I can’t get Ron Johnson out of my mind. Until recently, he was CEO of J.C. Penny.

He came from Apple where he’d run the retail stores, successfully. Elmer Fudd could have run Apple’s retail operation.

Johnson was a disaster at JCP. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. He hired a bunch of whizzes – the kind of people who jetted home from JCP’s Texas HQ to the coasts on weekends – and began to change the way the chain does business, completely.

First, he got rid of discounts and couponing, then he decided to turn the stores into mini-malls, each a collection of boutiques.

Along the way, he changed the company’s TV commercials to look and sound exactly like Target commercials. Perhaps good for Target, undoubtedly a waste for JCP.

The entire fiasco will make a great book some day but for now it’s enough to know that as Johnson’s changes took effect JCP’s stock tumbled, sales fell off a cliff and the already struggling retailer lost a quick billion dollars.

What’s truly remarkable is that Johnson made the sweeping changes without testing them first! He could have. Testing is easy in these here United States. You can screw up, say, Pennsylvania and still have 49 more states plus DC to work with.

Johnson had at least heard of testing. When a minion asked if they’d be testing the new ideas before launching them nationwide, he snapped, “We didn’t test at Apple”. Anyone who thinks that what happens at Apple bears any relevance to what happens at a lower middle department store is not paying attention.

Bill Ackman, a hedge fund honcho and member of the JCP Board, had championed Johnson. So had Johnson’s immediate predecessor, retail legend Allen Questrom. They changed their minds after 18 months of destruction.

In early April, Ackman said “One of the big mistakes was perhaps too much change too quickly without adequate testing on what the impact would be.”

Around the same time, Questrom said, in an interview with the Dallas Morning News about Johnson’s in-store boutiques idea: “I think they should find out if it works first without putting the whole company at risk.”

Scientists, direct marketers and little kids who stick their toes into swimming pools know the value of testing. Johnson didn’t, or he forgot, or hubris caused him to ignore the whole idea. So he damn near crashed the company.

Now comes something astonishing. We’re hearing about marketers defending Johnson against the philistines who oppose change. We’re afraid of change. We’re dinosaurs.

Baloney.

We love change and we embrace it eagerly when it has a good chance to make things better. And we test to find out. Then we proceed cautiously, rolling out slowly as we test and fine-tune the program every day. We don’t bet the whole company on someone’s guess!

The mechanics of change: First ask all kinds of questions that lead to the essential question: “Does this new idea work, Yes or No?” Then test to find out for sure. When the answer is yes, you’re off to the races. When it’s no, you head back to the drawing board.

Change for change’s sake is exciting, adventurous, cutting edge and it’s for amateurs.

A lot of people in charge of marketing don’t know what direct mail is. They think they do, but they don’t.

Most of them don’t like it anyway, and a lot either fear it or their wanna-be creative souls are outraged by its straightforward look and tone, and I’m sure they hate the idea that their opinions about what goes into direct mail are more or less irrelevant and nearly always turn out to be wrong.

Run of the mill bean counters are leery of direct mail because it seems expensive. Smart bean counters understand that ROI and the long term matter more than upfront cost. Really bright bean counters understand that knowledge gained from direct mail tests – and mailers must test constantly – is worth a lot of money.

Grasping the most important fact about direct mail is difficult: direct mail is not advertising. It looks like advertising and it feels like advertising, but it’s something else. Generally, advertising aims for impressions and awareness. Direct mail aims for specific responses stat! Advertising drops a message on you now in the hope that you will do something in the future.

Advertising and direct mail are alike in the sense that baseball and football are alike. You shouldn’t even think of letting advertising people run a direct mail program for the same reason you wouldn’t let Terry Francona of the Cleveland Indians manage the NFL’s Cleveland Browns.

I find it interesting that charities use direct mail a lot. Charities ask you to send them money in return for nothing except good feelings. And they succeed.

We see some marketers occasionally test direct mail with large postcards or envelope mailings with color brochures, but no letters that look like letters, and then say with firm conviction “We tried direct mail and it didn’t work.” Ha. You didn’t try direct mail, you used mail as a medium for advertising.

When it’s done properly, direct mail cannot fail on any scale larger than a tiny blip on an Excel chart. When it succeeds, which it eventually does, it makes scads of money, scandalous scads of money. So why has direct mail become the near-exclusive playing field of charities, political causes and catalogers?

