When Lapre failed to appear at his arraignment on June 22, he was arrested in Tempe at a health club, where he had reported lived for two days, with serious self-inflicted knife wounds to his groin. The wounds led authorities to believe that Lapre had attempted suicide by trying to sever the femoral artery in his legs. Lapre ultimately ended up dying in custody of an apparent suicide on October 2nd while awaiting his trial after cutting his throat with a razor blade and then concealing the blood loss from prison officials. He was potentially facing fines of upwards of $500,000 for each of count and a federal prison term between five and 25 years.

This combined with a recent Seventh Circuit of Appeals November 29 to fine Kevin “Secret Cures” Trudeau $37.6 million for violating an FTC settlement regarding “patently false claims in a weight loss book” causes me great consternation as a direct marketer and believer in the strategy of enigmatic personality as successful pitchman. While I have to believe that LaPre, after getting busted either couldn’t stand living the lie any longer or determined that he was “too pretty for jail”, Trudeau has rarely if ever, admitted to any form of wrongdoing and despite injunctions to keep him out of the infomercial business, he has continued to turn up like a bad penny, with the copper missing.

Either way, I am saddened by my chosen’s professions clear understanding of “the wilder the claim, the bigger the payday”. The biggest supplement infomercials of the last generation reveal an almost patently unflinching disregard for the authenticity of claims. Of course this is said with the 20/20 hindsight that some 32,000 infomercials aired by Trudeau couldn’t quite bring to the light. Was the FTC asleep (pun intended, I have seen many of them at 4am) during these incredible claims of “eat all you want and lose weight without dieting” for the five or so years this infomercial ruled the airwaves?

Certainly many clients I have worked with have run infomercials and ads with squeaky clean adherence to FTC or FDA guidelines, and have done fine, while others have gone right up to the line with better results. However going over the line is the equivalent of stretching the truth at best or making false (and illegal) promises at worst. Will it sell additional units of product? Sure. However is it ethical for your business or your own personal psyche?

In a time when lawmakers are calling for less regulation so that businesses can act more freely in an unfettered and overly nitpicky bureaucracy, it is important for consumers to understand that it doesn’t hurt to have checks and balances so these abuses are not repeated. As a society, do we have an obligation to protect those who naively take advertising on faith especially when a handsome reassuring face is involved? With so much abuse of the system perpetrated I would think so.

December 15, 2011

“My client spends $1 million per week.”

“My client spends $1 jillion dollars per week.”

”My client spends infinity per week”.

That’s what it often sounds like in the din of the electric white hallways of the San Diego Hilton, seemingly jammed to the aural rafters (because it’s not all that physically crowded) with direct response executivess boasting of their affiliation with the most free spending of clients whose open checkbooks confer some level of success on anyone within a stone’s throw of this largesse.

First off, I have no way of fact-checking your client’s budget figures, so just shut the front door.  I once worked at an agency where the CEO (Chief Estimating Officer) revised his annual billings upward with the regularity of a bidding frenzy at Sotheby’s.  Never mind if a client left, the annual billings only increased without any real consideration of the actual number!  Secondly, if I had a client who spent a lot, I’d keep it to myself, lest the poachers of direct response would be blowtorching their way into my henhouse to make off with my prized egg layers.  And thirdly, the success of any campaign is measured in the details and results, not the amount of money spent.  Is the client using Direct Response TV as a tax write-off or to push through a billion dollar deal at retail?  Are they going bankrupt with every aggressively over-optimistic budget the agency foists upon them?  I worked with another CEO (Chief Eggregious Overspender) who loved to say that she liked to run “aggressive media campaigns”.  Well, sure if it isn’t your money, why the heck not?  I like to buy Faberge eggs and then crack them into lovely omelets, but zealous overspending has turned more campaigns into mismanaged sinkholes than I care to recount.  However, add a little cheese and avocado to a Faberge egg and mwah!

The realities of this boasting, as far as I can tell, is mostly to let everyone in earshot know how successful you are, truth in advertising be damned.  “If I can do this for them, I can do this for you” appears to be the take-away of this breast-beating exercise.  But you know what?  Your success in one campaign does not translate to every other one.  We’ve all had non-starters on our resume’.  Your “brobdinganian” budget could be ended any day of the week by a wrongful death lawsuit, a false-claims warning from the FTC or FDA, a reality check on a free offer that inevitably doesn’t translate in the back end, a free-spending client who runs out of daddy’s money, your own ineptitude at managing it or the simple reality that it was never as big as you said it was.

