They’re all irritating but that’s not what I meant. Some companies actually go to great lengths to irritate their prospective customers, sometimes even their potentially most lucrative customers.

The all time champions at doing this are magazines like Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker and newspapers, most notably The New York Times, The Boston Globe (same thing, I suppose), The LA Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, (Houston Chronicle, too) plus the Seattle, Atlanta, Washington, Fort Lauderdale and Saint Petersburg rags. These are just the especially buffoonish operations that spring to mind.

Magazines and newspapers are losing circulation at a phenomenal clip and their publishers blame the Internet. Ha! Can it be possible they haven’t noticed that they constantly piss off at least half of their potential readership, the half that doesn’t get the news from the Internet?

How magazines and newspapers irritate prospects is simple and depressingly stupid. In the eyes of their former readers, they have stopped being normal every day dopes with left of center politics who somehow managed to get the news out with very little bias except on the editorial page and become preening, posing, pompous trendoid cretins who soak every single column inch in what polite people call liberal platitudes and really-irritated people think of as rank one-sided bullshit filled with lies, half truths and irrelevant opinion (in “news” stories or, in magazines, just plain stories). There’s no balance anymore and that is staggeringly stupid.

Check the recent election results: roughly half of the country is conservative. Half of the rest couldn’t tell the difference between the Communist Manifesto and The Bill of Rights if you ripped off the title pages and the remaining 25% is as left of center as the print medium’s writers, editors and managers.

Let us review:

Potential audience: 100%

Indifferent part of the audience: 25%

Lefties: 25%

Centrists and Righties: 50%

Newspapers and magazines appeal to the Lefties and get the Indifferents by default. In the meantime, they’re pissing off Centrists and Righties who would shoot themselves before buying their products. Helllllooooo? Losing money are you? Must be the Internet.

I wanted to write about silly car (sub brand) names today and thought it would be a good idea to go online to check out the latest nonsense.

I started with Mistubishi, the company that came up with the one el Galant, or was that Mazda? I have no way of finding out online, at least not from Mitsubishi, because Mistubishi won’t show me anything at all unless I first download and install the latest version of something called Adobe Flash.

I looked around to see if there was a no-Flash alternate Mitsubishi site. Nope. So to hell with them. For starters, I don’t download stuff, especially stuff that ends in .exe. I have two other laptops and they have Flash. I don’t know why this one doesn’t and I don’t care. I don’t want to spend time downloading stuff. I just want to get some info and move on. Plus, I know that anything requiring Flash is going to be a TV commercial, not an info source. Adios Mitsubishi.

So I went to Toyota. Same. Sayonara Toyota. Ditto Kia and Hyundai.

Guys, listen to me, please. People who want to sell things to other people don’t do this. They give people options. In this case, you might offer: 1) do you want to get information about buying our products then click here or 2) do you want to see something in Flash, in which case you click here. That way everyone’s happy and some of them, such as yours truly, aren’t irritated. And if they track visits to their sites, they can eventually get rid of Flash

Let’s see what Honda does. Well, I’ll be darned, I got in right away. Let’s look at Mazda. Bingo, right in. These guys must have hired the 4.0 kids from marketing school – the kind who give orders to IT – while Toyota and Mitsubishi got stuck with the kids who took shop, now known as computer science, who think they should be giving orders to marketing people.

I wasn’t going to check GM, Ford and Chrysler because as far as I know they don’t give their cars silly names. But now I have to. Guess what? My browser slid right in to all three, NFR, No Flash Required.

A full page ad for Vaseline’s intensive rescue clinical therapy skin protectant body lotion (hell of a name and all in lower case) shows a small round photo of a smiling woman. Dozens of thin lines emanate from the edge of her photo to dozens of smaller photos of her body parts, then to other people’s faces and on to their body parts. It’s kind of creepy. The headline above her little photo reads “It took one woman to prescribe Vaseline to an entire town.”

The target audience must be entirely female and entirely innocent.

Note to Vaseline: there’s no such word as protectant. Another note to Vaseline: people can get their hands on your product without a prescription. It’s just a skin moisturizer. And if a prescription was required, your lady couldn’t write it, legally I mean. You know that but you also know that “prescribe” is a powerful word. Is this dishonest, a sham? Of course.

When you buy something online, there’s a little asterisk beside the box for your email address. That means you absolutely must fill it in and, for the purpose of that order, it’s a good idea because you get an immediate email acknowledging your order. It’s like a receipt.

What happens next, though, is that you’ll get emails for years from the vendor offering you more stuff. If it was just one marketer, no big deal. The problem is that people like me, and you probably, order a lot of stuff online from all kinds of companies who email you and email you and email you and email you until your inbox is jammed every day with dozens of solicitations from the same companies.

