Is the silly season still with us? I’m beginning to wonder, what with strike action at Royal Mail affecting deliveries around the country. After finally seeing a welcome uplift in DM activity in recent weeks, comes not only a spate of regional mail delivery disruptions but the threat of a national strike next month. Perfect timing, huh? And all happening right when direct mail’s just starting to get its mojo back after months of recession-bred doldrums. As reported on Marketing Direct, big mailers like insurance giant BT and More Than are already feeling the effects of the Royal Mail industrial action. As the second and fifteen biggest UK direct marketers, respectively, you can be certain that if the ‘big end’ of DM is seeing response rates dip, others are also suffering. The market’s already shaky enough without the entire mail channel’s reliability being called into question during the lead-up to Christmas campaign season.So put October 9th in your diary and keep your worry beads handy, for that’s when the Communications Workers Union will announce whether there’s to be a national mail strike. We’ll all need Sherpa guides to help scale the mountains of undelivered mail accumulating over Swindon way, otherwise.
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This week has, of course, marked the first anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse. Which triggered the global economic meltdown etc etc. (By now we all know the drill, alas.) Should the US government bailed the failing investment bank out, as it did insurance giant AIG, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and their ilk and thus avoided the biggest bankruptcy in US history? The blogosphere and US bookshelves are chock full of debate on this topic at present. My theory is that the powers that be simply didn’t like the cut of Lehman Brother’s CEO, Richard Fuld. Every crisis needs a scapegoat, and Fuld – a self-proclaimed business ‘gorilla’ who amassed an enormous personal fortune while presiding over Lehman Brother’s inexorable descent into over-leveraged, toxic asset hell – was arguably the perfect candidate. A bit like RBS’s much maligned former Chief Executive Sir Fred Goodwin here in the UK – only without the obscene pension fund and Monte Carlo tax haven.Twelve months after Wall Street’s unprecedented meltdown and the hundreds of billions in government handouts to banks, stunned disbelief has given way to hardship and bitterness for many. Thousands of people have lost jobs and homes, relationship breakdown is rife – it’s been hideous. And to think that if we’d had tighter banking regulation, none of this would have happened. (Don’t believe me? Look at how the likes of France, Australia and Canada have weathered the sub-prime storm comparatively unscathed. Something more than just luck’s been involved.)So on this, the first anniversary of the recession we didn’t have to have, what have we learned? That maven of financial misfortune, former US Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, is apparently already predicting that another economic meltdown is inevitable because it's human nature to want more. Which is a bit rich coming from the man who arguably paved the way for the current recession in the first place, if you ask me. Yes, it might be human nature to always want more. But when we’ve seen the all too abundant pain that unfettered greed can bring, surely enough can sometimes indeed be, well…enough?Happy first anniversary, folks. Here’s hoping the economy's in better shape come September 15th, 2010.
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John Jay Daly, the Godfather of Opt-Out, died in Washington D.C. on August 27th of a blood infection. The man credited with pioneering DM opt-out in 1970 was also a popular D.C. spin doctor and, in an earlier incarnation (while working at the US National Institute of Drycleaning), John claimed credit for expanding dry-cleaning facilities in the former Soviet Union. Good to know that the Cold War was also a clean war, is it not?I’m not sure it was necessarily Mr Daly’s intent, but by giving rise to the Age of Opt-Out, he did transform campaign planning worldwide by forcing marketers to better target their offers towards those consumers demonstrating the greatest interest and propensity to purchase.That’s a considerable legacy indeed – particularly as DM (or ‘advertising mail’ as our American cousins call it), still accounts for 21 per cent of total US advertising spend and generated US$702 billion in economic activity States-side in 2008. Yet almost 40 years on from Mr Daly’s pioneering efforts, how disappointing that only 47 per cent of US mailers use any form of suppression file, according to the American DMA. As I noted on this blog back in March, perhaps it’s little wonder then that 19 State Legislatures across the United States currently have ‘Do Not Mail’ registries on their agenda – such is the volume of mis-addressed and unwanted mail swamping American households. Because with DM volume totaling 101.9 billion items and an estimated 40 million Americans changing address last year, that’s potentially one hell of a big offer mis-matched and ‘return to sender’ junk mail swamp.My views on the UK’s own rather shoddy suppression rates and attitudes to consumers are well documented. But compared to our American cousins, we’re paragons of best practice virtue.So keep up the good work, everyone. We Brits may yet do Mr Daly proud as responsible direct marketers.
It appears that calling someone a ‘skank’ in a blog can be costly. In a precedent-setting court case, a Manhattan judge recently forced Google to provide the identity of an anonymous blogger who had trashed former Canadian supermodel Liskula Cohen on the website ‘Skanks in NYC’ by being rather rude about her. I wont repeat the libel.A case of Fendi handbags at ten paces, methinks.The moral of this story? Nothing but nothing’s private in cyberspace. In other, less skanky news… The Institute of Chartered Accountants last week declared that recession in Britain is ‘at an end’. The ICA’s Index of Business Confidence posted the biggest rise for two years, peaking at 4.8 by the end of June – up from -28.2 in March. Additionally, the Institute predicts that the UK will grow by 0.5 per cent during the current quarter.So are the squints right? Is the recession on its way out?
Mark Roy
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