Direct Marketing Has Funny Words

There are some ugly words in the word of direct marketing, and I learned them last week.

Onsert, for example. It’s an object which is glued to the exterior of a magazine rather than being inserted between its pages. Or squinch analysis, which refers to balancing production cost and potential sales value of every square inch of a catalog. There are others, but I won’t horrify you.

Direct Marketing also full of weird, special definitions of things. For example, “Dimensional” means anything in a box or tube, while “flat” means not only flat, but also larger than normal envelopes. Envelopes don’t count as “flat” – they’re just envelopes.

And then there are the ugly facts. Things like the fact that all those advertising techniques you hate persist because they work. Or that the average turnover in a call center is 90% every 90 days.

Still, there’s some good stuff out there. I learned that Planned Parenthood has had a dramatic surge in donations recently, simply because Sarah Palin is practically doing their fund raising for them by this point. They barely have to send a letter, because the need for their services has been made so real by Palin’s candidacy.

We saw a prize-winning mailer was an oversized postcard with a small hole in the middle. The front side said “Can you fit your arm through this hole?” On the back: “A child dying of starvation can.” It was a mailer from Doctors Without Borders, raising money to bring medical care and food to children in Darfur. How many lives did they save with that campaign?

Was it more than our class presenter killed by running a series of Virginia Slims dimensional promos in the 80s?

There’s a lot of ugly business out there, and not all of it is dimensional tobacco promos and the hot new catalog from Landmines-R-Us. Some of it is collectibles.

Other things are just murky. We spent about twenty minutes examining the emotional appeal of a bank that had a multi-pronged campaign advertising home equity loans. Of course, many of those great loans are now in default. Here’s a compelling campaign for undergraduate credit cards… an area that combines irresponsible marketing with irresponsible lending and irresponsible spending to create financial nightmares for people in their twenties – not to mention plenty of opportunities for identity theft.

Still, it’s not the fault of the marketers if the credit approval standards drop, or if students rack up ten grand in credit card debt at 18% without really thinking about the interest payments (oh, they’re aware of them, they just ignore them.)

Is it?

One More Supposedly Fun Thing He’ll Never Do Again

David Foster Wallace was found dead on Friday. Suicide.

Even in his humorous pieces he seemed to radiate unhappiness and anger. It gave him an edge that appealed to a lot of people. But I tried to read “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” and thought it an excruciating invitation to share in DFW’s self-loathing.

Do One Thing, Do It Well

My pal Joel B tipped me off about Has The HLC Destroyed The Earth?, a site which tells you whether the world has ended yet. It’s not as useful as “Do I Need A Jacket?” (tells you whether it’s cold outside) or “Down For Everyone Or Just Me?” (tells you whether a missing website is your problem or someone else’s). But it does serve some kind of function.

I think it’s a crime in France

Calimocho, or jote, is a mixture of approximately equal amounts of red wine and Coca-Cola. Mixing a cheap, dry, tannic wine with Coke softens the harshness of the wine and balances out the sweetness of the soda. Of course, most cheap reds in the US are too sweet already, so it makes little to no sense to drink it in the US. Still, done properly, it’s actually quite good.

But, as I said, I think it’s a crime in France.