You never hear the names of most of the world’s heroes: the Battle of Britain spitfire pilots, the battlefield doctors and nurses. Do you know anyone who can name even one of the NYC firemen who ran into the World Trade Center?

Moms and Dads, teachers, nurses, blood donors, coaches, mentors, soldiers, cops, volunteers, philanthropists, can all be heroes. But the heroes we know by name stand in for the unsung rest.

There’s a difference between admired and heroic. Oprah and Mrs. Clinton often make the most-admired lists but they’d be the first to tell you that they’re not heroes. Well, maybe Oprah would.

Wondering who my own heroes are, I picked the first 10 names that sprang to mind then arranged them alphabetically:

· Boadicea
· Winston Churchill
· Cincinnatus
· Paul Rusesabagina
· Claus von Stauffenberg
· Chesley B. Sullenberger
· Margaret Thatcher
· Paul Tibbets
· Harriet Tubman
· George Washington

I’d be amazed if one person in a hundred knows who they all are.

Only four were office-holding politicos: Churchill, Cincinnatus (who hated politics), Thatcher and Washington.

Three are women, two are black. Four are Americans, three are from England and there’s one each of African, German and Roman. Most are fairly modern except two who are really old school: Boadicea and Cincinnatus lived about 1,900 and 2,500 years ago, respectively.

At first glance, it is not at all apparent why Cincinnatus, Thatcher and Tibbets would be especially heroic but they are, to me anyway. And to some people both Thatcher and Tibbets are evil and I suppose Progressives would consider Cincinnatus a fool.

When I made my heroes list, I didn’t have any criteria in mind except a vague sense of something heroic. But when I examined the result, I found that all 10 have a lot of things in common and those things are the criteria my subconscious used to help make the list.

What do my 10 heroes have in common?

Incredible courage for one thing. Leadership, independence of thought, competence, a certain mulishness, vision, confidence, a notable lack of grandstanding, social responsibility in the face of rabid opposition, and the Davy Crockett ability to “Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.” Most of them had terrific senses of humor. There are more just like them but these are the ten who came to mind first and, if you felt like it, you could use them to infer something of my character.

Who’s on your Top 10 list of heroes?

I ask this question occasionally and am no longer surprised to learn that some people don’t have heroes and that an amazing number can’t think of ten of them.

People conjure up names like Jesus, Ghandi, Mandela, Pope John Paul II, Lech Walensa, John Adams, Otto Schindler, Golda Meir, Florence Nightingale, Mother Teresa, Miep Gies, even the great Ignaz Semmelweis, all of whom could fit into my top 25, if my list went that high.

When I hear names like Michael Jordan or LeBron James, one of the Mannings, Ted Williams, I lose interest politely.

Plain old politicians like Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Reid, all the Kennedys, the odious LBJ, both Bushes, and Nixon occasionally get on some lists but they’re not remotely heroes. FDR was a hero of sorts for what he did in WWII and a villain for what he did otherwise. U.S. Grant was hero as a general and a bum as a President.

My blood runs cold when I hear that murderous vermin like Mao, Lenin, Marx (Karl, not Groucho), Castro, Guevera, are on someone’s Top 10 Heroes list.

What does all this have to do with direct marketing? Not much, except … the process of singling out specific people for any reason at all yields surprising results. It’s only after you do the picking that you realize what they all have in common.

In marketing, especially direct marketing, we pick people all the time, the people most likely to buy what we’re selling. They’re called Target Audiences. Collectively, they could be as seemingly different as, oh, Winston Churchill and Harriet Tubman. Only after you gather the names on one list do you realize that Tubman and Churchill are, in all their essentials, almost the same person. In an important way, all 10 of my heroes are very close to being the same person.

If you look at the relevant attributes of the people you most want to reach, every day people, you’ll probably find that as different as they seem, when you look at them all on one list, they’re astonishingly similar.

What’s important is that you’ll know how to talk to them.

Every now and then I get stuck in a budget meeting for a marketing department and, lately, the process makes me think wistfully of applying Direct Marketing budget logic to governments.

Maybe we need a 28th Amendment to our Constitution, something like this: “Every law, regulation, earmark, in fact anything at all involving money, incoming or outgoing, shall be approved by a majority of direct marketing planners with 10+ years of experience before going into effect.”

