Where's the Gee Wiz?

Direct marketing is not a sexy word.

Whenever I told someone that I was a direct marketer, the universal response was, “Oh, you mean direct mail.” It would drive me freaking crazy, because direct mail is only one channel of a
multi-channel/media discipline.
So I started referring to my work as direct advertising and right away, people had a better grasp of what I did.

Direct advertising is not a sexy word either, but it’s better.
Direct advertising is advertising that has clear accountability, as well as a good brand delivery. It consists of a mix of direct mail, web, TV, print, outdoor, etc.; you can even spray paint your ad on the sides of sheep, as long as you can read the results.
I'm going to focus on direct mail for this post. What a lot of people don’t realize, is how powerful direct mail is. And I’m not talking about all those postcards I receive and toss in the trash every day. We have client direct mail campaigns going right now that are doing so well that a tear of happiness runs down my cheek every time I read the reports. And on top of that they look great!

Direct mail is not a postcard.
You lose most of the advantages of direct mail by using a postcard. And the number one advantage is having all of the room you need to deliver a marketing message and ask the recipient to respond.

Good direct mail always has a well written letter.
The letter is a personal one-on-one communication that clearly explains what we are offering you, what it is, what it can do for you, how you get it. . The letter refers the reader to the support materials that are in the package like a brochure, fact sheet or reply device. Each additional piece in the direct mail package supports the brand message/offer and works with the letter to generate a response.

I refer to the letter communication as:
A logical progression of thought that leads to a specific outcome.

In addition to the letter comes the supporting material like a brochure and response card. This is where you can pay off the brand creative with a big “Gee Wiz” idea that brings in creative memory triggers and/or unique positioning. These “Gee Wiz” ideas can be carried over to the outside envelope where they break through the mail clutter (usually a bunch of postcards from your competition).
Sometimes at our agency you’ll hear someone in a creative meeting ask,
“Where’s the Gee Wiz?”

And if it’s not there, we start looking for it.

Jon

Accountability by Testing

You need early accountability to succeed.

As an agency founder with my feet firmly planted in direct marketing, I've never had a problem with being judged by the results of my work. The quicker I know that something I'm doing is not generating business for my client, the quicker I can get it fixed!
That means that not only do I need to find a way to measure the results of my advertising; I need to measure those results as early as possible.

Vision and energy...no clients
When I started Roska Direct, I had a vision and a lot of energy. What I didn't have was clients. I hauled my portfolio all around town, banging on doors and driving people crazy looking for my first big break. That break came from Marty Goodman, the national circulation manager at TV GUIDE. I honestly think that Marty gave me that first assignment just to get me off his back. The job was to create a direct mail package for new subscribers. I worked on that concept day and night for two weeks and when I presented my ideas to Marty, he liked what he saw and gave me the go ahead to finish it up for a test mailing.
I continued to work on the package day and night for another two weeks and when it was done, Marty included it in a group of test mailings.

And when the response results came back...my creative did so poorly that when it hit the ground, it left a crater. I remember walking into Marty's office after the results were in with my head down, knowing I had blown my big opportunity. Marty looked at me and said, "What's your problem? We all thought your idea was a good one, now we know it doesn't work." and he gave me another assignment!
Once again I worked day and night, applying what I had learned from the first test. When the results of the second test came in Marty told me that it had done much better, but did not beat the control. (The control is the direct mail package that generates the best results with a positive ROI) and he gave me a third assignment. The third assignment became a control position for TV GUIDE for the next four years.

Test early, test often
Marty Goodman taught me that testing early, testing often and learning from each test leads to advertising success. I was very lucky to have the opportunity to work with him.

Most advertisers don't test, they come up with what might be a very good idea, sometimes do research to validate the idea and then shoot the entire advertising budget on a campaign. They find out if the idea worked or didn't work after the ad budget has been spent. That's one of the big reasons why the average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is around 2.4 years!

Good marketers approach their job like a general approaches a battle. The general tests different parts of the enemy's lines, looking for weak spots or opportunities. When that opportunity is identified, that is where he strikes!

Test, find the opportunities and focus your resources where they will generate the best ROI.
Jon

My Secret Sauce

When your advertising is accountable...you better be good.

I know the results of every campaign we have done because as a direct marketer I test and build in accountability to prove the success (or failure) of our advertising.
Over the years I've learned what the power of incorporating good branding into direct advertising can do. I've developed and tested the techniques that allow me to "fuse" brand and direct together to create a different type of advertising.

These techniques are my "secret sauce"

Here are the ingredients:

1. Reputation - What customers and prospects are saying about your product or service.


2. Promise - The tangible attributes that your product or service deliver.


3. Vision - What customers and prospects will be or become through interaction with your product or service.


4. Response Triggers - Words and visuals that get customers and prospects to take action.


5. Memory Triggers - Words and visuals that remain with the prospects who do not react to the response triggers.


6. Individuality - A unique communication experience for each customer or prospect.


7. Accountability - A risky ingredient, but well worth it to prove success.
   

When you combine these ingredients the right way, you create my secret sauce--advertising that delivers brand and generates response.

