Fred Catona

Name your own price: how about free?

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In 1998, Priceline went from nothing to being worth $23 billion. They did it thanks to radio ads starring William Shatner and ending with the famous appeal:

“Priceline. Name your own price.”

In 2010, Fiverr launched. Their basic appeal was fixed freelance services, all for just $5. No need to haggle, negotiate over scope, or pay a lot. Fiverr went public in 2019, and is worth a little over $7 billion today.

Eventually, both Priceline and Fiverr backed off from their original appeals. You can’t name your own price on Priceline any more. And most services on Fiverr will cost you much more than a fiver today.

But those initial appeals were powerful. They made those companies worth billions of dollars.

Why?

What was so good about those two original appeals?

Direct marketer Fred Catona, who ran those Priceline ads in the 1990s, said that Priceline’s appeal was an “empowering statement.”

People felt in control, Catona argued, because they could name their own price. And so they took action and jumped on the Priceline website.

There might be something to that.

But Fiverr’s appeal was just the opposite. No control. Not only could you not name your own price… but you couldn’t even name the service you wanted. Five dollars. Fixed services off a menu. Take it or leave it.

And like I said, both appeals worked great.

So here’s my feeling:

Both Priceline and Fiverr appealed to simple greed.

“Name my own price? Hell yeah! I’ll take a ticket to Maui for $10, please!”

“$5 for an email sequence? Hell yeah! I’ll become an Internet marketing millionaire without doing any work!”

So my takeaway for you is to come up with new packaging for “cheap.” It might make you a billion dollars. Or 7. Or 23. And you don’t have to keep making the same “cheap” appeal forever.

Speaking of which:

There’s a new marketing funnel company in town, aiming to rival the $2B-valued ClickFunnels. The upstart is called GrooveFunnels.

GrooveFunnels does everything ClickFunnels does… and more. But while ClickFunnels costs hundreds of dollars a month to use… GrooveFunnels is free. For up to three websites… and for now, until they grab their share of the market.

Can you say cheap?

Of course, with cheap comes a whole host of headaches. I’ll tell you about a few of them tomorrow. And I’ll also tell you why it still makes sense to try out GrooveFunnels… and to even pay to get lifetime access for it, for more than three websites. Hell, I’ll even give you an incentive to do it.

But that’s tomorrow. For now, if you want to find out more about (FREE!) GrooveFunnels, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/groove

Dan Kennedy and a Lamborghini inside this post I’ve just written

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Dan Kennedy stood up in front of a packed room of marketers and said,

“Let me tell you how cheap Fred Catona is.”

Dan was supposed to be giving a dutiful introduction for billion-dollar direct marketer Fred Catona. But somewhere it all went wrong.

“He gives me this ridiculous introduction to read for him,” Dan said while holding multiple sheets of paper, “and he only puts a 20 in it.” And from among the papers, Dan pulled out a $20 bill to prove his point.

Turns out this was a joke. Dan and Fred were close friends.

But it is instructive, right? Because it’s such a pattern interrupt from the way introductions are usually done:

“We’re very pleased to have Mr. XY with us tonight. Mr XY went to such-and-such elite university…”

“… he is a close friend and confidant of celebrity Z and power-broker H…”

“… he has worked with billion-dollar clients such as A and B and C.”

And then humble Mr. XY, with his killer resume revealed, comes out on stage, blushing and yet pleased. He takes the mic and says, “Wow, thank you for that wonderful introduction…”

My point is this:

Association is the most powerful mechanisms of the human mind, that I know of at least.

You put two things together. Just once, and not even for very long. And the human brain starts to make connections between them. Properties of one seep into the other. Causal links form. A halo appears.

So that’s why, if you went to Harvard… if you hung out with Tony Robbins once… if you ever had a Lamborghini in your garage, whether owned or rented… well, you should highlight those things to people you just met, or who just found you online.

Or even better, have somebody else highlight it, so you don’t have to do it. It will make you seem both powerful and humble. Well, unless you get somebody like Dan Kennedy to read out your list of accomplishments.

And what if you have no accomplishments?

Then find cool, impressive, or elite people… institutions… or ideas to associate yourself with. It can be the flimsiest of associations, and it will still help your standing.

That’s my simple tip for you for today.

A more complex tip, for another day, is to be careful.

​​Because association is not the only mechanism in the human brain. And if people start to associate you as that guy who always shows off his Lamborghini, well, that can lead to new challenges of its own. But more about that another time.

If you want to read that other time:

You might like to know that several Agora copywriters, famous Internet marketing gurus, and 8-figure entrepreneurs read my daily email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

Kanye shows you how to win the sticky message victory

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Last Sunday, Kanye West appeared alongside Reverend Martin Short at the 18,600 seat Lakewood Megachurch in Houston, Texas.

Kanye was there to give testimony. He announced the arrogance and cockiness that people know him for is now in the service of God.

At one point, Reverend Short asked Kanye to speak about worshiping fame and money. To which Kanye replied,

“It’s like the Devil stole all the good producers, all the good musicians, all the good artists, all the good designers, all the good business people, and said, ‘You gotta come over and work for me.’ And now the trend, the shift, is going to change. Jesus has won the victory.”

Did you catch that?

Did you see how Kanye instinctively crafted a sticky message?

Rather than talking about vanity, and fame, and riches, all of which are abstract concepts that the mind can’t really latch onto, Kanye wrapped them all up in a single, crystal-clear, memorable character:

The Devil.

Which brings to mind an action-packed and high-value talk I heard by a guy named Fred Catona. Catona, who called himself the “father of direct response radio advertising,” was a high school gym teacher who first made a small fortune by selling Philly cheesesteaks by direct mail.

​​Somewhere along the way, Catona figured out the power of radio for driving traffic to his cheesesteak business. He then launched a little agency to help grow other businesses through direct response-style radio ads.

Catona’s giant breakthrough came around 1995. A guy named Jay Walker called Catona up, and asked for his help in launching a little startup in the travel space.

​​Catona took the job on. He hired the cheapest relevant celebrity he could find (an out-of-work William Shatner), and started running radio ads. 18 months later, thanks in large part to Catona’s radio ads, that little travel startup had a valuation of $20 billion. It’s still around. It’s called Priceline.

Anyways, Catona once gave a talk about his experiences and the lessons he’s learned from his massive radio campaigns. One thing he said is that you should always ask yourself, “Who is your enemy and what does he do?” Your enemy doesn’t have to be a competitor. It can simply be a way of doing business or living life, like Kanye illustrated in his testimony above.

Anyways, Catona unfortunately died a few years ago. But his talk is worth listening to. And even though it was part of Brian Kurtz’s $2,000 Titans of Direct Response, you can watch it for free once you get a copy of Brian’s Overdeliver book.

​​The book is apparently on sale now, and you can get it for $10 and with free shipping. And along with the Fred Catona talk, it’s got about $1,213 worth of other bonuses, including some rare direct marketing gems you can’t find anywhere else. In case you want to find out more, here’s where to go:

https://overdeliverbook.com/