February 2007
|
|
DIRECT Newsline
|
| Mixed Breed |
Purebreds may fetch a high price at market, but it was a mixed marketing pedigree that helped the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals...
By Beth Negus Viveiros |
|
| Printer's Mailing Gets 50% Response |
Every now and then, digital technology produces unexpected results for old-fashioned direct mail. Take Superior Printing Inks, which achieved more than...
By Larry Riggs |
|
| Rainbow Rewards Goes West |
Last year Rainbow Rewards, a loyalty plan designed to boost local businesses in Denver, increased enrollment 150 times — from 2,000 to 300,000...
By Richard H. Levey |
|
| SK&A's Back in the Mail |
For the first time in two years, SK&A Information Services will send out postcards as part of its marketing mix, this time to launch a medical research...
Larry Riggs |
|
| ZIP+4 + 2 = ZIP+6 |
How do you get an entire newspaper chain to improve its targeting? It's not easy when you own 90 papers, ranging from small weeklies to big-town dailies....
By Ray Schultz |
|
Features
|
| Listline |
NEW LISTS Quality Control Professionals OneSource Information Services Inc. is offering Quality Control Professionals, a list with 14,032 names. Sources...
|
|
Op-Ed Columns
|
| A Capital Idea? Well… |
The problem with so many “loyalty programs” is they demand our loyalty but don't volunteer a rat's behind for their loyalty. Veteran air...
HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS |
|
| Dirty Rotten Scoundrels |
Nothing is more boring than going through the Direct Marketing Association's Hall of Fame. For every genius on that wall, someone else is there only...
Ray Schultz |
|
General
|
| A Guide to Giving |
Way back in 1997, it was hard for a small nonprofit with a limited budget to get attention. The Internet wasn't the fundraising powerhouse it is today,...
Beth Negus Viveiros |
|
| A Ho-Ho to Remember |
Remember all those great corporate holiday cards and gifts you got in December? By and large, neither do we. Sure, there were some yummy boxes of candy...
Beth Negus Viveiros |
|
| Alive and Well |
In this multichannel age, direct mail is still the largest single power in direct marketing. The U.S. Postal Service handled 102.5 billion pieces of...
By Fred Morath |
|
| Another Ignorant J-Word Attack… |
When a column in a consumer newspaper is headlined “Beware the menace of junk mail,” you know you're in for a regular ignoramus-o-rama. That's...
KEN MAGILL |
|
| CLARIFICATION |
RCI Global Vacation Network uses SAS' Enterprise Miner data-mining software in its customer modeling work (“Vacation Planning,” January). ...
|
|
| CORRECTION |
The photo accompanying “AAA Targets Teens” (January) is not of Mary Wyatt but of Sue Burns, AAASNE's director of marketing membership. ...
|
|
| Credit Where Due |
Online merchants tend to take the easy way out when assigning a sale to a given marketing channel, such as a search engine, a Web site or an ad. The...
By Richard H. Levey |
|
| DMers Take First Look at Second Life |
To its 2.7 million registered users around the world, the virtual reality universe Second Life is a nice place to visit, play and shop for completely...
By Brian Quinton |
|
| DMers' PR Strategy: Get Visual |
As direct marketers vie for a more strategic position at the executive table, they have a mighty weapon: numbers. Deep inside marketing databases lie...
By Michael Talbot |
|
| DRTV Gets Some Respect |
When David Savage graduated from college in the early 1990s and landed his first job — at a PR firm working with clients like Guthy-Renker and...
By Beth Negus Viveiros |
|
| Dry Run |
Reader's Digest created a systematic and disciplined approach to testing new products, primarily because of the creation of expensive one-shot books...
By Gordon W. Grossman |
|
| Easy Does It |
In January the U.S. Postal Service toned down some of its proposed new mail rules. Here are some highlights. A relaxed flexibility test for...
Larry Riggs |
|
| Half Empty or All Empty? |
Are these people nuts? Do they have money to burn, and can't find any better way to get rid of it? Wait, wait. I'm forgetting my 2007 New Year's resolution...
THOMAS L. COLLINS |
|
| Letters to the Editor |
DRAFTFCB: A GUIDING LIGHT Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lewis Lazare's doom-and-gloom appraisal of the Draft-FCB merger as one of the darkest moments in...
|
|
| Marketing Mercenaries |
One of my all-time movie faves is “Last of the Mohicans,” because it's a classic film about pre-Revolutionary America, because it's beautifully...
BRIAN QUINTON |
|
| No Promotion Before Its Time |
It's a cold afternoon in January, and a woman's thoughts turn to drinking. Well, why not? I mean, something has to take the chill off the old bones,...
BETH NEGUS VIVEIROS |
|
| Political Post |
One thing we've never been able to figure out is when and how politicians started using direct mail. Some sources say it was during the 1960s, when large...
Ray Schultz |
|
| Preview Pain |
With the newest releases of Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft Windows Live offering users preview panes by default — at least while they're in beta —...
By Ken Magill |
|
| Stranger in Paradise |
There's an unlikely figure roaming the beaches of Oahu. He stands aristocratically erect, his nose aimed at the heavens as though avoiding the stench...
RICHARD H. LEVEY |
|
| The Buck Starts Here |
Jerry Bernhart, president of Bernhart Associates Executive Search, recently gave us his thoughts on DM compensation in today's hiring market. It's true...
|
|
| The Name Game |
Prospective parents are accustomed to lots of tests: for the health of the baby, for its gender, and for the mother's wellness. And so when
By Brian Quinton |
|
| Watch This |
Publishers and other marketers looking to get their customers' and prospects' attention might want to put on a show — a video Webcast, to be specific....
Beth Negus Viveiros |
|
| Web Doctor |
Pharmaceutical marketers can spend millions to create commercials that target, say, every allergy sufferer who watches “Desperate Housewives”...
By Beth Negus Viveiros |
|
| Window-Shopping the Small Screen |
Little more than a month after the holidays, many consumers probably still have psychic scars from the jammed malls and parking lots. Those memories...
By Brian Quinton |
|
| Write Away |
If you're at a loss for words next time you sit down to write a sales letter, you might want to take a look at “Gabay's Copywriters' Compendium:...
Beth Negus Viveiros |
|
