Direct Marketing News

The power of accusation

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Yesterday was the first time I ever got excited to watch a sales message. But I wound up bitterly disappointed. Aye, even offended.

Quick background:

I talked to a friend the day before. He’s a doctor. “We’re headed for a new round of corona lockdowns,” he said. He gave me reasons why, based on Israel and the rise in infections there. All this was news to me.

Then yesterday, I got an email with the subject line, “COVID’s return.” My ears pricked up because of my friend’s warning. I opened the email.

“Corona is all about control,” the email said. This tapped into my recent interest in mechanisms of control. So I clicked the link and found—

Ron Paul! Telling me the truth about corona!

Now in my eyes, Ron Paul is a genuine celebrity. He’s a former U.S. Congressman… a well-known libertarian figure… and three-time presidential candidate.

So that’s the quick background. New corona lockdowns… mechanisms of control… Ron Paul. That’s why I was excited to watch this sales message. For the first time ever.

Sure, the message came from Stansberry Research. So I knew what the conclusion would be — buy our newsletter and protect your money, or even prosper while the rest of the country goes to hell.

Still, I thought I might hear something new and interesting along the way. Something that would give me context for puzzling things I’ve been seeing. Something that might make me say, “A-ha, it makes sense now!”

But I didn’t get any of that. Even though the email promised to tell me “what’s actually going on in America”… and even though the sales page warned “Something BIG Is Coming”…

All I got was a bit about Ron Paul (it turns out he’s a doctor by training)… and then a bunch of stuff about out-of-control government debt… and how we are giving too much money to stupid things like the National Endowment for the Arts.

“But there’s nothing new here, Ron!” I finally yelled at the screen. “Why are you wasting my time with this? But don’t answer, I know. Because they are paying you. Still, Stansberry’s been saying this same thing for what, 20 years? Why should I buy it now? Couldn’t they come up with something a little fresh? A little stimulating?”

Hm.

Maybe you agree with me that Ron Paul and Stansberry should both go to the Devil, where they came from. Maybe you’re glad I finally voiced that.

Or maybe you’re puzzled by my negativity, and you’re wondering why I’d yell at my own computer screen.

Or maybe you’re put off. “All right, Bejako,” I hear you saying, “since you’re so holy, what fresh and stimulating thing did you say with this nasty email?”

To which I could pretend I’m not selling anything here. But you and I both know that’s not true.

So let me leave you with a quote from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible:

“Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God’s fingers? I’ll tell you what’s walking Salem – vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

The Crucible is a morality play about judging and accusing others. But it’s a morality play because it’s not just about a bad episode in Massachusetts in 1692… but about something fundamental in human nature.

So here’s the new and maybe stimulating bit I offer you:

I’m not suggesting you blacklist people. But if you set yourself up as an accuser in your market, at least some of the time… there is power in that.

Power?

Yes, power. The chance to write the law.  The keys to the kingdom. Particularly if you accuse somebody new… and if you are genuine in your outrage and your vengeance.

By the way, I know of several other direct response companies that are guilty of deadly marketing sins. I’ve seen them at night, walking with the Devil. And I will name them. But if you want to read more about that, sign up to my newsletter here.

“Huge Hack if YOU Sell 5k-250k products or programs”

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Two months ago, in a private Facebook group, I saw a post by a well-known real estate investing guru:

Huge Hack if YOU Sell 5k-250k products or programs.
We found a LEGIT funding company that will finance your customers.
VERY Easy qualifications:
620 credit score
40k in income
They will pay you 100% up front of what ever you charge, and the customers payments to them will be fractional to anything they pay you!
We have literally 3 folded our income with them overnight.

The guru was offering to make an introduction to the company, and he didn’t reveal their name. In fact, I still don’t know.

But just yesterday, I saw that Flippa (the online business marketplace) has partnered with a company called Yardline.

So now, if you’re looking to buy an online business through Flippa, assuming you can jump through a few hoops, then you can get 250k from Yardline to finance your purchase.

I’m not sure what kinds of terms Yardline offers.

