We do. Here it is on behalf of a great many Americans: We’re sorry.

We thought he was just a two bit punk with a remarkable gift of oratory.

It seemed obvious: commie dad, hippie mom, Chicago community organizer, history of shady deals (including wife’s $350,000/yr. non-job), hanging out with obscure mad bombers, 20 years of Sundays listening to a rabid lunatic, never had a job, never created anything. All he did was talk.

So we made a mistake. He’s not a two-bit punk. He’s much more than that. In just three and half years in the oval office, he has managed to:

• Polarize the country with a brilliant reverse-Alinksy strategy. Instead of isolating the enemy, it isolates single-issue groups with grievances which he then gathers into his arms and coddles. Oh, he still does the straight-Alinsky thing, too, but now it’s part of a double whammy;
• Build on the lunacy of his most destructively dirigiste predecessors: Wilson, FDR and LBJ;
• Destroy our relationships with long-standing allies;
• Appoint dozens of czars and balloon the bureaucracy in order to regulate us to near standstill;
• Ignore the Constitution so now he, his czars and his vast armies of regulators rule us by whim;
• Get us into crushing, ruinous debt with nothing to show for it;
• Begin stripping our most abundant and efficient sources of energy while fiddling amateurishly but at great cost with idiotically inefficient sources;
• Form an axis-of-evil alliance between government and bigBIG business;
• Focus on government control of health care which effectively gives government control of everything we do;
• Appoint two supremely unqualified lock-step justices to the Supreme Court – and then mock the Court;
• Fight all efforts to control the human flow across our borders;
• Allow horrifying critters like Eric Holder, Kathleen Sebelius and Cass Sunstein to serve as unfettered dictators.

In just three and a half years he has brought the great United States of America to its knees. All that remains is that last little push to tip us into the abyss and we’re done. America will die broke and helpless.

This is not the work of a two-bit punk. This is the work of a genius. This is a man whose monument will be the destruction of the greatest free country in history.

So we are sorry, very, very sorry. We underestimated him.

I was at a poetry reading last night (stop laughing!)

My interest in modern poetry faded about two seconds after I graduated from college but I listened attentively and enjoyed the whole thing. The guy’s very good.

Someone asked “How long does it take you to write a poem?”

“Oh,” said the poet, “sometimes months. Every poem goes through at least a hundred drafts, even the short ones (pause) especially the short ones.”

Wow, thought I, the philistine copywriter.

This man writes poems very few people will ever read or hear. They may be important poems but there’s nothing at stake that will make a practical difference in a great many lives.

On the other hand, what we write – copy for ads, commercials, web sites, emails, direct mail – is important because there’s a lot at stake – sometimes millions of dollars and lots of jobs.

And how many drafts do we go through? Not enough.

If I have time, I’ll write a dozen or so teaser headlines for envelopes and something like 20 drafts of a direct mail letter. Same with an email, especially Subject Lines. But who has time anymore?

The poet doesn’t have a deadline and he doesn’t submit his work to committees for their approval. He writes for himself and he puts his name on the finished product. It’s his and his alone. That makes a big difference. I don’t see how we can bring that factor into copywriting.

But we could at least tell the committees “Look, I wrote 20 drafts of this piece, read it to a half dozen people who know a lot about copy that sells, and made more changes. Please at least read it all the way through, the way our prospects will, without a pencil in your hand.”

P.S. The poet’s name is Michael Cleary: michaelcleary.com

Too many client “communications” whizzes and general advertising/PR agency people disdain direct marketing. They’re polite but get a few drinks in them and you’ll learn that they just hate our guts.

I’ve run into it a lot and it no longer scares me but it still puzzles me. Direct marketing can’t fail on a major scale because we plan carefully, test small and roll out gradually. Plus DM allows precision tracking and generates better and better results every time out. So whence the scorn?

It took a while, but the lights gradually went on. They hate us for at least seven very good reasons.

1. In advertising agencies, the direct marketing “departments” can wind up with a huge chunk of the advertising guys’ budgets if the clients actually care about sales.
2. Direct marketing is difficult. It takes a lot more detailed planning than the other disciplines.
3. There’s almost no room for opinions because direct marketing allows for objective answers.
4. Direct marketing can get results so exact that you can learn how well it’s doing to within a nickel. In other words, DM is accountable and that scares the pants off some people.
5. Direct marketing is not cool. There’s no room for funky, edgy, creative for creative’s-sake.
6. Its focus is on the prospect/customer not on the company.
7. If there’s a serious disagreement on approach, you can test inexpensively.

All seven of these attributes are deeply offensive to ambitious and talented wannabe cutting-edge mavericks. They’re albatrosses around the necks of avant garde creative critters.

Believe it or not, making money, acquiring and keeping customers, and building solid customer relationships can be annoying secondary considerations. It’s more important to stroke egos, be ultra cool, and, occasionally, jet off to New Zealand for a location shoot.

John Wannamaker, 19th Century department store mogul, is reported to have said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Direct marketers could have told him: “We might, maybe, waste a small percentage of your budget at the start. After that, it’s all good.”

I might.

I kind of like this spot, DollarShaveClub.com even with its “Our Prices are F***ing Great” line.

It’s a 90 second direct response commercial (Internet only by the looks of it) for DollarShaveClub.com.

It’s drawn over 4,000,000 views so far and @dollarshaveclub has about 14,000 Twitter followers.

The actual “dollar” shave looks like a loss leader. You get a free handle and two blades for a buck and pay s&h. But there are two upsells:
• $6 a month for a better handle and four better blades with no s&h OR
• $9 for a super handle and six blades – “like a personal assistant for your face.”

The prices seem to be right.

Gillette’s Fusion ProGlide seems to be about four bucks a blade and you have to buy a handle.

Assuming that DollarShaveClub.com’s $9 for 6 blades deal gives you an equally good shave, it’s less, a lot less, than half the price of Gillette.

The club’s web design is simple and kind of cool. The copy is terrific, all attitude, even in the Guarantee: “You’re going to love your blades. But even if you don’t, you can cancel anytime. Easily. We’re not Columbia House Records.”
The tag line reads “Shave Time. Shave Money.”
Nice work.
Because I’m not fond of being on the receiving end of continuity ship-till-forbid programs, I’ll check out prices for ProGlide when I visit Costco later this week. My guess is that I’ll give DollarShaveClub.com a shot. I’ll let you know.