Tag Archives: Direct Marketing

Where do you rank?

I’ve been working on a list analytics project recently and that’s resulted in me thinking of, among other things, universes. I’ve started to think about model performance and how the changes to the economy might be impacting marketing results.

However, I wasn’t tempted to write this post until two things happened yesterday. First, I received MediaPost’s Email Insider newsletter on the subject of customer lifecycle. Then, I needed to drive to a client yesterday and noticed that I’ve been driving a different car more frequently.

It dawned on me that I’ve become an x minus 1. Continue reading

People don't…

Over the years I, and my clients have labored mightily at our marketing efforts. Hours of careful thought about our marketing objectives, followed by more hours of careful analysis of past test results. And even more analysis of our lists and target audiences, followed by hour upon hour of agonized copywriting and creative development. Lastly, double- and triple-checking test emails, lettershop insertion samples and testing our telemarketing scripts in every imaginable way.

After all that careful planning and analysis, what could possibly go wrong?

Just three simple things:

  1. People don’t read.
  2. People don’t think.
  3. People don’t care.

Continue reading

While we build, a message from David Ogilvy

The site build is progressing well today. The CMS platform is up and stable, although page load times aren’t acceptable yet and a few things are being examined on the server side.

We’ve installed a number of plugins to give us more flexibility when adding content. One we’re experimenting with now allows easy addition of YouTube and other videos. And who would be more appropriate to test this with than the immortal David Ogilvy?

This video looks to be from the 80′s when Mr. Ogilvy was serving as the chairman of O&M in India. If you happen to know the audience this was filmed for, I’d appreciate your feedback.I’ll have more on Mr. Ogilvy and others in the future, but for now I bring you David Ogilvy in his own words, on the differences between general advertising and direct response and his advice to general advertising agencies.