Mel Martin has been called the “greatest copywriter you’ve never heard of.”
That’s because once his direct mail ad copy began mailing in the millions, his employer, Boardroom Inc., kept him under look and key for fear he’d be siphoned away by a competitor.
This video highlights his space ads which sold millions of books for a division of the New York Times called Quadrangle.
(Pssst. If you’re a client I’ve written a landing page for, now you know the origin of the winning headlines you’ve been using to knock it out of the park.)
Here are the 4 ads shown in the video in one downloadable PDF.
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.)
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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)
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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!
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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.
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If you’ve heard the story of a young Gene Schwartz working one day in the mail room and a few short years later becoming a mail order millionaire, then here is an interesting ad.
It was written in 1975 by the man who showed Gene the ropes in the early 50′s, Cecil Hoge, the founder and president of the Huber Hoge, Inc.
The promise of this ad is essentially a stone’s throw away from the internet marketing pitches that plague us today…but there’s a key difference.
Most of those offers lack the sophistication of even hinting that they might not be for you.
Not here.
How many internet marketing offers actually state that you can “lose plenty?”
Brutally refreshing.
Took Me a Lifetime.
My method took me a business lifetime to develop. But it works!
My method is no panacea…just as mail order is not for everyone. But I can tell it as it is…to give you a real chance in the real world of mail order. Because otherwise, believe me, if you are ill suited to…or ill informed or ill advised about the mail order business, you can lose plenty.
Here is a readable image of Mail Order Moonlighting.
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One of the best pieces of advice about the role of integrity in copywriting and marketing comes from Eugene Schwartz. There are bountiful examples he practiced as he preached.
Gene said:
“[The copywriter] must never write an ad just to please the client…or to make money…or meet a deadline…and never, never write an ad for a bad product.”
Turning a deaf ear to critics should be added to this list.More on Do You Have the Courage to Break Conventional Thinking?
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This is the tried-and-tested lead generation ad for The Institute of Children’s Literature.
It’s been going strong for over 30 years in both space and direct mail.
This space ad is the latest incarnation of the piece written by legendary copywriter, Malcom Decker.
If you’re a copy connoisseur, you’ll want to download the PDF by clicking on the thumb on the left and read it at your leisure.
Two of the main take-aways are the magic of the word “Institute” which has been used by savvy direct marketers since the 1920′s and the response-driving power of the “aptitude test.”
You know everbody “gets in.” Don’t you?
In case you missed the first piece on Swiping Successful Business Models, here it is.
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There’s been a lot written on Bruce Barton, so I figured I’d add a small piece to the pile.
Bruce Barton packed a lot into one lifetime. He was…
* Chairman and co-founder of one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, BBD&O
* Publicist, magazine editor and fiction writer
* United States Congressman and a prominent rival of FDR and the New Deal. (FDR singled out Barton and two other Republican foes in the fantasy firm of “Martin, Barton & Fish.”)
* A source of countless cling-to-the-memory quotes and catchy phrases (like: “If advertising has flaws, so has marriage.”)
* And…one heck of a copywriter.
A donation letter he penned to 24 wealthy men in 1925, requesting $1,000, received a 100% response rate.More on Bruce Barton: The Advertising Copywriter
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The year was 1919.
18-year-old copywriter, Lillian Eichler, was working for the New York Ad Agency of Ruthrauff & Ryan.
Her first problem:
To move 1,000 dusty copies of the pre-1900 Encyclopedia of Etiquette, written by Eleanor Holt, which were sitting on Doubleday’s shelves.
Her second problem:
Most of the 1,000 copies were returned after the 5-day-trial period. Respondents weren’t thrilled with the ludicrously archaic text and pictures.
Lillian’s ad copy had emptied the shelves in mere days.
Doubleday, being the smart publishers they were, realized if Lillian’s ad copy could move 19th-Century books, she was probably gifted enough to rewrite the book herself and have a second go at advertising it.
The result:
Lillian’s revamped effort, The Book of Etiquette, sold two million copies at $2 each, in the course of two years, resulting in $2.5 million in net profits.
Nearly $26 million in 2008 dollars.
All inspired by the wish to unload a roomful of dusty books…and the vision of a young copywriter.
Reading this copy in 2008, it’s stunning to realize it came from the pen of an 18-year-old girl, nearly 90 years ago.
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