The all time champions at doing this are magazines like Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker and newspapers, most notably The New York Times, The Boston Globe (same thing, I suppose), The LA Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, (Houston Chronicle, too) plus the Seattle, Atlanta, Washington, Fort Lauderdale and Saint Petersburg rags. These are just the especially buffoonish operations that spring to mind.

Magazines and newspapers are losing circulation at a phenomenal clip and their publishers blame the Internet. Ha! Can it be possible they haven’t noticed that they constantly piss off at least half of their potential readership, the half that doesn’t get the news from the Internet?

How magazines and newspapers irritate prospects is simple and depressingly stupid. In the eyes of their former readers, they have stopped being normal every day dopes with left of center politics who somehow managed to get the news out with very little bias except on the editorial page and become preening, posing, pompous trendoid cretins who soak every single column inch in what polite people call liberal platitudes and really-irritated people think of as rank one-sided bullshit filled with lies, half truths and irrelevant opinion (in “news” stories or, in magazines, just plain stories). There’s no balance anymore and that is staggeringly stupid.

Check the recent election results: roughly half of the country is conservative. Half of the rest couldn’t tell the difference between the Communist Manifesto and The Bill of Rights if you ripped off the title pages and the remaining 25% is as left of center as the print medium’s writers, editors and managers.

Let us review:

Potential audience: 100%

Indifferent part of the audience: 25%

Lefties: 25%

Centrists and Righties: 50%

Newspapers and magazines appeal to the Lefties and get the Indifferents by default. In the meantime, they’re pissing off Centrists and Righties who would shoot themselves before buying their products. Helllllooooo? Losing money are you? Must be the Internet.

I started with Mistubishi, the company that came up with the one el Galant, or was that Mazda? I have no way of finding out online, at least not from Mitsubishi, because Mistubishi won’t show me anything at all unless I first download and install the latest version of something called Adobe Flash.

I looked around to see if there was a no-Flash alternate Mitsubishi site. Nope. So to hell with them. For starters, I don’t download stuff, especially stuff that ends in .exe. I have two other laptops and they have Flash. I don’t know why this one doesn’t and I don’t care. I don’t want to spend time downloading stuff. I just want to get some info and move on. Plus, I know that anything requiring Flash is going to be a TV commercial, not an info source. Adios Mitsubishi.

So I went to Toyota. Same. Sayonara Toyota. Ditto Kia and Hyundai.

Guys, listen to me, please. People who want to sell things to other people don’t do this. They give people options. In this case, you might offer: 1) do you want to get information about buying our products then click here or 2) do you want to see something in Flash, in which case you click here. That way everyone’s happy and some of them, such as yours truly, aren’t irritated. And if they track visits to their sites, they can eventually get rid of Flash

Let’s see what Honda does. Well, I’ll be darned, I got in right away. Let’s look at Mazda. Bingo, right in. These guys must have hired the 4.0 kids from marketing school – the kind who give orders to IT – while Toyota and Mitsubishi got stuck with the kids who took shop, now known as computer science, who think they should be giving orders to marketing people.

I wasn’t going to check GM, Ford and Chrysler because as far as I know they don’t give their cars silly names. But now I have to. Guess what? My browser slid right in to all three, NFR, No Flash Required.

The target audience must be entirely female and entirely innocent.

Note to Vaseline: there’s no such word as protectant. Another note to Vaseline: people can get their hands on your product without a prescription. It’s just a skin moisturizer. And if a prescription was required, your lady couldn’t write it, legally I mean. You know that but you also know that “prescribe” is a powerful word. Is this dishonest, a sham? Of course.

What happens next, though, is that you’ll get emails for years from the vendor offering you more stuff. If it was just one marketer, no big deal. The problem is that people like me, and you probably, order a lot of stuff online from all kinds of companies who email you and email you and email you and email you until your inbox is jammed every day with dozens of solicitations from the same companies.

It’s water torture of the Inbox. I don’t even know what some of these companies sell anymore. Cherry Moon Farms? No idea. Frontgate? Who knows?

Even some of the companies I do know apparently don’t know me. Borders and Barnes & Noble should know by now that I buy books from them, only books, lots and lots of books, but no movies or music despite their endless pleas for me to buy some.

If marketers all got together to figure out how to be a collective huge pain in the butt, they couldn’t have come up with a more effective approach.

Delete, delete, delete, frigging DELETE.

How can we stop it? Simple. One quarter of one cent postage for any email sent to a US address. A dollar for four hundred emails is no big deal. But a million emails a week will cost $130,000 a year. Give the money to charity, burn it, origami it. The point isn’t the revenue, it’s the cost, the cost of annoying millions of innocent people whose only sin is that they occasionally order stuff online.