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How do you know when something works in direct marketing? The suits probably never explain this to you, so I’ll give it a shot, using a simple case study.

When we were in New York, we worked with a big brokerage house. They wanted to attract investors with liquid (i.e. moveable) assets of at least $500,000. They’d tried cold calling, advertising, referrals – everything but direct mail so they asked us to give it a shot.

They were nice people but didn’t know anything about DM, so we had a lot of initial chitchat. They were surprised when I asked them how much of their investors’ money they got to keep. They asked “What difference does that make?” and I explained that’s how we figure out if the program works.

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Not long ago, radio was a graveyard for direct marketers. Now just about every commercial I hear comes with a toll free phone number, repeated three times, of course. What happened? Simple, talk radio.

Radio used to be mostly music so it functioned as aural wallpaper; nobody paid much attention. Then came Rush and the rush after Rush. Now people who listen do pay attention, and so do direct marketers. The problem is that most talk radio listeners are guys of a certain age, such as yours truly. That means most of the DM commercials we hear are for hair replacement, erectile dysfunction, debt reduction, mortgages, bladder problems, investments (including, it would seem, lots of gold for sale), and cars although there are fewer car commercials on the radio lately and I suspect that has more to do with the fact that women handle most of the car buying than it does with the economy.

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I hate like hell to pick on an honored institution but I think National Geographic is stalking me. They’ve sent at least twelve different full size direct mail packages in the last few weeks. I wrote about it a few days ago when they sent me three at once.

All the packages are roughly the same: 6” x 9” window OE with similar innards, give or take a buckslip or a differently folded brochure. The products are books but every mailing is selling a different book – all in roughly the same way.

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We used to call them art directors. Apparently they’re designers nowadays.

All the good ones understand that their primary functions are: get everything to fit, handle a few tech things, guide the reader’s attention around a piece and make sure the copy is easy to read.

That last part gives me fits every working day of my life. Years ago in Toronto I was paired with a wonderful designer named Ray. Ray was, and probably still is, a very artistic fellow, wonderful sense of design. His only problem, with me, was that he deliberately made the copy almost impossible to read. He didn’t think that was what he was doing; he thought he was making the overall piece pretty. He’d use sans serif reverse type for huge chunks of body copy or small type on a tone background. He’d set ads and brochures in superwide type. Ray and I liked each other but we didn’t get along professionally because I insisted that he make it easy for people to read the frigging copy. Eventually we parted company and I worked with two terrific art directors in a row, Jiri Matousek and Lynn Sproatt.

I’ve met two direct mail design geniuses in my life, Ted Kikoler of Toronto and Heikki Ratalahti of San Francisco. I never got to work with either. They’re both very nice guys and easy to talk to, but Ted was too expensive in my Toronto days and I always thought that Heikki worked only with the great copywriter Bill Jayme.

Ted once made one tiny change to a direct mail control that resulted in a huge lift in response. The client was a Canadian construction trade newspaper called The Daily Commercial News. Their subscription package went out in a large brown kraft envelope with the paper’s name and return address in the upper left hand corner. Ted got a typewriter font and typed out the publisher’s name and title with one of the letters raised too high, as often happened with old manual typewriters, and slotted it into the small space above the paper’s name.

It looked something like this:

What was the point? Ted knew that anything that makes a direct mail piece look like it had been touched by human hands gets more attention. The apparently mistyped letters did that delightfully.

Both Ted and Heikki are masters of the power of simplicity, crisp, clean, obvious and supremely compelling simplicity. And they’re direct mail people, not advertising people slumming in the DM neighborhood. God bless ‘em.

National Geographic has sent me 10 different 6” x 9” packages over the past couple of weeks, each one selling something different. That’s a lot and it’s a mystery to me why I get them.

In all my life, I probably haven’t bought $100 worth of anything, total, from NG and the last thing was a book over a year ago.

The really odd thing is that all the packages are basically the same thing, like a formula, no matter what each one is selling. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed if they hadn’t all come so close together. It’s not annoying, just very odd.

What would I do differently? Maybe test just one package that offers everything at once, at least for unproven one-timers like me. It could be in book or magazine form with a window cover and a bound in personalized letter and order form. It’d be easy to print and assemble on a fast web and it’d be a heck of a lot cheaper than 10 expensive individual mailings. Might get more multiple orders, too.

Who knows? Maybe they did test it.

Around the same time, a company in the database business, sent a half dozen self mailers all at once to our agency’s former Miami office (we moved out 4½ years ago) all addressed to people who worked for us in New York City five years back! It’s easier and quicker to just burn money.