#81 Junk Mail P.R. Campaign

Issue #81 — Monday, January 20, 2020

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2020/01/81-junk-mail-pr-campaign.html

Posted by Denny Hatch

The Great "Junk Mail" Spat and
A Fascinating P.R. Campaign

First Used in 1950-1955, the Term “Junk Mail” Was

Universally Hated by the Direct Marketing Industry

Before the 1990s Internet did not exist.

     In those years, more money was spent on direct mail than any other advertising medium. More money than TV. More than Telemarketing. More than print advertising. More than radio, billboards and skywriting.

     Six days a week our mailboxes were stuffed with catalogs, letters, jumbo postcards and lumpy mailings of all shapes and sizes—consumer, business and non-profit.

Okay, Junk Mail Kills Trees and

Inundates Our Landfills... But...

At the same time it was one of the great engines that fueled America’s multi-trillion dollar economy.

     What’s more, during the 1950s—when the term “junk mail” was invented— direct mail was so profitable for the U.S. Postal Service it meant you and I could send a First-Class letter or greeting card anywhere in the country—including Puerto Rico, Hawaii and American Samoa—for just 4¢!
     (Compare the 4¢ cost for a First Class stamp to today's price of 55¢. Even with sky-high pricing, the USPS lost $8.8 billion in 2019!)

“Junk Mail” Drove the Industry Nuts!

     Any time the words “junk mail” appeared in the media, outraged people in the industry canceled their subscriptions to every magazine or newspaper that used the term.

    In addition, they wrote furious letters to Congress insisting the term should be outlawed in the English language.

     When I was publishing the WHO’S MAILING WHAT! newsletter, I would periodically use the term “junk mail” just to see how many hate letters and phone calls I would receive.

The Industry Strikes Back!

Ed Roll, Chairman of the Direct Mail Marketing Association (DMMA) and his board decided a P.R. campaign was needed to convince Congress that Direct Mail was really and truly a good thing for consumers, businesses and the economy. 
     Ed Roll hired the highest-paid direct mail creative team in the world—Bill Jayme and designer Heikki Ratalahti—to come up with an opulent personalized mailing to members of Congress touting the moral, spiritual and financial benefits of direct mail.

Bill Jayme and Heikki Ratalahti

BTW, Bill Jayme Loved Calling It “Junk Mail!"

      Jayme expressed his real feelings about “junk mail” in an interview he did for my WHO’S MAILING WHAT! newsletter many years ago. Jayme said:

     “I don't understand why the industry hates the term junk mail.

     “I love it.

     “After all, antique dealers love junk shops. Old car enthusiasts love junk yards. Until a few years ago, Wall Street loved junk bonds. Who among us doesn't love to head for the beach with a pile of junk fiction? And what's a Hong Kong fisherman without his beloved junk?

     “Junk is a wonderful word.

     “Of course, in Heikki's and my case, we spell it “junque.”

That said, Bill and Heikki—whose current rate for a direct mail package was $20,000 to $40,000 ($175,000 to $350,000 in 2019 dollars)—were delighted to come up with an unbelievably expensive mailing to roughly 1,000 members of Congress plus other government and business officials.

     As a “thank you” to the industry that was making them rich, Jayme-Ratalahti worked pro-bono.

Bill and Heikki’s Extraordinary Anti-junk-mail Mailing

The mailing went out First Class in a 9” x 12” envelope with bunch of live postage stamps plastered in the upper right hand corner. Open the envelope, and here’s what comes out:

Open this cover and a personalized letter to each Congressman and Senator literally falls out:

This is a textbook direct mail letter:

      • Personalized envelope

      • Personalized salutation*

      • Blue ink signature—the guy’s real signature, not a phony type font.

      • “Short words! Short sentences! Short Paragraphs.”

           —Andrew J Byrne, Freelance copywriter.

Bill Jayme’s Text for the Rest of the Mailing—

A Paean to the Joys of Receiving Direct Mail!

