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
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