How do you sell a high priced, around-the-world adventure, including the North and South Poles, on a shoestring budget?
Simple.
Lead with a great idea, then persuade the world’s best mailing list expert and copy talent to jump on board.
This seven-page sales letter was mailed in 1968 on a budget of $5,000 to owners of yachts, Arabian horse breeders and owners of private two-engine airplanes. The price for this round the world voyage was $10,000 or $61,000 in 2009 dollars.
The promo was a smashing success and pulled in 72 respondents who ponied up $10k each.
Dick Benson was the “grumpy genius” behind the marketing and Hank Burnett wrote the copy.More on The Admiral Byrd Society Sales Letter (Copywriter: Hank Burnett)
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The open letter approach in copywriting is hard to excel upon.
The key factor you’ve got going for you with an “open letter” is just that — it’s a letter first and foremost — not an ad.
As anyone who’s learned from the great advertising masters (Hopkins, Caples, Ogilvy) knows, editorial style layouts often get multiple times the readership that traditional advertising layouts do.
Open letters are the advertising parallel of op-ed (opinion editorial) pages. People read ‘em.
So, when Saturday Review Editor, Norman Cousins, was ready to launch his new magazine, World Review, he relied on the venerable open letter. Of course, it helped having the name recognition Cousins enjoyed at the time of this insertion in March of 1972.
More on The Open Letter In Copywriting
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Whenever I interview a prospective copywriting or consulting client, one of the first questions I usually ask is: “who’s this product for?”
And more often than I’d like to hear, I get the answer: “it’s for everyone.”
Experience has taught me to defer on such projects because the prospective client has no idea who his or her target market is. And that signals there’s usually a basket of oversights and problems in addition to this biggie.
Conversely, when you ask the question, “who’s this product for?” and get an answer like, “it’s for single executive women who live in Tribecca, have aspirations to be a managing director and spend their summer weekends in the Hamptons,” then this is as green as lights get.
These clients not only know who their target market is but they’ve likely designed the product with this demographic in mind.
Does this mean there are no products with “everyone” as the target audience.
Well, yes and no.More on Copywriting: Headline Nightmares
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How can you get a Nobel Prize Winner to endorse your product or service?
Believe it or not, it can be really quite simple.
And one of the best places to take a cue from is top flight direct response companies who know the importance of pairing promise and proof.
So with that in mind, I’ll swipe Ken McCarthy’s equation: Traffic + Conversion = Profits for:
Promise + Proof = Profits
See, without superb proof mechanisms, the loud promises just get drowned out. Amazingly, most marketers never catch on to this fact. And that’s good news for us!
Look at the above headline for the colon cleansing product, Flora Source.More on Promise + Proof = Profits
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On Tuesday, February 16th, I had the chance to chat with author and former Ogilvy & Mather CEO, Ken Roman, at the invitation of my friend, Byrne Hobart.
What did we talk about?
Byrne and I, of course, grilled him on his latest book, The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising.
Like a typical, turbo-charged CEO, Ken called into the conference line from the back of a yellow cab cruising through the snow covered streets of Manhattan.
This is a book that tells the rest of the story about David Ogilvy, the most famous advertising man in the world, from someone who worked shoulder-to-shoulder with him for decades.
More than just a book about Ogilvy, The King of Madison Avenue reveals the evolution of modern direct response advertising in the 20th Century.
Kenneth Roman has co-authored several acclaimed books including: “How To Advertise” and “Writing That Works” and he maintains an active speaking schedule.
Byrne Hobart works for the web development company, Blue Fountain Media in New York City.
The highlights are mine.
Lawrence Bernstein: Hello, this is Lawrence Bernstein and today I have the privilege of being on the line with Kenneth Roman and Byrne Hobart. Kenneth Roman is the former CEO of Ogilvy and Mather and the co-author of How to Advertise and Writing That Work. Today, we are going to be talking to him about his most recent book, The King of Madison Avenue, David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising. And we are also on the line with Byrne Hobart of Blue Fountain Media. Blue Fountain Media is a boutique website development and online marketing firm located in New York and Byrne is a rare expert bridging both new media and classic direct response advertising — the kind that David Ogilvy helped to make famous.
Kenneth and Byrne, welcome to the call.