​​All I can say is that if I were looking to buy a business, I’d look for investment partners directly, rather than going through a company like this.

On the other hand, if you do sell a high-ticket offer, and you target people for whom that much money is an issue, then Yardline and similar companies might be something to look into.

​​If I’m reading the Facebook post above correctly, it sounds like an easy way to grow your income without changing your offer, your marketing, or really anything else inside your company.

Plus I think this is jut a bit of curious industry news. Because a few days ago, I speculated whether the direct response industry is at a “Netflix moment.” In other words, if we’re at a kind of tipping point, where things go mainstream.

I don’t think the emergence of companies like Yardline is any kind of hard proof of this. But it is another data point for you to consider… when you think about which direction you want to take your own career or business.

And if you want more direct marketing industry news and predictions:

I write a daily email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

The end of Stansberry?

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Last week, a reader of my email newsletter who works for an Agora affiliate clued me into the following fact:

Stansberry Research is going public.

Stansberry, as you probably know, is one of the biggest imprints that came out of Agora. They had the End of America promo. This was one of the two or three biggest direct response campaigns of all time, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars through a single VSL.

When I heard that Stansberry is going public, my first thought was to David Bowie.

Back in 1997, Bowie released 10-year bonds backed by the future royalties of his album sales.

​​Bowie bonds put $55 million into David Bowie’s pocket, and were given a respectable A3 rating.

​​But within a couple of years, digital file sharing caused the whole music album market to implode. Bowie bonds were downgraded to Baa3, one notch above junk bond status.

Maybe David Bowie, with his artist’s intuition, sensed it coming, and made a smart cash grab just in time?

And maybe Porter Stansberry, using his entrepreneur’s intuition, senses something similar in the current moment?

The Agora copywriter who told me about this assured me I’m imagining things. “It’s probably Stansberry himself wants to be a billionaire. He must be pretty close now.”

A Barrons article that reported on this quoted the CEO of the company that’s taking Stansberry public through a merger. That guy’s reasoning:

“We were looking for a company in the attention economy with scalable, digitally delivered IP. As people say, ‘content is king.’ But it’s rare that you find a company that’s as prolific at creating new IP… They’re like the Netflix of financial content.”

So rather than this being a Bowie moment, maybe it’s a Netflix moment?

​​A moment in which a somewhat limited, niche company uses its own existing assets and a bunch of cash to become a mainstream powerhouse?

Or maybe it’s a sign of things to come — Stansberry & chill?

Maybe. I’m not convinced. But I am curious. So if like me, you dip your toes in the direct response pond, it might be worth keeping an eye on the the ripples from this isolated pebble drop.

Or do you want me to keep an eye out for you? If so, then sign up for my email newsletter, because that’s where all my writing shows up first.

Verdict in for Agora

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The verdict is in. The background is this:

In October 2019, before any of us had heard of such an animal as a pangolin, the FTC went after direct response behemoth Agora. Specifically, the FTC said Agora deceived customers with two products.

The first of these was “The Doctor’s Guide to Reversing Diabetes in 28 Days.” No diet changes… no drugs… no exercise required.

How?

The pitch was that diabetes is caused by “Non-Ionizing Radiation,” which the FTC says is based on no known scientific fact.

The second deceptive product was a book titled, “Congress’ Secret $1.17 Trillion Giveaway.”

The advertising for this book claimed you are entitled to get “Republican checks.” And if you don’t collect yours, somebody else will.

Really?

According to the FTC, it turned out to be the old play of “transubstantiating” dividend-paying stocks into free money.

So two days ago, the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, Northern Division, announced the verdict for this anti-Agora action.

​​From what I understand:

Agora has to stop making misleading, unsubstantiated claims, as with the two products above. (For example, they have to drop the “Non-Ionizing Radiation” shtick I mentioned upstairs.) They also have to pay a fine of $2M.

