Another giant is gone.
Bob Stone, a self-described “depression kid” who co-founded one of the great direct marketing ad agencies, died last month at 88.
Author of the standard industry text “Successful Direct Marketing Methods,” he took it upon himself to mentor young DMers.
Stone, who studied marketing at Northwestern University's night school, was hired by newsletter publisher National Research Bureau in the early 1940s to start a direct mail unit. In three years, 70% of the firm's sales were by mail, he said in a 1997 interview.
But back then there was no way to dedupe a list. And big agencies avoided mail because they weren't commissioned on it.
Eventually, that left an opening for shops like Stone & Adler, the DR agency co-founded by Stone and Aaron Adler. It pulled in clients like Polaroid.
“We approached them with an idea: That they could establish a separate profit center and sell cameras by mail,” Stone said. Soon Polaroid was selling up to 1 million $40 cameras every six months.
Next, “Hewlett came to us with a Project X, the first scientific pocket calculator. It sold for $395. Within two years, they were doing over $30 million worth of business via mail order.”
Who were Stone's heroes? One was lettershop owner Homer Buckley, who once headed what is now the Direct Marketing Association and is widely credited with inventing the term direct mail.
“I called and asked to see him,” Stone recalled. “He became my mentor.”
Another was Robert Collier, who “came up with 10-day pre-trial guarantees — all the things we use today.”
Collier once had “a bunch of black raincoats that he couldn't sell worth a damn,” Stone recalled. “So he got a list of undertakers and sold out the entire stock. It was a lesson I never forgot.”
