I felt its dark presence before I opened the mailbox. And sure enough, lurking under the bills and a magazine, there it was, a black envelope with dim goldish type and a large rectangular window with sharp corners.

In the upper left, just two words: BLACK CARD with TM in sub- rather than superscript. In the upper right, a preprinted postal indicia. The teaser copy, contrary to normal practice, appears on the back flap: INVITATION ENCLOSED.
Ooo. Classy mailing.

Oops. Hang on, the name and address showing though the open window are smeared. Otherwise, the name and address are in a nice serif face.

The letter, such as it is, appears on the reverse of the name and address card and it’s in a sans serif face. They got it backwards!! Sans serif addresses are okay but sans serif copy in print is hard to read.

The letter is mercifully short. The start is unfortunate, probably because of an attempt to say three things at once: “By invitation, you have been PRE-SELECTED*…” (The asterisk is really one of those sword things). What this means is 1) we’re inviting you, 2) we pre-selected you, 3) not really.

What does pre-selected mean, anyway? It can only mean, “before we sent out this mailing, we selected some names to receive it.” So what?

How can an invitation be involved in a pre-selection? No idea, but that’s the way it’s written, as if someone had been invited to pre-select me and I suppose someone was. The opening would make some rudimentary sense like this: “You have been preselected to receive this invitation …” and complete sense as “It is a pleasure to invite you …” but that sounds as if it had been written by a human being instead of a committee and we can’t have that, can we?

The letterhead says only BLACK CARD, actually B L A C K C A R D.

The letter is signed by the Director, Customer Experience, someone named Ashlee (really) Hutchison. That’s when I accidentally spilled coffee on the letter.

And there’s a folded app with a brochure kind of front panel sporting a short list of features, none of them translated into benefits, at least as far as I can tell.

• Limited Membership (Limited how: number of black cards issued or the quality of the membership itself? No clues given.)
• 24-Hour Concierge Service (Comes to the house?)
• Exclusive Rewards Program (Such as what?)
• Luxury Gifts (Like what?)
• Patent Pending Carbon Card (Carbon credit? Al Gore will be so pleased. Who on earth would care if the card is patented or not?)
• Annual Fee $495. (Pick up me up, Maude.)

Who sent this? You have to dig into the mice type Terms & Conditions to learn that it comes from Barclay’s Bank (Delaware). Heck it’s a VISA card! I wonder if anyone who gets this will think it’s from another company, the one that issues the real black card, the one with the initials AE.

This mailing is Eliza Doolittle trying to fit in with the lords and ladies at Ascot, trying hard not to say “gor blimey, guv”.

I imagine the creative brief went something like this: “Dis here is a foist rate product dat’ll bring in da bucks, big bucks. Make it look classy but don’t spend no money and don’t say nothin’ ‘bout nothin’ in da copy. People gonna tink dis is da udder black card and send us 495 smackeroos. Got it?”

Last week someone sent an email with blurbs and links for several downloadable best practices white papers. One of them is a real head scratcher.

Here’s the blurb verbatim:

Top Priority: Customer Acquisition and Retention Now more than ever, e-commerce and multichannel merchants are faced with the challenge of retaining current customers and acquiring new ones to drive revenue. Read COMPANY NAME DELETED’s latest white paper to learn more about strategies for effective acquisition and retention in today’s competitive and volatile marketplace.

First thought: Did I doze off for a minute? What’s new about acquiring and keeping customers? That’s what we do now, what we have always done. There’s no now-more-than-ever about it.

Second thought: Customer acquisition and customer retention are one thing? It sure sounds like these guys think so, otherwise “… challenge …” would have an s on it. Isn’t a paying customer worth, what?, 30 prospects, 40, with a much lower CPO?

Third thought: Why e-commerce and multi-channel merchants? Why not “every-channel merchants” or just plain old “direct marketers”? Buzz words obfuscate. Eschew obfuscation.

Fourth thought: Drive revenue? Wow, what a radical concept.

Fifth thought: Competitive? Oh no, when did that start?

Sixth thought: Volatile? Doesn’t that mean up and down quickly and often? Didn’t we descend rapidly into a down market and stay there? We can only hope it gets to volatile again.

Seventh thought: Current customers? How about reactivating lapsed customers, aka that untapped goldmine in your house file?