I’m just reporting this as industry news. I don’t have a single specific point to draw out of this. But here are a few thoughts circling in my head:

1. The $2M fine seems easy to manage for a billion-dollar company.

2. I’m no lawyer or blind supporter of the Bill of Rights. But to me, banning books (and consequent advertising) that promote unproven medical theories sure sounds like a violation of the 1st Amendment.

3. Overall, this decision seems fairly limited and uninteresting. At least it’s nothing comparable to the Raging Bull action currently in progress, which I wrote about before Christmas.

But fear not. When that verdict comes out, I’ll send you another update… and you can then decide whether it’s time to look for a new job.

A chilling Christmas card from the FTC

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Maybe you’ve already heard about Operation Income Illusion. It’s the FTC’s latest action, and it started earlier this month — just in time for Christmas.

The FTC filed lawsuits against five different companies. Among these is Raging Bull, a big and successful player in the financial publishing space.

​​Raging Bull got a restraining order prohibiting it from doing any more marketing… and it had its assets frozen.

So what exactly did Raging Bull to draw the eye of the FTC? From the FTC site:

“The defendants claimed in their pitches that consumers don’t need a lot of time, money, or experience, and that the global coronavirus pandemic represents a great time to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to learn their secret trading techniques, claiming in one ad that the pandemic ‘…might be the most exciting opportunity in decades!’ The defendants also made claims like ‘Learn how you could DOUBLE or TRIPLE your account in One Week!'”

Errr…

That sounds a lot like the VSL I just finished writing for a real estate investing opportunity. So I find this whole Income Illusion thing a bit chilling.

Because from what I’ve seen in the past, when the FTC goes after a direct marketing company, that company is probably doing something really shady.

But the FTC took issue with Raging Bull over pretty standard direct marketing practices. Making big claims… using the most flattering testimonials… appealing to people’s greed and sloth.

I have no idea where this will go in the future. Maybe the lawsuit will be dismissed… maybe it won’t, but Raging Bull will somehow beat it… maybe it will be a one-time action by the FTC to set an example, without broader consequences. Or maybe it’s a sign of things to come.

In any case, it’s something to keep an eye on.

Now here’s an unrelated pitch, also in time for Christmas:

I’m launching a weekly email newsletter about travel during corona (“…the most exciting opportunity in decades!'”). The first issue will go out tomorrow, right on Christmas Day. If you’re interested, you can sign up at the link below:

https://masksonaplane.com/

Scams and losers for your bulging swipe file

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Nasty little scammerses:

A report came out a few days ago about a guy who recently lost over $4k in a Facebook scam. If like me, you start to feel superior whenever you hear somebody has been scammed (“That would never happen to me!”), let me give you the details.

The guy in question is Niek Van ​​der Maas, the founder of an adtech company.

​​Van der Maas saw a Facebook ad that offered $3k of free credit for advertising on Tik Tok. This is a legit program that Van der Maas had read about, so he clicked on the ad, downloaded the required Android app, logged in with his Facebook account, and waited for the $3k credit to land.

Except the credit never did land. ​​Instead, what happened is that Van der Maas’s own Facebook ad account was charged over $4k.

​​The scammers, who ran the Facebook ad to an imitation version of the Tik Tok ads app, used Van der Maas’s Facebook account info to log into his FB ad account… lock the guy out… and spend $4k on Vietnamese-language ads promoting some kind of aluminum gizmo.

A pretty sophisticated way to make (or lose) $4k. And I’m not 100% sure it would never happen to me.

So I’m telling you this for two reasons:

1) Because the Internet is a dangerous place, and as your surrogate email uncle, I want to make sure you keep yourself safe, and

2) Because marketers and copywriters are always told to “Keep an eye out on what’s working now!” and to throw it in their already-bulging swipe files.

But is an ad working because it’s got good copy with a sexy offer and a well-thought-out back end… or because it’s a scam?

You might think scams are rare. But I’ve read plenty of reports of advertisers scamming customers in various ways, from sneakily putting them on autobill… to cloaked “free but enter your credit card for kicks” offers… to sophisticated scams like the one above.

