Slouching to Divadom
With Martha Stewart headed toward crinoline-trimmed orange jump-suits, the direct marketing industry faces a vacuum of diva figures. True, there will only be one Martha, much in the way there will only be one Spiro Agnew or one Ted Bundy, but a host of lesser DM divas have appeared on the horizon, looking to claim La Stewart’s mantle.
Take Diana Carrollton, list manager extraordinaire. A peek at her daily color-coded calendar reveals the following:
April 12: Assemble all automotive response lists. Merge into a single master file. Create new selects based on amount and types of trash found during routine service stops. Extrapolate age and presence-of-children data based on broken McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, loose change, and marijuana roaches found between seat cracks. Base religious selects on rearview-mirror air freshener information. (Pine-scented Christmas trees for Christians, rendered chicken-fat-scented images of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson for the miscellaneous Hebraic faiths.)
Alas, there is often a gap between illusion and reality. What did Carrollton actually do on April 12? A check of her own desk-side wastepaper basket revealed an empty bottle of Yukon Jack and three crumpled boxes of Mallomars. Purina Diva Chow? I think not.
Then there’s Endymion Tucks, a catalog creative director who believes the key to successful test cells is neither product placement nor design, but rather the quality of paper used. When designing marketing tests, Tucks matches personality and purchase characteristics to specific grades of pulp.
A map in his office has divided each of the top 30 metro areas into paper-centric psychographic classifications. Struggling artists residing in downtown Seattle are likely to receive catalogs printed on unbleached recycled pulp, while Florida’s posh Gold Coast citizens get theirs printed on cream-inlaid gloss-coated stock.
Tucks once designed a catalog mailing campaign that mixed paper stocks on an individual-book basis, necessitating each one to be individually weighed by local post office employees. Tragically, an unexplained fire destroyed the skids holding the catalogs before postal workers could tackle the project, and the mailing never went out.
Finally, Rhea Du Vieux is a compiler who believed that the best lists are not generated by anonymous information sources, but rather are the result of personal labor. Instead of relying on mass-distributed surveys or captured transaction information, Du Vieux shadows consumers individually for between a day and a week, until she has enough data on them to slot them into one of her files.
Exclusive Du Vieux-compiled lists include “Parents Who Can’t Take Toddlers Shopping Without at Least One Incident Involving Yelling” or “Auto Enthusiasts Who Shouldn’t Be Trusted With Anything More Complicated Than an Oil Change.”
A single Du Vieux list typically runs upward of $1,500 per 1,000 names, and features a neatly fluffed ribbon around the disk, tape or pressure-sensitive-label sheets. One problem: Given the compiling time, at least a third of the addresses are no longer valid when she delivers each file to her clients.
It would appear that the up-and-coming generation of DM divas leaves something to be desired. A memo to Martha: Eat off your own tray, attend all the personal growth classes you can, and don’t let the authorities find the faux-mother-of-pearl-inlaid shiv you’ll certainly fashion out of your bed’s slats. Grab as much time off for good behavior as you can. The industry needs you.
RICHARD H. LEVEY ([email protected]) is a senior writer for Direct. His Loose Cannon column appears every Monday on Direct Newsline (www.directmag.com).
