The Birth of Telemarketing

In 1895, the Metropolitan Telephone and Telegraph Company sent a mailing printed on tinted paper to names taken from the Elite Directory or Blue Book.

“HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT OF HAVING A TELEPHONE IN YOUR HOUSE?” it asked. “Those little worries and annoyances that cause so much friction in household affairs are abolished by the telephone, which makes the householder independent of distance, weather and promises.”

Relatively few people then owned a phone. Most had to visit a telephone center to place a long-distance call.

Metropolitan Telephone and Telegraph had since 1878 attracted only 12,500 subscribers in New York City, including 2,500 garnered in recent months through advertising and direct mail.

But marketers were looking for ways to exploit the medium. By 1903, Multi-Mailing Co. of New York was using telephone directories as a source for mailing lists.

The firm offered lists drawn from the phone books of New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia. Total count: 600,000 names.

Multi-Mailing claimed to be the first. And it was no easy task.

“So far as securing the directories of the large cities is concerned, there is little difficulty,” company president J. P. Cramer told a reporter. “But when you undertake to secure all the little directories in a state like Ohio or New York, with its independent telephone lines, the job is enormous.”

Cramer showed several volumes to the reporter.

“Here are the telephone directories of the country around Akron, Ohio,” he said. “Some of the little independent [telephone] lines built by farmers for their own communities are only 15 miles long. They have perhaps 100 subscribers. The subscribers’ list of such a line gives names that have been hard to get heretofore, as they are in no directory.”

What was the value of these names?

“The rural telephone sorts out the influential classes in every community, and lists of names made up from telephones are excellent for high-class propositions,” Cramer said. “I should call such names the very best that could be secured for investment advertising.”

The counts? There were 50,000 names in New England, 150,000 in New York, 20,000 in New Jersey, 80,000 in Pennsylvania, 100,000 in Ohio and 20,000 in other Eastern states.

Based on these numbers, it had even occurred to some businessmen that the telephone itself might used as a sales tool.

“The merchant located in a city with a prosperous telephone system has an opportunity for effective advertising which he seldom uses to advantage,” an expert wrote around the turn of the 20^th century.

For example, a grocer might phone customers to offer “extra fine fruits” at a lower price. “Ten chances to one the person would be glad of the chance at that fruit, thinking of course, it would be a bargain.”

The writer concluded: “Surely the telephone could be made more valuable than it now is as a business getter. Like other advertising, though, misrepresentation would ruin it, and if overworked, it might be a nuisance."

The New York Sun reported in 1905 that department stores were “now arranging to take care of all night orders received by telephone. One advantage is found in the fact that a shopper can file her order for bargains as quoted in evening papers without the inconvenience of visiting the store in the day rush. She is thus also enabled to anticipate the ‘all sold out’ announcement affecting cut rate offerings. Deliveries as a rule are facilitated.”

And how would the customer pay for merchandise? In 1903, Printers’ Ink magazine reported on a “well-defined demand in large cities for a telephone money order system. In the ordering of theater seats, concert tickets, sleeper berths, railroad tickets, staterooms and other things that can be secured by telephone the main difficulty is the transmitting of money.”

The article continued: “Seats and tickets are often forfeited when not claimed upon the minute by parties who have no accounts with theaters, and it is next to impossible to convey money by any convenient, inexpensive method. If a reliable system of stations were established where money could be paid and transmitted by telephone it is likely that urban telephone order business would be greatly increased.”

That was 50 or so years before the rise of the universal credit card.

Who says we can’t learn from the ancients?