And when I see crazy ads in Newsmax for ED pills endorsed by President Trump and Tom Selleck… I can easily imagine something shady is going on behind the scenes with those same offers, too.

Likewise, sometimes ads run for weeks and months — and never make any money.

For example, ​a few years back, I worked with several companies preparing for an ICO — that was the cryptocurrency rage at the time. There was simply so much money in this field that many of these crypto investors were perfectly fine throwing away a few hundred thousand on Facebook ads for different loser projects, hoping to strike gold with one massive success.

So what’s my point? Don’t click on anything. It could be a scam. And just because an ad is running all over the place, that doesn’t meant it deserves a place in your swipe file.

In case you want more advice from your surrogate email uncle, you might like to sign up to my daily newsletter. No Facebook login or credit card info required.

New neuromarketing insights from 1966

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I wasted an hour today researching “neuromarketing.” If you like, I’ll tell you what I found.

This is a new field. It’s based on insights and techniques from neuroscience. Its goal is to make people buy more.

Let me give you an example. Scientists put people inside an fMRI machine and showed them Coke and Pepsi. It turned out the two brands created different reactions in the brain.

This seemed like a pretty stupid result. There must be more to it, right? So I listened to talks by a couple of neuromarketing experts.

They made suggestions such as: make your advertising me-focused… use simple language… appeal to emotions. This was all backed by the latest science. Never mind that you could find it all — and much more — in a copy of Breakthrough Advertising. Which Gene Schwartz wrote in 1966.

But speaking of Gene, I think neuromarketing is good for one thing. It illustrates a concept Gene first talked about, which helps you sell in a crowded market. In Gene’s own words:

“If your market is at a stage where they’ve heard all the claims, in all their extremes, then mere repetition or exaggeration won’t work any longer. What this market needs now is a new device to make all these old claims become fresh and believable to them again. In other words, A NEW MECHANISM — a new way to making the old promise work. A different process — a fresh chance — a brand-new possibility of success where only disappointment has resulted before.”

By the way, even though neuromarketing is a disappointment so far, that might soon change.

Google and Facebook both started neuromarketing teams. These companies have such massive resources. Maybe they’ll get more out of neuromarketing than everybody else has gotten so far.

But if they do, don’t count on them to share what they discover. Instead, better grab a hardback copy of Breakthrough Advertising… and start reading and underlining. And if you want more recommendations for books to get you started in marketing, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/copywriters-hero/

Agora finally gets into Internet marketing

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I remember back in 2006, when Amazon announced its new Amazon Web Services.

How clever, I thought. Like Donald Trump selling golden mailboxes at Trump Tower to entrepreneurs who want the ritzy mailing address.

After all, Amazon already had all of the computer boxes and wires and know-how for connecting them together. Other businesses didn’t have this — but wanted it. So Amazon could make a nice business by making its internal IT resources publicly available on a per-use basis.

And what a cash cow it turned out to be. AWS is now estimated to bring in $25B a year — more than McDonald’s — and is one of the main profit centers at the famously profit-free Amazon.

Now here’s a puzzle for the marketers out there:

What’s lying around your desktop (literal, computeral, or mental) which you could sell like Amazon sold AWS?

Don’t just shrug if off, but think for a minute.

Because even some of the most successful marketing businesses out there don’t collect this free money. Case in point:

Agora.

Agora is probably the biggest direct response company, with dozens of subsidiaries, and hundreds (thousands?) of offers, mostly financial newsletters.

You can bet that with all this experience selling high-margin info products online, the people at Agora know a thing or three about copywriting and Internet marketing.

And yet, in spite of its tremendous proof elements and branding, Agora doesn’t have any offers in the profitable and growing copywriting/IM niche.

Or at least… they didn’t.

Right now, Agora is spinning up a new division focused on Internet marketing.

I’m not sure what it’s called, but they have an email newsletter called Daily Insider Secrets.

On different days, you can read insights from Evaldo Albuquerque, one of the most successful copywriters at Agora Financial in the past few years…

…from Peter Coyne, also a successful copywriter and the youngest publisher inside Agora…

…and finally, from Rich Schefren, a big name in the IM space for the past decade or two.