THOSE OF US in the business call it direct response advertising. The Postal Service calls it Third Class Mail. But you probably call all of those letters junk mail, and sometimes, how right you are:

     The circular that announces a sale on lawnmowers when you live high up in an apartment house. The invitation that asks you to try a magazine you’ve been subscribing to for years. The prospectus for retirement home properties addressed to you son … when your son is four months old.

SURE, WE MAIL advertisers make mistakes. Doesn’t everybody at times? But stop a moment. Consider. Think of the many nice things your mailbox does for you daily.

     It brings you catalogues that give you the fun of choosing ahead, from your armchair, gifts for the holidays and special occasions. Catalogues that let you plan next Spring’s garden while snow may be still on the ground. Catalogues that let you mull over new wardrobes, new appliances, new home furnishings, new cars, new toys, new gadgets.

     Direct mail lets you buy vitamins and medicines almost wholesale. Insurance and mutual funds direct. Records and books at discount. Magazines at reduced rates. Less expensive film processing.

     It lets you buy cheaper all sorts of delicacies your local stores may not stock. Apples fresh from Oregon. Lobsters live from Maine. Florida oranges. Wisconsin cheeses, Georgia pecans. Vermont maple syrup, Virginia hams, Texas grapefruit, wines from California, New York, Europe.
 

IT BRINGS ALL kinds of useful enclosures, from pennies to ball point pens. Seed packets. Christmas seals. Soap samples. Toothpastes. Cosmetics. Coupons that knock a dime or so off prices at the supermarket and drugstore. Chances at sweepstakes prizes. Photograph booklets about places to vacation. Art reproductions you can frame.

     It brings you notice of private sales at your department and clothing stores. Announcements of new shops, new services, new products.  News of adult education courses, lectures, concerts, house tours, theatre productions, sports events, charter flights.

     It brings appeals that let you help support museums, schools, universities, libraries, hospitals, churches, charities. Appeals that let you help save our wildlife, our open spaces, our environment. Appeals that let you help fight heart disease, mental illness, cancer. It helps you get to know political candidates. It also helps get out the vote.
 

ON DAYS WHEN the postman fails to deliver what you’ve really been waiting for—the check, postcard, note from the folks—an advertising letter can put a smile back on the day. Anything beats an empty mailbox. And on days when you’re just too busy, no advertising is easier to get rid of:

     Letters don’t make you sit through a dozen or more commercials when you’re trying to hear on a talk show what Dr. Margaret Mead has to say. Letters don’t keep interrupting when you’re trying to listen to the news.

LETTERS DON’T fast-talk you into buying something you may not want just so you can get out of the store. They give you time to think. Have a seat. Talk it over. Sleep on it. It’ll still be there in the morning. Same merchandise. Same offer. Same price.

     Letters don’t block your view of the scenery. Letters don’t blink on and off. Letters don’t make you answer the door just after you’ve stepped into the shower. And letters don’t make you dream up excuses to get the man off the phone. (Our favorite: “I’ve got to hang up now. The telephone is ringing.”)

     If ever a letter isn’t of interest—if it bores, intrudes, offends—all you have to do to make it vanish is throw it into the scrap basket.

     In most cases today, direct response advertising is delivered to your home pre-cancelled, pre-zip coded, pre-bundled—no extra trouble, says the Postal Service. And according to the Government’s own figures, Third Class more than pays its own way:

     In fact, direct response advertising helps make it possible for you to send a lengthy letter to a friend or relative hundreds, thousands of miles away for less than the time you pay to call up a neighbor next door!

NOT SO BAD as you may previously have thought is it—this business of Third Class mail. And in fairness, isn’t it time we all stopped calling it “junk”? We think so. We hope you do too.

P.S. A Bit of Trivia

Senator John V. Tunney (1934-2018)—who's letter is illustrated above—was the son of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney. He beat the legendary "Manassa Mauler”—Jack Dempsey—in the heavily disputed 1927 championship match forever known as “The Long Count.” 

Takeaways to Consider

• My opinion: this mailing was a colossal waste.

• As I recall, Bill Jayme gave me this mailing for my massive WHO’S MAILING WHAT! Archive. I scanned it. Whereupon I added it to the file of thousands of original mailings from 1982 to 2017. These were destroyed by the new owners of my little company in 2018, because this collection took up so much space.

