Hindsight

Wednesday, February 08, 2023

SAYS IT ALL

Monday, February 06, 2023

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

These Guys Are Stupid, And I'm Being Charitable

Why do some organizations still solicit funds the way they did in the 1960s? You need to take a smarter marketing approach, or you'll waste money like they do.

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

I'm still getting about two bucks a month in cash from stupid, misguided charities that insist on sending me actual money in the mail. I get half dollars, a few very clean dollar bills, and a two-dollar bill or two at least once a quarter from the knuckleheads who are running the marketing campaigns for these clueless organizations--typically asking for help for vets, pets, and orphans.

These idiots are still selling tonnage to suckers instead of data-driven targeting. They're basically dumping their clients' dollars down the drain. Sadly, most of the traditional charities still using the mail are run by tired old managers from pre-digital times who don't know any better and frankly don't care to rock the boat or change the ways they've "always" done business. To these people, tradition is just a convenient excuse for resisting change.

Never mind the decks of cheap playing cards, the tiny pairs of socks and gloves, the dozens of pens and notepads, and, of course, the zillions of calendars and greeting cards sent from October through December. I'm talking about real U.S. tender, and plenty of it. I'll leave the math up to you, but if an average non-responder like me - never having given a dime to any of these clowns -- is getting $20 or $30 a year, it's pretty clear when you consider mailing costs that millions are being wasted annually on these pointless pleas.

The charities apparently have no one in management able or willing to ask whether these mail spampaigns still make any economic sense, if they ever did. I used to feel bad about the stories of mail carriers dumping loads of mail in garbage cans rather than delivering it. Now I feel that they're just saving me a trip to the trash because I've long abandoned asking anyone to send me anything important by snail mail.

How can the marketers defend this approach of sending millions of misdirected missives? Their strategy starts with the assumption that an unsolicited and unwanted gift somehow confers an obligation on the recipient to reply, respond, or act in any particular manner, other than to laugh at the squandering of allegedly precious charitable funds. And please don't tell me that they wouldn't do it if they didn't ultimately bring in more money than the mailing costs because I'm not sure that even the morons in charge can count. This is a classic example of the old adage about knowing you're wasting half of your advertising and marketing dollars, but not knowing which half is being wasted.

In fairness to the charities, we've seen just as much waste and stupidity in the digital marketing world. Online advertisers are being sold the idea that by having random third-party firms create channel-stuffing content and other promotional pablum-- instead of useful, valuable, and authentic material -- they can cost-effectively attract and redirect indiscriminate eyeballs and generate substantial numbers of leads and site traffic. The emphasis, in case after case, is on the volume of eyeballs instead of actual attention and focused engagement. The vendors then justify and support this crappy content with metrics based on clicks instead of cash results. It was a short-lived scam, which has now largely run its course. There's only so many times you can spam me with protein supplements, vitamins, cure-alls and diet compounds before it all gets lost in the clutter and totally ignored.

The context of an attempted conversation and solicitation-- especially in the glutted and noisy digital world-- means far more in many cases than the content, even if it's well-crafted and actually valuable, because if the target isn't listening, it doesn't matter what you're saying or selling. Millions of dollars have been frittered away on content campaigns that disappear into the ether. That said, if the material itself is so bland that it could as easily have been written by ChatGPT, had such a tool existed then, you'd have still been wasting money. Turns out that it's very difficult to outsource your business's basic selling propositions unless the prospective partner doing the work invests heavily in the research necessary to learn enough about your business to be almost as good as you are in telling your story.

To make matters worse, there hasn't been any useful tracking for the clients of the reach, response, and results of the tons of commoditized content being launched into space, or of the ROI -- which should have been the point of the entire process. No leads, no prospects, no sales, and no outcome data -- nothing but noise. The last several years have seen hundreds of these counterfeit content marketing startups come and go, and the single shortcoming, which they all seem to share, is the absence of any substantive measurement tools to accurately report real dollar and cents results. You can't manage what you can't measure. And eventually, almost everyone catches on and no one re-ups. Client and customer churn in the industry was constant and there were no "second sales."

The post-pandemic emphasis on profitability and demonstrable results has helped to wash out many of the pretenders and even some of the otherwise viable players who failed to adapt to the new demands of the marketplace by streamlining and automating critical parts of their businesses. The survivors have changed their pitches -- from conceptual to concrete-- and they're leading the charge with proof and use cases.