Direct marketers learn exactly what works and what doesn’t pretty quickly. As a result, most direct marketing costs aren’t costs at all. They’re investments, as close to blue chip as you can get. Our governments should spend money like that.

Direct Marketers do not throw money into bottomless pits; we’d never get close to one trillion in debt never mind trillions and trillions. (For one thing, we’d wind up in the slammer if we even talked about it.)

DMers spend money where it will do the most good and work hard to find where that is. They also know how to choose price points for what they’re selling (this is analogous to taxes).

Once upon a time, our governments handled money more or less the same way. That’s why we paid low taxes, had a much smaller civil service and still got the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, bridges, libraries, parks, airports, schools, the world’s best-equipped armed forces and outstanding civil services like the NYFD. Most of the money (taxes) went into the actual work. In direct mail terms, that would be the equivalent of lists, postage, creative, printing, etc.

If direct marketers spent money the way government does nowadays, we’d spend most of it internally, in the marketing department, with little useful output. The New York City school department is a simple example; it employs more non-teachers than teachers. Some of them, like property managers, janitors and auditors, are useful but most of them are worse than useless; they’re counterproductive. Imagine a DM agency or a client marketing department with 10 supervisors, 10 theoreticians and a half dozen political commissars for every copywriter and you’d have a pretty good handle on the problem.

Direct Marketing operations have no useless departments. We can’t afford them. The Federal Government has two completely useless cabinet level departments – education and commerce – that do, literally, nothing useful and they eat up billions of our tax dollars and get in the way. (Apparently we have recently multiplied the number of useless, obtrusive and shockingly expensive government departments such as 33 new czarships avec staffs – at last count.)

We almost never have even one useless employee in DM. Every legislator in the country has at least one and a lot have dozens of them.

Collectively, all of our governments have hundreds of thousands of people in sinecures “working” for thousands of useless but obstructive boards and commissions.

Every non-vital branch of the civil service could lose half its employees without affecting what it euphemistically calls services.

Direct Marketers are the world’s greatest followers of Occam’s Razor which, essentially, says that of two competing explanations the simpler is probably right.

Government is, by nature, anti-Occam.

For instance, there is a simple way to improve health care enormously without raising taxes, creating huge bureaucracies or ripping off young people. It’s called the One-Page Health Care Bill and it’s here: RedState.com

Then there’s the government way.

The one-page way would probably work pretty well; the government’s 2,700-page way has no hope of working and comes with a 100% no-money-back guarantee of morphing into an abyss of national debt not unlike the Sarlacc sand monster in Return of the Jedi.

With our new 28th Constitutional Amendment, Direct Marketers would be able to insist that we give the simpler version a shot before we feed the whole country to the Sarlacc.

As soon as Cash for Clunkers clanked to a stop, I bought a new Ford Explorer.

It came with built-in Sirius satellite radio and a free subscription for a few months after which I had to pay for the service or lose Sirius in my new Explorer.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? And, since it’s such a good idea for both Ford and Sirius, you wonder what could go wrong.

Well, something could. And did.

Apparently it never occurred to anyone at either company that someone might already be a Sirius subscriber, someone like me.

I’ve been with Sirius for years. Then, suddenly, I had two accounts. Sirius automatically renewed my old one for a year and started sending me letters and emails about my new one expiring any day now. For some reason, I’d thought the Ford dealer would handle all this.

Foolishly, I started by writing back to Sirius with all the details: dates, account numbers, what I wanted them to do, etc. No response.

I emailed them a few weeks later. Nothing.

Finally I bit the bullet and called them. It’s like calling hell. Wait, wait and wow, how those fifteen minutes flew by. Didn’t feel like more than four or five hours. Finally, a young lady took my credit card info to save my about-to-expire new account.

Great. Now how about cancelling my old account and refunding my money? “Oh, you have to talk to billing about that. I’ll connect you.”

“Wait!”

Too late. She was gone. (You’d think Sirius would have music on their wait lines, wouldn’t you?) Three years later, I hung up. A few weeks after that, another letter arrived reminding me that my free trial Sirius account – the one I’d already paid for – was about to expire.

If it wasn’t for the 24-hours jazz channel, Sirius 72, and Larry the Cable Guy on 103, I’d have cancelled the whole mess. Despairing, I wrote another letter and asked Sirius to call me. A week later, a guy did call and he amazed me by straightening everything out and arranging the refund.

