Three Headaches: Short takes on list industry problems

Certain topics demand attention, but not much space. Here are some examples.

Geographic Selection Fees

Once upon a time, it was darned difficult to deliver a list rental order with a state select. That was when lists came on Addressograph-Multigraph plates, and the operator had to comb through heavy boxes of zinc plate to find those the mailer wanted.

Ruptures resulted, and the coating of fingers with ink, and travails which one cannot imagine.

The practices of those days, needless to say, disappeared along with other pachydermic business phenomena, such as non-deficit accounting and the wet Xerox sheet. Today, a selection charge for geographic locations of any sort is ludicrous.

Can we cut it out, guys?

Obviously not; nobody wants to get into an argument about what kinds of selectivity should be charged. The system has worked, the reasoning goes, so why fix it? And it’s true that the money is good.

Insurance mailers particularly are victimized; the cost of a state select to a large insurance mailer – even a smart one – over a period of one year’s list rentals probably equals the payout for hurricane damage in Florida. So mailers pay extra for marketing elements that cost the seller nothing to acquire and deliver.

The primary reasons this situation should be changed are that, as a process, it is cumbersome and causes hard feelings. It is cumbersome in that it adds needless details to an order-entry and invoice procedure that is so weighed down with useless details that computers at brokerage and management houses are actually beginning to creak. And it creates a lot of ill will among mailers who are, for the most part, totally aware they’ve been charged for a process for which there is virtually no cost.

Having said that much, there are a lot of selectivity elements for which hard-earned cash should be paid.

What should command payment is information that embellishes and increases the list renter’s opportunities to enhance results. Some examples would be age, income, type of product purchased, and dozens of other bits of data that the list owner has either added to his database as subsidiary elements of his own marketing program, or for which he has paid to add to his own file for marketing purposes.

And if list owners and managers think they would be shortchanged if they stopped charging for state or SCF selects, it would be both worthwhile and profitable to think about repricing the other data they present in a list to make up the loss.

Computer Programmers

An increasingly unavailable breed, particularly the younger ones who are all making so much money programming for major technological companies and new Web sites that they have no time or patience to work on the really good stuff, like improving your database.

Think of the irony: One of the great driving forces behind the development of the computer for commercial purposes was the imagined savings in manpower through process automation. Twenty years later, a bright young person just out of school with high marks in computer technology can command well over $60,000 a year in the marketplace.

And you can double that within the next five years.

But I have to say it: As difficult as that makes things in business, I’m tickled pink. From all over the globe, Third World citizens had to work, slave, sweat, toil, plod and grind their way into privileged universities in their own countries, had the courage and determination to work hard, got great marks and came to the United States because they were in demand. And they will be, for decades to come. Hurrah!

Let’s face the problem: There will be an increasingly acute shortage in technological manpower, here and everywhere, in the foreseeable future – far into the 21st century.

Part of the gap can be and has been made up by retraining older programmers and database administrators, those who’d been left behind in the late ’80s when companies like IBM shed staff members like lepers.

It would be worthwhile to recognize that the term “programmer,” in the modern technological world, may be a misnomer.

These days, companies have three entirely different sets of needs in the area of technology. They continue to have a need for innovative and creative programming, of course. But they also have a need for technological administration.

As computer networks become more complex, the very talents that were scorned by the programmers in the ’80s – discipline, a structured approach to computer security, the ability to administer programs rather than be creative – are coming more and more into demand. And former database administrators from large corporations have these talents in abundance.

Finally, it takes one set of talents to develop programs, and another more conservative set to maintain them.

Basic maintenance is not necessarily the difficult and exasperating thing it used to be. It just might be that a bright person with little formal training in computer programming could be brought along to handle aspects of basic computer maintenance in your company.

So programming may not be your need after all.

Pandering File

The term “pander” was used in Chaucer’s famous verse romance “Troilus and Criseyde,” in which Criseyde’s uncle Pandarus brings the title characters to bed together.

But a lack of cohabitation was a primary consideration when the Direct Marketing Association came up with the popular but problem-laden concept of a list of people who did not wish to receive direct mail – the pandering file.

The current list consists of 43 impressionable monks, six dozen admirers of Ted Kaczynski and 3.5 million people who could not reconcile the idea of possibly winning $10 million in a lottery and subscribing to the American Journal of Ethics at the same time.

The DMA’s original motive was to prove to the American public (read: 531 members of Congress) that one didn’t have to receive intrusive mail, and it has been hugely successful in this regard.

In time, though, news shows all over the country felt that this feature was worth wasting three minutes of their audiences’ time between car commercials. Local TV began to run features called “How to Stop Receiving Junk Mail.” The visuals on these programs usually depicted practitioners in our field – that’s us, Doc – as hunchbacked, evil geniuses who sat at huge computer banks focusing in on one name, and one name only – that of the person who was watching the news program.

“How did they know you needed insurance?” asked the voice-over. “How did they know you wanted to subscribe to Reader’s Digest?”

But we have not described the most horrible scenario of all. What would happen if all Americans wanted to opt out of receiving direct mail? Or if our evil empire simply went kaplooey one day and the U.S. Postal Service closed its doors, opening its vast cavernous edifices only to bar mitzvah parties?

The answer is that, without direct mail, our entire culture – a quarter of a billion Americans, give or take a dozen concerned citizens or so – would have more time to watch more TV commercials!

Think of it: having to watch, over and over again, a parrot who turns out to be the president of Omnipoint sitting at his desk, dispensing crackers to the minions who want to please him. Now that’s pandering.

What’s important here is that it’s OK for people who want to get off mailing lists to have a vehicle to do so. It’s quite another matter to elevate our pandering list to the level of public irreproachability.

The real virtue of direct mail is our ability to deliver opportunities that will enhance people’s lives. Isn’t overemphasis on the values of the industry’s pandering list a way of inadvertently cheapening this virtue?