I suspect that the key lies in the sentence way up there in the second paragraph: “Most of them don’t like it and a lot of those people either fear it or their wanna-be creative souls are outraged by its straightforward simplicity.”
Perhaps a big part of the problem is that direct mail isn’t hip, happening, cool. There are no directors’ chairs for clients to sit in. No talent to schmooze with. No commercial, website, billboard, event for clients to show to friends and families. And it’s old-fashioned. It’s snail mail. Yuck. Maybe our crash course should rename it La poste de l’escargot to give it that certain je ne sais quoi the hipsters seem to like.

Another part of the problem is that you know pretty soon how well direct mail works and which elements of a direct mail campaign are most important. A good test could bomb overall but be invaluable because it contains nuggets of information that will lead to success next time out. This scares some people because eventually there’s a detailed report card. Life’s easier when you can just issue orders and ignore their outcomes, like Ron Johnson (disastrous new CEO) at JC Penney. He blithely waved away the notion of testing his radical concepts before rolling them out nationwide. “We didn’t test at Apple” he apparently said. (Like hell they didn’t.)

And that leaves the speed and economy and reach of electronic marketing. Why would anyone use snail mail when you can go mobile and social? Good question. There’s a very good answer but it requires a crash course in direct mail to understand it.

I’ve been thinking about David Ogilvy a lot lately. Occupational hazard, I guess.

Ogilvy was a more or less self-taught genius who didn’t even start his career in advertising until he was 38. He and his hand-picked associates created some of the most effective and memorable campaigns of all time for Shell oil, Rolls Royce, Dove soap, Schweppes, Arrow shirts, and Puerto Rico among a whole lot of others.

He was especially brilliant in print and he won my undying admiration for praising Direct Mail as his secret weapon.

In his spare time, he wrote several eminently readable books. “Ogilvy on Advertising” is probably his best known but I like “Confessions of an Advertising Man” a lot more.

The day I started working at his agency (Ogilvy & Mather) in Montreal, the creative director handed me a copy of the Claude Hopkins 1923 masterpiece, “Scientific Advertising”, and told me writers in the shop don’t get asked to write a word until they’d read and understood it. That was Ogilvy’s idea.

Basically, both Hopkins and Ogilvy thought research, copy, facts and testing mattered most.

Maybe the reason David Ogilvy is on my mind these days is that one of his lines pops into my head whenever I read a newspaper or magazine or watch TV, listen to radio or do anything that allows advertisers to vie for my attention. The line is: Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn’t sell much of anything.

I think a couple of other Ogilvyisms explain why: What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it; and Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.
Too many companies focus on the frills of how, and committees hammer any big idea to death. Ogilvy hated committees.

His thinking still works in selling things to grownups. He wasn’t so hot at “buzz” ads for teenagers and adults who never quite manage to grow up.

Ogilvy preached testing over and over. “Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving,” he wrote. Add “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative” and “Five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.” to the testing idea and you’ve got an outstanding primer on how to write a successful ad, commercial, billboard, direct mail package or pretty well anything.

• Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn’t sell much of anything
• What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it
• Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night
• Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving
• If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative
• Five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy
• Research, big idea, test, great copy.

Shame there aren’t all that many grownups around anymore.

Some DM copywriters don’t want to write about the companies that pay them. They’d rather write about whoever’s in the target audience, and when they get away with it the results can be great.

The two kinds of copy – about the company and about the prospect – couldn’t be more different. One is writing to yourself and the other is writing to people who might eventually send you money.

In McGraw Hill’s classic “Man in the chair” B2B ad that first appeared in 1958, a grumpy old dude stares at the reader and “says”:

• I don’t know who you are.
• I don’t know your company.
• I don’t know your company’s products.
• I don’t know your company’s customers.
• I don’t know your company’s record.
• I don’t know your company’s reputation.
• I don’t know what your company stands for.
• Now…What was it that you wanted to sell me?

You can see the ad here.
There’s almost nothing in it about McGraw-Hill, the company that paid for the ad.

Here’s a consumer “mail order” ad from 1925. The whole thing is about the prospect and the client’s not even mentioned until the 524th word of the body copy! This ad ran for almost 50 years.

When writers have to toe the line, their copy is about the company or its product. The problem is that prospects don’t care about the company or the product. They care about one thing: “what’s in it for me?”

We’ve got maybe a heartbeat to give them the answer.

