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Brad Kugler

Founder of DirectMail2.0, Marketing Strategist
Brad Kugler
Background

About Brad Kugler

Direct MailMarketing AttributionAI ForecastingCompetitive IntelligenceCampaign Strategy

Brad Kugler is the founder of DirectMail2.0 and a marketing strategist with more than 35 years of experience helping businesses make smarter marketing decisions. He has carried organizations through several waves of industry disruption — traditional direct mail, the shift to digital, and now AI-driven forecasting. His focus is narrow and practical: help business leaders see where a market is heading before they commit significant time and budget to a campaign that the market has already moved past.

Brad works with marketing agencies, brands, business owners, printers, and mail service providers. DirectMail2.0 combines direct mail with digital marketing, competitive intelligence, and AI-powered forecasting — layering QR codes, identity resolution pixels, call tracking, and SMS tracking onto physical campaigns so every response can be attributed the way a digital ad click would be. His team models new campaigns against a proprietary database of tens of thousands of past direct mail campaigns, plus hundreds of thousands more, to benchmark performance before a client spends the money.

On The Daily Mastermind, Brad sat down with George Wright III for a conversation about why direct mail is becoming an advantage again. He explained how his family's 23-year business selling CDs and DVDs to Blockbuster and Circuit City collapsed, why entrepreneurs misread market shifts as lost customers, and how sequencing digital ads and email around a mail drop lifts response. His closing advice was blunt: go where your competitors are not.

Featured Conversation

Brad on The Daily Mastermind Podcast

Marketing That Actually Works with Brad Kugler
Jul 30, 2026
Marketing That Actually Works with Brad Kugler
Brad Kugler explains why direct mail still works, where AI improves marketing decisions, and how to combine high-touch and high-tech campaigns.
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE →
Key Insights

Key takeaways from Brad

01
Digital fatigue has made the mailbox the least crowded channel you own.
People absorb thousands of digital impressions a day and two or three pieces of mail. Brad points out that mailboxes once stuffed three inches thick are now nearly empty, which gives a well-designed piece room to be held, read, and stuck on the refrigerator.
02
You are usually not losing customers — the market is moving.
Brad's family business saw the writing on the wall for physical media in the early 1990s and still did not fully transition until 2017. Declining results are often a market shift, not a customer problem, and incremental tweaks will not fix a fundamental change.
03
Sequence digital around the mail drop, not instead of it.
Brad's team runs digital ads three to four days before a mail piece lands, so the physical piece feels familiar when it arrives. Emails follow the day before and after delivery, with retargeting once the prospect visits the site.
04
Use AI to benchmark the campaign before you fund it.
Clients upload creative and answer targeting questions, and the system compares the campaign to similar past ones by industry, geography, timing, and volume. Brad runs it through multiple AI models rather than one, to avoid a hallucinated recommendation driving real spend.
05
Go where your competitors are not.
If competitors have abandoned direct mail for digital-only strategies, that absence is the opening. Brad advises owners who already know the channel to layer on attribution and AI tools, and newcomers to test it inside a broader mix rather than betting everything on one channel.
Find Brad

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