I’d never heard of John Nolte or of biggovernment.com, the website he writes for, but I stumbled across a link to him at the wonderful smalldeadanimals.com blog. This is the ending on a Nolte piece about the (long overdue) death of Big Media.

“The shift towards online investigative journalism has only begun and look at the impact already. And maybe, just maybe, had our ink-stained dinosaurs picked up on and owned these stories they might have, I don’t know, sold more ink?

“Blaming the death of Big Media on cable news and the Internet is ridiculous. Blaming everyday Americans who have simply grown tired of paying for the privilege of being lied to is insulting.

“When there was no competition, hiding behind objectivity while openly playing press agent for leftist causes and politicians was simply the whoring out of credibility. But now that alternatives exist it’s a kamikaze mission – a Big Media suicide.

“May they rest in Hell.”

Four and a half months ago, Guts came to the same conclusion, expressed slightly less elegantly, of course.

Guts July 14, 2009

Another buck slip/order form and BRE in a #10 OE arrived yesterday. This one came from the NY Times and it’s more or less exactly the same as recent mailings from all kinds of magazines like Fortune, Time, Money, Newsweek.
I’ve finally figured out why none of these august publications bother with letter, brochure or lift note: they have nothing to say about anything, including themselves.

The Times (and, to a lesser extent, Newsweek and Time) has a real problem in direct mail: no matter how brilliant their list strategy, at least 50% of the mailings are going to land with a klunk in the mailboxes of people who hate their guts.

For at least 75 years, the Times has been printing flat out lies in stories that sing the glories of communism (Walter Duranty reporting on Stalin’s Russia), furiously florid fawning over commies (Herbert Matthews reporting on and interviewing Castro), making stuff up (Jayson Blair in just about everything he wrote), printing all the latest news about the US’s top secret weapons in the war on terror (the whole damned rag), and generally behaving as if the paper’s owners were in the employ of whoever’s the country’s enemy du jour.

I guess they think we haven’t noticed.

The Times has one of the oddest business models of all time: their target audience is people who read newspapers. In general, that’s older white guys. Older white guys tend not to be left wing dopes.
And yet the Times keeps flying along on one wing, the wrong one for its business.

Jay Nordlinger is a columnist for National Review Online and has nothing to do with direct marketing. On November 30, writing about the soul-destroying aspects of communicating by machine, he came up with this:

“And let’s not forget the envelope! With its address, return address, stamp, and postal mark — an envelope can be a wonderful thing, can’t it? Of course, what an envelope does is quicken anticipation of what the envelope contains.”

“… quicken anticipation of what the envelope contains.” If Jay Nordlinger, not a direct marketer, knows that, how come … aw, to hell with it.

Usually my mailbox is cluttered with bills, mangled fliers, catalogs and a half dozen immediately forgettable super-sized postcards.

But every now and then a National Geographic package turns up and I smile – gold among the dross. National Geographic knows something a lot of marketers have forgotten. Classic direct mail works. (It had better work or NG’s going to go broke; they mail and mail and mail.)

The creative is old-school terrific. Not spectacular, just workmanlike and hitting all the right buttons: chatty, engaging copy that may be a little overblown and hokey but so what?; benefits, benefits, benefits; urging response.

The latest effort hawks a kids’ Atlas of the US. The 6” x 9” OE is printed on both sides with lots of copy and magic words: FREE, Exclusive, etc. You know what’s going on before you open the envelope; you’re in the mood for what’s inside.

The brochure unfolds to something like 22” x 16″ and it’s good but I love the order form … Deluxe Edition SOLD OUT (ooh, better get on this right away) … move the Yes sticker from here to there … mail the postcard … send no money now.

Music to my ears. If I was atlasless or had any ankle-biters at home, I’d jump at it.

The Post Office (USPS) is considering dropping Saturday mail delivery. They’ll eventually do it.
I have a better idea. Keep Saturday in the mix for a while but cut mail delivery to three days a week. Just split every district into two parts, east/west, north/south, whatever. One part gets mail on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; the other on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Nobody will care, not even NetFlix.
Keep all the postal workers but don’t replace them until the work force is cut in half.

As you know, when DMers plan, everything falls under one of five headings: Background, Objective, Strategy, Tactics and Budget.

When we execute a plan, we tend to do it in stages: Test, Track, Fine tune, etc. That way, we can’t lose big but we sure can win big. The people who run our federal government never heard of this approach.

They went straight to maximum rollout to give away hundreds of billions of our dollars (000s of 000,000,000s of our $s) in “stimulus” money. Unemployment has since soared from about 8% to 10.2% and nothing has actually been stimulated.

At the same time, we took on more debt in the last nine months than we did under all previous administrations combined – from the first George W. to the next George W. – as if drunken illiterates with expensive tastes had run amok with every credit card in the country. And we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, perhaps when we learn why the mint has been working overtime.