The truth is that every campaign starts with a test budget and your success, however big you claim it to be, doesn’t translate to everything you ever have done and will do.  I’m sorry if I have used up my last ooh-and-aah over your lordship of mega-trillion dollar budgets and how you have mastered a Zelig-like presence over every successful direct response campaign that has existed in the last 20 years.    Urban Dictionary defines the vuvuzela as a “mind-numbing torture device made of cheap, brightly colored plastic.”  In San Diego, the player and the instrument have become one.

For some reason I am obsessed with the unraveling of the iconic media I grew up with. Though there is little love lost over that stupid spindle you put on your record player so that it could drop one 45 rpm record after another onto your turntable (as it ever dropped just one record!)….but it is interesting at the least to see once untouchable and prevalent parts of our lives go by the wayside with the same relevance of dinosaurs stuck in tar (or ice, or whatever the heck made them instinct).

So although I was bemused by the announcement of Samsung at the recent CES Show in Las Vegas of the new “smart Wifi” refrigerator, the concept that Pandora is one of the built in programs certainly gave me pause to think about how long radio as we know it will exist.

When I first heard about Pandora , I was relatively nonplussed. Another radio station that streams music on the Internet, that’s nice, blah blah blah. Genome project? Blah blah very interesting way of saying there’s something scientific about our music preferences and how we listen and enjoy music. The fact that Pandora’s popularity has soared to the point where we get a quick listen while deliberating over which week-old cold cut to stuff into our swollen gullets tells me that the way we take media is no longer “mass media” as we learned it back in school. This is a purely individual listening experience predicated solely on what we want, when we want, and now apparently where we want it, with leftovers and spoiled milk. And that is impressive.

I am not saying that Pandora is the be-all to end-all by any means; sometimes even my own radio stations cause me irritation. Engulfing myself in the earnest mewlings of one singer-songwriter after another on the “Indigo Girls Channel” can be as tedious as any string of six auto insurance commercials and a traffic report, but credit where credit is due. If I don’t like a song in the middle? Thumb it down and it goes away! If I like an artist or a song, thumb it up and I am going to get more of it. The commercials are infrequent, short and calm. And the Spa Channel? Well bathe me in lavender and give me a perennial, aural massage. As the blanding of radio continues to distill itself down to the smallest common denominator that absolutely no one likes, it’s refreshing to create my own radio experience without the hype.

Perhaps there is some lost element of spontaneity of hearing a song completely out of left field on my Pandora station, but given the options, I wonder what is left for FM radio to do for us. Between the endless nattering of self-referential and listen-to-me-laugh-at-myself morons, unnecessarily prevalent traffic reports, and the seemingly endless well of commercials and self-promotion (done pitch perfectly on an old Family Guy episode called “Dingo & The Baby”), my money is riding on a personalized radio experience that takes what I have told it I like into account. If I don’t like THAT radio station, then my taste in music must suck.

What can radio stations do to stem the tide of eroding listeners? Well, there’s plenty, but we can rest assured they won’t do it. Just like any other animal marching towards extinction, it requires adaptability, innovation, risk, attention to detail and a hundred other things an animal too dumb to know it’s days are numbered has no belief it needs to figure out. In any given market where a program director may now program three, four, five stations, they have no time to consider anything different or interesting. Corporate bottom lines, and national standardization of our music tastes has created an echo chamber so boring and bland that eventually anyone with a refrigerator will figure a way out of it. And not a stale, cold slice of pizza too soon.

Short of walking around for the duration of an hour with a Travelocity Gnome in your backpack, the blending of content and advertising is not a new concept. QVC has blurred the line so magnificently that I had to install a parental block on myself concerning all things Joan Rivers. All those Facebook ads telling me that my insurance rates are down now that I’m 50 truly feel like they “understand” my station in life and that they are truly there to usher me into my days of drooling incontinence. I think the biggest challenge in this whole pas-de-deux, is to make sure, as Aretha Franklin put it, not to let on who’s zooming who (pardon the vaguely late 80s reference).

