Loose Cannon: A Loaf Of Bread And Ow
Jul 7, 2008 1:27 AM, By Richard H. Levey
Success, it is said, has a thousand parents. Failure is an orphan. But when a consumer-focused mail campaign generates a 0.0625% response rate – 30 responses on a 48,000-postcard effort – the words “failure” and “orphan” somehow fall short. “Travesty” is a good start. And “forsaken foundling” is an appropriate counterpart. ...

Loose Cannon: Missed It By That Much
Jul 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Richard H. Levey
Here's a riddle: What do children's fears of being eaten by bears, a survey of unfaithful wives and socially disruptive snoring have in common (aside from having nothing to do with direct marketing)? Answer: They're all subjects of press releases sent to Direct magazine. ...

A Million Little Direct Mail Pieces: A Memoir
Jun 22, 2008 11:23 PM, By Richard H. Levey
The average citizen does not wake up in the morning, hell-bent on becoming a direct marketing reporter. My own path was a circuitous one, and I offer what I hope is an inspirational tale of my transformation from a lad without focus into the direct marketing chronicler I am today. In setting down these memoirs, I join the ranks of James Frey, Margaret B. Jones and JT LeRoy, and it is in their spirit that I tell my story. Although I did not know it at the time, the experiences that led to my life in direct marketing journalism began with my service within the U.S. War Department during World War II. ...

Loose Cannon: Sounding Off At DMDNY
Jun 15, 2008 7:58 PM, By Richard H. Levey
Step aside, Lester Wunderman, Bill Jayme and David Ogilvy. The direct marketing industry has three new heroes, and they are Ted Leonsis, vice chairman emeritus of AOL; David Sable, COO of marketing agency Wunderman; and Tom Goosmann, founder and chief creative officer of True North Inc. I am bestowing this accolade upon them not because of their career accomplishments (all three are quite distinguished, and don’t need me to confirm that) but rather for their valor. They all spoke at the recently concluded DM Days New York Conference and Expo under unnecessarily adverse conditions. ...

Loose Cannon: One Casino Would Rather Switch Than Fight
Jun 8, 2008 11:06 PM, By Richard H. Levey
Folks, I’m torn. On the one hand, I am militantly anti-cigarette. On the other, I genuinely enjoy writing about direct marketing. So when cigarettes cause a casino to abandon direct mail, thereby reducing the number of companies potentially interested in Direct magazine by one, I’m confused in regard to where my sympathies should lie. Here’s what happened: ...

Loose Cannon: Two Young Men Meet The Wizard From Oz
Jun 1, 2008 9:37 PM, By Richard H. Levey
Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch must have been feeling a little restless in April. When not trying to acquire his third New York City-based newspaper, he was pressuring the managing editor of his Wall Street Journal property into an early retirement. Speculation held that change wasn’t coming to the Journal as quickly as its Oz-based masters would have liked. Given Murdoch’s appetite for sensationalist tabloids, direct marketers might wonder if an overhaul of the paper’s classic “two young men” prospecting letter is in the offing. If so, a reworking of that pitch might look like this: ...

Two Young Men in Oz
Jun 1, 2008 12:00 PM, Richard H. Levey
Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch must have been feeling a little restless in April. When not trying to acquire his third New York City-based newspaper, ...

Loose Cannon: Poli-Sigh: DM Mistakes Know No Party Lines
May 19, 2008 12:16 AM, By Richard H. Levey
Had enough of Barack, Hillary and John yet? No, of course not—this presidential campaign has been the gift that keeps on giving. How could anyone tire of it? For the few who have, there are thousands of other federal, state and local political races being run, and DMers wishing to learn what doesn’t work, marketing-wise, need only look at their elected officials. These object lessons may be the most valuable constituent services these pols provide. ...

Loose Cannon: For DMers, No Incentive At All
May 11, 2008 9:05 PM, By Richard H. Levey
There is no delicate way to eat beef jerky in public. Visitors to the New York Incentive Rewards & Recognition Show would have done well to remember this. Omaha Steaks hosted one of the first booths to greet attendees on the exhibit floor, and was handing out samples of edible leather. Tasty, yes, but the results weren’t pretty. ...

Loose Cannon: Spam @ 30
May 4, 2008 6:13 PM, By Richard H. Levey
Readers who didn’t drag out the party hats and noisemakers this past Saturday missed a significant anniversary: On May 3, 1978, the very first spam message hit e-mailboxes. (For those who want to mark the occasion properly, the appropriate gift for 30th anniversaries is pearls.) ...

Ad Astra Advertising
May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, Richard H. Levey
It must be nice to be a brand marketer. Brand marketers have all the fun of creating advertising without assuming any of the responsibility for generating ...

Loose Cannon: We Interrupt This Universe For An Important Message
Apr 27, 2008 11:55 PM, By Richard H. Levey
It must be nice to be a brand marketer. Brand marketers get all the fun of creating advertising without having any of the responsibility for generating results. Consider a branding effort by Doritos, which will launch on June 12. That’s an actual launch date, as opposed to a campaign debut date: On that day, Frito-Lay will beam a 30-second Doritos commercial from a 500 megahertz Ultra High Frequency Radar into outer space. ...