I’ve been signed up to these emails for a few days. So far, it’s been like they say — IM secrets you can’t get nowhere else.

Except perhaps, in my own email newsletter. After all, my only fun in life is scouring the Internet for new marketing and persuasion ideas, and then giving them away in my daily newsletter. Usually packaged up in some kind of story.

If that sounds like the kind of thing you might be interested in, then you can try out my (FREE!) email newsletter here.

[3-Min DR News] The end of protein, $1M+ email drops, DJ Trump ad spend

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My local radio station has these short, punchy 3-minute news segments.

I like them. So I thought I would do something similar on occasion, but about direct response marketing. Here’s the first edition:

The end of protein?

I just listened to a new interview with Dr. Steven Gundry. Gundry is the face of Gundry MD, a Golden Hippo company. (Golden Hippo one of the biggest direct response health businesses.)

Anyways, Dr. Gundry says in the interview that you should limit your protein to 20 grams a day because that’s all we need and because “protein ages you.” So we’ve come full circle. First fat was bad and carbs were good… Then carbs were bad and protein was good… And now protein is bad and fat is good.

Will a low-protein longevity diet be the new fad for the 2020s, spawning hundreds of new direct response offers, like keto and paleo did before it? Here’s the Gundry interview if you wanna decide for yourself:

https://jamesaltucher.com/podcast/508-dr-steven-gundry

A multi-million dollar email

Justin Goff’s “Wife saves husband — doctors stunned” email drop started running several years, or at least that’s when I first heard about it. In any case, it’s running still. I see it on average twice a month in Newsmax alone. In fact, it ran again today.

Who knows how many millions of dollars worth of business this single piece of copy has brought in? Here’s a version from Glenn Beck’s list is in case you wanna read and study:

https://newslettercollector.com/newsletter/wife-saves-husband-doctors-stunned-by-military-fountain-of-youth-drink(2)/

DJ Trump in 3rd place with ad spend

I wanted to see which advertisers are spending the most on FB ads. Foolish, it turns out. There’s no way FB is sharing that data. But, thanks to Trump and Cambridge Analytica, FB is sharing very clear data about which political campaigns are spending how much.

Looking over the past 30 days, the top spender, at around $4.3 million, is one Tom Steyer, a billionaire Dem candidate for president I had never even heard of. No. 2 is Mike Bloomberg who entered the race only two weeks ago, but already spent $1.5 million. In 3rd place, we have DJ Trump, with around $1.4 mil in ad spend.

If you wanna see the full list, which links to the ads for all the candidates, and also includes other high-integrity advertisers such as Goldman Sachs and Planned Parenthood, here’s where to go:

https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/

Got a hot tip?

3-Min DR News wants to hear from you. You can submit your industry news or gossip, on the record or off, by clicking here and writing our editorial team (of one) an email.

The FTC strikes again

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A couple days ago, the news around the marketing and copywriting water cooler was that the FTC, the club-wielding government body in charge of stamping out deceptive and prohibited marketing practices, had sued several Agora companies.

Agora and its offshoots are some of the biggest players in direct response space, so this has the potential to be big news. Or not. But in any case, it got me curious about what the FTC is up to, so I signed up for their newsletter.

And only yesterday, while I was in the middle of hacking away at my current real estate VSL, I got an FTC email with the subject line, “Yet another real estate seminar scam.” The email reads:

“For the second time in about a month, the FTC sued a company that falsely promised it would show people how to earn money in real estate to get them to pay thousands of dollars for seminars. […] If someone says you can earn a lot of money on an investment with little or no risk, that’s probably a scam.”

So how does this affect the real estate promo I’m writing, which pretty much says you can make money in real estate with little or no risk, and also has an $1k+ upsell on the back end?

​​Well, I’ll tell you about that another day.

​​For now, I encourage you to head over to the FTC site and sign up for their newsletter. It’s entertaining reading, and might be a lifesaver if you’re doing work in edgy markets like bizopp, investing, or health.