The marketplace is changing around you. What do you mean by that? There's always a bright, new, shiny object, especially in marketing, which is what I'm selling. You know, somebody comes around with something different. You follow trends. I'm in the B2B SaaS market, and people talk about the SaaS apocalypse. All of this money is moving towards AI, and everybody's got a cloud or a chat GPT license, and companies are spending, I heard Microsoft spent, $100 million in one month between all their employees using AI. So the money shifts and moves. You've got to find a way to stay in front of somebody, especially with the absolute legendary shift we're having in technology right now. It's tougher than ever. welcome back to the daily mastermind george wright the third with your daily dose of inspiration motivation and education we're going to talk a little strategy today with with uh brad kugler how are you doing brother thank you very much george i am honored to be on your podcast and excited to share whatever i can to help your audience yeah you know i a lot of people on um in our audience, in our community knows that we get a lot of requests, but we try to be very specific about who we have on the show. And for those of you that don't know Brad, you know, he's a founder of Direct Mail 2.0, 35 years in marketing, technology, business growth. He's had, you know, he's reinvented his business through a lot of different waves of market disruption. And he does a phenomenal job of combining direct mail, digital marketing, competitive intelligence. And so I really wanted to give that background to our listeners, because there's a lot of people that are out there navigating a massive sea of the next big idea on marketing and AI and tech and things. So I'm curious, just real quick, Brad, why don't you let everyone know why you chose direct mail and just how your background kind of pushed you into that and it's been moving. But give us just the setup so they understand what your business is as we have this conversation. Sure. So let me go with the origin story. Most people like it, but I was 23 years in a family business that sold CDs and DVDs wholesale to Blockbuster, to Best Buy, Circuit City, which doesn't exist anymore. And that business obviously doesn't exist anymore. But the transformation, we knew this was coming. This wasn't a surprise. In fact, I started hearing this in the early 90s, and we didn't actually close the business until 2017. team. But a lot happened between that. You know, we, we, we tried many things to try to go online. We tried to do get into streaming and, and those were big capital expenditures. And I'll be honest, we didn't have the connections or the deep pockets to jump into streaming. I think there's only three or four companies that actually did. So I knew I was looking at a career change at 50 years old, Never finished college. I had almost three kids in college and I'm like, wow, what am I going to do? So I had to get bright real quick and I started studying every MBA business book on the market. I think I read 27 books in one year. Our revenue went from 25 million and 50 employees down to, well, pretty much zero and one employee within two and a half years. So I learned so much more on the way down than I did on the way up. And one of the key things, it wasn't so much looking what I wanted to do. It's knowing what I should not do. And I knew I wanted a recurring revenue business. I knew I wanted to be in technology. And I knew that I wanted to be in a business that was a disruptor versus a disruptee. So then one says, well, what the heck are you doing in direct mail? Well, direct mail is ripe for disruption. And a longtime family friend of mine, Joy Genduza of Postcard Mania, I'll give props there. She said, look, I've really been impressed with how you survived this transition without a personal bankruptcy or collapse and how you always were trying different things. I want you to come spin off this technology. It was a marketing technology that took direct mail and it reported on it and it lifted it with three simple things. tracking mail like you track packages, re-targeting, which everybody's heard of, and call tracking, where you route a phone call through a third party and it keeps track of the stats. Very simplistic product that had three services. Fast forward, we made our deal. I saw the recurring revenue model, which she didn't even have. We spun off the technology and here we are eight, nine years later with Direct Mail 2.0. And we position ourselves as the performance stack for direct mail. So if you're doing direct mail, we have three platforms that improve the tracking, the reporting, and the lift on direct mail. And I will not rant for another half hour. No, no, it's good. But I'm curious because I think a lot of people, like you said, things are coming back around because we own magazines. We're doing a lot of digital, but we're also doing print because attention is a difficult thing. And direct mail, magazines, things that are written, it does capture attention for individuals. It's just how do you make it successful? And so the digital tech, the tracking, the call tracking. So I'm curious, when you get asked this, you mentioned if companies are doing direct mail, these things that can help them. What would be your argument for doing direct mail? Why do you feel that it is an important thing for people, especially right now, to do as part of their marketing mix, where most people are saying move away from TV and radio and mail and things like this? You're saying maybe lean into it a little. What would be your reasoning for that? A hundred percent. And it could start with a few questions. How many emails do you get a day? Probably three to five hundred, like most people. Yeah. Do you even know how many digital ads you're seeing as you scroll social media? Most people are getting 10 impressions a day Now that includes your emails your billboards your radio your TV The general noise level of digital advertising is above the ability for most marketers to even break through. Now people get very smart with their