Kenneth Roman: Thank you very much, can I also add that Blue Fountain designed my website which is how I got involved in this whole thing and they did a terrific job for me.
Lawrence Bernstein: Well, that’s great. Thank you. I thought before we just dive into a couple of questions, we might just preface it by letting you tell us, Kenneth, a little bit about your work at present day.
Kenneth Roman: Well, I’m out spending a lot of time talking about the book. I just have done some work on the paperback edition, which is coming out in this spring and I’m thinking about what I’m going to do next.
Lawrence Bernstein: Do you want to lead with a question then, Byrne, and then I’ll follow up?
Byrne Hobart: Sure, so as I was reading the book, I noticed that Ogilvy goes back between the soft sell and hard sell traditions. Do you know which one he ended up settling on?
Kenneth Roman: The idea of soft sell verus hard sell is one that a lot of people in the business reject a little bit. David Ogilvy believed in only one thing and he really believed this passionately, which is, in selling, he did some of the classiest, most interesting advertising that’s ever been done from historic edit, but as he was proud of saying, “Every ad I ever wrote sold.”More on Interview With Former Ogilvy & Mather CEO, Ken Roman
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One late summer evening, two copywriters sat down at their keyboards to craft sales letters for almost identical products.
They were very much alike, these two copywriters.
Both had years of experience writing every type of ad and were dynamos at selling to their core markets.
Both writers were also dedicated students of direct response marketing and were up on the latest trends and techniques for making their clients (and themselves) ever larger profits.
But while one writer spent an entire week on writing and edits, his leisure-loving colleague cranked his final draft out within hours of sitting down that first evening.
And here’s the capper.
The ad that was written in mere hours buried the week-long effort by many multiples.
What Made The Difference
While one writer spent days building the perfect lead, piling layers of proof into his ad and extracting every conceivable hot button to boost response…
The other writer had a hunch that a good, old-fashioned story was called for to sell the dickens out of his particular product.
And he was right.
But where did he get such a brilliant idea?
More on A Tale Of Two Copywriters
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This ad comes from the December, 1980 Popular Mechanics issue and sold Joe Sugarman’s seminar retreat in the North Woods of Wisconsin.
Joes’s was the first high end seminar for direct response advertising and a finishing school for countless marketers, including: Richard Thalheimer of The Sharper Image, Drew Kaplan of Dak, Fred Simon of Omaha Steaks, Joe Karbo (The Lazy Man’s Way To Riches) and numerous others.
I was struck by this line:
“To be successful you must learn the rules, know them cold, and follow them. To be super successful, you must learn the rules, know them cold, and break them.”
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“Bin Laden’s dead.”
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” the sarcastic little New Yorker in my head instantly uttered, on hearing the news.
Since I lived in Lower Manhattan at the time of 9/11, I like most New Yorkers, recall far more than the TV images the rest of the world watched for weeks on end.
And gratefully, though I didn’t lose any family or friends, I know several people that did.
One of the things I recall most as a New Yorker in the aftermath of 9/11, was the acrid smell of burning jet fuel and debris that wafted several miles uptown… all the way to 14th Street, near where I lived.
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One evening, eight years ago, I was sitting in my high-rise apartment across the Hudson River from New York City.
I was working on my laptop when my wife broke the silence.
“Hey, have you heard of Joe Sugarman?”
“He’s giving a workshop on copywriting at the Learning Annex.”
“Heard of him!?” I excitedly fired back.
After living in New York for many years I cultivated a proud indifference on seeing film actors and other luminaries. I was a true New Yorker.
But it’s fair to say Joe Sugarman was my idol back then… and my wife still rides me about the goofy smile on my face that night.
“Have I head of Joe Sugarman?”More on The Lost Sugarman Tapes and a Sugarman Story
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Posted this with the permission of my friend Bill in Chicago who sent this to me a few months ago. Bill’s a sales and marketing genius. Last year, he outsold everyone else in his home office combined.
Here’s his recap of this strip mall merchant’s success story — quick and concise the way all effective marketing and sales should be.
Lawrence,
Thought you would appreciate hearing this success story.
Tonight I took my daughter to get her hair cut and colored.
Went to a new place, and ended up talking with the owner for 2-and-a-half hours about business, marketing and life in general.
Check this out.
He opened his salon 17 weeks ago with zero clients.
More on Strip Mall Marketing Success Story
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