Gene Schwartz

If this email makes me any money, I still won’t really get it

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I read a story a while back about a man named John Clauser.

Clauser studied physics but he struggled with it. That resonated with me, not because I studied physics, but because I studied math, and I struggled with that.

Anyways, Clauser had to take a grad-level course in quantum mechanics.

He failed. Twice. Eventually he managed to pass but he never really “got” it.

Some time later, Clauser decided to design an experiment to disprove quantum mechanics. His advisors told him not to do it. Clauser insisted. Maybe his ego was on the line.

Clauser carried out his experiment, which was meant to falsify a key prediction of quantum mechanics. Instead, to his disappointment, Clauser demonstrated quantum entanglement, just as the theory predicted.

Last year, Clauser won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work. He said, “I confess even to this day that I still don’t understand quantum mechanics.”

In his book Breakthrough Advertising, Gene Schwartz compared copywriters to atomic scientists. Gene argued that both copywriters and atomic scientists work with primal forces of nature. They cannot create those forces, but they can harness them and use them.

I’d like to extend Gene’s analogy. It’s not just that we can’t create those primal forces. We can’t even understand them, not really, not using our everyday human intuition.

Nobel-winning physicists still don’t understand quantum mechanics. ​​A-list copywriters still don’t understand human desire multiplied.

A few decades into his career, Gary Halbert put a lot of money into a weight loss product with a great proof element — a high school student who lost almost 600 lbs. “Without hunger! Without pills! Without low energy! Without giving up good food!”

Gary flew down to interview and record the guy. He created the product. He wrote and ran the ads. He put in dramatic before-and-after pictures and a money-back guarantee.

The ads bombed.

Nobody wanted this thing. Why? Nobody knows. You would think that a weight loss offer with a strong proof element and copy written by Gary Halbert would be a sure shot.

As screenwriter William Goldman once said — about those other people who cater to human desire, the Hollywood crowd — “Nobody knows anything.”

My point is not to depress you, by the way. Gary Halbert made millions of dollars and lived in Key West and fished all day long. William Goldman won a couple of Oscars. John Clauser got his Nobel prize. All that, in spite of not understanding how the damn thing works on a basic level.

The key of course is to keep generating ideas, to keep working, to keep taking a new step every day. And the day after, and so on until you drop dead. Great things can get accomplished in this way, and small things, and everything in between.

All right. I hope I haven’t inspired you too much.

I now have my Most Valuable Email training to pitch to you. I doubt you will be interested. You have probably heard me talk about this training before, and you have probably decided already it’s not for you.

That’s fine. But in case you want to find out more about Most Valuable Email, and how it can help you keep writing a new valuable email each day — and maybe even make money with it, God knows how — then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Daniel Throssell prompts me to put Gene Schwartz into a bigger context

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In response to my “Age of Insight” email yesterday, Australia’s best and favorite copywriter, Daniel Throssell, writes to ask:

I love how you think about this.

But aren’t your three levels of marketing kinda just expressions of market sophistication — and the different techniques required to make an ad succeed at each level?

You’ve probably heard about market sophistication. It’s an idea from Gene Schwartz’s book Breakthrough Advertising.

Basically, sophistication is a question of how many ads people in your market have seen previously. The more ads, the more sophisticated — and you gotta act accordingly.

At first, a simple promise will do. Then you need a bigger promise. Then you need a mechanism. Then you need a cooler mechanism.

And eventually, people get soooo bored with all your promises and mechanisms. You’re in the last stage of sophistication.

So Daniel is asking whether my “ages of marketing” — the Age of Promise, the Age of Positioning, the Age of Insight — are just a restatement of Gene’s stages of sophistication?

​​​​And is insight just another concept that’s hidden between the densely written lines of Breakthrough Advertising?

As often, my answer is both yes and no.

Yes — because pretty much all of marketing is contained in Breakthrough Advertising. This includes examples of proto-insight and insight-like techniques.

And no — because while pretty much all of marketing is contained in Breakthrough Advertising, there is one thing missing.

As far as I understand, Gene’s sophistication model is about individual markets. The way Gene has it, when a market reaches the ultimate level of sophistication, it eventually dies, and a new market is born out it:

The market for cigarettes dies, but the market for filter cigarettes is born, like a phoenix rising out of the ashtray.

And then the market for filter cigs goes through the same stages of sophistication, from naive to jaded, as the cigarette market went through.

Eventually, the market for filter cigarettes also dies, and yet another new market — the market for flavor in cigarettes — opens up. “Winston tastes like a cigarette should.”

Sounds reasonable, right? Human desires and gullibility are infinite, right?

Well, about that. That’s the one thing that’s missing from Gene’s magnificent Breakthrough Advertising.

Like I said, Gene’s sophistication model is about individual markets.

But it doesn’t account for what happens to both society and to individuals after many such deaths and rebirths.