targeting and I'll give you that. However, with 10,000 marketing messages being slewn at you a day, the tactile marketing that you held in your hand and touched happened to be direct mail. It's a letter you open. It's a postcard you stick on your refrigerator. Most of the Gen Z and millennials, they're just now getting their household set up and they're now receiving mail that they're actually responding to. When I was a kid, mailboxes were full, three inches thick with direct mail flyers and advertisements. Not anymore. Most people get two or three things a day. So there is no competition in that mailbox. So this, although it's expensive, you can target the individual person. There's no security or spam rules. And you can get something in their hand that they will hold, even if it's for three seconds before it goes in the trash. Now you combine that with some of our digital technologies. You planted that seed. And the magical thing of marketing is repetition. So if you get the piece in the mail once a month, once every three weeks, and now you're seeing the digital marketing, now it's going to catch your attention because you've got that tactile thing in your hand that you stared at or put on your fridge or left on your kitchen table for a few hours. There's a connection there. And that's the premise. It's the basic of marketing. It's repetition, but it's starting with that tactile piece that has very little competition in that mailbox. Yeah, I think that's a big, I think it makes sense for people too. It's like when all of this digital noise becomes white noise, the thing that cuts through is back to those basics. And it's that high tech, but high touch. I also work very closely with Franklin Planner and I always ask myself, I'm like, wait, people still buy planners? Yeah, they sell 400,000 paper planners per year. And it's because I think people have a need sometimes to kind of slow down mentally, but they've also done a good job of like taking the physical and adding the digital. So I think that is the solution for cutting through the noise. And you kind of made a comment. I can't remember where I picked it up, but you've said, you know, and I'm paraphrasing, leaving or aren't always leaving you. The marketplace is changing around you. What do you mean by that? Well, Well, it's very simple. You know, there's always a bright, new, shiny object, especially in marketing, which is what I'm selling. So, you know, somebody comes around with something different. You follow trends. All right. So I'm in the B2B SaaS market and people talk about the SaaS apocalypse. All of this money is moving towards AI and everybody's got a quad or a chat GPT license and companies are spending. I heard Microsoft spent $100 million in one month between all their employees using AI. So the money shifts and moves. So it isn't necessarily, you've got to find a way to stay in front of somebody, especially with the absolute legendary shift we're having in technology right now. It's tougher than ever. I mean, you've heard companies like Salesforce are having lowered stock, even though their sales and their profits are still legendary, they're still losing, they're losing subscribers, you know? Yeah. I mean, why do you, why do you think it is that most entrepreneurs don't recognize these shifts when there's so much around you? Um, and how, and how can they recognize them sooner and pivot sooner? And direct mail is a great example because, you know, if you're not trying, and so maybe you think, oh, it doesn't work anymore. How do you stay in that frame of mind, why do entrepreneurs not recognize those shifts? I think it's a very fine line. You can be so reactionary to every market change that you can't take your eye off the ball and you miss an opportunity. Or you can be too slow at noticing a market change and pivoting towards that migration. So I don't think that everybody misses it. I think you get some that are too reactionary and jump ship on the first sign of a little swell out there. And they're like, that's the way. And then you have others that don't see it. So like anything, you've got a bell curve of people that recognize it at the right time, at the right place. But most don't. And you have some that are just kind of anchored in fear of change and they don't want to change. They're like, we had a good thing going here for 10 years. You know, the average business or technology cycle is 10 to 15 years. This has been going great. I don't know what's happening. My revenue is eroding at 10 percent a year. and they they let's see what happens next year let's make these tiny little changes let's replace this one guy which in many cases that might work but when there's something as fundamental now as this technology shift of ai it's going to be it's going to be a hard lesson and then it comes up what do you do what do you do you know yeah i sit and ponder this stuff nightly you know yeah i i've How, how, why? The vibe code, you know, and I'm, I'm turning out apps and half a day that honestly, two years ago would have taken two to four months to do, you know? Yeah. So you, you chose this path with mail and I'm just curious, what's, what's, um, what's helped you to stay focused on that and not just pivot into some of these others? And is it just that you've, you've created a way to, um, sort of infuse the digital and the tech to it? And that's, what's kept you? Because I am curious why you've picked that path other than, you know, you've had really good success with it. Well, one, I always believed in direct mail. I did it in my previous businesses and it worked. So I had a foundation of this is a good technology. Now, if it can be combined with some of the new tools that are coming out, some of the attribution tools, that was what was lacking with direct mail. Is you couldn necessarily say it came from this mail piece like you could with an email They click on a link right They click on an ad You knew instantly that attribution With some of the tools that have hit the market in the last few years, like QR codes or identity resolution pixels, you know, tracing back call tracking