So in my mind, the key is to create content that doesn’t reek of the ham-handed approach that NBC employs, but also doesn’t go so far in the other direction that there really is no “call-to-action”. After all, Jennie-O is spending money while I roll my eyes at the banal conversation revolving around its’ preparation. Some of my favorite examples of this done right include Woman’s Marketing, a New York based print broker that creates “advertorial” pieces in women’s magazines that simulate a product review page . It does it so well, that it ultimately is a product review page. Radio and television infomercials if done properly (and most are not) can also be applauded for creating an environment of entertainment while still managing to get their sales point across. It’s a fine art that most advertisers can’t quite grasp the subtlety of, but would be rewarded for if they did.

One of my early successes was with a product called “Road Construction Ahead”, an innocuous video made for pre-school kids which was merely a low-fi half hour of trucks driving around and dumping dirt into pits. While the advertising drove initial sales, it wasn’t until a Noah Adams piece on “All Things Considered” focused on the issue that young kids could literally watch a loop of this show for hours non-stop that the true message and USP of the product was born. Our advertising became an “editorial piece” centered on the NPR story that kids could watch this video for hours. Were we selling the product or merely reporting the story? The public bought the advertising-as-story concept and sales went through the roof and begat more press on other news magazine shows on TV.

For all that’s bad about Kevin “Bad Debts Cure Cancer” Trudeau, he truly understands the “Larry King” content- fizz around a black screen and his smarmy puss focusing on “the story”. Yes, this is an infomercial, we know that, but we can’t turn away from his “show”. Why ? Because he’s selling it to us in a way that “seems” like content. Please cure my cancer with coral shells, Kev….please tell me about the 5,000 ways to get out of debt I never knew. Simple, unsophisticated, yet somehow compelling because we are familiar with this format from another genre. Another recent example I’ve come across is a series of local TV show called “Best Deals TV”, which is essentially a half-hour infomercial packed with “product deals” from around the Los Angeles area, presented in that left-for-dead feature news story that runs at 11:34pm (snake gets into classroom, cat can talk) that walks, talks and acts like a real news show. I admire the blur and appreciate the measureable response it generates.

My reason-de-etre these days is to recognize the paradigm shift in advertising. Not because I want to fool consumers into believing my ads are stories, my radio shows are news or my TV spots are “life-vignettes”, but because in the prevailing winds of our go-go era, admitting you watch ANY advertising is nothing short of admitting you have time to waste and you’re a loser who can’t multi-task their way around a sales pitch. I’m going to pitch to you while you don’t even realize your batting. Hope I hit it of the park. Huh, what? Who’s zooming who, now?

1) Same Target Audience. The median age of a newspaper reader is currently 51. In newspapers, there are verified circulation numbers and these figures do not even take into account pass along, when one paper is read by multiple readersl. Even small market newspapers have a circulation in the tens of thousands.

2) Informational Environment. The readers of newspapers are looking to gather information from a trusted news source. The advertorial creates a “story” that seamlessly blends your marketing message with a interesting to read feature about your product.

3) Low Cost of Entry. The average cost of a quarter page newspaper ad is in the hundreds of dollars, even lower in smaller markets.

4) Scalability: With over 1,600 daily newspapers alone in the United States, you have many options to ramp up your media campaign with a proven successful message.

5) Low Production Costs – Easy to Make Changes Easy To Test. The ability to change offers, make changes to copy, test different headlines is very simple and inexpensive. The cost of creating new artwork and distributing material is negligible.

6) Regional Targeting: You can target your message in a particular market, region, or area of your choosing. Often what works in one geographic area will work in most others, but there are always exceptions and you can take advantage of them by targeting where you want to target.

7) Embraces Retailing: Newspaper advertising is beloved by retailers. Whether your product has retail distribution or if you sell direct to consumers, supporting your efforts at both can be achieved simultaneously and one does not take away from the other.

8) Story Telling: Your print advertorial allows you to tell a story. Rather than having to “sell” in a short, concise time period or space, you have the opportunity to “spread out” and tell the full story of your product or service.

