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ROI is not a trendy business buzzword. It’s fundamental to marketing success. And who knows return on investment better than direct and digital marketers?

We keep hearing about big data. Marketers are (finally) delving into their customer files to learn what really works. They are using direct marketing unique predictive abilities and running the numbers on their programs before they...

Digital and direct marketers talk about measurement. We like to brag about measuring everything we do at every step along the way. We’re hearing more about “big data” every day. The implication being that we have more information than we know what to do with.

Some marketers forget that we can do so much more with the data when we have a good idea what it means. We need a...

You’d be amazed by what you can learn about direct marketing in your neighborhood grocery store, or even under your kitchen sink.

Take, for example, oh I don’t know… pest control products?  Your relationship with said items may not be as intimate as mine was when I lived in a tiny studio apartment in a Hell’s Kitchen walk-up, but back then I didn’t appreciate...

Postal officials have said that, without help, the USPS will default on several payments to the federal government and will be $10 billion in the red as of September 2011. They have already stopped contributing to the Federal Employee Retirement System account and are now targeting 120,000 jobs for layoffs by 2015. The Postal Service also wants to increase postage rates, reduce delivery days, increase...

The “convergence marketing” session at DMA 2011 by Richard Rosen reminded me of a tweet I read yesterday that said “it looks like direct marketers are more concerned about brand than general agencies are.”

Rosen is talking about taking the best of brand and direct and converging these two disciplines.

The Rosen Velocity Scale that shows the convergence is a...

Jennifer Schulties, Senior Marketing Manager at Martha Stewart Living and Keith Bergendorff of Publishers Clearing House Analytical Services talked about predictive modeling solutions in a single model in a DMA 2011 session I attended today.

They call it lifecycle modeling across channels for acquisition and retention.

My take? They are in a difficult place.

Schulties laid out...

The highlight for me so far at the DMA 2011 conference was the interactive breakout panel after the keynote address this morning.

Gary Vaynerchuk from Vayner Media said, “Managing acquisition has been fine-tuned to a science.  Brands are struggling with retention."

I don’t want to sound too self-serving here, but this statement reminded me of where Hacker Group was...

Lawrence Kimmel, CEO DMA, began his DMA 2011 keynote with an engaging visual illustrating the convergence of limited time and technology. The time is always now. (Of course the theme of the conference is real-time marketing. So no surprise there!) He is setting up the conference for capturing those transformational moments with ideas shared, meetings that changes the course of your business. We...

‘Tis the season, folks, and retailers are gearing up. A few including Macy’s and Toys ‘R Us are anticipating an uptick in demand this year, but overall the seasonal hiring outlook is looking less than bright....

Just read an article in Target Marketing about an MIT research paper called Modeling Customer Lifetimes with Multiple Causes of Churn. (I haven’t...

Another book I recently finished is Winning Ugly: Mental Warfare in Tennis – Lessons from a Master.

I am terrible at tennis and don’t really play much. But, this is the best business strategy book I have read. Seriously....

I just finished reading Luke Sullivan’s Hey Whipple Squeeze This: A guide to creating great advertising 

I was drawn to the book for several reasons: 

• First, the title is great. I know I shouldn’t judge...

In advertising, if you don’t take risks, then how can you be innovative? A client of ours took a very big risk with their advertising campaign earlier this year. Rather than pull it when it didn’t appear to live up to its promise, they let it ride. After all, advertising is all about impressions and sometimes it takes a little time before you see real results.

Since we are the...

I was a freshman in college when I learned one of the most valuable lessons in business, and it came from an unlikely source. It was the summer of 1983 and I was earning five bucks an hour on the retail floor at the SuperRunner’s Shop, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The legendary running store is owned by Gary Muhrcke, winner of the first New York City Marathon and a patriarch of the...

When I tell people I work for a marketing agency, it sounds pretty cool. People get that Mad Men image in their mind’s eye. Yes, I work with some very creative individuals. And I confess I enjoy seeing the great work our creative team does for our clients.

But what I’ve learned again and again over the years is that targeting your audience is what really gets spectacular...

A couple of recent articles have reinforced my closely held beliefs about marketing. And isn’t that one of the biggest reasons why we read articles?  I love having my biases fed as much as the next guy.