If you're still looking for a outsourced solution in this area, and if you're a business without a boatload of marketing and writing talent already on board, make sure you ask for answers upfront. The clear winners should be able to show you success stories and improvements in four or five critical categories. Not every one of these metrics will be at the top of your list of objectives, but each of them is making someone's business grow and prosper.

The basic buckets, where you should see baselines and then a record of clear improvements, are the following for almost every business: (1) direct lead generation; (2) referred traffic leads; (3) social media traffic leads; (4) organic traffic leads; (5) exposure, redirect and shared blog and paper publication; and (6) website/domain authority and links-- referrals and keywords. Each of these areas and metrics is its own world of data, processes, measurement, and relative weight, which will vary by company and concerns. But each is worth examining, understanding, and discussing carefully before you choose a managed services vendor for any outsourced marketing.

Trial-and-error solutions or DIY attempts to deal with the costs and complexities of these matters aren't smart bets for most SMBs. Look for a one-stop, experienced partner who has assembled a comprehensive set of integrated solutions and used them effectively and efficiently for others. Lean on and learn from someone who's already been there and done it.

DO YOUR JOB DICK - YOU WERE A WEAKLING DURING THE KETANJI SUP CT HEARINGS AND LET THE MAGAts LIE AND BULLY HER - STEP UP NOW

How to Stop a Senator From Blocking a Federal Judge

Feb. 6, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

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By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Last February, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, abruptly decided to block a nomination for a federal judgeship, though Mr. Johnson actually recommended the nominee just eight months before.

Why the reversal? It was never very clear. Mr. Johnson said it was because the candidate, Judge William Pocan of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court, didn’t live in Green Bay, where the federal district is. But Judge Pocan didn’t live in Green Bay when Mr. Johnson first recommended him and, at any rate, offered to move to the city if he got the job. Was it because Judge Pocan had something to do with the prosecutors’ decision to give low bail for a domestic violence defendant who later drove his car into a Wisconsin parade, killing six people? That’s what Mr. Johnson implied in his statement, though that accusation would be false: Judge Pocan had nothing to do with the bail decision and was unconnected to the case.

Or was it because Mr. Johnson later learned that Mr. Pocan would have been the first openly gay federal judge in Wisconsin? That’s what Mr. Pocan’s brother, Mark Pocan, a Democratic congressman from the Madison area, charged in an interview, accusing the senator of homophobia. Mr. Johnson denied it.

In the end, none of these possible reasons, or the lack of them, really matter. Mr. Johnson refused to give his home-state permission for the nomination to proceed — declining to return what is known in the Senate as a blue slip — and the nomination stalled, expiring at the end of the Senate term in January. The White House has not renewed it.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Richard Durbin of Illinois, fumed about Mr. Johnson’s decision at the time, saying he was disappointed by the last-minute turnabout and noting that Judge Pocan had received nothing but praise and high ratings from lawyers.

But in fact, there was nothing formal that stopped Mr. Durbin from ignoring Mr. Johnson and proceeding with Judge Pocan’s nomination. There is no rule or law that prevented him from sending it to the Senate floor for final approval. The only barrier was Mr. Durbin’s interpretation of an archaic Senate tradition of courtesy that allows senators to effectively veto federal district judge nominations from their own state for any reason or for no reason at all.

That home-state veto is a fundamentally undemocratic practice that gives far too much power to individual senators, as the editorial board wrote in 2014. Like the filibuster in all its forms, it allows vital Senate responsibilities to be controlled by small fractions of the chamber or even single members — powers never envisioned in the Constitution. Democrats have used it to block extreme candidates from Republican presidents when they were in the Senate minority. But as we noted in 2017, elections have consequences, and there will be times when Democrats will have to accept unpalatable judges in order for the Senate to operate along the principle of majority rule.

For now, though, it is Republicans who will have to accept the consequences of their failure to regain the Senate last November, and Mr. Durbin holds the power to make that happen. He could unilaterally end this blue-slip custom at any time without requiring any kind of vote or radically upending an important Senate practice, just as Republicans decided to end it for appellate-level judges in 2018. That’s when President Donald Trump was the one nominating judges and Republicans wanted no interference in their goal of filling the circuit courts with conservatives.

It’s far past time for Mr. Durbin to do so. Republicans have worked for years to turn the entire judicial selection process into a proxy war for their ideological goals. Mr. Trump allowed the Federalist Society to pick his judges as part of their crusade to remake the federal courts, and the lack of home-state veto power is one of the reasons the appellate bench now contains so many unqualified and extremist choices. When in power, Republicans did their best to block President Barack Obama’s nominations, which is one reason there were so many openings when the Trump administration moved in.