Loose Cannon: Reflections During Passover and Easter
Apr 20, 2008 4:31 PM, By Richard H. Levey
As per my annual tradition, I offer the following column. I am presenting it again because -- just as the stories surrounding Passover and Easter are re-told every year -- so too does this one deserve a re-telling. Readers looking for Loose Cannon's usual breezy gloss on direct marketing may wish to skip this column. This true story, of how one merchant who valued his customers acted when his business was threatened, does not have a happy ending. ...

Letters to the Editor
Apr 14, 2008 9:31 PM
Copious letters in response to Loose Cannon: Big Brother, The Gray Lady and Me By Richard H. Levey: ...

Loose Cannon: Big Brother, The Gray Lady and Me
Apr 13, 2008 7:10 PM, By Richard H. Levey
Anyone who has ever turned off a favorite radio station because they’ve heard a given song one too many times will understand my reaction to Adam Cohen’s recent New York Times editorial “The Already Big Thing on the Internet: Spying on Users”. “It’s not paranoia: they really are spying on you,” writes Cohen, who later alleges “The driving force behind this prying is commerce.” No, dammit, it’s not. ...

Loose Cannon: Are We Having Ads Yet?
Apr 6, 2008 11:24 PM, By Richard H. Levey
This week, Loose Cannon author Richard H. Levey considers Zippy the Pinhead, single-sponsorship online content and the closing of a favorite diner. Don’t be surprised if the column leaves you with a fast-food craving… ...

The Day Andi Emerson Made Me a Man
Apr 1, 2008 12:00 PM, Richard H. Levey
Roughly a decade ago I underwent a rite of passage that was necessary to my becoming a full-fledged direct marketing reporter. This rite occurred at the ...

It's Not Brain Surgery
Apr 1, 2008 12:00 PM, RICHARD H. LEVEY
News item: A new research system measures consumers' reactions to advertising. Test subjects wear a baseball cap containing microsensors that track changes ...

Loose Cannon Will Return Next Week
Mar 31, 2008 8:12 AM
Loose Cannon will not appear this week, as its author was engaging in the rites of spring and inadvertently strained his stravinsky. See you next week! ...

Loose Cannon: A Load Of Junk
Mar 23, 2008 11:50 PM, By Richard H. Levey
Of late, legislators have tried to place marketing channels under consumer control. The results range from the successful (the federal do-not-call list), to the questionable (the dubious effectiveness of e-mail registries as anti-spam mechanisms) to the unexplored (anti “junk mail” lists are not mandated by the government.) Pushes for these regulations are often accompanied by spurious economic statistics. For instance, according to anti-marketing groups repetitive stress injuries resulting from citizens standing over their wastebaskets and throwing away “junk mail” will single-handedly bankrupt our healthcare system by 2045. ...

Loose Cannon: Dullards At Sharper Image
Mar 16, 2008 11:47 PM, By Richard H. Levey
You read it here first, folks: Last week, Sharper Image Corp. unofficially started moving from its current state of Chapter 11 bankruptcy (restructuring) to Chapter 7 bankruptcy (liquidation). Now, Sharper Image management will tell you differently. The Powers That Be at the nation’s most notorious retailer of Ionic Breeze air purifiers are making halfhearted efforts to keep the company an ongoing concern, and as far as I know no formal dissolution plans have been announced, nor has a petition for liquidation been filed. ...

Loose Cannon: Cold Call
Mar 9, 2008 10:01 PM, By Richard H. Levey
For reasons that will soon be obvious, I’m hiding the subject of this column behind the name “Susan Donym”. On the evening of Jan. 2, Sue received a phone call at her home. The unidentified male caller knew a fair amount of Sue’s personal information, including her name, her address and her apartment number. And that last bit was especially disturbing because the caller threatened to rape her. ...

Loose Cannon: Google Knows Best
Mar 2, 2008 10:41 PM, By Richard H. Levey
When it comes to assigning additional search terms, does Google really know what's best for its clients? Not necessarily, according to Loose Cannon columnist Richard H. Levey. For his take on what correspondence between a marketer and a Google representative over this issue might look like, click the title, above. ...

Loose Cannon: It’s Not Brain Surgery
Feb 24, 2008 10:10 PM, By Richard H. Levey
News Item: A new research system measures consumers’ reactions to advertising. Test subjects wear a wired-up baseball cap containing microsensors that track changes in brain response, eye movement and the subjects’ skin, 2000 times a second as the consumers are exposed to marketing materials… Lord love a scientist. Or a labful of them, as the case may be. They’ve finally overcome a concern that has plagued generations of researchers attempting to link brain activity and marketing. ...

Loose Cannon: The Day Andi Emerson Made Me A Man
Feb 18, 2008 9:26 PM, By Richard H. Levey
Roughly a decade ago, I underwent a rite of passage necessary to becoming a full-fledged direct marketing reporter. This rite occurred at the hands of Andi Emerson, the DM doyenne who died last week. Andi suffered no fools, and early in my career at Direct I must have screwed up the name of the organization she founded, the John Caples International Awards. Her reaction was quick and to the point: “You’re a ...