9) Credibility: There is a conferred credibility factor of being printed in the newspaper. If your article is there, it confers that you are a credible company with an interesting story to tell and a viable product to sell. You are able to tell that story in an “informational” way rather than a hard sell.

10) Proven to Work: Many major direct to consumer advertisers have had great success in print. We have shepherded many advertisers into a format that works incredibly well in the mature market and in the natural products forum

11) Durability: When an electronic ad runs, the memory of it dissipates quickly. A newspaper advertorial can be read, kept and reviewed over and over. The lifespan of a response from newspaper is days and weeks instead of just minutes or hours.
12) Availability: Other media only have a finite amount of space for your message. Newspapers are open seven days a week and available to read at any time of the day or night.

13) Consistency of Response: Consistency is a two-fold advantage with newspapers. First, there is no “spike” in calls that could potential overtax a call center. Calls and response come in at all times throughout the day. Secondly, results across all newspapers are very consistent. Once a campaign is running, it is very easy to predict the volume of response from each newspaper. Also, while a particular event, holiday or seasonal changes may effect other media drastically, newspaper tends to be a more consistent go-to media even at holidays, national events or tragedies or even during low viewership of other medium seasonally.

14) Direct to Web Easier: Let’s be realistic, more and more people purchase via the Internet. The opportunity to have a clear and easy to copy website makes directing customers directly to your website much easier. In addition, you can create special web only offers and direct people to very specific sites for very specific offers.

15) Proof Of Publication: If you have ever run some electronic media and received no response, you must go through quite a process to confirm broadcast, and even after receiving logs and affidavits, you can’t be completely sure you ran. In print, you have lasting proof of your ad running with a ‘tearsheet” pulled directly from the newspaper. There is never any dispute as to whether an ad ran or not.

For the uninitiated, the concept works like this; a radio station, or TV station or newspaper or magazine has some unsold time or space. Rather than put a “house ad” or public service announcement in this unsold inventory, the station will run a PI spot in there and the advertiser, who agrees to pay a fixed amount for each order, will have their spot run, and then they report to the TV station how many orders they get and the station will bill them and the client pays a pre-agreed amount based on each response. This amount is usually some percentage of the overall income each sale represents to the advertiser – perhaps somewhere between 30-50%, sometimes more based on future earning potential the client may realize from that customer. Seems fairly straight forward – and it’s a win-win for everyone – station gets revenue for time that would have otherwise have gone unsold – client gets a no-risk opportunity to run their direct response commercial and only pays if they sell something. It all sounds great, right?

So I am mystified because – well – OK – first off, any inventory that a station has that is unsold that has any value will probably not be unsold for long, right? So, you can’t build on the success of anything because if it’s any good it will disappear and if it isn’t any good, it won’t generate much. Secondly there are several companies that act as intermediaries between the media and the agencies and clients. My old acquaintance Bonnie Schalle at EMM in New York comes to mind, or RevShare out in the California desert has long been creating a giant reel of PI spots for TV stations to pick from. So now there is a company that represents the stations that also will take a small piece of the action, ostensibly a bit from the station and a bit from the advertiser. If you are selling a $19.95 widget and you are splitting a PI “payout” of say $10 at least two ways, wouldn’t it be just easier to look for change in the seat cushions of your couch?

Plus the PI companies want a deposit against future sales up front, so if you are a client you are going to dole out a few grand before you even see sale #1. Plus you might have to hire or pay extra to have a stand alone in-bound call center handle your calls, not to mention purchasing of different phone numbers, tape and shipping costs to get the commercials out there, manpower of traffic, tracking, sourcing, training etc, . Plus you are often betting on the future value of that customer, which could be nil. Plus if a spot cost $50 and you regularly generate 10 calls and pay $10 per call, you are paying $100 PI for a spot that you could flat out purchase for half the price, why wouldn’t you do that instead?

Then of course there are all the other costs associated with that sale, in-bound telemarketing, customer service, returns, credit card expenses, etc. Even if you are the client and you are making a couple of dollars per sale after all these expenses, how can you ever turn this into a scaleable and financially viable business model? And how can a station be forced to rely on a completely one-sided reporting system that the client either pays for or owns themselves? And, what station wants their airtime all “junked up” with this year’s cheap plastic Widgets, Gadgets and Obama Inaugural Plates? On both sides of this business model it seems like a lot of work for a measly few shekels. As my old business partner Don Potter used to say “is the squeeze really worth the juice?”

