Today, highly respected colleges offer degrees in direct marketing, and DM has even become the darling of some sages who report it will replace general advertising. But 20 or 30 years ago, direct mail hardly had this kind of cache – rather, it was the opposite.
My first job in direct marketing was, I now know, illegal. As a pre-teen, I stuffed mailboxes with notices about my babysitting skills. My next foray was a high-school night job in telemarketing, selling for the Jaycee’s. Both taught me that a direct connection with the consumer could be powerful, get results, be informative and even fun. I entered DM through general advertising, but soon moved into the kind of advertising that gets trackable results.
What motivated some of today’s leaders in direct marketing to step into this untested, less-than-envied profession?
Jan Baiden, director of creative and print production, Hammacher-Schlemmer – Heading for a career in a big ad agency, Jan had completed her B.S. in advertising after four years of a five-year master’s program (on scholarship). But she was “so desperately poor that I just couldn’t stand the idea of going through one more year of a ghastly apartment and Hamburger Helper.”
Jan was attracted to the help-wanted ad for the game-show-famous Spiegel Catalog, which needed copywriters who could type 35 words a minute. She “practiced typing like mad,” got the interview and then made her way to it. Three trains later, she arrived in a less-than-stellar neighborhood. “When I got to the viaduct under the abandoned rail line and had to walk in the street to avoid the filthy mattresses and broken bottles, I said to myself, `I will never work here no matter what.'” Several hours later, Jan “pranced out happily, having accepted a job that started the following Monday.”
Marty Davison, vice president, direct marketing, General Wig Manufacturers Inc. – Marty stumbled into direct marketing while working as a “traffic controller” for a sheet-fed printer. One day he was so aghast at the graphics on the job being printed that he called up the client and told her – in more subtle terms – that her creative was “really tragic.” The lady took it well and asked him to stop by. Marty did just that; the result was one of the biggest successes the client had ever had. All this happened was while Marty was still in graduate school, but every job thereafter has been in direct marketing.
Bob Dunn, vice president, marketing, Transcat – Bob started as a sales rep in laboratory supplies, where one of his accounts was a major university. Though the company had a mailing list, “I was asked to create a list for hand-delivery, as it made a great sales visit to deliver the books.”
I doubt if Bob would have agreed so readily had he seen the truck with its hundreds of 5-pound catalogs. He did the job, though, staying up all night laboriously addressing each catalog for these “best customers” and taking months to hand-deliver the monsters. You’d like to think it was worth it. Wrong. It took so much longer than the good ol’ U.S. postal service that the “best” customers were deprived of the most up-to-date book! Bob learned early in his career the value of letting the mail make “sales calls.”
Terry Jukes, president and CEO, g. Neil Inc. – Terry worked for a major oil company that spent millions on TV advertising, and to him it seemed as though the company was always arguing about which half of the expenditure was wasted. It seemed like a no-win, circuitous conversation; he got tired of it so he transferred to the credit card division where everything was measurable. He was hooked once he built his first spreadsheet with circulation, response rate, AOV, gross margin, etc. Terry recalls thinking “how wonderful it was to source code the world!”
Michael Stern, CEO, Huntington Clothiers and Shirtmakers – In 1977, Mike says, “It looked like polyester was going to take over the world. I couldn’t find a cotton shirt in all of Columbus, Ohio, a city of over a million people.” So he and his wife started a catalog at the kitchen table. “I was a refugee from the advertising business,” Mike says, with design and marketing savvy. Hiring out the manufacturing, they ran the operation from home “complete with dogs barking in the background and kids answering the phones.”
Mike says he never wanted to be a shopkeeper and knew they would look more substantial if they had a catalog rather than a store “not unlike the Internet business today.” Sure it was a risk, he remembers, but “I was average in size, 15-to-16-1/2, and I figured the downside was a lifetime of blue oxford-cloth shirts!”
George Wiedemann, chairman and CEO, Grey Direct Inc. – In high school, George started a magazine called the Plagiarist. Because it lampooned the faculty, it was popular with the students but almost got him tossed out of school. Even so, it planted the publishing seed and George chose Time Magazine as his first job after college. “It took me three seconds of the first day trying to be a writer at Time to realize that I wasn’t going to make it writing,” he says.
George noticed the “big shots” seemed to have come up through circulation (not thought of as DM at the time), so into circulation he went, being promoted to circulation director by age 25, a record. During that time billions of promotional pieces went through his hands, but George says his greatest achievement was “raising the price of Time from 10 cents to 50 cents a copy, mainly by unleashing the medium of television.” Soon George realized he loved DM better than publishing and followed a successful career that has lead him to his current, 20-year tenure at Grey Direct.
Ann Zeller, vice president, information and special projects, The Direct Marketing Association – Fresh out of college in 1978, with a B.A. in government, Ann decided to seek work as a paralegal. Knowing nothing of DM, she nonetheless compiled a mailing list of desired law firms and “lawyers in those firms whose names sounded nice.” After putting together her own direct mail piece on a then state-of-the-art memory typewriter, she sent the “campaign” to 81 firms – and 40% responded! Ann got eight interviews and three job offers. Time went by and Ann met Jonah Gitlitz, who later became the president of the DMA. In that capacity, he grabbed Ann. Though Jonah has since left DMA, Ann moves into 18 years of “a wonderful career of learning, researching, interacting and sharing results in an incredibly interesting industry.”
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