There was a time, not so long ago, when even a schoolchild could tell the difference between direct response and general advertising.

DR ads tended to be mail order ads, which meant they were ugly, and laden with copy that explained the benefits of the product and asked for the sale. Most looked disreputable.

Then the Fortune 1000 companies starting coming in, bringing Madison Avenue creative values with them. As Lester Wunderman said last month, they enclosed the iron fist of measurability within a velvet glove.

The question is: Have they gone too far? Does a full-page photo of a woman on a beach with no product description to speak of (and no response mechanism except for a Web site URL) qualify as a DR ad?

This question was prompted by Lester’s recent talk at DMD New York, and by the tremendous volume of critical mail we get about Tom Collins’ column, The Makeover Maven.

You may have read some of the many letters Tom draws every month, but if so you’ve only seen the printable ones. We have gotten letters insulting Tom’s ancestry and our own. And while we enjoy hate mail and publish as much of it as we can, we sometimes wonder why readers get so riled.

People are often threatened by the new and unfamiliar, but the tried-and-true formats being used by Tom hardly fit that description. What may be getting to some readers is the inference that direct marketing creative has not evolved in a steadily upward direction, and that it took a wrong turn somewhere.

In that sense, Tom is like the critics in art and music who argue that modernism has brought us to a dead end. We see his columns as a form of shock therapy.

What always gets us is the charge that he’s stuck back in 1950, which is far from true, as you can tell by examining his career. First off, he is a consummate wordsmith, and he did start out in mail order, working for the old Schwab & Beatty agency. One piece of his early advertising work was a comic strip titled “Thom McAn and His Magic Bazooka Shoes.”

Returning from a sabbatical during which he wrote fiction, he went to work for Simon & Schuster, creating the following headline to herald the publication of Herman Wouk’s first novel: “Who and What Is WOUK?” Later, he joined the Wunderman agency as copy chief, and was part of the team that helped Lester revolutionize DM.

That great work was continued when Tom teamed with Stan Rapp to form the Rapp & Collins agency. That shop attracted many blue-chip clients, and Tom and Stan later co-authored the MaxiMarketing books, a set of business best sellers that introduced a generation of marketing execs to the idea of getting to know their customers.

In the end, it’s all subjective. The only real way to figure out if Tom is on the right track is to test his ads. So please keep the mail coming.

But know this:

We are honored to have The Makeover Maven in the pages of Direct.

Design magazine launches in style

DWELL is a new bimonthly magazine dedicated to sleek modern home design and architecture. However, its subscription campaign is anything but sleek and modern. In fact, the effort is decidedly retro direct mail.

The first drop last June of 1 million pieces earned a 6.25% response rate, says circulation director Marcia Newlin. Response to last December’s 800,000-piece mailing is still being tabulated.

Dwell – its logo features a fashionable lowercase “d” – premiered in October. The San Francisco-based magazine focuses on modern, “idea-driven” architecture and design that’s “sensitive to social and physical surroundings.”

The target audience consists of young, intelligent consumers between the ages of 25 and 40 with a median household income ranging from $75,000 to $100,000.

Newlin developed a list from categories used in a June 1999 test, employing New York’s Paradysz Matera & Co. as broker and adviser. She tapped architecture, design, photography and graphic design files.

Regional publications from Los Angeles Magazine to Time Out New York were also sourced, as were such lifestyle publications as Elle, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Interview and Out.

Dwell now has 50,000 subscribers who pay $19.95 annually. It hopes to increase its rate base to 100,000 in the second half of the year.

The current subscription package is a “tweaked” version of what was sent in the test mailing. The test tried out the magazine’s concept as well as alternative titles for it.

Although the magazine has a Web site (www.dwellmag.com), it’s not using e-mail marketing or subscription drivers.

However, Dwell is on major search engines, Newlin says, and people can subscribe online. So far, 10% of all the magazine’s orders are placed on the Web, and they’ve been driven mainly by the direct mail piece or magazine inserts. Another 25% comes from newsstand sales. A joint renewal and gift-to-a-friend offer polybagged in Dwell’s second issue also performed well, Newlin notes.

Future subscription marketing plans for the design magazine include mailing about 2 million pieces annually over the next five years. The magazine is also looking into cross-promotional activities with other companies and events as a way to increase visibility as well as the subscriber base. It plans to reach 125,000 subscribers by 2005.