Direct marketers gather facts. We start with facts, collect new facts as we go along and we never forget them.

Facts can be anything relevant from history to LTV. When we notice gaps in our arrays of facts, we fill them. We test to gather facts about facts.

We don’t ignore a fact because we don’t like it and we never, ever, commit major bucks or resources to an untested concept.

Perhaps the most important fact is the simple cost/benefit analysis that tells us if our program has a chance to be successful.

If our government did things this way, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. It’s not too late.

Instant Program Guaranteed to Save the Economy
What does this have to do with Direct Marketing? Simple: as the economy goes, so goes DM.

We’re screwed, thanks to the idiot legislators saddling us with overwhelming debt and unfunded obligations. If we continue doing what we’re doing, we and future generations will be terminally screwed.

What we’re doing now is clearly wrong. We must stop accumulating debt. Debt is killing us. Then we have to figure out how to pay off the debt we’ve already accumulated as quickly as we can.

Fortunately, that’s easy, so easy that we could solve most of this mess by tomorrow at noon.

All we have to is announce that we’re going to drill for our own oil and gas, build more refineries and start building hundreds of nuclear energy plants. This would:

· Send the stock market soaring.
· Create millions of jobs.
· Generate so much revenue for governments that we could start paying off the debt, eliminate deficits and cut taxes to the bone.
· Open the country for business and investment … again.

In the long run we would be assuring our own energy supply and we could stop sending billions of dollars to people who hate us.

Any company can feel free to create an unsubsidized business to develop the wonders of alternate energy sources. If there are markets for them, the company will do very well without our help and if there are no markets for them why would we subsidize them anyway?

For the last, oh, ten years or so, it seems that a lot of creative departments have been just copying creative briefs and running with them – verbatim.

A perfect example is this thing that came attached to the top of my Citibank MasterCard statement.

I can imagine the boss at Citibank (or MasterCard; who is this from, anyway?) “Use this space when it’s blank to tell them we appreciate their business and if we can make their experience more rewarding, they should contact us. But don’t get all artsy fartsy on them.”

Stilted language like this is fine for a brief, we know what it means, but it lands with a clunk in the brainpan of the customer. It’s robotic, platitudinous, self-serving (we instead of you), impersonal, meaningless, a content-free zone. It’s not signed, not even with a logo.

“make your experience” … what experience? What the hell are you talking about?

“more rewarding” … than what? If you can make it more rewarding, just do it and drop me a line. Surprise me. Delight me.

“do not hesitate” … you mean “don’t hesitate” or “feel free to” or perhaps a “please” in front of either.

“contact us” … how? And who are you, anyway?

It would take a direct mail creative person about 10 minutes to make this meaningful. Otherwise, they should just put a Sudoku puzzle in any available blank space.