September 20, 2007
Ralph Ginzburg and Godlike Copywriting Cheats
If you jumped back in time three decades and picked up any major market newspaper in the United States, you'd be certain to bump into one of Ralph Ginzburg's ads.
In earlier years, he was a taboo busting publisher of "Eros" who helped spark the sexual revolution.
Later, Ginzburg was the iconoclastic ally of "the little guy" who acquired millions of subscribers through punchy portraits and bullet ridden copy.
Though he founded and promoted a half-dozen publications in his career, "Moneysworth" was by far his most successful venture.
Validating the Nietzschean quote, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger," Ginzburg fought an obscenity case all the way to the Supreme Court…lost…served eight months in prison…and then came back to found a multi-million dollar, direct response publishing empire.
But Ginzburg didn't make his money on the subscriptions. In fact, he lost money there. If you subscribed to "Moneysworth," your mailbox would be assaulted with offers for everything and anything sold by mail.
That anything would later get him in trouble with many states' attorneys general.
It wouldn't be inaccurate to call him a pre-Internet, direct mail spammer.
Ginzburg would spend twice Moneysworth's $5 subscription cost to acquire a customer through full page advertising and even two-page spreads. But he ultimately made several times that by selling the name. And he sold it many times over.
Godlike Copywriting Power
Since renewals weren't the primary force driving the business, this gave Ginzburg Godlike copywriting power to achieve one objective: get the order at all costs.
He did this by creating some of the most captivating and eclectic bullets and fascinations ever written. And his advertising was a powerful inspiration for Eugene Schwartz, Mel Martin and the behemoth, 
Boardroom Inc., founded by Marty Edelston.
These are typical Ginzburg bullets:
* "Golda Meir's Recipe for Gefilte Fish"
* "Low Cost Psychoanalysis"
* "How Two Widows Got Merrill Lynched"
The ad at the right is a great example of Ginzburg's use of controversy as a promotional device.
"Pictured above is the most tightfisted, thrifty man in America Pt I"
"Pictured above is the most tightfisted, thrifty man in America Pt II"
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Comments on Ralph Ginzburg and Godlike Copywriting Cheats »
Lawrence,
Thanks for this one on Ginzburg
What a wonderful time machine ride you provided for me.
Instantly, I was transported back to the salad days of puberty
wasting time in my fathers shop, rummaging through old Playboy
magazines, New Yorkers, and other semi-literate pulp of the 60's.
I read those Ginzburg ads and I wonder why I forget them?
Whack, whack, whack. Yep, Eddleston, Schwartz, and the worlds
slowest copywriter himself, the master of fascinations Mel Martin. And no doubt Sugarman too took a bit of inspiration from the strangest, scariest looking guy I've every seen in print, Ralph Ginzburg.
To bad he has passed on because that would be an interview for the ages. Can you imagine picking his brain? I get shivers and goosebumps just thinking about it.
You picked a whopper. You have no idea of the climate of that era. Ginzburg was todays equivalent of a child molester. Yes sir. What he dared do was so far outside the envelope that he was bound to get slapped around like a mule.
He fired the first shot out of the sexual cannon and it landed like an atom bomb on him and unleashed the genie of deep hidden desires we now see pandered about like Palmolive Soap.
Spooky, weired and disturbing.
I was too dumb and preoccupied by other matters at the time but I sure wondered what that Eros magazine had to offer. But I had my Playboys to play with so I forgot about it.
Your email prompted a quick check on the man and apparently he took a mental beating and his reputation made him untouchable.
He burned bright, burned fast and burned out, ending up as a photographer.
Sincerely, Alger Cavalloro