Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Give Before Midnight. Save Democracy

Spoiler Alert: Chances are your $3 contribution rushed to Nancy Pelosi won’t save democracy. Not even if your donation is matched 10X and arrives by midnight as requested. These days –about every 11 minutes –my email inbox dings with news that another message from a Democratic candidate, the party itself, or some strange sounding political […]

Learn More August 5, 2022

Generational Labels Are Lazy

It’s a summertime (and Fall, Winter and Spring) Agitator tradition to tilt at windmills and lament the profoundly stupid use of generational labels. It’s Quixote”esque” because of the bullshit asymmetry principle: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it. But, we’re wearing our muck boots […]

Learn More August 3, 2022

What the Hell is Cadence?

Cadence had its heyday in the 1800s according to the fount of all wisdom, the Google machine. But it’s making a heck of a comeback as it turned the corner from a musical, rhythmic usage to business speak, 101. What might we have lost in this talk of cadence for our direct marketing and […]

Learn More August 1, 2022

Behavioral Science > Nudging

Behavioral economics (aka “nudges”) is the observation that sometimes people behave irrationally. You can google it and find long lists, infographics and diagrams listing reams and reams of biases. It seems all the cool kids have a bias they invented. You can also find lots of non-scientists and non-researchers espousing expertise because they read a […]

Learn More July 29, 2022

charity: water Goes Mailing?, Part 2

Personalized Matching Findings Winning execution Openness, losing on Agreeable. The holdout group has no hard, incremental costs to service it – it’s all digital. The net or profit margin for the holdout in the winning Openness treatment is higher than the letter group margin. But, you got a lot more people “engaged” with the brand […]

Learn More July 27, 2022

charity: water Goes Mailing?

We did some very cool direct mail testing with charity: water. They’ve agreed to let us publish the results. Some things worked, others didn’t. We’ll share it all. This will be a two-part post but worth the ride and we’ll also combine both posts into a downloadable, single pdf for ease of future reference. charity: […]

Learn More July 25, 2022