Omaha: Direct Marketing Central
What’s the capital of American direct marketing, Chicago or New York?
My vote goes to Omaha, Nebraska.
Omaha Steaks is there. So is InfoGroup and many subsidiaries.
Nestled on the Missouri, across from Council Bluffs, Iowa, Omaha offers many advantages. Its downtown is being developed, and there’s plenty of space in the outlying industrial parks. And the people are wonderful.
What’s more, the town long served as the center of American telemarketing. With good reason—Omaha had the best phone lines in the country, thanks to the presence of the Strategic Air command.
But Omaha played a role in direct marketing way before that—in the 1870s, to be precise. The Union Pacific Railroad terminal was located on 10th, and the trains left daily bearing letters from an early direct mailer: J.M. Pattee.
Not that Pattee was admirable. He ran crooked lotteries—the drawings were held in the Opera House on Farnam. (It’s the white building in the 1872 photo shown above). And he swindled people by mail. As one critic wrote, “I have yet to find the first person who ever received one dollar from him in return for money sent.”
Omaha soon got tired of Pattee, and he moved on to Laramie and New York. But he was a great copywriter, and one of the first people to realize that lists could be used for more than one purpose.
