Being Direct: Making Advertising Pay

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.

Lester Wunderman is Chairman of Wunderman, Cato, Johnson and Senior Adviser to the Board of Directors of Young and Rubicam, with which it merged in 1973. He has received countless awards for his contributions to the field of direct marketing and has been named to the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame. He has served as Director and Secretary Treasurer of the American Association of Advertising and was Director of the Advertising Council. This is his first book. He lives in New York City with his wife, Sue Cott.