUSINESS OR OUR TRUST? THAT’S WHAT IT SAYS IN GRAY AND WHITE.

If you are in the market for a new car, I urge you to shop GM. We are open for business with some of SOME OF? COULD THIS BE WEASELIER? the best vehicles, values and financing rates available. When you come in, I encourage you to be a critical judge of everything – from your experience in our dealership, IT’S A GM DEALERSHIP BUT IT IS NOT GM’S DEALERSHIP. IT’S OWNED BY SOMEONE ELSE. to the quality of our cars. We owe you nothing but the best. THIS IS AN UNFORTUNATE SENTENCE. PEOPLE WILL READ IT AS “We owe you nothing.” WHY NOT JUST “We owe you the best.” And we will deliver.

General Motors may look (HOW ABOUT “will be”?) different down the road, but we are here to stay. LIKE NIGHT FOLLOWS DAY? THE’RE TRYING TO AVOID CAUSATION WITH THAT SNEAKY LITTLE “but.” THEY REALLY MEAN “GM already looks different and we’re going to look like KIA soon and we hope like hell it works.” By accelerating work that is already underway and making fundamental changes from top to bottom, HANG ON COWBOY! YOU’RE ACCELERATING OLD STUFF AND AT THE SAME TIME YOU’RE CHANGING EVERYTHING? DOES ANYONE HAVE THE FOGGIEST IDEA WHAT’S HAPPENING THERE? GM will be leaner, greener, GREENER? ARE THEY INSANE? WHY NOT JUST SAY THAT THEY’RE GOING TO STOP MAKING CARS PEOPLE WANT. faster and stronger. We’re not just rebuilding our company. We’re reinventing it. YADA, YADA.

Over the coming days, months and years, NO WEEKS? we will prove ourselves by being more transparent, more accountable and, above all, more focused on you,our customer. NONE OF WHICH WE CARE ABOUT. GREAT CARS, GREAT SERVICE.

I invite you to track our progress at GMreinvention.com. And on behalf of all the men and women doing the hard work of changing or company for the better, we look forward to showing you the New GM. THANKS BUT THIS LETTER GIVES US A PRETTY GOOD IDEA. CAN WE HAVE OUR MONEY BACK NOW?

Sincerely,

Frederick A. Henderson

President & Chief Executive Officer, General Motors REALLY? GENERAL MOTORS, HUH? WHO’D A THUNK IT?

I think maybe corporate idea killing committees and ham-handed copy critics don’t pay much attention to what gets painted on the sides of their trucks – because a lot of it’s pretty good. McDonald’s full truck color photos of food look great while their TV commercials have been going downhill slowly from “You Deserve a Break Today” … to “I’M Lovin’ It.”

Driving to work today, I saw a truck from Smith’s Office & Computer Supply pulled up at a red light. The company name was on the side along with the URL and a smallish slogan that read “where service still matters”. Without still, the line would be snooze inducing. But still lifts it up. I thought immediately of places like OfficeMax whose slogan should be “where service is still sporadic”.

As soon as I got to the office, I logged onto www.smithofficesupply.com to see what other cool things the company had to say. Turns out, the service line on the truck must have been a fortuitous accident because the line on the website reads:

Zzzzz.

Selling magazine subscriptions by mail used to be an artistic science.

We’d test offers, prices, premiums, creative look, creative voice, color vs. b&w, brochure vs. no brochure, buck slips, lift letters, long letter, short letter, who should sign the letter, terms.

Once we tried to find out if it made any difference whether a subscription cost $19.99, $19.98, $19.97, $19.96, or 19.95. I once discovered, accidentally, that if we put the long term (52 issues) ahead of the short term (27 issues) we got a lot more long term orders with no reduction in overall response.

Now I’m seeing plain envelopes with one short-copy inserts offering a year of Time for $10, 3 years of Fortune for$20, a year of National Geographic for $20. And Fortune sends me emails with sanctimonious gobbledygook about saving the environment.

This used to be a fun business.

I love Borders but even they’re getting kind of goofy. Their Memorial Day Sale this year ends two days before Memorial Day.

I keep hearing the opening lines of an old Buffalo Springfield song:

There’s something happening here

What it is ain’t exactly clear

The economy’s a basket case which means a whole lot of marketers, direct or otherwise, are going to be unemployed. Marketing’s the first thing management cuts when money’s scarce.