If the people who did this worked for you (actually, they do, in theory) they’d be out on their asses faster than you can say “I told you to test, you idiots.”

Then our totally open and accountable civil servants reported, um, waffle-y numbers for the jobs the “stimulus” created and saved. Turns out it created mostly government jobs and, of course, there’s no way to count jobs saved so they can say anything they like. (We’re not allowed to do that in direct marketing.) If our civil servants lived and worked in the real world, Madoff and the Enron crooks would be looking forward to an influx of new roommates.

Next up? The we-know-what’s-good-for-you whizzes are coming after our healthcare system with a 2,000 page House bill nobody has read but which, rest assured, has not a line about: Background, Objective, Strategy, Tactics, Test, etc.

The odd thing is that they could test easily.

California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts have a total population of about 90,000,000 – about 27% of the country – and they’re states with apparently insatiable appetites for this kind of stuff.

The Larry-Moe-Curly feds could try their Brave New World programs in any or all of CA/IL/NJ/NY/MA. The rest of us could watch to see how things shake out. Or we could ignore them, knowing perfectly well how things are going to shake out.

Cap and trade could be voluntary. If people and companies like the idea, they can just do it. Some of them already are. For instance, if you fly out of the San Francisco Airport, and you feel guilty about it, you can just slide your credit card into a machine and buy some carbon credits to offset the devastation you’re about to wreak on the environment.

Just don’t ask where your money goes.

Heck, the coming massive income tax increases could be voluntary. The government would introduce a flat income tax, like Russia’s 12%, and anyone who thinks we should pay more, could just do it. There are more, many more, multi-millionaires (and multi-billionaires) in the tax-increasing camp than in the tax-decreasing camp. Being rich doesn’t guarantee sanity or even common sense. It probably helps to be nuts.

A well-written direct mail letter could explain the concept to the likes of Ted Turner, Barbra Streisand, George Soros, Sean Penn, Al Gore, etc., with suggested levels of voluntary contributions to federal and state coffers. They’d leap at the opportunity to lead the way and set a great example, wouldn’t they? Sure they would.

I might even kick in a couple of bucks, just to encourage them.

Three or four a day land in the old mailbox. The standout, once again, is Tiffany’s. It arrives in a blue envelope. No crumpled back page and wafer seals for Tiffany’s.

The envelope is interesting. It’s never quite Tiffany blue, too dark. The return address on the back flap is 5th Avenue and 57th Street although I imagine the mail order department is in a warehouse east, west, or north of there, across one of three rivers.

The 60-page catalog that arrived the other day is perfect bound which is a nice touch. The photography and the printing are perfection. There are no prices in it, though. They’re in a separate black and white pamphlet. There’s also no order form and no mention of ordering online. Just call.

Since I have no interest in jewelry at all (I don’t even wear a watch anymore, not since I realized that my cell phone keeps pretty good time) so I have no thoughts about the jewelry. Well, one. Tiffany is selling fake keys as jewelry which is baffling.

There are 7 whole pages devoted to striking models and wherever one appears she’s across the gutter from a silly statement that takes up another whole page:

Some style is legendary
Some chic is enchanting
Some design embraces you
Some statements are striking
Some creations are renowned
Some fashion is timeless
Some style is legendary (again)

None of it makes any sense at all but neither does jewelry, so babble on.

One of the models is a blonde Oriental girl opposite “Some Chic Is Enchanting” although I’m not sure she’s what you’d call chic. She’s wearing a lot of jewelry, though: a triple loop necklace, another necklace, a ring, a butterfly on her finger that might or might not be jewelry, a Tiffany key on a ribbon wrapped around her wrist and another bracelet. She’s a walking display case. She’s also wearing a headband, the Tiffany’s version of a ’60s hippie headband and it’s tattered, of course. I imagine this appeals to the kind of people who buy blue jeans already ripped at the knee. It’s, like, totally authentic, street cred, with, you know, diamonds and such.

There’s catalog theory and then there’s the Tiffany catalog. Two different worlds. I hope this works for them because for some reason I like Tiffany’s but that’s only because a certain lady I know loooooves Tiffany’s.

(a tax designed to change behavior)

If it doesn’t affect us directly then we think it doesn’t affect us at all.

The carbon tax, disguised as something called cap and trade, is going to be a sumptuary tax. The tax on health devices, “Cadillac” health insurance plans and fines for not having health insurance in the first place will be sumptuary taxes.

The net result for Direct Marketers is that our customers and prospects will have less money to spend – because a huge chunk of our national disposable income will have been hijacked from the productive part of the economy and shoveled down the insatiable monster maw of government.

That’ll affect us.

A simple example is the recent thugtax on cigarettes in Florida. A few months ago, a carton of cigarettes cost about $25 at the 7-11 down the street. Now the same carton costs $50. The only difference is tax, federal and state.