• Neither the Tunney letter nor the Jayme copy mentions a reply mechanism and the copy gives no reason to reply and does not ask for one.

• This is nuts.

• Okay, it was a P.R. effort—an attempt to influence thinking rather than sell a product or service and ask for an order.

• Quite simply, if you send out a mailing and do not give a reason for a reply, nobody will respond.

• If the great semi-truck carrying bags of mail from the printer to the USPS Distribution Center went over a cliff and into the ocean, no one would know it.

• No response means you have no way of knowing if the mailing indeed went out or if anybody bothered to read it.

• In short, always, always, always ask for a response of some kind—via an order form, 800 number (with telephone reps standing by), a survey or a URL that takes the recipient to a dedicated landing page.

• Otherwise, the mailing is a total waste. Or a total bomb. Either way, you'd want to know for sure.

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#79 How to Avoid Writer's Block

Issue #79 – Tuesday, January 6, 2020

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2020/01/79-how-to-avoid-writers-block.html

Posted by Denny Hatch

How to Avoid Writer’s Block:

Getting Started Is Often the Hardest Part.

The New Yorker's 
Dorothy Parker.

Above is a wire to her editor, Pat Covici, at Viking Press. 
June 28, 1945




It’s a bitch when you’re staring at a computer screen and the words won’t come to you.

     I’ll say this at the outset. If I find myself struggling for thoughts and words, it takes me a few minutes to remember I am tired—probably from a lousy night’s sleep or not leaving a cork too long in the bottle lest the contents spoil.

     I don’t fight it. I quit and start again when rested.  —Denny Hatch 

Robert Benchley (1889-1945), 
Grandfather of 
Peter (JAWS) Benchley.

Benchley was a polymath—humorist, drama critic, film actor and newspaper columnist. 
     One day—under tight deadline and with a severe hangover—Benchley was sitting at the little desk in his room at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. He stared and stared at a blank piece of paper in his typewriter. To get started he typed the word "The."

     Benchley arose from his chair, walked to the window overlooking West 44^th Street and then glanced at his watch.

     His gang of regulars was assembling for the splendid daily lunch of booze and bon mots at the legendary Round Table downstairs. Among them: Dorothy Parker, Groucho and Harpo Marx, George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, New Yorker editor Harold Ross, Algonquin owner Frank Case and others.

     Benchley returned to the typewriter and stared at "The" for a long time. In a burst of inspiration he completed the sentence.

     It read, "The hell with it."

     Whereupon he took the elevator down to join the party.

From John McPhee’s

Letter To a Distraught Former Student 

\

Dear Joel [Achenbach of The Washington Post]:

     You are writing, say, about a grizzly bear. No words are forthcoming. For six, seven, ten hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere, and that's where you've been getting. What do you do?

     You write, 'Dear Mother.' And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper. You outline your problem, and you mention that the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat.

     You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rests fourteen hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can.

     And then you go back and delete the 'Dear Mother' and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.

—John McPhee (b. 1934), Draft No. 4, The Writing Life (The New Yorker)

Ted Nicholas on Getting Started

Ted Nicholas is one of the great entrepreneurs, publishers, teachers and writers in the world of direct marketing. Here's his advice to copywriters and, by extension, to all writers:

     Clear your mind. 
     For some persons, this might mean lying down for a few minutes before going to work.

     For others, it could mean jumping in the pool or jogging around a track.

     Frolic, spend time with someone you love or go dancing. Do whatever comes naturally to you in order to have a clear mind for creative purposes.

     Never write when you're tired. You're not going to try to drive or operate machinery when you're tired. Don't try to write if you're fatigued.

     Never write when you're busy. If there are other demands pressing on you, tend to them first. I don't think anyone can write well when watching the clock. Don't try to write if you have appointments later in the day or errands to run.

    Don't write in bits and pieces. Once you've turned on your creative energy, you need to keep it flowing. I don't stop until I complete a draft. I try not to stop even for meals.