When we were in New York, we worked with a big brokerage house. They wanted to attract investors with liquid (i.e. moveable) assets of at least $500,000. They’d tried cold calling, advertising, referrals - everything but direct mail so they asked us to give it a shot.

They were nice people but didn’t know anything about DM, so we had a lot of initial chitchat. They were surprised when I asked them how much of their investors’ money they got to keep. They asked “What difference does that make?” and I explained that’s how we figure out if the program works.

They get an annual fee of 1.5%.

Then I asked how long the average high end investor stays with them. Again with the “What difference does that make?” We explained that’s how we figure out the Lifetime Value of a customer.

Three years seemed about right to them.

1.5% of $500,000 is $7,500 a year. Soooo, over three years, a high end client will generate $22,500 dollars in fees. You subtract the cost of getting that client and servicing the account from that number.

We put together a program with a lot of tests because nothing anyone else had done for them ever worked, mostly because the very rich are a tough audience.

In the meantime, while our tests were in the mail, the company hired a gung ho advertising manager.

When the results came in we did the numbers. There were about a dozen test cells and their average response was 0.7% (seven tenths of one percent) with an average conversion rate of 55%. That means that 0.385% of the people we mailed invested $500,000 or more with the company.

Then we extrapolated from all the test results to estimate what the result would be if we used only the winning elements of each test. We’re very conservative when we do this. No matter how we ran the numbers, we figured that the simplest package with the best performing letter, the best offer, first class stamp (rather than preprinted postage paid indicia) on the reply envelope, mailed to the top 5 lists in the top 6 markets would generate a basic response of 3.2% with a conversion rate of 60% which would result in 1.92% of the people we mailed to investing $500,000 or more with our client.

We had found a gold mine! The mailings and the offer were expensive, about $2.50 each, including all costs right up to the fulfillment of the expensive premium.

So, for every 10,000 pieces we mailed, we’d spend $25,000 and get 192 people to invest at least $500,000 for a total of $96,000,000. Revenue (1.5% x 3 years) for the company would be $4,320,000. If we mailed 100,000 names, we’d generate over $40,000,000 for a cost of $250,000. That’s an ROI of about 160 to 1. We’d created a money-making machine that for every dollar we put in the top spits out $160 over three years. Factor in the cost of servicing those accounts and the ROI is around 120 to 1. We were very excited.

We presented these numbers to the new advertising manager at our first meeting. She barely listened then looked at us with a steely eye and said “You didn’t get 1% from your tests. Everyone knows that’s the standard in direct response.” And the company never did another mailing.

Lessons? 1) A little knowledge is a (very) dangerous thing. 2) Advertising people should never be involved in direct marketing.

Radio used to be mostly music so it functioned as aural wallpaper; nobody paid much attention. Then came Rush and the rush after Rush. Now people who listen do pay attention, and so do direct marketers. The problem is that most talk radio listeners are guys of a certain age, such as yours truly. That means most of the DM commercials we hear are for hair replacement, erectile dysfunction, debt reduction, mortgages, bladder problems, investments (including, it would seem, lots of gold for sale), and cars although there are fewer car commercials on the radio lately and I suspect that has more to do with the fact that women handle most of the car buying than it does with the economy.

I’ve has a Sirius radio in my car for about 4 years and it’s a Godsend. I start off listening to the talk shows on AM when I’m driving but as soon as a string of commercials comes on, I press a couple of buttons and the sounds of commercial free Sirius jazz fill the air.

I have nothing against DM radio commercials. I know they work because I hear them over and over and over and over.

All the packages are roughly the same: 6” x 9” window OE with similar innards, give or take a buckslip or a differently folded brochure. The products are books but every mailing is selling a different book – all in roughly the same way.

One of yesterday’s arrivals was selling the Illustrated Green Guide and the other the Concise History of the World.

The green guide mailing came in an ostentatiously recycled envelope, same die as the other OEs but the paper is rough, greeny-grey with specks of what looks like dirt. At the risk of incurring the wrath of ELFies, the whole thing is pretty one-sided because it’s based on the premise that the extreme of the green movement actually make sense. For instance, the 4-color brochure has the headline “As the power of green lights up the planet …” above a photo of one of those twisty light bulbs that last longer and use less electricity.

The headline itself is laughable. A more accurate one would read “As the power of green turns the planet dark …” (Our new president and both houses of Congress are going to bankrupt the coal industry that right now provides us with 49% of our electricity. They won’t allow us to build any more nuclear power plants and they won’t let us drill for our own oil and natural gas, so I’m cornering the market in whale oil futures.) The new light bulbs crack me up. I suppose you could get used to the hum and the lower candle power but don’t ever break one because they’re filled with mercury, a poison, and you have to call EPA HazMat teams to come over and clean up. I can’t wait until they’re in every house and men in space suits are regular visitors.