Of course, smokers should quit. We could pause here and go on and on about the evils of smoking; that’s what the powers that be hope we will do because it would divert attention from the evils of sumptuary taxation.

We all agree smoking is bad and everyone should quit. Now let’s focus.

A pack a day smoker in Florida now pays an additional $1,000 or so a year for cigarettes (pack a day smokers accelerate a bit on weekends). And, of course, nearly all pack a day smokers will pay it. It’s not even a problem; they’ll just cut back on movies, Starbucks, the annual trip to Disney World, going to restaurants.

There are 3,000,000 or so pack a day smokers in Florida, not counting tourists. That means, with occasional smokers, the new tax shifts over $3,000,000,000 (three billion dollars!) from the productive part of the economy to the useless part of the economy. For no gain.

Of course, some smokers have quit …

… buying cigarettes from retail stores in Florida. They have other sources ranging from armed robbers to smugglers, to frequent interstate travelers, to counterfeit cigarettes from Asia, to Indian reservations.

All of which divert more money from the real economy (and generate $0 in taxes for the state).

Because it involves cigarettes, the elected looters will get away with it. Then they’ll pause and attack booze. Then sodas. Then fatty foods. Then the national healthcare scam will kick in followed by the scandalously foolish cap and trade nonsense.

Once people buy what they need, they’ll have little left over to spend on anything else – including what direct marketers offer.

Smokers should pay more for the increased cost of health care? Baloney. Smokers die early. They do not linger on. We probably owe them a refund.

Despite a decades-long all out attack on smoking, last month saw a recent national uptick in the percentage of American adults who smoke, from about 19.8% to 20.1%. In DM terms, that’s three more smokers per thousand.

In other news, the government of Florida recently admitted that it cannot account for or find 18,000 buildings it owns in the state. These are the geniuses who think they’re smart enough to tell us what to do.

According to the paper this morning (NYP-Article), the guy who owns the company that owns Pabst, Old Milwaukee, Schlitz, Ballantine, Colt 45, Lone Star, Olympia, Piels, Schaefer, Schmidt, Stroh’s (and, probably, others like Narragansett) wants to sell and is asking $300,000,000.

That’s a lot considering that the actual brewing of all those iconic American beers is contracted out to Molson, a Canadian company.

One of the amazing things about beer brands is that it doesn’t matter much who brews what.

When I was a bartender, my favorite job ever, customers would occasionally argue about which was the best beer. If it was a slow night, I’d conduct a blind tasting of five different beers. In maybe 100 tests, only a few guys ever picked their fave beers, including one who then astonished the audience by naming the other four correctly before burping, excusing himself and reeling off into the night.

(I occasionally ran the same test when guys argued about Scotch. I’d put out 5 different Scotches in lowball glasses, only I lied; two of them were Scotches, but one was brandy, one Canadian and the other was golden rum. Every now and then someone would notice the rum or the brandy. Everybody thought the Canadian was a Scotch.)

If you make it cold enough, a martini with McCormick’s el cheapo gin is, for most people, indistinguishable from a martini made with more expensive gin, say, Tanqueray. (And a martini made with vodka isn’t a martini.)

I still get a kick out of people who insist on Grey Goose or a high end single malt or a bottle of $100 wine. They’re paying for a label and not a product. (The products are terrific; the issue is that most of us can’t tell, especially after a drink or two.)

The power of brand drives the bulk of the beer and booze business, which brings up an interesting question: how do you screw up a great brand?

How did the great Schlitz and Schaefer (and Stroh’s which bought both Sch brands before being bought by Pabst) wind up in the remainder bin? How on earth did Seagram’s just disappear?

This kind of thing happens all the time. Pepsodent toothpaste was neck and neck with Colgate for a while and then the bottom fell out. Now someone over in Asia makes it and you occasionally see Pepsodent for 50 cents in dollar stores. Pears’ soap once ruled the Anglosphere, now very few people have even heard of it.

The answer, other than expanding too quickly or not expanding at all, is, I think, obvious. It’s arrogance. The people who run a lot of great brands have absolutely no sense of the customer, the people who make their brands great. They never talk to them.

One thing I learned in the bar business is that about 20% of customers are responsible, one way or another, for 80% of revenue. It’s easy to identify and relate with the core 20% in a bar; it’s a lot trickier when they live all over the world. I’d want to know who they are and I’d love to hear from them all the time, every one of them, every day if I could.

That’s where direct marketing should come in, but doesn’t, at least not often enough. Jack Daniel’s has a nice relationship program, mostly online. So does Budweiser but they’re both one-way programs that talk at consumers, not with them.

Listening and reacting to customers would be expensive, of course, but shaving a few bucks from the bottom line to pay for it would bring big time benefits and that sure beats getting bundled with a bunch of other loser brands and sold off to bottom feeders.