President Obama’s inauguration was yesterday and congratulations to him and his family.

Today J&R Music and Computer World ran a full page ad in the New York Post with this headline:

Change is Good.

Other than their logo and a tagline about being in downtown NYC since 1971, that was it. (The ad probably ran in the Times, Daily News and Newsday, too.)

“Change is good” makes no sense at all without some kind of qualifier. A week ago in Miami, it was 80 degrees and sunny. Today, it’s sunny but only 53 degrees with an annoying northwest wind. There’s been a change in the weather. Good? No.

On August 26, 1883, all was peaceful in the Sundra Straits between Java and Sumatra. On August 27th, Krakatoa exploded, killing about 35,000 people. There was a change in the Sundra Straits. Change is good? Nope.

Let’s throw Nancy Pelosi out of the House of Representatives and replace her with John Boehner. That would be a change. Let’s throw Barney Frank and Chris Dodd in jail. Lot of change and, according to J&R Music and Computer World, Change is Good. So let’s do it.

That’s not what the precious people at J&R meant. They meant

Good Change is Good.

Why didn’t they say that? Mostly because even J&R might suspect a logical flaw somewhere, and partly because New York City voted overwhelming for Mr. Obama so J&R’s target audience knows they mean Good Change is Good.

But they also did it to be oh so cool. Nowadays, saying something really stupid can make you cool. We’d better get used to it.

By the way, I am now unassailable on topics like this because I am speaking truth to power. (“Speak Truth To Power is global human rights forum based upon the book by Kerry Kennedy” according to its website and it’s the kind of banality lefties have been patting themselves on the back for since shortly after the Quakers came up with it years ago.)

Mailings from Business Week, Fortune and the New York Times all arrived in my mailbox a few weeks ago.

Fortune made an unbelievable “corporate” offer, about 27 cents an issue if I subscribe for three years. They can’t even mail the magazine for that, can they?

I’d change the negative guarantee (if it ever fails …) to a positive (you must be …) and I’d mention it just once or, if I had to mention it twice as Fortune does, I’d at least phrase it the same way both times.

The mailing includes a freemium, a laminated bookmark, but the whole thing is pretty stark. The OE, a double window #10, just has a single line of copy: DO NOT BEND. Odd, but maybe it gets the envelope opened. There’s no letter, no brochure, just the offer and a BRE. I guess at 27 cents an issue, there’s not much room for frills.

Businessweek offered 83% off in the same kind of stark mailing with two big differences: 1) Where Fortune had offered one, two and three year options, Businessweek offered only one year; 2) then, after the year’s up, they’re going to charge your credit card the prevailing rate for a renewal, unless you remember to tell them not to.

The New York Times offered 6 months for 50% off. I won’t subscribe to the NY Times for free until they demonstrate some integrity.

All three mailings are odd because they’re so frills-free, but each is also odd for at least one unique reason. Fortune’s spectacular offer is so compelling, I might take them up on it. Businessweek put in a poison pill, that “till forbid” automatic renewal, and the NY Times replaced the truthful “Irritating one-sided news coverage, egregiously biased analysis and elitist sophomoric commentary” with “Thought-provoking news coverage, analysis and commentary”.

On Wednesday,  January 7, I got the usual bunch of emails that I normally delete without even reading, but I thought it would be fun to look at them briefly to see how well frequent emailers adhere to the idea that From and Subject are crucial.

          The answer seems to be “Mostly no”. Here’s some evidence:

From: Magilla Marketing

Subject: Post Christmas Percent Off Promos Ruled: Email D(ata Source)

                Although, for some reason, they email me all the time, I don’t know who or what Magilla Marketing is. But the tagline is neat: The Blunt Truth on Everything E-mail.  They seem to alternate between Email and E-Mail. I have no idea what the Post Christmas Subject line could mean. (The bracket between D and a in Data above is mine. It means that the Subject line in my Inbox went only to the D and then stopped.) Magilla likes to put a capital first letter on each word. I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not. I suspect not.

From: Adobe Systems Incorporated

Subject: What’s the buzz from design professionals?

                Not bad. It’s actually kind of interesting with several key concepts in the Subject line. One of the concepts is curiosity, the good kind and not the dopey kind in the Magilla line which is more of a “What the hell are they talking about?” curiosity. The Subject line uses only one capital letter which, I suspect, is good. If I were Adobe, I’d probably drop the Incorporated in the From line and, maybe, use a person’s name like this:

From:Tammy Johnson at Adobe Systems

From:SIRIUS Satellite Radio

Subject:Your Guide for January Listening

                I’m mad at SIRUS from another movie (they merged with XM and in the shuffle eliminated the great Wednesday and Sunday nights DooWop show and the terrific Sunday morning Artist’s Choice jazz show.) It’s nice of them to tell me  what’s on in January but there’s nothing I care about. That’s just me. All first letter caps in the Subject line, except the preposition.

From:Williams-Sonoma

Subject:New: Le Creuset Citron + 250 Other New Items Ad(ded)

                New is a good word and they use it twice here. Whatever a Le Creuset Citron might be, I hope they sell a lot of them. Why they email this stuff to me is a mystery; I am not a Williams-Sonoma kind of guy.

From:Borders Rewards Perks

Subject:Introducing a new way to save with Borders Rewards

                I like Borders a lot and this is a pretty good Subject line. I actually read the first paragraph of the body copy … 

Hello mike,

You’ve been granted access to Borders Rewards Perks, a free benefit available exclusively to Borders Rewards members. Here members save all year round on everything from flat screen TVs, diamond jewelry, and new clothing to everyday items like discounts to restaurants, movie tickets and more.