NG’s copy about the green guide mentions none of this stuff. It’s all rather saintly. I suppose some people will fall for it, though.

The history book mailer is a hoot. It’s touted on the face of the OE as “A must-have chronological reference for every history enthusiast!” And on the back, there are 4 history thumbnails in bullet points. What four historical points would you stress? Bet they’re not acupuncture, the folding fan, the Salem witch trials and the Nigerian civil war. Ah well, I hope the mailing works for them.

I can’t wait for the next dozen mailings.

All the good ones understand that their primary functions are: get everything to fit, handle a few tech things, guide the reader’s attention around a piece and make sure the copy is easy to read.

That last part gives me fits every working day of my life. Years ago in Toronto I was paired with a wonderful designer named Ray. Ray was, and probably still is, a very artistic fellow, wonderful sense of design. His only problem, with me, was that he deliberately made the copy almost impossible to read. He didn’t think that was what he was doing; he thought he was making the overall piece pretty. He’d use sans serif reverse type for huge chunks of body copy or small type on a tone background. He’d set ads and brochures in superwide type. Ray and I liked each other but we didn’t get along professionally because I insisted that he make it easy for people to read the frigging copy. Eventually we parted company and I worked with two terrific art directors in a row, Jiri Matousek and Lynn Sproatt.

I’ve met two direct mail design geniuses in my life, Ted Kikoler of Toronto and Heikki Ratalahti of San Francisco. I never got to work with either. They’re both very nice guys and easy to talk to, but Ted was too expensive in my Toronto days and I always thought that Heikki worked only with the great copywriter Bill Jayme.

Ted once made one tiny change to a direct mail control that resulted in a huge lift in response. The client was a Canadian construction trade newspaper called The Daily Commercial News. Their subscription package went out in a large brown kraft envelope with the paper’s name and return address in the upper left hand corner. Ted got a typewriter font and typed out the publisher’s name and title with one of the letters raised too high, as often happened with old manual typewriters, and slotted it into the small space above the paper’s name.

It looked something like this:

What was the point? Ted knew that anything that makes a direct mail piece look like it had been touched by human hands gets more attention. The apparently mistyped letters did that delightfully.

Both Ted and Heikki are masters of the power of simplicity, crisp, clean, obvious and supremely compelling simplicity. And they’re direct mail people, not advertising people slumming in the DM neighborhood. God bless ‘em.

In all my life, I probably haven’t bought $100 worth of anything, total, from NG and the last thing was a book over a year ago.

The really odd thing is that all the packages are basically the same thing, like a formula, no matter what each one is selling. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed if they hadn’t all come so close together. It’s not annoying, just very odd.

What would I do differently? Maybe test just one package that offers everything at once, at least for unproven one-timers like me. It could be in book or magazine form with a window cover and a bound in personalized letter and order form. It’d be easy to print and assemble on a fast web and it’d be a heck of a lot cheaper than 10 expensive individual mailings. Might get more multiple orders, too.

Who knows? Maybe they did test it.

Around the same time, a company in the database business, sent a half dozen self mailers all at once to our agency’s former Miami office (we moved out 4½ years ago) all addressed to people who worked for us in New York City five years back! It’s easier and quicker to just burn money.

Frontgate’s raspberry is for a callout from a photo of a trash compacter which has a special “junk mail” separator. Bite me.

I’d never heard of Wolferman’s. They sell breakfast stuff: bagels, muffins, bread, jam, coffee, etc. Their slogan is “Because Everything Starts With Breakfast.” I’d drop the Because.

All the catalogs invite response by mail, online, phone and fax. One offers email response after downloading an Excel sheet which sounds ’way too complicated for me.

An interesting trend is that most of these catalogs have on page order forms, on glossy stock which is hard to write on without smearing, and they make you find your envelope. The two with bound- in order forms and formed envelopes make you find your own stamp. Looks like the general idea is to discourage mailed-in responses. I suspect that adding an envelope with prepaid postage would increase overall response and, at the prices charged in these catalogs, it’d be a cheap way to generate a lift.

They all have negative guarantees which amazes me. A negative guarantee says something like “not satisfied” or “if it ever fails”. A positive guarantee is phrased slightly differently, “You must be delighted or simply return …” Domestications doesn’t even call its guarantee a Guarantee; it’s a “Return Policy”.

A few catalogs have little letters boxed on the inside front cover. One of them, Hammacher’s, is about the guarantee and it’s really strange. They offer to take back whatever you don’t like but say nothing about returning your money.

What am I going to buy from any of these catalogs? Hammacher has a nifty looking item on page 14, a sort of Gameboy for bridge players that my girlfriend might like.