Product Description

Lester Wunderman created the business known as direct marketing. He conceived and refined its basic strategies, and he gave it a name. Today, he is Chairman of Wunderman, Cato, Johnson, the largest direct marketing organization in the world, with billings in excess of $1.5 billion and 65 offices in 36 countries. This is his own story, in his own words, of how he did it -- how he sold everything from roses to Ford cars, from credit cards to coffee, using the direct marketing techniques he and his agency created; how he showed Time, Inc., how to market its magazines and Columbia Records how to become one of the largest and most sophisticated direct marketers in the world.

25 years before the Internet was conceived, in a now-famous speech delivered at MIT, Wunderman described the sales relationship of the future as "interactive." In tomorrow's electronic marketplace, the "interactive" techniques that Wunderman developed will account for the great majority of sales worldwide. Wunderman's intimate first-person account provides a business road map to the future.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #325789 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01-01
• Released on: 1996-12-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Amazon.com Review
Lester Wunderman's Being Direct: Making Advertising Pay truly is both informative and entertaining. It combines an extraordinary personal history of "direct marketing" with a remarkably candid look at the field's most acclaimed practitioner. Written in an easy-going and deliberately persuasive style obviously honed during Wunderman's six decades in the trenches, the book shows his skill developing and gaining acceptance as he creates revolutionary advertising programs for future corporate stalwarts like the Columbia Record Club and American Express.

From Publishers Weekly
Born in a Bronx tenement, Wunderman started his own advertising agency with his older brother in 1939, at the age of 19. It went under two years later. With a never-say-die attitude, he learned the ropes, and by 1959, Wunderman, Ricotta & Kline (WRK), which he had founded a year earlier, was the world's largest agency specializing in mail-order advertising. A collector of African art, conversant with Spinoza and Marshall McLuhan, Wunderman credits his 1972 meeting with the chief of Mali's Dogon tribe as the key to his understanding of kinship and power-sharing-insights that led him to merge WRK (now Wunderman Cato Johnson, which he chairs) with a larger general agency, Young & Rubicam. Highly skimpy on personal detail, this career-oriented autobiography is a seasoned pro's detailed casebook of direct-marketing hits and misses. Wunderman's campaigns helped launch the American Express card, boosted Time Inc.'s magazine division circulation, devised interactive media to sell Lincoln Continentals and made the zip code an accepted part of the postal system. His account of these and other legendary feats is high-energy. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Wunderman has been working in advertising since World War II and is currently the chair of his own direct-marketing firm. In this memoir, he describes his career and how he created the concept of direct marketing. He began by doing mail orders in newspapers and magazines in a small firm before moving on to create direct-marketing campaigns. Wunderman helped develop both the Columbia Record Club and the Book of the Month Club. He examines how his campaigns for American Express, Ford, and Time magazine, for example, were initiated and how successful they were. He offers a well-written look into the field of advertising and direct marketing that would be a welcome addition to any business collection.?Joel Jones, Kansas City P.L., Mo.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

An interesting guide to the history of direct marketing
This book is interesting particularly for the evolution of direct marketing that Wunderman describes--and to a large degree, instigated. Readers will notice a tendency for Wunderman to toot his own horn, but don't worry; it doesn't ever become obnoxious.

The book would be good as a general guide as to what works and what doesn't--and why--in direct marketing. If a company is looking at direct marketing as a possible direction, this would be a good place to start to get an idea of what is involved, and what it takes to be successful. It may or may not help the reader that Wunderman describes using his techniques in marketing both goods (flowers) and services (credit cards).

In the end, you get more history from it than hard, specific tips. A very good read, but don't expect it to be "100 tips to direct marketing success". The hints are there, but you'll need to dig them out.

This is the MAN!
What a story! Wunderman invented so many of the marketing techniques we take for granted. Now he shares the inside story on how it did it. An inspiring trip through some of the greatest marketing ever.

Getting experiences in Direct Marketing by reading
As a Direct Marketeer I was really impressed by Wunderman's clear, sophisticated, simple book that is REALLY about direct selling ! For a Direct Marketing "freshmen" it helps to think about what you should think about. And for profis it is a treasure of Direct Marketing strategies that allready worked.