                … and boy, is it ever annoying. It’s Mike, not mike. And when did we get on a first name basis? I have been granted access, like I’m serf and they’re Louis XIV? (This is the kind of thing that happens when you use the passive voice.) I buy books from Borders and have never, as far as I know, bought anything else from them except maybe an impulse item at checkout. They are confusing their brand here which is a bad idea.

From:Direct Newsline

Subject:Holiday E-Shopping Was Difficult for Many: Survey

          Same layout and fonts as Magilla’s newsletter email. Must be the same company. Interesting Subject line but it’s a tad confusing: difficult for whom, buyers or sellers? I guess I’d have to read the whole thing to find out more. 

From:DMA09 Show Management

Subject:DMA09 Early Early Bird Extended One Month

                Weird. Why not just from the DMA? The DMA09 repetition is somehow hammering, offputting. The double Early is odd. Overall the headline screams “We’re desperate.” Which is a little early for Early Early, isn’t it?

From:nationals.com

Subject:                               Spring Training Tickets Go On Sale January 17 at 11 (a.m. on nationals.com)

I like the lower case n in nationals.com. Very few companies do that and I bet it’s effective on a couple of levels. The Subject line is a little long. Spring Training Tickets On Sale January 17 (42% shorter) would have been fine but otherwise this is perfect.

From:Prevention Advertiser

Subject:Exclusive Offer – Try FRA Healthy Energy FREE

          I’m assuming a bout of temporary insanity at Prevention Magazine.

From:Hammacher Schlemmer

Subject:Help with New Year Resolutions: Fitness, Family Time, Or(ganization and more)

          The Subject line is an example of severe overreaching, don’t you think? Sounds more like Hammacher Schlemmer is repositioning itself as an efficiency expert company.

          Like everything else, some of this is good, some annoying, some misdirected, and some just a waste of time.

Incoherent Subject lines are amazing. And I do wonder why more companies don’t create human personalities to be their spokespeople. (People will always relate to people, rarely to companies.)

          I’m beginning to prefer Subject lines that read like normal sentences (one capital letter and the rest in all lower case unless a proper noun pops up.)   

Testing. Nobody tests much anymore and that’s just dumb. 

          We actually had a prospective client back in New York say: “Testing? You’re supposed to be experts. Don’t you already know what works?”

          We could have replied “We were only kidding,”  and taken his money. But we didn’t. We tried the right answers which are:

• Sure we know what works. Testing works.

• The first thing direct marketing experts do is test inexpensively, then drop losing ideas and roll out cautiously with winners.

• Experts know what to test, how to read results and predict future results.

          How you test is another story; the point of this little screed is that it is insane not to test. I’ve seen one creative approach, letter only, improve results by over 1,000%! Our President once put together a list plan that beat the client’s house file by 170% and that’s unheard of.

          Changing the (soft) offer on a program we ran for Ford lifted response to a survey mailing from 18% (amazingly good) to 37% (just spectacular!) I thought the new offer was ridiculous, of course, but it was a cheap test so I let it go. Boy was my face red.

Quick aside: you can’t test direct marketing concepts with focus groups. In a real DM test, people get involved personally, usually by sending you money – they get committed. In focus groups, people respond by saying what they think – with no commitment and no involvement at all after they go home. A direct marketing test involves thousands of prospects. A focus group involves maybe a dozen.

          The other day an art director told me he doesn’t know anyone who works on a PC. Reminded me of the doofus Manhattanite (a famous lady writer) lamenting Nixon’s ’72 election “I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”

The fact is zillions more people work on PCs than on Macs and I don’t understand it at all. When you buy a Mac, you basically plug it in and off you go. With a PC, you need to hire someone to set it up and someone else to keep fixing it. PCs get all the viruses, Macs get none.

And yet, I work on a PC. How dumb is that? I have three laptops and one of them is a terrifically fast Mac. I never use it. I actually don’t like it. Maybe you remember this from school:

I do not love thee, Dr Fell,

The reason why I cannot tell;

But this I know, and know full well,

I do not love thee, Dr Fell.

That’s how I feel about Macs. It makes no sense at all, but there you are.

When I started in this business at Ogilvy & Mather, I worked on a manual typewriter, then an electric followed by a Selectric with interchangeable fonts on “golf balls”. My last typewriter was a tower electric with memory.

My first computer was an Apple 2c, a basic word processor with a built in Pong game. My second was one of the first laptops, a Toshiba. No Windows. You had to remember DOS commands and there was a strip of laminated paper at the top of the keyboard to help you.

Then something happened in the 80s. I decided everyone in my agency, the DM arm of a much bigger advertising agency, should have a computer and we should have a local area network (LAN). I made a few calls, got quotes and before I knew it, there were PCs on every desk with … Windows! Wow. And I’ve been a Windows guy ever since. I don’t recall ever making a Mac or PC decision one way or the other. It just happened. I suspect there was a hidden genius behind it because it just happened all over the world.

          Apple may not be helping its cause with those PC and Mac commercials. The PC guy, chubby with glasses, slightly sneaky, embarrassed about his product, is kind of likeable. The Mac guy is young, cool, sure of himself, tolerant and I’ll bet not 10% of the audience relates to him. That’s about Apple’s overall share of market, isn’t it?