One of those articles was about how “ugly” often works in marketing. Robert...

Just read a post called “Do you want real-time or timely data?” (BTW, I’d have commented on the post, but I don’t remember how to sign in. When are “they” going to fix that particular annoyance?)

The author argues that only “very rarely”...

The Postal Service continues to push to implement five-day delivery during FY 2011. By eliminating Saturday delivery, the Postal Service estimates annual savings of $3.1 billion.  For this to happen, Congress must not enact an FY 2011 appropriations bill requiring six-day delivery.   As part of this process the Postal Service presented their proposal to the Postal Regulatory Commission...

As a child of the ‘70s, I grew up watching Underdog. I was fascinated by that elusive mouse, Savoir Faire. He “is everywhere,” impossible for Klondike Kat, one of Underdog’s entourage, to pin down. Marketers these days may feel a lot like Klondike Kat trying to find customers. They really are “everywhere,” as research continues to point to ubiquity in the media...

I am fascinated by social media. How is it that by exposing your thoughts and opinions publicly, they are so often transformed?

When I read LinkedIn and see people I know recommending people I know they know, but I also know they don’t like, it really gets my goat. Why would your opinion change when it becomes public?  Likely it’s for the same reason that marketers shouldn’t...

Major trends in advertising are visible. Advertisers want us to know that they care about us, their consumers, our health and our happiness. They even want to show us the personality of their employees. The people behind the potato chips, for example, have families of their own and care about nutritional value of their product.

I think it’s fascinating to see the mass media endeavoring...

In this technology age, now more than ever, new media offer a plethora of opportunities to measure. Yet, according to the August 2010 CMO Survey, joint-sponsored by the Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association, while marketers say they value metrics, they admit to doing a lackluster job of it.

For example, the survey states that...

After reaching the end of a marketing campaign, how do you know if your efforts made a difference?  Can you simply take credit for all those sales?  Can you assure yourself that the sales truly happened due to your marketing? 

One method we insist on using at Hacker Group is a never-mailed control group – a group that lets you stay in control of your results and take...

It’s easy nowadays to forget that, while staying ahead of the digital curve, we still need to know what’s going on in the physical world. Here are a few updates pertinent to marketers from the US Postal Service.

BMC no longer:The USPS continues the switch in terminology from BMC (Bulk Mail Center) to NDC (Network Distribution Center). The locations and...

I recently talked to the executive team of a prominent financial services organization discussing their plans to upgrade their customer profile from beginner to advanced user.

While seeing higher transaction frequency, higher average dollar values per customer and a higher lifetime customer value seem like obvious goals, this isn’t a gimme. Other competitors want the same thing and...

Human beings love categorizing. It must be our survival instinct. You see something and you need to know: Friend or foe? Predator or prey? (My dogs get confused on these issues quite a bit. Thank goodness they don’t live in the wild.)

Human beings hate being categorized. When you put people in a box based on age, gender or skin color you’re going to annoy them –...

Medicare marketing specialists are clearing their throats, revving their engines and getting ready to get ready for the influx of Boomers  who will be turning 65 starting in 2011. We have heard all the speculation about Boomers’ attitudes, their hopes and dreams, their innermost insecurities and their dedication to their grandchildren.

What’s implied in all of these articles...

Just found this quote from Steve Jobs on my recent AMA MarketingPower newsletter.

"It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them."

Darn right, Steve. I would even go a step further....

The Chinese have an animal name for each year, but I proclaim that 2009 was the Year of the Ostrich. Hallelujah and jubilation, it is almost over. I work in Business Development here at Hacker and have been in sales and marketing for more years than I like to admit. This has been the roughest year in my memory and has been called the toughest since the headline appeared October 30, 1929, “WALL...

Nobody likes to be labeled, but everyone loves putting labels on other people. Baby boomers, Gen X, Millenials. You can’t avoid the label. You can only say, "Wait a minute. I’m not like that."

Here’s a commentary on MediaPost that tells us about the motivations and feelings...

We may not be in a real depression (yet), but a lot of marketers could use some Zoloft about now. Customer attrition is throwing a wrench in our plans for the quarter, if not the year.