—Ted Nicholas, (né Nick Peterson, b. 1934),  The Golden Mailbox

 Gene Schwartz and His Kitchen Timer Secret

 

Gene Schwartz's powerful direct mail copy sold millions of dollars-worth of books (many published by himself). His Breakthrough Advertising is must-read for direct response copywriters.

     Gene once told me to get a kitchen timer and set it on the desk next to me.

     Then hit 4-4-4-4. That's forty-four minutes, forty-four seconds. During that period, all you do is work—write, do research, deal with correspondence, design, whatever.

     When the timer goes off, get up and shut the alarm sound off. Take a break. Walk around, stretch, get a cup of coffee, clear your head.

     When you're ready to go back to work, hit the 4-4-4-4 button again and dive in.

—Eugene Schwartz (1927-1995)

    

Ernest Hemingway on the Mechanics of Writing.

When Ernest Hemingway finished writing a novel, he would stick the manuscript in a drawer and go deep-sea fishing, hunting in Africa or attend bullfights in Spain with Ava Gardner. On his return several weeks (or months) later, he would read the book with fresh eyes and immediately see where he went off the rails and what needed work.

     Most of us under deadline do not have this kind of time. However, if you can lay aside a piece of writing for 12 or 24 hours or longer and then go back to it for edits and rewrites, it can be beneficial. Hemingway wrote:

     I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day...

     I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day.

     That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.

—Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), A Movable Feast

  





Tom Wolfe on an
Early Effort

The piece about car customizers in Los Angeles was the first magazine piece I ever wrote. I was totally blocked. I now know what writer’s block is. It’s the fear you cannot do what you’ve announced to someone else you can do, or else the fear that it isn’t worth doing. That’s a rarer form. In this case I suddenly realized I’d never written a magazine article before and I just felt I couldn’t do it. Well, [Byron] Dobell somehow shamed me into writing down the notes that I had taken in my reporting on the car customizers so that some competent writer could convert them into a magazine piece. I sat down one night and started writing a memorandum to him as fast as I could, just to get the ordeal over with. It became very much like a letter that you would write to a friend in which you’re not thinking about style, you’re just pouring it all out, and I churned it out all night long, forty typewritten, triple-spaced pages. I turned it in in the morning to Byron at Esquire, and then I went home to sleep. About four that afternoon I got a call from him telling me, Well, we’re knocking the “Dear Byron” off the top of your memo, and we’re running the piece.

—Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) From an interview with The Paris Review
 

 Ray Bradbury, Master of Science Fiction, Horror, Fantasy et al.

Now, what I’m thinking of is, people always saying “Well, what do we do about a sudden blockage in your writing? What if you have a blockage and you don’t know what to do about it?” Well, it’s obvious you’re doing the wrong thing, don’t you? In the middle of writing something you go blank and your mind says: “No, that’s it.” Ok. You’re being warned, aren’t you? Your subconscious is saying “I don’t like you anymore. You’re writing about things I don’t give a damn for. ”You’re being political, or you’re being socially aware. You’re writing things that will benefit the world. To hell with that! I don’t write things to benefit the world. If it happens that they do, swell. I didn’t set out to do that. I set out to have a hell of a lot of fun.
     I’ve never worked a day in my life. I’ve never worked a day in my life. The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year. I want you to envy me, my joy. Get out of here tonight and say: ‘Am I being joyful?’ And if you’ve got a writer’s block, you can cure it this evening by stopping whatever you’re writing and doing something else. You picked the wrong subject.  
—Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), from the keynote address at the Writer’s Symposium by the Sea.

 Short Takeaways

• A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.

—E.B. White (1899-1985)

• What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks, “the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.” And it might be just the most boring awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, “Okay. Okay. I’ll come.”

—Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

• Over the years, I’ve found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below; I will be there to write.

—Norman Mailer (1923-2007), the Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on writing.

• Don’t get it right, just get it written.

     —James Thurber (1894-1961)

• The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.

     —Anne Tyler (b. 1941)

• Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.

     —William Faulkner (1897-1962)

• Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

     —Samuel Beckett (2906-1989)

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