A DECADE OR SO ago, I asked Jay Walker if he was a millionaire yet. “Maybe on paper,” he answered. “Don’t ask for a check.”
Times have changed, and Walker is now reportedly a billionaire. As John Courtmanche reports in our DMDNY supplement, Jay’s IPO for Priceline.com raised $9.8 billion.
After writing countless stories about one-hit wonders who made an overnight killing on the Web, it’s refreshing to report on someone like Walker, a nonstop workaholic who has generated many great ideas. Also, he happens to be a very familiar character-sort of like a local boy made good.
For one thing, he actually worked here (that is, at the operation once known as Hanson Publishing). According to company legend, he was loath to leave a single square inch of white space unsold.
But he also has roots in direct marketing, for when he quit his job as director of new product development at Folio: around 1984, he threw himself into the task of reinventing the catalog business.
How many remember what cataloging was really like during the 1980s? It was the era of quantum postal and paper hikes and other economic problems that were only partially offset by list rental income. Walker responded with a series of daring programs:
* He sold catalogs on newsstands.
* He sold space advertising in catalogs.
* He arranged for affinity deals with airlines and other big outfits.
* He hooked catalogers up with Federal Express, forever changing the timing of holiday purchases.
It’s true that not all of these programs succeeded, and that some resulted in amusing flaps. In hindsight, it is clear that some of his ideas were years ahead of reality.
Priceline.com is only one of the many projects Jay has worked on since those years. He is also trying, with partner Michael Loeb, to revolutionize magazine circulation through their NewSub Services. As reported in DIRECT last April, NewSub dominates the business of selling magazine subscriptions through credit card statement stuffers, and is seen by some as the best single source for new subscribers since American Family Publishers started.
The most important component of the program, as Tim Litle (another great idea person) once pointed out to me, is that it offers continuous service-till forbid. Magazine circulators have dreamed of that model for years without being able to achieve it. (Jay credits Loeb with NewSub’s success.)
How many truly creative thinkers have come out of direct marketing? I can think of a handful who live up to Norman Mailer’s definition of genius as “balance on the edge of the impossible.”
Jay Walker is one of them, and richly deserves his designation as DMDNY’s DMer of the Year.
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