Boxing records do not mention a heavyweight contender named Kid Velvet. But Lester Wunderman remembers him.
The Kid was fast and smooth. But one night he found himself being cuffed around by the champion, and for the first time he had to display some real punch.
As Lester put it, he had to prove he had an iron fist in his velvet glove.
Direct marketers have to do the same thing, said Lester, speaking at DMD New York. And what is their velvet glove? The slickness that they borrowed from the general ad world. Their iron fist? Measurability.
Only Lester Wunderman could make that metaphor work. But he did during his 30-minute keynote. And he offered up some episodes from his own career to further illustrate the point.
For example, there was the time that the McCann Erickson agency tried to compete with the Wunderman agency for its Columbia House account. McCann was a general shop, and had little use for response mechanisms.
McCann argued that it would do a better job than Wunderman with a TV campaign to support Columbia House’s print advertising.
The two agencies each took 13 equivalent test markets. Each did both print and TV ads.
McCann bought 300 to 400 gross rating points in prime time television in each market, outspending Wunderman by 400%.
Wunderman’s print ad featured a simple gold box that looked like a design element. "Our ad was examined by the McCann group and no one questioned it," Wunderman said.
That was their first mistake. "Our television commercial told viewers to look for our ads in TV Guide and Parade," Wunderman continued. "They would find a ‘gold box’ at the bottom of the coupon. If they put the number of an additional record on it, they could have it free."
Guess who won?
McCann bought "300 to 400 gross rating points in prime time television in each of its markets," Wunderman said. "We bought far fewer;, and our buys were in less expensive fringe time. As a result, McCann outspent us by 400% in their markets."
What’s more, Wunderman’s ads pulled.
"Even though we spent far fewer TV dollars, our Gold Box spots increased the results for the print ad by 89% in our markets, while McCann’s increased the results in theirs by 19.5%," Wunderman noted. "Every market supported by the Gold Box was profitable."
Columbia House executives conceded the point in a memo: "Not only did the Wunderman campaign increase application response; it did so at a lower overall cost per application."
How does direct marketing stack up now?
"The key difference between the two forms of advertising is that direct marketing is not the advertiser-to-consumer monologue of general advertising," Wunderman said. "We direct marketers don’t want to just talk at our prospects and customers, we want to create a conversation, a dialogue of exchange of means and needs."
He added that "we have to invite the conversation with advertising that wears the velvet glove."
One more thing for anyone who’s wondering: The mythical Kid Velvet won the title—with a one-punch knockout.
