THAT’S REALLY HARSH…
In the mid ’90s I was involved with several companies in the Direct Mail Marketing industry: those who were spammers before there was spam; generators of junk mail with degrees. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. And now they’ve gotten really, really big.
The New York Post yesterday offers an interesting perspective on Wal Mart’s new advertising agency and the strengths it brings: in a word (mine, not there’s) Spam.
Wal-Mart is lost in America.
The nation’s No. 1 retailer, closing out a miserable five-year stretch last week, reported an embarrassingly anemic 0.5 percent rise in same-store sales for October and said November may be worse.
Its stock, which used to lead the retail sector, has been flat for the last five years after quadrupling over the previous five.
Desperate to get its sputtering sales engine humming again, Wal-Mart dumped its longtime ad agencies and awarded its $580 million account to a largely unheralded Chicago firm, DraftFCB, headed by rising star Howard Draft.
The move shocked professionals both inside and outside the ad game as Draft made his mark not in the 30-second TV spot world of traditional ad agencies but in the decades-old discipline of direct marketing – long looked down upon and equated with late-night infomercials, junk mail, and bad hair.
What could the retailer be thinking in going with an all-Draft army of direct marketing geeks? In a word: data.
No matter how you dress it up, spammers are the bottom feeders of the bottom feeders. If it were possible to exile everyone even remotely involved with junk mail and it’s electronic offspring I have no doubt that Americans as a whole would rise up with pitchforks and torches.
This is the path of salvation that the Bentonvile Behemoth has chosen?
[...] THAT’S REALLY HARSH… In the mid ’90s I was involved with several companies in the Direct Mail Marketing industry: those who were spammers before there was spam; generators of junk mail with degrees. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. And now they’ve gotten really, really big. Keep reading… [...]
[...] If you don’t. Maybe these will jog your memory. [...]