I got a riddle for you. A persuasion riddle. It goes like this:
In 1907, Albert Lasker, President at the Lord & Thomas ad agency, badly wanted to hire Claude C. Hopkins, widely believed to be the greatest ad man of that time, and really, of any time.
Problem:
Hopkins 1) didn’t want to work and 2) didn’t need the money.
The background was that, a short while earlier, Hopkins had been publicly disgraced and privately shook up.
He had become a part owner of a patent medicine company called Liquozone. He believed in the Liquozone product — he thought it had saved his daughter’s life. He advertised it very aggressively and effectively.
Hopkins took Liquozone from bankruptcy in 1902 to making a profit of $1.8 million the next year (about $60 million in today’s money).
Over the next five years, Hopkins, who owned a 25% stake in Liquozone, made millions of dollars personally, probably over $100 million in today’s money.
And then some muckracking journalist had the gall to go and write a series of muckracking articles (“The Great American Fraud”) about how patent medicines were all bunk and how Liquozone in particular was the “same old fake” and how, according to lab tests, it was probably more harmful than helpful.
In response to those articles, a bunch of states banned Liquozone, and the federal government set up the Food and Drug Administration, to regulate health products and the claims made about them.
Again, Hopkins, who genuinely believed in Liquozone, was privately hurt. And publicly, being involved with something that was now known as a fake and a scam, he decided to retire to a village on Lake Michigan, determined not to work in advertising no more.
And yet, as Hopkins later wrote, “As far as I know, no ordinary human being has ever resisted Albert Lasker. Nothing he desired has ever been forbidden him. So I yielded, as all do, to his persuasiveness.”
So here’s the riddle:
What did Albert Lasker say or do to convince Hopkins, who didn’t want to work and who didn’t need the money, to come out of his village hiding hole and get back into copywriting?
If you dig around on the internet, or if you get Perplexity to do it for you, you can probably find the answer.
But what’s the fun in that? And what’s the value?
The fact is, if you riddle this out for yourself, you might come up with good ideas of your own.
And when I share the actual answer in my email tomorrow, it’s sure to be much more memorable and useful to you.
By the way, the answer to this riddle applies way beyond convincing A-list copywriters to come work for you. It applies to just about any kind of new business partnership you might want to start.
But more about that tomorrow.
For today, I thought about what offer makes sense to promote, given the Hopkins and Lasker story above.
I realized that once again, it’s Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin, which I was promoting extensively last month.
I’m no longer giving away bonuses just for trying out Ronin for free for a week.
I am giving away bonuses if you decide to stick with Ronin past the free trial.
But honestly, the bonuses I’m offering, nice as they are, are but a drop in the total value of what you get if you are actually inside the Ronin community, and if you simply make a point to do something with the resources inside.
If you’d like to find out more: