The other day I was reading about the Edsel debacle when this line from a 1957 Ford brochure leaped off the page: “… gearshift buttons sensibly located in the steering wheel hub.”

Sensible? Anybody who’s ever driven a car, never mind designed one, knows that gear buttons are anything but sensible and, if they were, putting them in the center of the steering wheel is imbecilic.

Yesterday I noticed an online AT&T ad with the headline: “A first impression only happens once.” It’s badly phrased, of course; only is a tricky word.

Worse, though, is that it’s a bland statement of the obvious. It’s not a lie like the Edsel line. It’s the opposite, an axiom, so fundamental that there’s no support required or available.

This genre of unsupported and unsupportable statements first came to my attention about 25 years ago in Toronto when the city decided to spend a bundle advertising a program called “Bicycles Belong.” New York City has a program like that now. So do Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

If bicycles belong, the obvious question is Where do they belong? Flat statement people aren’t good at answering questions, so you dig. I dug.

The answer, apparently, is that bicycles belong everywhere, not just on suburban side roads and leafy lanes in Cape Cod, but out on city streets with trucks and cars and buses. It’s a feel good bromide related somehow to the notion of replacing cars with bicycles and thereby saving the planet.

My bicycle-riding 6-year old nephew could demolish the idea before breakfast.

Bicycles add nothing to the economy, a few retail jobs and that’s it.
You don’t have to take a course or get a pedaller’s license to ride a bicycle on the street with the big boys. You don’t need insurance.

Bicycles are lousy at night, hideous in the rain, not so hot on cobblestones and potholes and railroad/streetcar tracks, ridiculous in the snow, suicidal on ice.

Far too many bicycle riders zoom along sidewalks, hang on to speeding city buses, go through stop signs and red lights, tow their babies in little trailers through city traffic.

You can’t bring your shopping home on a bicycle. You can’t rush a birthing momma or an infirm Grandma to the hospital on a bicycle. You can’t take the family skiing or to the beach on a bicycle and you can’t go very far anyway. You freeze in the winter and sweat like a basketball player in the summer. Bicycles are easy to steal and their riders are easy to mug.

Bicycles are on the road by sufferance. You pedal at your own risk and, when you do, you are a pain in the ass to sane citizens.

“Bicycles Belong” reminds me of the J&R ad in NYC papers after a certain election. The headline was the whole ad. It read “Change is Good.”

Unsupported and unsupportable, hence the simple and profoundly stupid statement.

The cool thing is that we catch on quickly, just not quickly enough sometimes, especially in the case of that certain election.

Takeaway? Never say anything in an ad you can’t back up.

Check out the line under the guy’s name on the card showing through the window. “Helped save 2 children’s lives since 2007.” How’s that for making a strong, accurate and super-involving connection with your donors?

The back of the envelope has a line almost as powerful but in another arena: “100% of your donation goes toward programs – 0% goes toward overhead.”

The SmileTrain is a great organization and everything they do shows it.

I have a personal official secrets act that won’t let me mention details of weird business experiences for 10 years and I’ve been dying to talk about this one.

We were still in New York and a big ad agency needed help with a DM program for a national stock broker client. The client had already tried, and missed, attracting investors with $500,000 or more in liquid assets. The portfolio management service they were offering was fee- not commission-based. The fee was 1.5% a year.

That means the minimum annual revenue (1.5% of $500,000) was $7,500 per customer. We came up with a multi-panel test: lists of course, 5 letters, 5 different markets, premium/no premium (they’d never offered one), brochure/no brochure, stamp on BRE/indicia on BRE, etc. etc.

Pretty soon, we had enough results to analyze and they were great: 0.8% response with a 40% conversion for an overall 0.32% sign up.

Sound pretty low? Well, we’d mailed about 125,000 pieces. 0.32% of 125,000 is 400. 400 x $7,500 = $3,000,000. The total cost of the mailing, all in, was about $200,000.