Eighth thought: Too many thoughts for one little blurb. I’ll pass, thanks.

One of BMW’s newish commercials starts with one of those new twisty light bulbs and the word Responsibility.
Then we see thousands of the light bulbs in a ceiling, like the bottom of ET’s spaceship, above a couple of white vehicles on a white background (the effect is blinding).

A rubber-faced spokesdude who looks like a young Max Patkin, the old baseball clown, stands between the vehicles and starts talking in fluent gibberish. His message, a sophomoric mini-lecture, is that responsible means green, or vice versa – it’s a little muddled – and BMW is one or the other or both.

What does come across is that the Bavarian Motor Works company is more precious than a kindergarten play with puppies in it.
Apparently, BMW hasn’t heard about the twisty bulbs’ weird light, annoying buzz, migraine-inducing qualities, or that you have to call a HazMat squad if you ever break one because they’re filled with mercury vapor.

Best of all is the preciousness of burning thousands of light bulbs while claiming to be green and responsible.
I’ll bet the trendoid part of their target audience eats it up.

BMWs, for all their undoubted merits, are les autos de choix of trophy wives, guys whose dads own three McDonald’s stores and wannabes up to their eyeballs in debt who, unaware that genuinely wealthy people drive Buicks or Toyotas, think we’ll be impressed by their Beemers.
BMW would do itself a favor by keeping this nonsense buried in (very) tightly targeted direct mail.

Two and a half Men and Funniest Videos are the only TV shows I pay any attention to. Otherwise I tune in a baseball/football/college basketball game or Fox News and mostly ignore them while I go about my business.

But that’s enough exposure to lead to the conclusion that society made a major blunder when we let lawyers and drug companies advertise on TV.

Not only are their commercials much more expensive and much less targeted than direct mail, they’re a public menace, a threat to the mental health of 50% to 99% of the population. We don’t want to hear this crap!

Anti-depressant drug commercials depress the cheeriest of souls. Middle aged guys who have to pee every half hour point to a dismal future for younger guys. All commercials for drugs make you want to set your hair on fire when the voiceovers get to the interminable side effects.

I have it on good authority that oily discharge and erections that last 24 hours are less annoying than listening to announcers yak about them twenty times a day. The on and on and on droning of lawyerese CYA copy will almost certainly drive some of our more fragile citizens to run amok with machetes in the public square.

No wonder liquor companies are running TV spots nowadays. After a string of ambulance chaser commercials scouring cable networks for America’s last mesothelioma patient, world’s most boring gorgeous lady doctor worrying about dry eyes, middle aged dudes sitting around pickin’ and grinnin’ about Viagra to the tune of Viva Las Vegas,
credit card debt counselors (hah! some counseling), hair growth and snake oil salesmen, and, coming soon, politicians lying to our faces yet again, we need to be reminded that maybe a strong drink is a good idea.

“Bartender, leave the bottle, hang onto my machete, and turn off that damned TV.”

In TV and radio commercials for the Wachovia Check Card, the rambling voiceover eventually gets around to this incentive: when you use the card, Wachovia will move one dollar from your checking account to your Way2Save® savings account.

That’s what it says.

It doesn’t say they’ll give you a dollar. It says the bank will move one of your own dollars from one of your accounts to another one of your accounts. I may be dumb, but I think I could figure out how to do that myself, assuming I wanted to.

What’s the deal here? Sunroom therapy in Bellevue for stressed out bookkeepers? “Take one dollar from here and put it over there. Good. Tomorrow we’ll be working with pennies and nickels.”

Oddly, there is more to it than moving a customer’s dollar from one pocket to another but you have to work to find out what.
The real deal is that you can also transfer $100 a month from your checking account to your Way2Save account. And, for the first year, you earn 5% interest, then 2% in years two and three. With CD APRs around 1%, that ain’t hay. An average customer could put, say, $120 a month into the program for three years and, with compound interest, earn a few bucks.

Apparently unaware that it can be good idea to tell customers and prospects about actual benefits, Wachovia’s commercials merely offer to move a dollar from here to there every now and then. I’ve been a Wachovia customer for years and you’d think someone at the bank would drop me a note about Way2Save. But no! The reasons, I imagine, are that they have 0 direct marketers on staff and the ad agency brings a director’s chair for the client to the shoots.