Jon

The Annual Roska Picnic

Our annual agency picnic is fast approaching!

That means all of the trash talk emails start flying around the agency as different agency teams try to recruit or just psych-out the competition. Ed B. and I love to play horseshoes and below is our trash talk email:

Equestrian Footwear Competition
That's right folks, it's that time again.
You have a shot at beating the unbeatable, of gaining some serious bragging rights by winning a game of horseshoes against the Jon R./Ed B. Equestrian Footwear team. We've won so many games over the years that we have lost count. The only team that even came close was the Ed R. team and we came back last year and beat them so bad that Ed R. needed a sock puppet to tell his therapist what happened to him.

Spectators and challengers are invited to watch Ed B. drink gallons of beer while throwing ringer after ringer. Don't miss Jon R. insulting the competition's Mother, children and dog as he caps their last throw. Come by, take your best shot, while Jon and Ed open a can of horseshoe whoop-ass on you.

Hear Ed and Jon not only insult you and everything you hold dear in life, but as a bonus you get to hear them insult each other with disparaging remarks sure to have you cheering.

So pick your partner, get some practice and say a prayer, light a candle or dance naked around a chicken, whatever works for you. See you there!
This trash talk is brought to you by the Jon R./Ed B. Equestrian Footwear World Champion Team.

Talk to your HR department before you send trash talk emails out.

Jon

Don't Forget the Memory Trigger

“Nobody bakes a cake as tasty as a Tasty Cake!”

A great advertising man, Charlie Coffey, who I had the honor of working with for several years, once told me, “If you can’t think of anything to say about a product, sing it.”

One of his best was the Tasty Cake jingle. Once you get that little tune stuck in your head, you were condemned to replay it over and over, for the next 24 hours. Now that’s a memory trigger.

Memory triggers are a key component to incorporating brand into a direct advertising campaign. They can come in many forms, visual, music, copy and they all relate to your product, service or brand.

Take a little quiz
Here’s a list of 10 memory triggers. You tell me what brand or product they represent –

1. Blue Box
2. Duck
3. Hot Air Balloon
4. Gecko
5. Repairman with nothing to do
6. LSMFT
7. Garden Gnome
8. Rabbit
9. Cowboy
10. Zoom Zoom

All of the above are memory triggers for large, broad market brands. Their advertising budgets give them the reach and frequency to ensure that most of you will be familiar with them, (#6 is worth bonus points if you get it right). The best memory triggers relate to things that we will see, hear or encounter in our everyday lives. It doesn’t matter how big the audience is; memory triggers can make an advertising campaign better.

Memory triggers help direct advertising work better
Many of you have a finite audience and using targeted direct advertising that delivers a memory trigger that ties back to your brand will do a better job.

We are working on a direct advertising campaign right now that uses famous statues in unusual poses as the memory trigger. The visuals are very creative, easy to remember and when people see a picture of the actual statue during their everyday work or play, they will relate it back to our client’s brand on a conscious or subconscious level.

Our objective is to generate an immediate response from a portion of the target market, while leaving strong brand memory triggers with the non-responders. This will maintain or improve response from the target market during future marketing efforts.

The RPV session leads to memory trigger development
As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, clearly defining your brand reputation, promise and vision gives you the positioning statements and power words you need to focus your creative thinking. It’s not unusual for a big idea to leap out of the process and deliver a great copy line or visual. Turn that into a memory trigger and you’re creating great advertising.

Here are the answers to the quiz

1. Blue Box – Tiffany & Co., if you’re ever lucky enough to get a gift from Tiffany’s, hang
onto the box. You’ll look like a big spender when you toss a $5 pair of earrings into it
and give it as a gift. In fact, that’s probably what the person who gave you the box did!
2. Duck – Aflac Insurance
3. Hot Air Balloon – RE/MAX Realtors
4. Gecko – GEICO, the lizard is good.
5. Repairman with nothing to do – the Maytag repairman
6. LSMFT – Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco – A famous campaign from the mid 40’s.
If you got this one, you’re old.
7. Garden Gnome -- Travelocity
8. Rabbit – you get two chances to get this one right. Kix cereal, “Silly rabbit, Kix are for kids”
or the Energizer Bunny.
9. Cowboy – Marlboro Man
10. Zoom Zoom – Mazda Automobiles

Jon

The Advertising They Deserve

We get a lot of "Request for Proposal" (RFP) at the agency.

It’s the first stage of how a prospective client begins a search for a new advertising agency. They will send out a RFP to a group of agencies that they think might be a good fit with them. When the response comes in, the client will review and select several of the agencies for a meeting. Sometimes that will lead to a hire and sometimes it leads to a full agency pitch between one or two other agencies.
What a lot of potential clients may not realize is that a good advertising agency is looking at them, just as hard as they are looking at the agency! As much as a company wants a good advertising agency, a good advertising agency wants a good client.
We recently received a RFP from a company that had an unusual request in it.