ROI was more than good. Right. Off. The. Bat.

But wait. There’s more.

Even assuming 50% lapses a year – 400 to 200 to 100 – the revenue over three years would be $3,000,000 + $1,500,000 + $750,000 = $5,250,000! Minimum!

And this had been a test, a lot of tests all at once. Now we would build on winners and drop losers. We fiddled around analyzing test cell results, extrapolating this and that. If we stroked all the right factors and kept testing, we had a great shot at getting the response up to 3.7% and of converting 50%.

We had discovered a goldmine.
We put together a PowerPoint show and raced over to a scowling panel of clients who had no interest in anything we had to say. They’d been studying up and knew that the normal response rate was 1% to 2%. “You didn’t even get 1%. Thank you for trying.”

And don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.

I burst out laughing on the way back to Manhattan. These people were supposed to be financial advisors.

Fact is, there is no such thing as an across-the-board normal response rate, especially when your target is very wealthy.

After you do the math, plain old-fashioned mail order math, you realize there is a response you must get to make a profit. And, depending on a lot of factors, it could be anything. The main points are dollars out, dollars in, improving every time you mail and, most of all, getting and keeping customers. Percentage is a handy quick tool but essentially irrelevant.

The most valuable thing you get from testing is knowledge and I am grateful to clients for providing the opportunities to learn.

Tell it to my jammed mailbox.

Week before last it was all charities. Last week, no charities but lots of mail anyway.

The same Chase mailing arrives about every two weeks.
The OE is glossy and several shades of blue. It concerns something called Chase Sapphire without a hint as to what a) Chase or b) Sapphire might be.

Chase just got to Florida a few months ago and I guess they assume everyone already knows it’s a bank. There’s some gobbledygook OE copy about points. Inside is a bad letter with more babbling about points and about me being preapproved (not quite true) for Sapphire which, it turns out, is a card. What kind of card? Doesn’t say but credit card would be a good guess.

The letter is in an unreadable small sans serif font and signed in a weak black, though there’s a lot of blue elsewhere on the page.

Worst of all is that, although I can earn 10,000 bonus points, double points and a point for every dollar I spend, there is no clue about how many points I need to claim one of the many opulent rewards.

An incoherent mailing but it must be working or Chase would stop sending it.

Time and Florida Trend magazines sent me the same mailing at the same time.
I haven’t been able to read Time for the last quarter century, and I imagine a lot of other people feel the same way because I can now get 85 issues for about a quarter each.

This mailing comes in an envelope that says merely DO NOT BEND although it contains nothing that would suffer in the slightest from bending. There’s no letter, just a list of features and an attached order form. The Florida Trend mailing has the same DO NOT BEND on the OE and the same format in the non-letter/order form. The return address is in California! Amazingly bad, both of them.

The disgraceful New York Times continues to write insisting that it is a newspaper. No teaser copy on the OE, no anything but the familiar Gothic logo and the presorted indicia.

Inside is some hilarious copy, especially in two fake-ish (and unattributed) testimonials that are nonetheless between inverted commas as if someone had actually uttered the words. One says “… I always find something that surprises me” and I imagine that’d be true for people who get their news from actual journalists. The other says “Nothing beats relaxing with the paper on the weekend.” Nothing? Not your first born, winning the lottery, being in Paris on a spring day? This is foolish, self-defeating puffery. The non-letter is signed in black ink.

I’m assuming National Geographic’s good old fashioned 6” x 9” mailings continue to work because they keep coming, sometimes three or four different ones a week. Good luck to them.

Wachovia’s selling accident disability insurance. Wachovia’s a bank.

The Metropolitan Museum’s latest catalog is lovely, lots of gold on a black cover. Cool stuff, I suppose. I usually buy a few things from them at Christmas and this is a sensible followup.