In the meantime we are left to wonder if a Check Card is anything like a debit card or an ATM card. I’m assuming that, like wireless and cell phone, they’re the same thing.

Charities, that’s who, and it’s got me wondering.

If any marketers ever had to make every penny count – max response for min investment – it’d be charities, wouldn’t you think?
So if mailing makes sense to them, why doesn’t it make sense to everyone else? Beats me.

I’m no more generous than the next guy but I get a dozen or so mailers from different charities just about every month. Only National Geographic comes close for frequency and now that I think about it, they’re not idiots, either.

Charities’ creative is usually brilliant, simple and brilliant. This one from The New York City Rescue Mission is typical. Tiny envelope, big window, perfect headline (COMPLETE THANKSGIVING DINNER ONLY $2.04). Ask for the order. Irresistible.

I love the P.S. “We’d love to have you visit the Mission and see for yourself how your gifts are at work. For information, please call Joe Little at (212)226-6214, ext. 123”

They could have wasted space and time telling us how much they spend on this and that, but why bother when you can just ask people to visit?

Costco’s a weird company. They email me all the time and somehow manage to offer nothing even remotely connected to anything I bought in the last 10 years or so. And they do know what I bought.

But they desperately want me in their loyalty program.

Maybe this has happened to you. When you check out, you hand over your Costco membership card. About every 5th time, the checkout clerk yells for a roving nag who races over to importune you to sign up for the loyalty program. The program costs $100 to join and gives you 2% back on your purchases over the year.

I ask the nag how much I spent with Costco last year. $5,100, she tells me after checking her hand held customer monitoring device.
So the deal is I give Costco $100 now and in a year they give me back $102? And if I slow down a bit, to, say, $4,900, I lose two bucks.
They actually want me to give them $100 to inspire myself to shop more at Costco. Does this make any sense? Am I missing something?

Bernie Madoff’s problem was that he didn’t quite grasp the concept of customer service. He thought it was all about Bernie and the customer be damned.

He’s not alone.

Stores like OfficeMax and Marshalls with their interminable checkout lines are mini-Madoffs that steal our time. Banks that have started hustling deposit customers for their brokerage operations don’t even know what business they’re in anymore. Government Service is an oxymoron and this matters because when government finishes the country off and runs absolutely everything, Madoff will be remembered as the pinnacle of probity.

We don’t even know what customer service means anymore.

Just to make sure, I looked online for a quick definition. A reference in About.com led to theacagroup.com where I found this:

According to the ACA Group, www.theacagroup.com, customer service is the ability of an organization to constantly and consistently give the customer what they want and need.

What the hell?

The start, “According to the ACA Group, www.theacagroup.com …”, is odd considering I was already at their site. After that, the whole definition could only break down and it did.

· “is the ability to” doesn’t sound right. “gives an organization the ability to” makes more sense.

· “constantly” sounds as if the idea is to hound the customer 24/7.

· “give the customer” is silly. Why not “give customers”, especially since …

· … the singular antecedent, “the customer”, is followed by the plural pronoun, “they”? That makes it appear that the idea is for the organization to give customers what the organization wants to give them.

· And what does need have to do with it? Does ACA recommend analyzing what a customer asks for and deciding whether he really needs it?

Miraculously, the definition sort of works when it is rewritten in English. Customer service: giving customers what they want. Not a bad starting point but it’s still off.

The Golden Rule is a lot closer: “Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You … because then our customers will buy more stuff from us and spread the word about how wonderful we are.”

And we’ll be more likely to hang onto our businesses and less likely to wind up in the Butner, NC, federal slammer with Bernie.

Kraft’s Nabisco Oreo cookies are simple: two round dark wafers with something creamy and white between them. Simple is good.

Now they’re getting complicated with a commercial for a fairly new product called Golden Oreo Double Stuf (one f).

There might even be a bilingual pun in the product name but I doubt it: or is the French word for gold. (In his movie The Jerk, Steve Martin tells us “Those French – they have a different word for everything!”)

Part of the campaign started about 9 months ago when the company got Eli and Peyton Manning (and then Venus and Serena Williams) involved in the Double Stuf Racing League (DSRL). Double Stuf Oreos have twice as much creamy white filling as normal Oreos, and the racing involves prising the wafers apart and licking the stuff as fast as you can. Great for kids whose table manners are supposed to be revolting, but it looks a little weird when grown up millionaires do it.
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