One of the great curmudgeons of the ad biz now advocates throwing corporate CEOs in the slammer. Good for him!

This is Denny Hatch. Don't 

mess with him.

Unless you were in what used to be called the “junk mail” end of the advertising business before it went all electronic on us, you may not have heard of Denny Hatch. He’s an iconic direct marketing consultant and business magazine publishing pioneer, celebrated for his marketing insights and knowhow.

Like many of the rest of us, he also really wishes he were a full time novelist. Well, there's nothing you can do about that, so let's get on with the story.

In recent years, Hatch has also been a columnist for Target Marketing magazine.

If you’re in the business of highly targeted direct response advertising and marketing, you’ve not only heard of him, but also know he gets pissed off easily.

Rage, rage against CompuServe

For example, back in the 1990s, when the Internet was new and most people simply dialed it up via their ISP provider, which often was a now-defunct company called CompuServe. Hatch ran a CompuServe online direct marketing forum. He quit in an explosive fury after the CEO of CompuServe dared to describe what his customers on that forum produced  as “junk mail.” (These days everybody calls it "junk mail," including – at least once in a while – Denny Hatch.)

Ya gotta love Hatch, if only because he not only says what he means, but also because he says it with a sledge hammer.

Currently, Hatch has a column in Target Marketing online called “Denny’s Daily Zinger.” Most of the time, he points and shoots lightning out of his finger at marketing incompetence, but from time to time he goes beyond that.

Today, January 13, 2015, he went after fat cat corporate CEOs. The source of Denny’s rage is the policy made by corporate chieftains who place profits and their own bonuses above the financial security of their customers. These are customers who entrust the multi-billion dollar companies with personal information such as credit card numbers.

Here’s Denny Hatch on the subject:

My opinion: greedy CEOs whose organizations are entrusted with our actionable data—and then allow thieves to steal it—should go to jail along with the thieves. 

I'm not talking pieces of paper. 

I'm talking jail time for James Dimon (JPMorgan); Craig Menear (Home Depot); Karen Katz (Neiman Marcus); Gregg Steinhafel (former CEO, Target); and Tim Cook (Apple). 

Only when prison stripes replace pinstripes will the nabobs of corporate America be scared so witless and they'll stop treating their customers like dog turds.

Now mind you, Denny is not some crazed political radical, or a left winger. I doubt he'd normally spend ten seconds of his time at a blog like The New York Crank. I’ll bet that when he saunters out of his Philadelphia town house on Election Day, he generally votes Republican.

Slammer time for CEOs and

the politicians who suck up to them

But when corporate behavior becomes so egregious that even generally-pro-business Republicans want to throw the bums in the slammer, you know it’s actually time to really throw them in the slammer.

Congress? Want to act on this, Congress? 

Oh, sorry, I forgot. Nearly all of you Congressional and Senae imbeciles are on their payrolls via campaign contribution scams. Which means nearly all of you ought to be behind bars, too.