and SMS numbers, you can nail that attribution on a piece of mail the same way you could nail it on an email or a digital ad. So there has been this combining of technologies with direct mail that made that attribution rock solid. So that was the one thing. The other thing is you're talking about combining the best of both worlds. Digital marketing does work regardless of the noise. If you're a smart marketer and you know how to get above that white noise, as you say, and you combine it with digital marketing, well, now you've got the best of both worlds, you know, working for you. So, yeah, it really is. That really is the case. And digital can now bring it in even more. We were at one time mail-in millions of pieces of direct mail-in. And that would be one of the other questions I have for you is the lead time was always one of the problems for us. You know, everyone wants quick, fast deployment and answers in analytics and mail seemed to take, you know, we always had this like six week cycle of, of creating the mail and printing the mail and we were printing 2 million pieces a week. So it was, it was pretty heavy. Um, what do you say to business owners from a timing standpoint, when it comes to direct mail versus now where they can throw out Facebook ads and turn the time and get quick, immediate feedback? Cause you've got the reporting and analytics, um, and, and there's a huge value in mail, but the lead time kind of is out there as well. What are your thoughts? So, again, you're combining the best of both worlds. The way that our platform works is we time the ads to start four days before the mail arrives. So imagine you remember that movie Inception, where you're sort of planting that idea in their head. So we start hitting their social feeds three or four days before the mail arrives. So then the mail arrives and, you know, it may not be completely conscious, but, oh, oh, I've seen it. And we ensure that that creative is creatively similar enough to make that link, you know, whether it's conscious or subconscious. So I'd like to say that we're shortening that lead time. I mean, the production to hitting the households is a week or two weeks, but you can time that digital campaign to start warming that audience up before the mail arrives. We have emails that start hitting the day before the mail arrives and the day after the mail arrives. And then if they start going to the website, we do good old retargeting to sort of follow them up. And then if they use the QR code or the text back or the phone number on there, now we've memorialized that incident forever. We pass that to the advertiser so they can follow up in case the guy walks into the store or calls and doesn't close. The guy doesn't close the sale. You now have that lead rock solid and in the advertiser's hands forever. Yeah, I love this. It's a it's a very predictable marketing blueprint, real pattern, right, where you can you can set up the expectation. You can get the lift with the mail. You can track it, analyze it, retarget it, geo target it. You know, we did a bunch of these types of campaigns when I was working closely with a very large Freddy's restaurant franchise where we would go out and do these kind of things. This was a personal mentoring client of mine. And so, yeah, I'm just saying, like, guys, if you're listening to this, I don't have any past knowledge working with Brad, but the type of tech and technology he says and what he's doing, And it's definitely something for your business that can open up some doors and some gateways, especially if you have data, you have a list and things like that. I'm curious, Brad, how have you infused or what have you done to incorporate AI and take advantage of some of these things that a lot of people are thinking, you know, first of all, maybe overhyping a bit, but over or underestimating the power of AI. How do you incorporate AI into your direct mail marketing intelligence? That's a great question because honestly, as I said, I have been put the fear of God into me for being disrupted again. So I was an early adopter of this. And AI comes from your data, especially if you have proprietary data. So I've got seven or eight years of 80,000 direct mail campaigns. I bought a direct mail competitive intelligence database of another 500,000 campaigns. So I believe I own the largest direct mail database probably in the world. So what do we do? I'm lucky enough to have attribution stats. So we model direct mail campaigns. I hired a very expensive set of mathematicians and engineers about 18 months ago to start building the models. So I'll give you an example. How would someone use it? So we've taken all of our data. We've crunched it with all the top frontier model LLMs with our proprietary data and our proprietary modeling. And let's say you are our insurance company and you're doing a mailing for homeowners insurance. Well, what I do is I dig through my database to find all the previous homeowners insurance mailings to the zip codes they're targeting at the volume of mail they're doing. And I have these in buckets. So I know what the engagement rate has been historically for these type of mailings and these geographies and these times of year and these volumes. and let's say for example that that engagement rate when i say engagement rate people that engage with the campaign something we know they did they went to a website they called they they scanned a qr code they clicked on an email they did something that we know a that person actually did and we chart that engagement rate we compare it to the the creative they've done and the creative all the similar campaigns and then we provide a rating and a recommendation hey here are the campaigns that did really well in your vertical of similar nature similar timing similar geography and here what they had that your piece that you submitted does not have So they upload their creative they answer eight questions on their targeting, and we go and we churn the data. We run it through not only Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini, just to make sure that we're not going