By Mark on Feb 19, 2008 in Advertising, Copy, Database marketing, Direct Mail, Direct Marketing, Featured | 3 Comments
And sometimes I just shake my head. My apparently never-ending stream of poorly executed direct mail continues, with the latest effort being a shockingly bad example from Marriott's Fairfield Inn and Visa. It appears to be the result of a co-op promotion, which may account for the execution; nobody at either Marriott or Visa felt [...]
By Mark on Feb 11, 2008 in Database marketing, Direct Mail, Process | 0 Comments
After lashing out at Verizon and Vonage a little while ago, I thought I'd move on to other topics.
But Verizon can't help but make simple mistakes in their direct mail efforts. On Friday, I received yet another first-class mailing, this time promoting Verizon's FiOS Internet service.
Since I've now been a triple-play customer for two months [...]
By Mark on Jan 28, 2008 in Database marketing, Featured, Process, Testing | 0 Comments
I've recently received several direct response efforts that are unfortunately poor examples of our science and craft. But they provide some important lessons that we should all take into account when preparing our next campaigns, whether they be acquisition, retention or winback efforts.
The two efforts I'm going to write about appear to suffer from at least one flaw that I try to address with clients and employees. I call it "fingertips."
By that, I mean that the nuts and bolts and detail of the marketing effort or analysis need to flow from the written page or the computer monitor through your eyes, be processed by your brain and then exit via your fingertips to the email, instant message, Excel spreadsheet, etc. It's not about forwarding the print production schedule you get from your printer or assigning the analysis of the media plan to your least-experienced employee because it's tedious. Having "fingertips" means you know the detail because you've not only seen it, but processed it and then had it exit via your keyboard.
I didn't see the "fingertips" of the marketing managers in these efforts. Al Pacino, in his famous rant at Kevin Spacey in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross would have put it more bluntly.
"Where did you learn your trade?"
By Mark on Jan 15, 2008 in Database marketing, Featured, Strategy | 0 Comments
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, [...]
