An hour into a recent flight to Chicago, the phone nestled in the seatback facing me rang. I was the only traveler in my row, so I picked up the handset.
“Hello, sir, do you have a second?” a male voice asked.
“About 6,000 of them,” I replied. “I’m done with my newspaper and this trip doesn’t have an in-flight movie.”
“Good,” he responded, seemingly oblivious to what I’d just said. “I’d like to take the opportunity to offer you a unique —”
“Wait,” I told him. “I have a corporate credit card with a $25 limit — just enough to pay for a cab ride to my hotel. But I’ll spend it all with you and walk from O’Hare if you can explain why you’re calling row 14, seat C on an American Airlines flight.”
He paused. “You’ll really let me have the $25?” he asked.
“Scout’s honor,” I told him, neglecting to mention I’d been thrown out of the Cub Scouts for gargling the Pledge of Allegiance with Yoo-Hoo during an assembly.
With the eager tone of a man about to make his sales quota, he began to speak. “The do-not-call list left us with an ever-shrinking pool of usable telephone numbers,” he explained. “We call locations we know won’t be registered, such as pay phones, airline phones and the occasional customer service hotline.”
He paused, and added: “We even have a few Defense Department numbers in our prospecting database that are so secret the government can’t register them without betraying confidentiality.”
“If they’re so secret, how do you have them?” I asked.
“Predictive dialing,” he said smugly.
“But isn’t it hard to sell things to random people? How do you target your offers?” I asked.
“We can figure out from the ambient noise where our prospects are. We represent a network of clients with a wide variety of products. We quickly determine which offering will appeal most,” he said. “For instance, I can hear the turbines of your plane, so I’m not going to offer you soft drinks and pretzels.”
A note of pride crept into his voice. “We have a crackerjack marketing team. When Men’s Health magazine named Houston the fattest city in the United States, we started making random calls to public phones in the 713 area code. We offered either Abdomenizer devices or Chef Paul Prudhomme ready-to-eat meals, based on how folks answered two initial questions we asked. We cleaned up.”
He paused. “Can I have your credit card now?”
I read him the card’s number. “So what have you identified as my need today?” I asked.
“Flight insurance,” he replied.
RICHARD H. LEVEY ([email protected]) is a senior writer for Direct. His Loose Cannon column appears every Monday on Direct Newsline (www.directmag.com).
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