We’re screwed unless the economy rebounds pretty quickly and this is where we wind up with me feeling stupid because we seem to be doing everything possible to make sure the economy doesn’t rebound, including, believe it or not, increasing every tax there is, inventing a whole lot of new taxes (Fed beer tax up 225%!!!) and quadrupling (so far; they’ve just begun) the national debt.

What could we do instead? For starters, I suspect we could solve the whole mess by tomorrow at noon.

Maybe, just maybe, if we stopped fooling around and started drilling our own oil and gas, building more refineries and planning about 150 nuclear energy plants, then just announcing that we’re serious about doing this would:

• Jumpstart the stock market.

• Create millions of jobs.

• Generate enough revenue for governments to pay off the Chinese, erase deficits (even California’s), cut taxes to the bone (even New York’s and maybe even New Jersey’s), and open the country for business and investment … again. It’s possible that we might be able to afford to keep coddling the civil service unions indefinitely.

I don’t understand why we don’t produce our own energy. We know how. And it’s amazing that we’re not even talking about it. I should know why but I don’t and I feel stupid.

Apparently, the only thing standing in the way is what was called global warming 10 seconds ago, climate change 5 seconds ago and now, according to Eco-America, it’s, drum roll please, climate crisis.

Greenland once had palm trees, so we know that global warming and cooling don’t need us to keep on keepin’ on as they have been for millions of years.

We know that the globe isn’t warming right now and hasn’t for 10 years (and we’re probably entering a cooling phase). So if it isn’t global warming, what the hell is the crisis?

I don’t know, you don’t know and we don’t know how to find out.

Whatever the climate crisis is, it’s inspired the government to keep us from tapping our own resources and to force us to keep sending billions of dollars a month to people who want to fly more airplanes into our buildings.

It’s also inspired the Feds to plot a ukaseish kind of igno-cretin fatwah to force (there’s that word again) car companies to start producing hundreds of thousands of vehicles nobody wants, tiny things that would be perfect for munchkins with no luggage, content on a wind-free day to drive a distance of 40 miles at 12 miles an hour because any faster and they’ll all die if they hit anything – or if anything hits them.

In 10 years, old cars and trucks, real cars and trucks, will be treasures because the only other vehicles available will be near-useless fragile death traps.“Yep, Charlene and the kids died, but they were getting great mileage.”

A Canadian blogger (small dead animals) summarized it nicely:

Imagine if the President had instead said today, “This new fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions rule will slow the increase in future global temperature seven thousandths of a degree Celsius by the end of this century, and it means the sea will rise six tenths of a millimeter less than it otherwise would over the same timeframe.” It loses some of its punch, no?

The government is eagerly grasping the climate crisis to force something called “cap and trade” on American industries. This will make Bernie Madoff appear to be a public benefactor. At least he paid a few bucks back to the first sucker investors and he still has a seizable asset or two lying around. Cap and trade is pure benefit-free spending; it’ll piss billions away for no reason at all.

I don’t understand why we’re doing any of that stuff. When I ask, people yell at me although that’s encouraging because one of the laws of nature is that he who talks loudest and fastest is almost certainly full of baloney.

We have no money and we’re in debt up to our eyeballs and the government insists on creating nationalized health care. We know it’s crazy-expensive, loonily-inefficient and doesn’t work anywhere it’s been tried. It’s the medical equivalent of an Irwin Allen movie, a disaster of major proportions. It kills folks with bureaucratic denials and/or long waits. People, the ambulatory ones anyway, are now running from national healthcare wherever it exists. Brits and Swedes and Germans fly to Mumbai for operations. Canadians come down here but, as soon as we adopt their health care policies, they’ll be calling Air India, too. So will we. I don’t understand why we’re even thinking about that. We’d be better off with M.A.S.H. units going from town to town. “Hawkeye! Think you and Trapper can do a double lung transplant after you finish with that hip replacement?”

We know that the trigger for the economic crisis was the government forcing (maybe they’re all into bondage, who knows?) the financial industry to give mortgages to people with no credit and nowhere near enough money to buy an outhouse, often no money at all. When the law of unintended consequences kicked in, the pigs - Lehman, AIG and so on - snuffled ‘round the trough. And the government’s doing it again! I don’t understand why. I’m just stupid, I guess.

I don’t even understand why Barney Frank and Chris Dodd aren’t in jail. I must have missed something.