And the answer is never about how great the company is. It is always about prospects and what the company can do for them. It doesn’t matter what medium you’re working in.

Once upon a time, most TV commercials were merely annoying and some of them were even pleasant. Then something happened.

For some reason I still don’t understand, we allowed lawyers to advertise. Back when sanity reigned, lawyers could insert professional cards in print and that was about it. Now we have tort toads running spots to recruit members of class action law suits. The most egregious are the bottom feeders hunting the last few mesothelioma patients.

Drug companies never used to advertise, not prescription drugs, anyway. Now we have scenes of happy people with accompanying soundtracks of disjointed voices droning on and on with warnings that you might, oh, become impotent, poop your pants, grow breasts if you’re a guy, get cancer, hear voices. The point of the commercials escapes me completely. You need a prescription for these things. You’re going to tell your doctor to give you scrip for this cool drug you heard about on TV? Not likely.

Government commercials used to be rare and harmless: McGruff the Crime Dog, military recruiting, Smokey the Bear, food guides, what to do when a nuclear strike is imminent.

Now they slide monstrously gross-out spots showing sad, sad people with extremely rare side effects of smoking into family shows. Political commercials are beyond disgusting; they’re the pathetic lies and distortions of vermin.

Beyond the more blatant categories of slimeball commercials, lie the subtle ones which may be even worse.

The war against men, especially straight white men, continues to accelerate. Ace Hardware’s most recent (so new that it’s not even on YouTube) man-as-dweeb spot shows a near-totally infantilized grownup on a child’s scooter wearing a helmet (a helmet!). Scooting along at a snail’s pace, he yells at his neighbors that the weekend is coming. In any other context, people in white coats would show up.

Car commercials do at least two astonishingly stupid things: 1) they show people, who clearly should know better, racing through city streets as if they were on the last lap of the Daytona 500, and/or 2) they show people suddenly able to do things they apparently couldn’t do before just because they bought a specific brand of automobile. All of these things could be accomplished in any vehicle or they have nothing to do with automobiles at all.

State Farm’s latest string of car insurance commercials show various aftermaths of accidents with hapless, whiny fools actually singing something like “I have blah blah insurance so person come help”. The spots are so lame, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Progressive and GEICO chip in on the media buy.

There’s more, lots more. Beer commercials used to be funny, at least entertaining. In the last couple of years they’ve descended to a level of lameness once reserved for local car dealers. Business commercials (e.g. BDO, whatever that is) are so pompous, they could appeal only to people with delusions of royalty. Banks spout such astonishing claptrap that I’ve begun to think Barney Frank writes their spots.

Worst of all is the 3- to 5-minute string of commercials. What possible good could it do a company – even with a great commercial – to pay for, say, the 4th spot in a string of abhorrent commercials? Much easier to just convert the advertising budget to Benjamins and set fire to a pile of them a few times a day.

Luckily, nearly all of us have clickers.

The 1/27 Sunday Morning show on CBS gave a platform to Louis Michael Seidman, a law professor at Georgetown U.

Seidman burbled briefly that the Constitution had some good things in it and then ranted about how silly it is to allow a 200+ year old document (actually 225+ year old) to determine public policy. (If only!)

He’d said more or less the same thing in a New York Times op-ed piece a few days earlier.

The professor wants us to ignore the Constitution whenever it’s convenient. He neglected to mention that we already have a way to change (amend) the Constitution. Perhaps he didn’t know.

He should know that the fact that the Constitution is 200+ years old (actually 225 years old) is a good thing. A very good thing, sort of like the 2400+ year old Hippocratic Oath is a good thing.

Then Seidman got down to his real issues: guns and the Electoral College.

Seidman’s main beef on the guns issue is that the discussion revolves around the Constitution. It “raises the temperature”, apparently, and it’s just wrong because the Constitution was written by people 200+ years ago.

It would have been nice if he’d mentioned another way to talk about guns.

Perhaps, we could talk about lives saved and rapes, kidnappings, etc., prevented by legal guns. That might be a good start.

And Seidman doesn’t like the Electoral College.

Like most lefties, he seems to think that the National Popular Vote should determine the winner of a presidential race – our only national election.

Oddly, for a law professor, he seems unaware that there is no such thing in this country as a National Popular Vote. Since it doesn’t exist, it can’t be won.

