When talk radio and Fox News personality Glenn Beck called President Obama a racist, a whole bunch of companies pulled their advertising from his TV show, probably because a few fringe organizations and how-dare-you-disagree-with-me boys and girls threatened to boycott the advertisers.

Apparently the list of companies that knuckle under to thugs includes ConAgra Foods, Procter & Gamble, Walmart, GMAC Financial Services, Best Buy, CVS, Travelocity, State Farm Insurance, Broadview Security, Progressive Insurance, Roche, Sanofi-Aventis, Radio Shack, Men’s Wearhouse, Lawyers.com, Sargento.

This is great!

For starters, Beck fans, millions of them, could now safely boycott the chicken companies with the obvious rationale: “Abandon Glenn and we’ll abandon you – don’t abandon Glenn and we’re fine.” Sounds fair, doesn’t it? The only problem is that Beck tells his listeners and viewers that boycotting is stifling, bullying and completely un-American. Oh, those right wingers! Who do they think they are fighting fair like that?

Based on the old idea that what’s legitimate for you is legitimate for me, Beck fans could, but won’t, boycott companies that advertise on certain shows on NBC, CBS, ABC, and MSNBC, (a.k.a. MSDNC) as well as in the pages of The NY Times, which, believe it or not, still has advertisers. A columnist on Politico.com suggested that maybe folks will boycott Olbermann’s advertisers but there’s no easy way to find out who they are without actually watching Olbermann and that’s asking too much.

This whole boycott thing could be a Godsend to direct marketers. There’s no political baggage in a direct mail package unless we bring it in ourselves and who would be that dumb?

Sane people boycott TV networks and newspapers every day simply by not watching or reading the ones they don’t like. Insane people demand that everyone goosestep along to their secret drumbeat or heads will roll.

Boycott away. We’ll sit back and enjoy the show.

I was a Miller High Life guy for years, right up until the brewery started sponsoring street fairs for lawbreakers in Chicago. I wrote them a goodbye letter and switched to Bud.
Then about a year ago, Miller High Life launched a series of commercials starring Windell D. Middlebrooks, the greatest take-charge pitch man of all time. Four years after graduating from the Claire Trevor School of the Arts with an MFA in Drama, this roly poly, round-faced, baldheaded charmer has carved out a wonderful old school niche for himself.
He plays a guy in overalls who rides a Miller High Life beer truck. His job is the opposite of delivering beer; he takes it away from undeserving people who have already bought the product.
He and his crew have made it their mission to “take back the High Life” for real people and that means taking the Miller High Life away from the phonies.
After they remove the High Life from a nightclub with velvet ropes outside and a $20 cover charge inside, Windell yells “I’ve got shotgun” and hops into the truck.
He invades a skybox at a ball game and asks its denizens if they know what inning it is and when they don’t answer the crew starts on undelivering the High Life while Windell’s attention strays to the ball game. He bangs on the sealed shut window. “They can’t even hear me!”
The spots are brilliant and Windell Middlebrooks is pitch perfect. His voice, his movements, his smiling face, his muttering about the principles of the High Life are all bang on. He looks and acts like the working class hero he is. He turns the concept of elite upside down making the point that poseurs would like to drink Miller High Life but Windell won’t let them.
Now all Miller has to do is close the loop by making the one-to-one connection with millions of average guy beer drinkers who would be delighted to hear from Windell. That’s where DM comes in. In the meantime, you can see him on youtube. Just search for Miller High Life commercials.

Quick Note to Beer Aficionados: Sam Adams, Heineken, Lowenbrau, Anchor Steam (the best beer in the country), Molson, St. Pauli Girl, Smithwick’s, Guinness (new widget draught is outstanding), craft beers, boutique beers and on and on are fine, but they’re a different topic.

That’s us, guys. We’re the all purpose mockable fools and buffoons
The dopey dads in the friends and family phone commercials? One of them busts a piñata so the cascading goodies demonstrate how many people you can call for free? Another one pours a gallon of sprinkles on the ice cream to make the same point (and the feckless dope behind the counter)? Guys.
The idiot kid in the AT&T commercials who can’t quite grasp the concept that old minutes are as good as new minutes? A guy.
The morons in the don’t drink and drive commercials – motorcycle helmet filled with beer, car filled with wine? Guys.
The poor old doofus who can’t find his medicine in the drug store? A guy.
And real guys couldn’t care less.

A moose is a deer designed by a committee. You start with this guy …

… hand the concept over to these guys …

… and wind up with this guy.

About 95% of the faxes that come into our office are from PITA (Pain In The Ass) people we’ve never heard of using our ink and paper to try to sell us something dubious. Like these guys:

Most of them use a lot more ink than this. That makes me crazy because changing the ink cartridge is a pain in the butt, especially if it involves a run to Office Max and standing in one of their interminable lines.
Whoever sent this fax didn’t bother identifying the source company by name and address (wow, talk about inducing trust!) but did provide a URL to unsubscribe. It’s www.NationalDoNotFaxList.com and it’s almost certainly bogus but I went there anyway and became, according to the site, the 13,774th person to unsubscribe.
We get a lot of PITA telemarketing calls at home, mostly from banks and credit card companies whose customers we are (so they can call us at will) and from charities. Some of the numbers are masked in Caller ID with fake numbers (there’s one that says it’s 012-345-6789), Private Caller or Unidentified Caller. I answer them all anyway and just say “Thanks but we never do business over the phone with someone we don’t know. Please send something in the mail.”
“What’s your address?”
“Very funny. Goodbye.”
When I lived in New York, ordering Chinese meant that a delivery guy would drop the food off, then zoom down the stairs, stopping at each floor to slide menus under apartment doors. One night doorman had a great idea. He collected the menus from complaining residents and made a list of the restaurants. When a delivery guy showed up, the doorman checked his restaurant’s name and if it was on the list, the resident had to come down to the lobby to get the food. This had a deleterious effect on the offending restaurant’s business so they promised to be good. And they were, for a week or two.
PITAs like these give direct marketers a bad name, like John Edwards did for lawyers when he channeled dead babies.