Describe your ideal client and working relationship

Now you might think that this is a very common request in a RFP, but I cannot remember the last time that I have seen a request like this and it leads me to believe that this company might be a very good client. I thought I’d share our response with you --

There is a famous saying by David Ogilvy about the advertising business,

“Clients get the advertising they deserve.”

Your first impression when reading Mr. Ogilvy’s quote might be to take it as a negative comment. But let’s assume it was never meant that way and put a positive spin on it.

“Great Clients get great advertising”

When you’re a great client, everybody in the agency wants to work on your account. Creative staff put in extra hours to deliver their best work for you. Account Executives find excuses to be at your place of business. HR hints to a hot new talent they are trying to recruit that they “might” get to work on your account and Project Managers send you emails with little smiley faces at the end.

Do you want to be a great client? Just wanting to means you probably already are, but I’ll give you some inside tips that can make you even better and you’ll see the results right away.

Be the cheerleader
Your positive attitude is contagious! Great clients know that their agency will come up with the “big idea” and you’re there to help them in any way you can. One great client sent 20 pizzas to the agency with a thank you card after a successful launch. We’d take a bullet for a client like that.

Share your ideas
Let’s be honest, every idea is not a good one, but like President Reagan loved to say, “There’s got to be a pony somewhere in this manure heap.” Great clients join with the creative team and we all share in the success.

Be realistic with your schedules
If we go for it, we go for it together. Great clients make sure that their agency has everything they need to get the job done. They return phone calls and emails and if, God forbid, we miss the date by a day, thank the team for trying and for the great work.

Be open with information
We are at our best as an agency when we’re working as an extension of your marketing team. The only way for this to happen is when we know as much about your business as possible. So share as much as you can – your goals, plans, priorities, and hurdles – and invite us to your company picnic! The more your agency knows, the more they can contribute to your success.

Great clients get great advertising

Jon

Fishing Where the Fish Are

I used to fish in a lot of Bass tournaments.

It was a lot of fun, flying across the lake in my 20 ft bass boat, pushed along by a 200 Horse, fuel injected Merc engine. But I never caught a lot of fish because I could never figure out where the fish were! I read in a fishing magazine that 80% of the fish were in 20% of the lake. The problem was that they were very big lakes.

Advertising has the same challenge. 80% of your customers are in 20% of the country, or marketing channels, or media.

I once gave a presentation before an audience of around 1000 marketers and I asked if anyone in the audience had a $100 million or more ad budget to work with, no hands were raised. “What about $50 million,” I asked, and two people raised their hands. I didn’t see more than ten hands go up until I dropped below $10 million and the vast majority of hands rose when I hit $3 million or less.

When you have a limited budget, and I’ll make a safe bet and say, ‘That means you.” you cannot afford to waste one dollar on advertising to people that will never buy your product or service. You must fish where the fish are.

Now I may not be a very good fisherman, but I’m a pretty good marketer and I’m going to tell you how to find out where your prospects are.

A best customer profile
You start by clearly identifying the characteristics of your best customer, we call this a “Best Customer Profile” (BCP). How old are they? Gender? Where do they live? How much education? Do they have children? How old? Pets? Hobbies? Income? Etc.
The same technique is used if you’re a business marketer. Look at your business customers and identify your BCP.

You then start looking for prospects that match your BCP. In our agency we have mapping software that allows you to overlay all of the different best customer values and
you begin to see the areas where your prospects are that match up with your BCP. We call these areas “Opportunity Zones”. They are where you want to focus your limited marketing budget to get the most bang for your buck.

Here’s an example of how this technique worked very successfully for a client.
In 1997 we launched PetFoodDirect.com (PFD), a dot.com start-up that sold pet products. PFD had a marketing budget of around $5 million.

At the same time Pets.com launched a competitive operation with a marketing budget of over $100 million. Pets.com hired a big, broad market advertising agency and started spending money like a drunken sailor on a Saturday night. They created the Sock Puppet mascot and ran TV spots all over the country, including Super Bowl ads.

We did our homework.
23% of all the pet owning households in the USA, with a household income of $50,000 or higher, and a wife and two kids are located down the I-95 corridor between Connecticut and Carolina. And guess what? 80% of all pet product purchases are made by females. We knew what our Best Buyer Profile was and we knew where our best prospects were.

We targeted 100% of our marketing efforts on those pet owning women who lived in that small part of the country and had the money to pay for the product.

Long story made short, PetFoodDirect.com today is the largest, web-only pet product site in the country. Pets.com went bankrupt after a few years and the last I heard, the Sock Puppet was shilling loans out of an alley in Las Vegas.

Fish where the fish are.

Jon