to have a hallucination or throw some outlier recommendation. We use all three of the top tier LLMs and we give them recommendations on, and all they do is they spend anywhere from 20 to $80 inputting what their campaign is, including their creative. You know, if they're going to spend 10 grand on a direct mail campaign, if anyone would, would you spend $80 to know how it compares to similar ones and what you can do to make it better? I would. And that's what REI is. Yeah. It's interesting because digital intelligence is important, but there's a level on a mass scale that it can analyze you just would never catch. It's like analyzing all your bank accounts for a couple of transactions. It's such a powerful tool. And you said it, spotting trends or spotting nuances that you would not catch. This is where the technology really amplifies and enhances things, right? Right. Absolutely. And we do the same thing with our competitive intelligence tools. So we collect samples of direct mail from 60,000 different brands. We catalog them, we OCR them, we've made them searchable in an AI database so they can say, show me some non-profit campaigns for animals in New England in October. And it'll show you all the companies that did it and how many times they mailed and who they targeted. So you've got tools now that are ingesting huge amounts of proprietary data. This is not something that chat or Gemini or Claude has access to. This is our own world of data that we owe. So if you are going to do a direct mail campaign, as we say, we are the performance stack for direct mail. You have tools that you can't get anywhere else that will improve the likelihood of your success. I won't say guarantee it, but it'll improve the likelihood of success. Yeah, I love that. I love working with individuals that have all of those unique, exclusive things as well, because there is a science around direct mail. I can speak to that, right? So, you know, people don't realize the nuances that, you know, the outer envelope or the postcard versus a letter and how to get them to open it first, check it next, get the copy, everything from handwritten to stamps to whatever. So there's a lot of that that, like anything else in business, I always recommend people go with people that have the experience and the knowledge that then stack it on top of the tools and stack it on top of tech and reporting and AI. And then you've just got it. Like you got the mix. Well, I appreciate you sharing this. I really felt like it's been a while since I've heard people in the industry talking about direct mail and the innovations that have come. And I thought that was pretty important to kind of share with our audience. I'll give you kind of last word. What is it that you feel, what would you recommend? What advice would you give to a business that's thinking about adding to their marketing mix or even allocating some of their budget. And it's just kind of something they haven't really thought about because they've thought it's, you know, it's an unknown, it's untestable, whatnot, or just in business in general, because you've been able to innovate your business so much. What advice would you have for our listeners? Specifically in terms of marketing, we all agree that there's a digital fatigue setting in. Go where your competitors are not. So if they're not in your mailbox or in your customer's mailbox, then you should be in there. And if you're going to be in there, look at some of these more advanced tools. This is no longer your parents' or grandparents' direct mail industry. There is a lot of layered-on technology straight up into the latest AI tools that will improve your direct mail. In fact, we're getting great results from AI design tools that will redesign a piece and it will be infinitely better than, unfortunately, than someone who's sitting and using Adobe Illustrator or something. There's a lot of tools. I would revisit direct mail if you haven't. If you use it, I would add some of these technologies to help ensure your success because you're probably familiar with it and you probably know what you're doing and you found your sweet spot. now take it up to the next level with some of the other tools. Yeah, I love the awareness of that. I used to collect mail pieces myself just because we used to do a lot of the like the wedding invitation for our events and things like that. We had everybody from, you know, Trump signing pieces for us to whatever for direct mail. And it was just crazy because I used to collect direct mail pieces. But I think that the awareness is coming back. So this is excellent. You know, Brad, where can people catch you or kind of learn more about what you guys have to offer? I think the easiest place to go is dm20.com. That's dm20.com. From there, you can find the rest of our performance stack for direct mail. And you can find me on LinkedIn. I honestly love to give back and help others. You know, I'm pushing 60 here. And at this point, I like to see other people win as I'm in a later stage of my own career. You know? I love it. I love it. No, thank you. I appreciate you sharing that. And, you know, if you're listening to this, the reason I wanted to bring this topic on is I feel like sometimes we're so far down the rabbit hole trying to figure out how to do more Facebook ads or this or that. You don't innovate. You're not looking at the trends. You're not getting around people that have had, you know, decades and decades of experience and diversifying your marketing mix as well as how you're integrating all of the technologies. And so I thought it would be very helpful. So if you're listening to this, go check Brad and DirectMail 2.0 out. Also, let me know what you're working on. You know, we're really excited to celebrate some wins with you. and also find where you're struggling. Share this episode. It would mean the world to us. It'll make a big difference for others that are out there building their business. And hit me up on the Daily Mastermind. You'll see some links in the show notes and we'll look forward to talking with you more tomorrow. Have an amazing day.