Hammacher Schlemmer, in case you don’t know the company, sells all kinds of interesting gadgets. My favorite source of Christmas presents. Prices in the current catalog range from stuff that costs $39 to a $1,400 Swiss Army Knife with 87 different tools and a $30,000 big glass orb with a complicated version of that game you tilt this way and that to roll a ball-bearing past holes, walls and obstacles. Another sensible followup to Christmas buying.

The catalogs are terrific, professional, engaging. The direct mail packages are ghastly things written (and/or approved) by people who have nothing to say, contempt for the recipient and no knowledge whatsoever of how to engage people. They couldn’t sell cold beer in a ballpark on a hot Sunday afternoon.

I guess the pros are working for charities because those mailings were all excellent.

I haven’t been tweeting long and I’m not doing it right yet but I’m having fun tinkering and figuring it out. It’s more work than I thought.

This morning in the shower it occurred to me that Twitter has a lot in common with the old CB radio. Not even close to an exact fit, but some striking similarities.

CB had “handles” like Big Jack and Stompin’ Momma. Twitter has handles: @buzzword, @seagullprincess.

CB had CB-specific jargon: breaker, smoky, hammer. Twitter has a lot of sometimes complicated jargon including a new form of it, namely Twitter’s wonderful trick for shortening links so they’ll fit into tweets.

CB involved random conversations with strangers. You might have been driving along a dark road on a snowy night with the Citizens Band radio on Channel 10. You see something big on the road and you pick up the microphone, click the speak button and say clearly “Hey big Hess truck on I-95, green Chevvy coming up on your left.”

Most of the time, I’d get a response like “Got ya little Chevvy. All clear from here. What’s your handle?” and I’d reply “Mike on the Pike, yours?”

Twitter’s a lot like that. You start by telling a stranger what you’re doing and you get a response and continued conversation, or not.

Occasionally on CB someone would dominate the air, babbling nonsense. You get that in Twitter now and then: long strings of tweets full of aphorisms, paeans to Jesus and other really annoying things. After a while, you just stop following, I imagine. I haven’t done that yet, partly because I don’t know how and partly because I don’t want to.

Back in the day, you picked up a lot of valuable information from CBers. Smoky on the next bridge, Bear in the air, drunk weaving in the right lane up ahead, great truck stop just ahead. Twitter is an amazing source of info, sometimes in the tweets but more often in the attachments which can lead to pages of stuff you didn’t know.

People use Twitter to sell things, which is great. Folks who think CBers didn’t sell things never heard Stompin’ Momma up on 1-81 near Watertown.

Breaker, breaker. Stay tuned.

If you saw the Super Bowl, you probably saw the commercials.

My fave was the Betty White/Abe Vigoda spot for Snickers. Funny as hell but did the target audience get it, even know who Betty White and Abe Vigoda are? They could be any geezers and the spot would still be funny and memorable but then why bother with Betty and Abe?

Volkswagen’s Audi commercial was scary. I hope the client (and the agency) thought it was funny. The central conceit was that the Green Police will come to wherever you are at any time of day and night to arrest you, slapping on the cuffs, for flouting ecoNazi shibboleths.

The sound track is Cheap Trick’s Dream Police only now it’s Green Police and it’s just as annoying as it was in 1979.

One wise fellow drives an Audi Green car, a diesel, apparently. He is handsome and saintly and the Green Schutzstaffel, holding up traffic to check engines, wave him on with smiles.

Other guys get busted in a supermarket checkout line for preferring plastic to paper, at home for throwing out a battery that the Reinhard Heydrichs find in his garbage, at home again for not composting, at home for having real light bulbs, two dudes somewhere outside for plastic water bottles, a guy in his backyard for a too-hot hot tub, and a guy cop, in his cop car, for coffee in a Styrofoam cup.

All the bad guys but one, we don’t see the battery maldisposer, are white guys. No surprise; the enlightened elite long ago identified society’s troglodytes.

