No BS Direct Marketing

from being a search engine and platform for other companies. selling shoes or food or lawn furniture. following Amazon as your model because they sell pet supplies fast track to bankruptcy you may see a company like Boland Branch, Luxury Bedding, or Zypa, Stop Snoring, as e-commerce or pointed to by sellers of online advertising as proof of its power, but much of their online traffic is being created offline with direct response radio, TV, print, and direct mail. They use hardcore, classic, principle direct response, adhering to and demonstrating the approach I'm giving you in this book. Be cautious about importing too much significance to any big company's observed activities or methods, to any business seeming to be driven by online advertising, to Amazon, and most important of all, to your own peers who are influenced by inappropriate models. The fact is that most of your peers are blind mice leading other blind mice. The proof is in the financial facts of every category of business, every profession, every sales organization, every population. 1% create tremendous incomes and wealth, 4% do very well, 15% earn good livings, 60% stall, stagnate, and struggle to make ends meet, and 20% fail. Working back up, you have an 80% poor to 20% prosperous ratio, a 95% vs. 5%, even a 99% vs. 1% ratio. Thus, the overwhelming majority of your peers are engaged in marketing that fails them, intellectually and emotionally committed to that failed and failing marketing, and bloated with opinions about why you should follow the same path to frustration and failure. If you refuse, deviate, or even dare to question the validity of this path, your peers and friends, and sometimes employees, react violently. They mock, they criticize, they shame, they shun. It's important to remember that every critic has his own agenda, whether conscious or subconscious. Crossing the Great Divide of Advertising and Marketing The principle that what you see others doing is not necessarily what you should be doing, especially if they have a different agenda than yours, is a challenging idea. Next, I offer the even more radical and challenging idea that pretty much everything you think you know and have been conditioned to believe about marketing is wrong. Here, I'm going to expose the Great Divide. On one side, the majority of companies and business owners who are married to very traditional, mainstream, brand and name visibility-driven, largely unaccountable advertising and marketing. Most of the money invested in it is based on faith and hope. Many people think, falsely, that by using new media they are doing a new kind of marketing. In truth, they merely move the same bad advertising and flawed marketing from one place to another. Also on this side are a lot of big, dumb companies, with mixed and mixed-up agendas, with marketing media and message decisions driven by top executives' egos, by the need to impress Wall Street bankers, by the pursuit of favorable recognition in their industry. Sometimes there are legitimate in-industry political considerations. All this puts accountable return on investment low on their priorities. But for you, it probably is, or should be, priority number one. On the other side, a small, ragtag band of rebels and rogues and renegades who use direct marketing. This book will expose the Great Divide between the two. Moons ago, the greatest adman of the Mad Men era, David Ogilvie, credited us, the direct marketing rogues, with being the only people using advertising who actually knew what we were doing. He made this pronouncement despite leading a traditional ad agency, as a criticism of his own people and of his own clients. He was right then. It's truer now. Most, yes, most of what you see done in advertising and marketing is being done by people who don't know what they are doing.