Can This Woman Save Direct Marketing?

Linda Woolley has just signed on for what’s arguably the biggest challenge of her career. But judging by her résumé she’s been gearing up for it for more than three decades.

Woolley was hired in August to fill the Direct Marketing Association’s newly created position of executive vice president for government affairs. Operating out of the DMA’s Washington office, Woolley is spearheading the government affairs team at a time when direct marketing is perhaps more threatened by legislative overkill than ever before.

Emboldened by the National Do Not Call Registry’s spectacular success, anti-marketing and environmental activists are attacking direct mail on multiple fronts with unprecedented vigor. Last year alone the DMA worked to head off more than a dozen state do-not-mail bills.

And the press certainly isn’t helping matters. Anti-marketing groups such as Catalog Choice, ForestEthics, 41Pounds.org and GreenDimes are the subjects of a seemingly never-ending stream of fawning, lopsided consumer media coverage.

Negative press coupled with general public ignorance of how much the U.S. economy depends on direct marketing results in some of the cheapest political points currently available. For many politicians, being anti-DM is as reflexive as being pro-babies and pro-puppies.

Then there’s privacy and the Internet. This summer the U.S. Senate held hearings to determine whether online behavioral advertising should be restricted. Last fall a group of nine privacy and so-called civil liberties groups lobbied the Federal Trade Commission to implement a national “do-not-track” list in an effort to kill behaviorally targeted Internet advertising.

And the issues don’t end there. Last year the DMA kept tabs on 33 bills in the House and Senate. The legislative environment has become so treacherous for direct marketing that the DMA created a new executive VP position to focus solely on government issues.

Enter Woolley. When asked if she’s aware of how easily vilified the industry is, she says: “Yes, I am. I have neighbors and friends who’ve told me that since I took this job.”

But Woolley is no stranger to representing unpopular groups. As a lobbyist and director of public affairs for mega-conglomerate ITT Corp. from 1983 to 1995, Woolley was part of an organization that carried the legacy of former ITT lobbyist Dita Beard.

Reportedly hard-drinking, boastful and unafraid to curse, Beard got her 15 minutes of fame when the contents of a memo she wrote appeared in a bombshell column by Jack Anderson in 1972. In the memo, Beard implied that ITT had pledged $400,000 to the Republican National Convention in return for a favorable decision in an antitrust case. She also wrote that President Richard Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell blessed the deal.

The episode resulted in Senate hearings during which ITT portrayed Beard as a lush who made up stories to exaggerate her own importance and administration officials claimed everything in the settlement was strictly legal, according to Anderson in his book “Peace, War, and Politics: An Eyewitness Account.”

The charges were never proven, but the scandal — along with later allegations that ITT tried to block the election of Chilean president Salvador Allende Gossens, a Marxist who nationalized an ITT subsidiary and was overthrown in 1973 — left an indelible stain on ITT’s image.

As an ITT lobbyist, Woolley says, “[Beard’s] legacy kind of followed you around whether you wanted it to or not.” However, if the descriptions of Beard’s coarse demeanor are accurate, Woolley is no Beard. As she lays out her credentials, Woolley comes across as civil, articulate and affable, and not remotely boastful.

In the years immediately preceding her hiring by the DMA, Woolley ran LegisLaw, a public affairs and government relations consulting firm that she founded in 1999. LegisLaw specialized in lobbying, particularly in the tax and trade areas. Woolley’s clients included Fortune 500 companies and trade associations from industries such as transportation, manufacturing, chemicals, healthcare, energy, building materials, banking and defense.

She also has firsthand DM experience. “I used direct marketing myself to market my firm,” she says. “When we had new product lines and services, we used mail and the Internet.”

When asked what she believes are the DMA’s greatest challenges, Woolley says: “If you’re talking legislatively, the biggest would be the proposed limits on behavioral marketing. We’re doing strategic planning to make sure we’re poised to deal with [such] issues when the new administration and Congress [begin their terms in January].”

Woolley also says she’ll spend some of her energy beefing up the DMA’s political action committee. “Through PACs, people with like views can pool their resources to elect members of Congress who share their views. We plan to raise more money for our PAC.”

Part of her plan is simply to let DMA members know they have a PAC and that they can contribute. “Some of it is really basic stuff,” she says.

Another issue Woolley mentions is taxation — which, she points out, her consulting firm provided her the experience to confront: “Over the years, and especially during the last 10, I’ve worked a lot on tax issues for clients. I’ve worked closely with the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees — the principal tax-writing committees in the U.S. Congress.”

Woolley adds that she has the contacts necessary to get audiences with the right people in Washington. “Absolutely — yes, I’ve got the contacts. I’ve spent close to 35 years in Washington. I think that’s one of the things I bring to the job, a great deal of connections in lots of diverse groups and industries that maybe the DMA hasn’t had so far.”

Another of Woolley’s attributes that the DMA can sorely use right now is the ability to speak environmentalists’ language. She began her career in the ’70s working on Capitol Hill for Paul Rogers, then the House Health and Environment Subcommittee’s chairman. Rogers, she says, wrote the first Clean Air Act and the first Safe Drinking Water Act.

“My background is in environmental issues,” Woolley adds. “I also did a fair amount of graduate study in environmental sciences.”

She’s willing to speak to environmental groups such as Catalog Choice to see if there’s any middle ground. “I’m starting with the premise that my door’s open,” Woolley says. “There are advantages and disadvantages to being new, but one of the advantages is that you can start fresh and make those relationships, hear people out and [draw up] a game plan.”

DMers can only hope that along with her impressive string of credentials, Woolley has deep reserves of patience and stamina.