Of course, we could change that with a Constitutional Amendment, assuming 38 states agreed. Since that would render less populated states irrelevant to electing a President, it is highly unlikely that more than 7 or 8 states, the most populous, would approve the Amendment.

Nine states, with more coming, have already approved something called the National Popular Vote Initiative (NPVI). That’s not the same as approving a Constitutional Amendment, not even close.

The NPVI is a plot to nullify the Constitution in order to disenfranchise voters. The plotters want to ignore the results of popular votes in NVPI states in order to throw their Electoral College votes to the winner of the National Popular Vote.

Which does not exist.

Seidman and the NVPI conspirators pretend not to know that a national popular vote election would radically alter the way candidates campaign.

Whole new ballgame!

A simple analogy might be the 1960 World Series between the Yankees and the Pirates. The Yankees scored twice as many runs as the Pirates over seven games but the Pirates won 4 of those games, so, of course, they won the World Series.

Danny Murtaugh and Casey Stengel (the teams’ managers) would have had their teams playing quite differently if the objective of the World Series had been to score the most runs in seven games rather than to win four games.

Change the objective and the strategy has to change.

The professor was prevaricating, dissembling and weaseling, and doing it on CBS, a network with a “political director” who recently demonstrated that he is in the Democrats’ pocket. Click here for FoxNews video.

Seidman was actually speaking in favor of the intolerable rule of whim (Hitler, Stalin, Mao all loved it) rather than the rule of law.

How do we know Seidman was prevaricating?

Our first clues are that his op-ed essay appeared in the egregious NY Times and his screed on the disgraceful CBS – both of which, incidentally, would throw corporate fits if anyone suggested ignoring the Constitution’s First Amendment.

Shunning the intolerable is personal and companies might want to start paying attention.

Mass boycotters and strikers act to force some entity to do (or stop doing) something. Boycotts and strikes once made sense but no longer. Today they’re easy to fight (and often backfire) when the target has truth, principles and backbone. Just ask the Reagan-era air traffic controllers or today’s activists who boycotted Chick-fil-A and the workers who thought it’d be a good idea to strike Twinkie-making Hostess.

The personal boycott or strike (properly called “shunning”) is nearly always 100% effective, mostly because the target doesn’t know it’s happening until it’s too late. Because the shunner makes no demands on the shun-ee, the personal boycott is impossible to fight.

I’ve been shunning The New York Times since at least 1980. (Had I known about Stalin-apologist Walter Duranty, I’d have started earlier.) Apparently hundreds of thousands of other potential newspaper readers refuse to have anything to do with the rag which just announced that it’s laying off a whole bunch of the people who got them into this mess.

I’ve been boycotting professional sports since the 1994 baseball strike. I don’t want a nickel of my money to go towards paying someone millions to play third base. I continue to watch games on TV but the teams get none of my money. Judging by the emptiness of the absurdly high priced seats behind home plate at Yankees’ game and the Jets’ problems with their ludicrous “personal seat licenses”, I’m not alone.

A key difference between a one-man shunning and a boycott/strike, is that in a shunning, nobody tries to force anyone to do anything.

There’s no need for a list of things to shun because it becomes almost automatic. For instance, many Americans never have to listen to our silver-tongued President because they turn the sound off the minute he appears on screen.

Millions and millions of potential news-watchers have no idea what nonsense David Gregory is spouting on NBC, or indeed what anyone on NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC or CNN says about anything because all those individuals made the decision to shun the intolerable.

I don’t watch much television anymore. I’m a reader anyway, but even if I wanted to watch TV I couldn’t because so few shows are not inane or flat out repulsive.

I occasionally get forced into a movie theater by my significant other but I boo loudly at the odious on screen commercials. It takes commitment because it’s dangerous. For one thing I get elbowed in the ribs a lot.

If I could get away with it, I’d boycott flying. Airlines and the airline experience are scuzzier than a Greyhound bus ever was.

I refuse to have anything to do with sexist and/or racist organizations such as NOW and the NAACP, to pick just two. Companies run by left wing phonies are on my permanent shun list: Men’s Wearhouse, Ben & Jerry’s, and Progressive Insurance spring to mind. You couldn’t get me to a Barbra Streisand concert (or movie) with a gun to my head.

The basic principle is one-man, one vote: I think, therefore I (occasionally) shun.

The All American Boycott and Strike Association currently has a membership of just one, me. If you want to join, feel free. You don’t have to announce it or show up on a picket line. You just do it.