The commercial should be funny because the concept of rabid Green Police is so ridiculous. It’s not funny for three reasons: overkill, reality (just ask the farmers in California’s Central Valley about that San Francisco smelt), and Audi is a German car.

Most tag lines, especially on TV, are useless so nobody will remember the tag to this spot. It’s “Green never felt so right.” Hmmmm. So they were serious when they made this spot or they’re still trying to be funny and their real message is that Green doesn’t feel right at all.

In case they were serious, the operative word is “feel” as in logic has nothing to do with it, it’s all about feelings. Someone cue Morris Albert.

The other day the mailbox yielded the most innocently goofy direct mail package I’ve ever seen.

The Neptune Society wants me to pay for my cremation now, before I’m dead. How’d I get on the list? What does Neptune have to do with this? Maybe they expect me to drown.

The OE is wonderful. On the front: name and address, a stamp and a teaser: Free Pre-Paid Cremation! On the back: return address and clip art of Old Glory waving in the breeze. Free Pre-Paid Cremation is patriotic? Who knew?

Free Pre-Paid is an oxymoron, of course. Someone pays for it, or it’s free. Can’t be both. Besides, the word is Prepaid.

A careful read of the letter reveals no mention of anything free, certainly not a cremation, prepaid or otherwise. Something is free, namely information about the Neptune Society, but they don’t say that. They say NO obligation, which isn’t quite the same thing.

The letter is in italics, the whole letter. It starts off “Dear Michael” and I think if you’re going to talk to me about impending doom in Neptune’s realm, “Dear Mr. Lastname” might be more appropriate.

The letter is dated January 12, 2010 which is kind of cool except that when it goes out 3rd Class (now misleadingly called Standard) it arrives a couple of weeks later.

The letter copy is beyond goofy. What’s beyond goofy? Pluto?

The first sentence should be a grabber. It should rivet your attention. This one is 28 words of numbing irrelevance:

“For a variety of reasons, more and more people are choosing to plan for a memorialized cremation over traditional funeral arrangement – and the numbers are increasing every year!”

It’s 38 characters too long for Twitter for crying out loud. (39 if you count the missing s on arrangement.)

“A lot of people choose cremation over a traditional funeral,” says roughly the same thing and you could fit it twice into a Tweet with 20 characters left over so you might want to add “Who the hell cares?” Older people (Morituri te salutamus) don’t care what other people are doing, otherwise they’d be cooking meth, piercing body parts and wearing their hats sideways.

The letter proffers 4 reasons why “Cremation just makes sense…” Naturally none of them make any sense at all. The silliest is that cremation has less impact on the environment. Really? Sticking a body 6 feet under where it becomes one with the circle of life is worse environmentally than burning the same body, casket and all? This clean, green claim is the whole focus of the Neptune Society’s website, complete with a lady looking out at the ocean and the sound of waves and gulls in the background. It’s more likely to make you think of drowning, not getting cremated.

It goes on and on. The P.S. actually starts with “Sometimes death happens …”

I truly hope this works wonders for the Neptune Society. I’m sorry I can’t be a customer, though. I’ve asked to have my corpse dropped into the Everglades at night. It’ll be gone in a minute and the whole process will be clean, green and actually free. PETA will approve, too, unless I suddenly wake up and find myself wrestling ‘gators.

In every massive creative breakthrough I’ve seen, the hero was a new letter.

Most of them were letters the clients hated. One guy threatened to fire me if I even thought about mailing an oddball letter but it had already gone out and the result was a lift of 1300%. For a B2B service that cost $2,000 a year! With renewals around 75%.

I’d discovered a platinum mine and he’s hated my guts for it ever since. (The letter didn’t meet corporate guidelines, meaning it wasn’t stilted, self-serving and snooze inducing.)

The 1300% letter started: “If you can send me a quick email with this code – XXXX – I’ll send you back …”

You can get nice lifts with offer changes, new premiums, new pricing, new terms, different timing.

