At last, after a l-o-n-g  and tedious migration to a speedier server, I’m able to post new content again.

And this is one I’ve been itching to share.

26 years ago, the mega ad agency, J. Walter Thompson, ran this full page copy test in the New York Times, entitled, “Write If You Want Work.”

The candidates who took them up were given eight unusual writing assignments. Out of thousands who sent in their answers, ten people passed and joined JWT’s 85 member creative team.

Billy Bloom was one of them and he’s generously shared his winning answers to all of the questions.

What’s instructive about this copywriting assignment — really creative thinking assignment — is the concept of playing without a safety net. It conjures up images of an open tryout for an N.B.A. team. Here’s the court, bring your game…now show us what you’ve got.

And Billy definitely brought his game. Just sample his rendition of “Moldy Pizza Night” (Hit the PLAY button below!) sung to an  omnipresent 80’s melody. If this track didn’t get the ad execs’ attention, nothing would.

Here are all eight of Billy Bloom’s winning answers to the J.W.T. copy test. (1.9 megabyte PDF)

Hit play button for “Moldy Pizza Night.”

Here’s another zinger from Billy Bloom’s winning submission to the JWT copy test. Thousands answered this test, Billy was one of ten people that landed a position in the ad agency.

As a former New Yorker, I love this one.

For any New Yorker who’s ever said “#$@% it!” after waiting 20 minutes for the M-79 bus to take them crosstown, and walked through Central Park — especially after dark  — you’ll agree Billy’s “Central Park By Day…Central Park By Night” nails it.

Here’s question #4, I’ll be posting the other answers this week.

Question #4:

A delegation of Martian’s has just landed in Central Park. They do not understand any Earth languages — only very basic symbols. Prepare a short speech (comprised of pictures and symbols) to welcome them and to tell them just what kind of place Central Park is. (Please enclose a plain language version of the speech in an envelope, in case we are confused.)

Answer #4: (Here’s the 2-page answer to this question in PDF.)

Two down and eight to go.

Last spring I found the terrific J. Walter Thompson copy test which ran as a full-page ad 26 years ago in the New York Times.

Thousands of entries were sent in to the agency, only ten people grabbed spots.

Mystery writer, Chris Grabenstein was one of them and I interviewed him a few months back. But Chris never kept his answers to the test — though he did remember the answer to the sixth “entertaining and involving assignment.”

And last week, in steps Billy Bloom, one of the other 10 candidates who nailed the copy test and got a position at JWT.

Moreover, Billy kept his submission and he sent me the whole kit-and-kobodle over the weekend.

Initially, #6 was my favorite but after seeing some of Billy’s answers, I’ve switched my allegiance. I’ll be posting the other seven over the next week.

Question #6:

“You’ve heard the story about the man who made a fortune selling refrigerators to Eskimos. In not more than 100 words, how would you sell a telephone to a Trappist monk, who is observing the strict Rule of Silence? (But he can nod acceptance at the end.)”

Answer #6:

MONKS HAVE MOTHERS, TOO

You’re a Trappist Monk. You’ve chosen the lifestyle
that suits you best. For others, talk is cheap. But
not for you. Only through complete silence can you
come to appreciate the universe around you.

But just because you’re silent doesn’t mean you can’t
hear. On the contrary, you pride yourself on your
ability to listen. To the sounds of nature. To the
creaks in your house. To your mother.

Get the phone that allows you to listen, but not talk.
The only phone designed exclusively for the Trappist Monk.

NOSPEAK: The Phone Without A Mouthpiece.
(…from AT&T)

This has got more potential than anything I’ve seen in a while.

If you do any form of email marketing, this is something you’ll want to test asap because now you can embed YouTube videos that play directly in your customers’ Gmail Inboxes.

No need for your customers to click on an outbound link or take an intermediate step, they just click on the play button and your video plays immediately.

So, lets say you intend to send your customers to a long scroller of a sales letter.  You can now record a two-minute video with your webcam, upload the video to YouTube, then include the Youtube URL in your email broadcast.

The upshot is, you can give your customers a quick overview with a call to action at the end of the video before they click on the target link in your email message. This can make a world of difference when your customers arrive on your sales page.

And with Gmail possessing over 100 million users, plus being the fastest growing email service, this isn’t something to ignore.

You don’t need fancy production values or be a polished speaker to do this. If you screw up, as I did several times before recording this, you just do it over. Another benefit of embedding videos that play in your customers’ Inboxes is you establish you’re a real person. It’s hard to do enough of that.

No doubt, we’ll be seeing a lot of YouTube content sent directly into our email Inboxes in the near future. God help us when the spammers catch on!

At first, I thought my friend, Karl Blanks, got a degree in rocket science just so he could make room silencing jokes about it.

Now, after seeing an article in CNN Money entitled, “Google’s favored rocket scientist?,” it’s clear there’s evergreen PR value in his degree…besides the added rocket fuel he brings to the marketing table as a Cambridge trained rocket engineer.

But really, Karl’s success isn’t rocket science. (Last rocket science joke,  I promise.)

Last year, he related the story of being hired by large corporation to find out why people bought xyz widget.

So what did he do?

He went to a remote country fair — heck, it looked like the Scottish highlands –  and stood at a concession table for 6 hours asking prospects and customers a series of core question about the product: how they felt about it, what made them buy it over competing products, would they pay more for it, etc.

By the time he was done, he knew more about that widget than the widget manufacturer did and was able to get down to site optimization with as close to perfect information as any marketer can hope for.

He and his partner, Ben Jesson, just put together a report on “How we increased the conversion rate of Voices.com by over 400%.” In this fast reading report, they mention four things that gave them quick wins during their conversion rate overhaul.