I think. I hope.

The “customer experience” reminded me of the farmer watching the single track railroad out back of his yard. A train came from the east and another came from the west. Head-on collision. A reporter asked the farmer what he was thinking when he saw the trains heading for each other. “I was thinking that’s a hell of a way to run a railroad.”

He’s reaching out but not touching us with his healthcare speeches. Why? I think it’s because he’s applying ham-handed politics to a marketing problem.

Marketers, especially direct marketers, always start with a plan based on reality. The plan’s framework never needs to be longer than a few pages or have more than four headings: Background, Objective, Strategy and (some) Tactics.

Background (the Situation) is a list of all available relevant facts. It must be written out, passed around, examined, queried and culled of all subjective elements. A wrong step here screws up the whole operation.

There is only one genuine Objective. It must be realistically achievable, given the Background, measurable and come with a timeline and milestones. Its framers must be willing to have their feet held to the fire.

Strategy is the hard part. It is the deceptively simple statement of the breakthrough big step approach to how we are going to achieve our Objective.

Tactics are the fun part, like little children with all the fun and none of the responsibility. Most people are tactical thinkers. Planners don’t really need to think about tactics at the onset but they do need them to explain things to tactical thinkers.

Once the plan’s framework is constructed, a lot of other plans get attached to it: testing, budgets, creative, media, response management, customer service, etc.

If we ever got invited to try this on Obama’s healthcare campaign, we’d find so many huge holes that we’d automatically start from scratch.

The main problem is that the Background is disgracefully blotchy. Obama’s team, burying its collective head in the sand, flat out refuses to deal with a lot of big issues, including:
• Tort reform, health savings plans with tax deductions, interstate health insurance, catastrophe insurance, high risk pools, cost transparency;
• The public’s very real problems with unions and lawyers;
• The public’s reluctance to cede control of their lives to government;
• Perception that government-run health care is a nightmare wherever it’s been tried;
• Perception that Medicare and Medicaid are nightmares;
• The astonishing negatives of creatures like Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, SEIU, Frank, Durbin, Sanders, etc., etc., etc.;
• Why the people, including nearly all representatives and senators, can’t be allowed to read the bill. (Pelosi actually said that we have to pass it so we can see what’s in it. How’s that for planning?)

• Why the rush;
• Some kind of acknowledgement that the great mass of American citizens is the only real stakeholder;
• How we will pay for all this;
• That prickly Constitution;

• Where they got the idea that we’d fall for the 10-years-of-taxes, 6-years-of-benefits scam;
• Our aversion to paying for illegal immigrants, an apparently eternally renewable resource, and having them swamp the system;
• The lack of a sound principle outlining the parameters of saving money and improving access;
• An explanation of what, specifically, is wrong with our current system;
• Justifying the odd notion that in order to fix parts of the system it is necessary to tear it down;
• Challenges that “Doing something” is not an Objective, not a strategic statement, not even a tactic. It is merely nonsense, noise.

Because there’s no honest, fact-based Background, there’s no clearly achievable Objective. Beyond a pathetic list of vague feel-good wishes, there’s nothing.

Strategically, Obama, the front man, finds himself tied in knots. He has nothing to say for the simple reason that he hasn’t thought the whole thing through. He does not know what he is talking about.

Most important, he has no idea where he (and, sadly, we) will wind up with this. And there’s no way to measure progress, or lack of it.

Obama is wandering down the political path with a practical real life issue that matters tremendously to 330 million people. We need straight talk and substance. We’re not getting either. Instead this politician wastes our time while he scalds insurance companies relentlessly and speaks to us as if we are idiots. We’re just not getting it, he insists, sounding like an exasperated third grade teacher and making us more angry every day.

Marketers could help him get his healthcare plan across and rescue his nose-diving approval rating. We’d start with reality.

But he wouldn’t let us. He knows now that he has seriously blundered and he’s not the kind of guy who’d ever own up to that. All he can do is talk through his hat and bully the idiots, that’s us, who don’t share his vision.

He knows that reality would kill his plan in its nest.

Another take. This essay is based on the premise that our President and his gang actually care about health care. They don’t. And they are not bumbling planners. They may, in fact, be planning geniuses. Their goal is to micro-manage every element of American lives. Once they get this monster through, they’ll do cap-and-trade and then they’ll be in command of everything and we’ll be toast.

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.