My usual take on things is to see the glass as half full -- but it seems pretty empty. New leads and new customers are certainly harder to come by and churn is depleting the base. It’s become even more...

Targeting, segmenting, media planning . . . all those things are tailor-made for spreadsheet junkies, right?

We’re so darned rational in the marketing world. At least when we’re explaining what we do to clients. We do all this research, you see. Qualitative, quantitative, all of it. We mine your customer database and overlay somebody else’s database and see what shakes...

Yet another survey of marketers has shown that they are unable or unwilling to measure marketing return on investment. This time the information comes from The Conference Board in a report called Managing and Measuring Return on Marketing Investment.

I don’t doubt...

We’re all being a lot more careful with our budgets in 2009 -- consumers and businesses alike.

"Do more with less" is back in style with CFOs everywhere. Argh.

I have a proposal for you: Use some of your marketing budget for split testing -- even if that budget is smaller this year. In fact, do it especially if your budget has shrunk.

Multivariate testing...

I attended the Good and Green Conference last week. I’d love to sum up what I got out of it . . . but I haven’t quite reached a pithy conclusion yet.

One thing was confirmed to me about marketers that I hesitate to discuss in this post -- because it’s negative and I met such lovely people in Chicago. But I’ve made this knock...

I like stuff a lot. And I like a lot of stuff. I imagine other people do, too. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was George Carlin who said that "home is where you keep your stuff, while you’re out getting other stuff."

Knowing that, it was hard to keep a straight face when I read in Adweek that a...

At a certain point, people stop believing your messages. For banks, that day has arrived. For political candidates . . . well, I have to think their time for "setting the record straight" may have come and gone. The hysteria has reached a fever pitch and cynicism is everywhere. No one believes anything that doesn’t match their pre-conceived ideas about the candidates.

If you’re...

Buy low. Sell high. Now that’s wisdom for the ages.

It’s pretty clear we’re going to be hitting bottom in the economy one day soon.  And we may be hanging out at the bottom for a while.

That’s an opportunity to buy.  As a marketer, you may be able to pick up market share on the cheap.  But it takes guts.  You have to believe you’re...

I have hope that one day general advertisers and direct marketers will speak the same language.  That day is not yet here—but we're getting closer.  In a July 7 article in Ad Age about the changing consumer market, Peter Francese said:

In the...

So many marketers are still caught up in old school marketing, where the goal is to drive someone from unawareness to ''awareness'' and, finally, all the way to ''brand liking.''  Or something like that.  There may be an ''intent to buy'' after that.

A post on Advertising Age fine-tunes this a bit further.  Between liking and...

Life is a trade-off.  My dad used to say, ''You can do anything you want.  You just can't do everything you want.''  Saying yes to one thing means saying no to many, many others.  It makes logical sense, but just about everyone still has trouble with it.

EMarketer.com came out with an

 ...Often creative directors and designers are invited to join the fun.  Copywriters and art directors get together and brainstorm.  Generating ideas on the creative side of an agency is almost always a team sport.

The June 10 Wall Street Journal had an article about how six cable companies have developed new technology that will help advertisers better target TV watchers.

I think this is great news -- both as a marketer and as a TV watcher.  If I'm going to spend money...

One of my favorite marketing challenges is helping our clients find new customers.  But in an economic downturn we can't forget the enormous problem of losing current customers.

Formerly loyal customers can be tempted away by a competitor's lower prices. They may even decide to forego your product or service altogether, if the value proposition isn't clear to them anymore.  It's...

I hope your Memorial Day celebration was full of fun and kicked off summer with just the right amount of verve.

I read in last week's New York Times that tourism marketers are nervous about getting your travel dollars and are changing tactics to...

If a commercial gives you goosebumps, are you more likely to buy the product?  If your palms sweat, does it mean you're going to reach for your wallet?

Disney thinks so -- and I'll bet they're right, if they're talking about entertainment advertising.  Nothing is worse than going to a movie that doesn't arouse your emotions.  Most of us figure that if the trailer doesn't do...

A nice article in Strategy + Business, a Booz Allen Hamilton publication, lays out the recent history of marketing measurement in a straightforward, unbiased way.  I admit to being very biased toward metrics that are about outcomes rather than inputs.

Christopher Vollmer,...