And you can get nice but not massive lifts with creative tricks like printing the sender’s name in typewriter type or handwriting above the return address, a new format or, and I love this: putting the upsell first on the order form – it’ll get you slightly fewer responses but a lot more money.

But nothing will ever beat a great new letter, email or snail.

You have to test and 5 out of 6 will either fall short or just match your control. But when you strike gold, you’ll get your test costs back over and over again.

The first three or four paragraphs are crucial, especially the first paragraph. After that, if you’ve got their attention and sympathy and you sound like a real human being, they’ll stay with you as long as you stay on topic (them), keep adding benefits and urge response now.

You have to be talking about your readers and you need short but not staccato paragraphs with lots of air around them.

Devices like underlining, bold, italic, indenting and handwritten notes help, but only used sparingly.

It all has to ring true and it should be seamless from beginning to end. It helps if you avoid adverbs, reduce adjectives to a minimum, use short declarative sentences in the active voice, understand paragraph-to-paragraph linking and, when faced with a choice, pick the Anglo-Saxon rather than the Latin word. (e.g. job or work instead of employment.) You should get it right in twenty drafts.

Here’s one of my favorite first lines from a letter I wrote for a tourism organization a few years ago:

Dear Mr. Jackson,

I hope you don’t like fishing as much as I do, because it’s cost me two wives so far.

Got ‘em.

This came in the mail the other day and I responded immediately. The Salvation Army is one of the few charities I actually trust. Smile Train and the NYC Rescue Mission are two among a few others.

This is a nice and simple old school package. The Army uses its wonderful tagline perfectly. The Soup & Shelter Club incorporates two of the things the Army does with a compelling curiosity element. Club?

Inside is a straightforward letter, simply written and in a large-ish serif font with indents and double spacing between paragraphs (hence eminently readable). The salutation is the classic: Dear Mr. LAST NAME.

Major Fernando Martinez, Area Commander (of, I assume, the Miami area), thanks me for past support and makes a simple argument that the Salvation Army would find it helpful to have a steady stream of revenue for planning purposes. Makes sense. Now what?

Hmmm. I give them my credit card or bank info and they use that to get $10 a month from me. $10 a month is not a problem, yet, but ORP (Obama,Reid,Pelosi) might make it a problem any day now. So I’m aboard but I don’t want anyone, not even the Salvation Army, to access my accounts willy-nilly. I send a check for $120 and ask them to trickle it out over the year.

A couple of nits, one major and one minor. $10 is not a big deal but that low dollar amount is not mentioned until line 5 of page 2. I’d mention it a lot earlier. That’s the major nit. Major Martinez’s signature appears beside a spot color photo of the premium so the signature could have been in blue but it’s in black. That’s the minor nit.

I had no clue what IPOWER was and, after reading the letter in this package, I still don’t. The company appears to have some connection with Google. A signed lift note from a Google exec would have made the connection more clear not to mention making it really clear that Google approves of this mailing.

The letter starts off on the wrong foot with a Dear FIRST NAME salutation, and then goes downhill. It seems to be selling something to do with Google AdWords which we already use.

The letter is a dog’s breakfast. It’s written in the faux chatty style of an unrelenting midway shill and it appears in a tiny sans serif font. It’s difficult to read, well, not really difficult, just enough to be annoying. About halfway down the letter, there’s a subhead that promises three reasons to use Google AdWords. Four reasons then appear. Not one of them mentions the offer.

The whole letter is about using AdWords. Wouldn’t you think it should be about using IPOWER to access, get involved with, test, (whatever) AdWords? The only benefit to dealing with IPOWER is that you’ll get $100 in free advertising and it’s not worth it once you read the small type.

Best of all is that IPOWER seems to find direct mail a more effective tool than AdWords. Otherwise why wouldn’t they try to reach us through AdWords instead of snail mail? A head scratcher.

Winner of Battle of the Creatives? The Salvation Army by a TKO 15 seconds into the First Round.