This slice of life spot comes to us from Walgreen’s, a drug store chain.

A man and a woman sit at a kitchen table having breakfast. The woman is looking at the man in some alarm as he reads the newspaper.

A voiceover tells us that the man is about to eat a sugar donut.

The wife, surely they’re married, watches in agitation as hubbie picks up the donut. She grows more agitated as he brings it toward his mouth. Suddenly, she snatches the donut from his hand and squeezes it, crumbling it to small chunks and dust on the table. She smiles and hands him a bottle of something healthy from Walgreen’s, which he accepts and drinks.

A brilliant commercial.

It has everything, beginning with the isolation of that one evil sugar donut in the hand of an ignorant, idiot male. The agitated wife, a long-suffering but wise female who should be nominated immediately for the Supreme Court, finally does something drastic, striking like a rattlesnake.

Mike Bloomberg probably wet his pants watching this spot. It is Nazi maternalism run amok. It is food police, health nut police, the use of pure force with the purest of intentions versus an ignorant Neanderthal, newspaper-reading, wife-ignoring male doofus.

The only way to make the commercial any better would be to reverse the roles and have the male snatch food from the mouth of the female and crush it to smithereens on the family breakfast table. Then we’d be able to enjoy the aftermath – feminists railing against the violent sexist pig – which would be much more fun.

In related news, a DISCOVER (a credit card) commercial opens with a woman calling DISCOVER customer service. Her husband forgot to pay the bill. The wise, Supreme Court-eligible woman who answered the phone says “Yeah, I’ve got one like that.” Her husband, too, is a dolt. They resolve the issue and the customer service woman asks “So, is your husband off the hook?” The caller looks horrified and shakes her head “Oh, noooo.” Her idiot husband is always doing things like that. For example, he once went out for milk and came back with a puppy.

Meanwhile, in another commercial, a woman at a Toyota dealership is talking to a saleswoman about the new Camry. They have a semi-intelligent conversation, trying to ignore the customer’s husband who is playing air guitar or air drums or both while bouncing around in the driver’s seat of a floor model like an 8-year-old on a sugar high.

The advertising industry has been hiring from the bottom rung of the politically loathsome class of job applicants.

Émile Coué was apparently misquoted all these years when he said “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”

He meant to say “Every day, in every way, we are getting worse and worse and worse.”

Rob Parker is co-host of a program called “First Take” on ESPN (a sports TV Network). Robert Griffin III (aka RG3), a rookie, is the talented starting quarterback for the National Football League’s Washington Redskins. Both men are African-American.

Griffin, in an interview with someone else, had said that he doesn’t have to be defined by the fact that he’s African American … “just let your talents speak for themselves.” Martin Luther King said the same thing many times.

Parker believes otherwise, apparently under the impression that all legitimately black people think and act alike. Here, according to the NY Post is the core of what Parker said about Griffin on First Take on Thursday, December 13:
“My question, which is just a straight, honest question, is he a
brother or is he a cornball brother? He’s not really. OK, he’s black,
but he’s not really down with the cause … He’s kind of black, but
he’s not really the guy you want to hang out with. He’s off to
something else. We all know he has a white fiancée. People always
talk about how he’s Republican. There’s no information at all. I’m
just trying to dig deeper into why he has an issue.”

Parker is a stone racist and doesn’t know it. Even by the leftie-thought axiom that blacks can’t be racist, Parker is a racist. Black on black racism is just plain old racism, by any standard.

RG3’s issue is that he’s his own man. Parker’s issue is that RG3 has wandered off the plantation.

The larger question is why Parker would talk about this stuff on a sports program. The answer is tricky. The first part is that Parker, like NBC’s Bob Costas, has Taliban-brain-thought processes that transmogrify a personal belief into something Moses would have brought down from the mountain with the other Ten Commandments if only there’d been enough space on the tablets.

Costas, you may recall, ranted at half time of a Sunday night football game a few weeks ago that more government gun control is an effective answer, indeed the only answer, to stopping murders. (To summarize all the evidence: It’s not.)

The second part is that neither Parker nor Costas has any standing to comment on these issues on national TV. The third part is that they both have giant egos. The fourth part is that they have never grown up; they are both naive children. And the fifth part is that they desperately wish to appear to be important, serious journalists.

I’m thinking of Costas as Moe, Parker as Larry and, if he wants to play, Chris Matthews as Curly. Nyuk, nyuk.