24May 2004 by Bob Cargill

Tailor-Made for Two-Way Traffic

Public Relations
Monday, May 24, 2004 – While we’re on the subject of presentations (see previous post, entitled The Black Door), there’s one I made with a former colleague nearly six years ago that just begs to be resurrected here in A Fine Kettle of Fish -- for reasons you’ll quickly understand. At the time, I was working at CPS Direct, where they had a program called Direct Marketing University. The gist of this program was that employees of the company were to exchange their knowledge and expertise with each other, leveraging, if you will, our pool of intellectual capital. Brownie points of some sort were doled out, commensurate with how many of these “courses” you either attended or taught, but for the life of me I can’t remember all the details.…
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17May 2004 by Bob Cargill

The Black Door

Miscellaneous
Monday, May 17, 2004 – People who know me know how highly I speak (no pun intended) of Toastmasters International, a remarkable organization that truly empowers its members to achieve their full potential and realize their dreams. There are Toastmasters clubs in more than 80 countries -- about 200 Toastmasters clubs are “doing business” in Massachusetts alone -- and in each one people like you and me are developing their communication and leadership skills, and finding the courage to change. Back in the day, one of my dreams was to hone my public speaking skills to the point where I could lead seminars and speak at conferences and industry events about direct marketing and creativity. At the time (in the late ‘80s), the extent of my public speaking opportunities was…
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10May 2004 by Bob Cargill

Planting the Seeds for Bountiful Results

Copywriting, Direct Marketing
Monday, May 10, 2004 – An article I wrote, 10 Ways to Grow Your Audience with Direct Mail, was just published in Perfect Register, the newsletter for employees of International Business Systems (IBS), Inc., and their associates in the business community. I am grateful to IBS (thank you, Aleka and George) for asking me to write this article, as it gave me the chance to talk shop with an audience of more than 1,000 readers. And while plans call for us to post the article on our own Web site at Yellowfin Direct Marketing, I thought I’d be remiss if I didn’t incorporate at least a piece of it in A Fine Kettle of Fish. The original article ran in the vicinity of 1,500 words, but I won’t be going…
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03May 2004 by Bob Cargill

Addressing the Facts on Labels

Direct Marketing, Fundraising
Monday, May 3, 2004 – One of the more interesting newsletters I’ve been reading lately is the Fast Company Now Newsletter DIGEST, which notifies me of new posts on the FC Now Web Log. On Friday, something posted by Heath Row, entitled “Marketing Play,” caught my eye, given that it spoke to the business of direct mail and the lengths we direct marketers go to convince people to respond affirmatively to our offers. One riff led to another, of course (the tangled webs we weave), and I eventually found myself reading a page on G-Blog.net -- written by a user named Spam on March 31, 2003 -- about charitable organizations and their use of address labels as a front-end direct mail premium. “I just got forty-five adhesive address labels in…
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