What is it about fast food that makes people think corporations ought to sacrifice profits for creativity? 

I talked about Wendy's decision to (finally) pull their ads featuring a guy in a red wig a couple of months ago in The Madison Avenue Journal.  Now

Just read an interesting Ad Age CMO Strategy piece on "Why Consumers May Never Be the Same" after the recession.

The author, Eric Spahr, talks about how to figure out consumers. And he suggests observation, rather than focus groups. Here's what he said:

Consumers...

This month the CMO Council came out with a new report suggesting that marketers are "struggling with amassing and strategically applying data and customer insights to effect substantive business growth and strategic gain."

In other words, they don't know their own customers well enough to keep them --...

Ever since the beginning of online advertising, marketers have been trying to get a grip on measurement. We can all agree that there are too many data points to absorb and act on, if we're going to retain our sanity.

It's old news that click-through rates are not the key. (Marketers started saying that just about the time when click-throughs started dropping through the floor.)

Brandweek...

You must remember Charlie Brown's saying, "I love mankind. It's people I can't stand."

I love statistics, it's analysis I can't stand.

It drives me nuts that people derive their own conclusions that basically just prove their own point when looking at data. And when the "data" isn't that great to begin with, the conclusions just get wackier.

What got me...

In many organizations, sales and marketing report to the same executive leader or are even in the same department, but they rarely seem to be on the same team. When things aren't going as smoothly as desired, the finger-pointing begins.

"Sales just doesn't care about maintaining our standards on branding or lead generation."

"Marketing couldn't sell their way out...

The articles about marketing mind-readers are starting to scare me a little. Brandweek just published another one . . . this time about using hypnosis in focus groups.

Why...

I do a lot of traveling and I've finally come to terms with haggling with street vendors. I used to just say "Okay!" (universal language) when I heard the price of something I wanted. I'd hand over the lira or pesos or whatever and be done with it. My husband took the opposite approach. He'd start out offering half the asked-for price. It was muy dificil for me to keep a poker...

Brand.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a direct guy. If the writing, the creative, the offer, the strategy all aren't working on a particular, identifiable individual to take a particular action that...

We started working on it last year. We've come up with several ways to reduce our clients' impact on the environment without a huge hit to their budgets. We call it our green best practices.

Our goal is to compensate for our own office's carbon footprint through all...

...The results found that marketers overgeneralize, misrepresent and sometimes ignore the generation, lumping them together and, in the process, alienating them.

Apparently those wacky Boomers don't like the generalizations made about them any more than Gen Xers or Millennials do. Nobody knew...

People found it offensive. I have to admit, it struck me as going a little too far when I saw it during the game.

The guy who wrote the commercial, Vinod Gupta, owns the company. He's a direct marketer...

In the "post-game analysis" of the ads,...

That was the big question on Monday when Wendy's International gave their fourth-quarter report on a conference call to stock analysts. When the analysts start asking about your marketing strategy, it's got to hurt.

The honest answer would have to be that they have no idea how good their new advertising...

My view is that this is almost always a vanity play — often on the part of both advertiser and agency. I guess ego is as good a reason as any to follow a particular strategy . . . unless you have a good faith responsibility to do your best to bring in a profit for your company....

Around here, we question everything. It can get a little annoying. But in the long run it's the best thing for our clients. Here are some of the questions I've heard in the last week:

• What would it take to...

This time we got a number of other account people involved to share what's working with their clients — so that we could use that information on behalf of a specific client who's...

Many, many years ago, I worked for a software company as a marketing copywriter. The vast majority of people there were software engineers. The business owner was, too. She's a brilliant woman and I learned a...

Now we must be multi-channel marketers. There's no choice in the matter. It's to the point where it's just about impossible to depend...

They say their "premise is that 85 percent of brand purchases are made by women." And yet the agency's founders claim women are "often not influenced...

Everyone's talking about the environment here in Chicago at the DMA. But is anything really happening?

After the first full day of the conference, we've certainly gotten an earful about going green. There were lunches and breakout sessions. John Greco announced 15 green initiatives on behalf of the DMA itself in a keynote address.

Those of us here from Hacker Group were ready to fill...

I wish I could say we were perfect.  We'd love to have Hacker...