Rather than pass my judgmental wand over the proceedings of PI or PO or cost-per-acquisition, I call upon my brethren and sistren of the PI world to come forward and show me the light. Who does this work for? What is the real big money value? At what point in the product life cycle of a DR campaign does this make the most sense? At what point are you just paddling up river? How many similar products can a station take on before they burn out their entire audience with these DR offers? I welcome reasoned and thoughtful debate on the subject. Please! Leave your comments here or email me at dave@overthemoonmedia.com

That being said, the other day I was speaking to MeLynda Davis, a display sales manager at the Riverside Press Enterprise, a 100,000 plus circulation newspaper on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where the temperature spikes from 70 to 115 degrees at the turn of a canyon. Also on this call was a new display ad sales trainee named Nathan, still learning the “trade”. I casually mused to them both that it seemed an odd time to be launching a career in newspapers with all that was going on and MeLynda replied, “oh no the Press Enterprise is doing just fine”. Whether it was denial, the desire not to lose face in front of a new sales recruit or the 115 degree heat, I chuckled to myself and let it go. The Riverside Press Enterprise is doing just fine.

Perhaps my jadedness about the current state of the daily newspaper is reflective of my own hometown newspaper just sixty miles to the southwest, the Long Beach Press Telegram, which, on a daily basis, is slightly less hefty than my old bi-weekly high school newspaper. Part of me thinks the only reason the Press Telegram is still chugging along is that the daily newspaper is an American institution that we just can’t lose, like AIG but with smeary ink. It would be an irrevocable loss to not have that joyous morning ritual, replete with a steaming hot cup of joe, several Marlboros, and an hour of quiet time to absorb the news of yesterday, relish the nine game hitting streak of that rookie phenom, and perhaps chortle at the endless travails of that canine hellion, Marmaduke. The younger generation does not share this ritual and often invokes disdain for this seemingly prehistoric experience altogether. Today’s generation cannot understand why we would WAIT A WHOLE DAY to get the news from some local venue that barely even reports particularly skillfully. As Michael Kinsley blogs on Time.com, “You can sit down at your laptop and enjoy that same newspaper or any other newspaper in the world. Or you can skip the newspapers and go to some site that makes the news more entertaining or politically simpatico”.

But this is precisely why the Riverside Press Enterprise is doing just fine. The demographic make-up of eastern Riverside county includes the retirement communities of Hemet, San Jacinto, Moreno Valley, Temecula, Perris and Rubidoux.. Riverside County’s core of readers grew up with the daily newspaper, and no new technology will replace the newspaper read. And as the boomer audience (and their parents) age, they will be herded off to these hospice-friendly zip codes, where ultimately the last ink newspaper will live out its’ end times with centurions who fondly recall the murmured obscenities of their younger days aimed at the fumble-fingered paper boy who’s unsteady arm found the wettest part of the driveway every dad-gum morning. So, there is an audience for the Riverside Press Enterprise and it is stable, fueled by the shared enjoyable habit of endlessly folding, twisting, bending, straightening and wrangling with a two-pound 26” x 21” hulk of inked butcher paper filled with celebrity birthdays, high and low temperatures around the U.S., Dear Abby and the Jumble.

Many of my own clients are targeting folks over 50, and doing it successfully with daily newspapers large and small. It still is a mass media, in these days of micro-targeting. Unlike in it’s heyday, when I would receive those breathlessly written rate increase notices crowing that “our circulation base is up 10% but our rates are only increasing 6% next year”, no one is projecting a long happy career for the printed newspaper. In the short term, it is a great way to reach a concentrated audience of oldsters and last generation’s intelligentsia holding on, literally, for dear life. But the young’uns aren’t coming along for the ride. There is a scene in Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” where a futuristic subway rider is reading a digital copy of USA Today and the headlines and stories change as we see Tom Cruise making the news in front of the reader. Quite prescient, but unlike that cinematic representation of the future of the newspaper, I have a feeling we won’t be reading our newspaper one minute and warming homeless people in the park the next. Unless they steal our computer. Or our phone. Viva La Revolucion Informacion!