Of course they no longer call it the Post Office because that’s what everyone has called it since forever. (The idea for USPS probably came from the same brains that try to make us call cell phones “wireless”.)
The people who work at the Post Office do a pretty good job, and at least they go to work. Over in the UK, there’s talk of yet another Royal Mail strike. “Hmmm, mail volume is down, revenue is tumbling, we’re in a deep recession … I know, let’s go on strike!” Brilliant.
The Post Office over here is almost certainly going to try to stop Saturday delivery and shut 300 to 700 post offices which makes sense but, as Guts predicted a couple of weeks ago, the slow-class kids in Congress are probably going to butt in.
Sooner or later, they’re going to force the Post Office to raise postage on standard mail, what we used to call Third Class. That’ll have the same impact that raising taxes has: less (much less) revenue and fewer jobs … in the private sector, people like you and yours truly. But they’ll do it because they just can’t help themselves.
We direct marketers need the Post Office and businesses rely on it: NetFlix, for instance, and magazines, small package shippers. I still get all my bills through the mail and will continue to do so until they start hanging hackers, phishers and other cyber vermin. (Only idiots mess with the mail. There’s a whole separate police force dedicated to finding people who do that and they actually get the bad guys sent to the slammer.)
One way the Post Office could save a bundle is to get out of the health care business. At the moment, they (we, actually) are on the hook for an immediate payment of about five and a half billion dollars just for retirees’ healthcare with a hell of a lot more to come. It would make more sense to give employees a tax free $10,000 a year each and make them put it in health savings accounts. We could probably afford a group catastrophic care policy on top of that. But that’s not the way they did it in the Soviet Union, our current model of good government, so there’s no way we’ll ever do it here.

The other day I saw a list of most-traded-in-clunkers in the government’s Cash for Clunkers program. At or near top of the list, apparently (and who knows with government stats), was the Ford Explorer SUV. Today a few too-too-precious souls think this means consumers are rejecting large vehicles.

Maybe, but the vintage of the clunked Explorers suggests otherwise. The 1995 Explorer tops the list, followed by the ’97 then the ’96 and ’98. Really old but still running.
I have a ’98. It runs like a top and always has. According to the Blue Book, in the real world I might be able to get $2,500 for it as a trade-in, assuming, I imagine, an altruistic dealer. The government would probably give me a lot more than that and then wreck it – using a brilliant process that seems to cause more “environmental damage” than if the clunkers just stayed on the road.
I’m waiting for the public outcry for Cash for Old Dishwashers (oops, too late; just heard that they’re already talking about that in Florida), Cash for Tickle-me-Elmos and, most of all, Cash for Barney Frank.
By the way, one report suggests that ex-Explorer owners are buying the Ford Edge, basically another SUV. Overall, though, Cash for Clunkers is a boon to foreign-owned car companies.

Of the top 5 new car sales emerging from the Clunker boondoggle, 4 are made by companies headquartered elsewhere than here in the former United States of America. The good news is that #2 on the list is the Ford Focus. The really good news is that the two soviet pension and eldercare companies, Chrysler and GM, didn’t do well at all.

As I stood in a blessedly short line at the friendly neighborhood Wachovia bank this morning, a small poster on the bullet proof glass between customers and tellers caught my eye. The first line of its long headline read:
Values Free Checking
A mirage? I shook my head, looked away and looked back. Nope. It’s still there. What the heck is values free checking and shouldn’t it be values-free, with a hyphen?
Oh, hang on, at the bottom of the poster there’s a small photo of a guy made even smaller by a fake wriggly white snapshot frame the likes of which nobody has seen since Pat Nixon discovered martinis.
Then I got it. The lack of a hyphen between Values and Free was intentional! Ah, that changes Values from a plural noun to a singular verb.
So the guy in the photo finds the free checking here valuable. He values it. Wow. And I thought that Wachovia had become so cynical that they offered a checking account with no values: no financial values, no family values, no corporate values, just no values at all.
How nice of the bank to give us these little games to play while we wait in line.

When Daimler crawled into bed with Chrysler (only to slink out again a few years later) I remember wondering what they were thinking. Now we know. They’re nuts.
The latest evidence seems to be conclusive. In a much-run commercial for one of their new cars, an E-Class Coupe races through the woods somewhere near Stuttgart. Meanwhile, quick cuts show a car museum in a Bauhausy/Gehry-y kind of office building, isolated, like grandmother’s house, in this bucolic paradise. Inside, unsuspecting yippies and their urchins wander around oohing and aahing at great old Benzes.
Meanwhile, the new car races through the woods where there are, apparently, no police. The people inside the building hear it coming and barely get out of the way as the lunatic driving the damned thing smashes it through a glass wall and, somehow, pulls a 180 stop without totaling the new coupe, the old cars or any of the people he barely missed.
What? The brakes failed?