So what happens? ​​What happens after decades of advertising, after thousands or millions of our personal money spent on cars, cigarettes, detergents, copywriting courses, and book-of-the-month clubs — all of which failed to really deliver on the deepest promises we were hoping they would fulfill?

I’ll tell you.
​​
What happens is that more and more people become guarded against any kind of advertising — not just bored with the claims in a given market.

What happens is low self-esteem — people start to suspect that there’s something wrong with them, and that even the most credible and amazing new offer can’t help them.

What happens is compulsive aimlessness — as is endemic in the info publishing world — where people still buy on occasion, but they never consume or implement.

That’s when you enter the Age of Insight. And that’s when insight techniques become useful beyond the techniques that Gene talks about in Breakthrough Advertising.

All that’s not to say that promises or mechanisms or positioning are obsolete. You can still sell and influence using just those.

But as Gene says, it’s a matter of statistics. And today, more and more people are becoming jaded, defeatist, or simply indifferent in response to classic advertising and marketing methods.

The good news is that it is possible to reach them — and to open up vast new markets for your offers.

How do you do it? That’s something I talk about on occasion in my daily email newsletter. In case you’d like to read that, and maybe find out how to reach those unreachable people, click here and sign up to get my dailiy emails.

What I learned from copywriting

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Copywriting pays for my food, my rent, and my collection of black t-shirts.

Copywriting allows me to work on a Saturday, if I so choose, and skip Monday through Wednesday.

Copywriting has put me in touch with multimillionaires and even one billionaire.

It’s exposed me to strange new worlds, such as beekeping, billboard wholesaling, and penis enlargement.

But all that is kids’ stuff. Where copywriting really impacted me, where it changed me in ways I didn’t expect, is the following:

A. It taught me to read.

David Deutsch said, “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t read 50 books one time each; I would read 10 books five times each.”

Other famous copywriters say the same.

So I reread books now. And I find mucho stuff in there that I didn’t see before. My brain changed in the meantime.

Also when I read, I’m much more careful. I keep stopping to ask myself, “Is this interesting? New? Useful? Could it be useful if I combined it with something else I’d read?” It’s slow and it’s work. But it’s a better use of my time than flying through text and not getting anything out of it.

B. It gave me a real acceptance of the moist robot hypothesis.

Scott Adams says we are all “moist robots”:

“Humans are wet robots that respond to programming. If you aren’t intentionally programming yourself, the environment and other people are doing it for you.”

This sounded outlandish when I first heard it… then amusing… then interesting… then believable… then obvious. Copywriting provided me with plenty of real-life examples. There might be something more inside of us, some capacity for experience and reflection… but most of what we do is moist robot.

C. It exposed me to the Gene Schwartz sophistication/awareness models.

This is so valuable whether you’re writing copy or doing any other kind of communicating. It can be summed up with the idea of starting where your reader/prospect/adversary is… But how do you do that? Schwartz’s models tell you exactly.

D. It taught me the low value of secrets.

And also the low value of supplements. And the low value of opportunities. In general, through copywriting, I’ve developed a suspicion of anything new being advertised for sale.

E. It taught me the enduring power of listicles.

For getting attention. Not necessarily valuable attention. Which is why I used the headline “What I learned from copywriting” instead of “5 things I learned from copywriting.” As Mark Ford said recently:

“If you want to get cheap readership, listicles are great. But they don’t do a good job selling anything, or getting serious attention, or creating a fan out of the reader, especially at higher price points.”

F. It taught me how to get rich.

I’m not sure if I ever will be rich. But I might.

Through copywriting, I’ve had an amazing business education. I’ve gotten to look behind the curtain at dozens of successful enterprises. I’ve found out exactly how they get their customers… what they sell to these customers… and how they keep selling more.

Maybe one day, I’ll turn that knowledge into actual success. Speaking of which, let me repeat something I wrote a few months back:

​​”Perhaps success is simply about choosing a field where you don’t mind getting better. Where the daily work is something you find enjoyable enough — or at least, not too repulsive — so you can continue to get better at it day after day.”

Copywriting is not my passion. I don’t have any passions.

But I don’t mind the daily work, and sometimes I even find it enjoyable. And that’s something I never thought would happen.

Maybe you’d like more articles like this. In that case, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter.

“Research is the enemy of creativity”

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Yesterday, I mentioned an embarrassingly titled book I bought, “Damn Good Advice (for people with talent!)”

The book is written by a brand marketing guy, George Lois. On the face of it, it’s all about pushing the envelope, thinking outside the box, following your bliss, and other cliches that advertisers who work for prizes, rather than for sales, resort to.

Take for example Lois’s advice no. 50, which says:

“Research is the enemy of creativity, unless it’s your own ‘creative’ research (heh-heh)”

Nonsense, right?

Like direct response giant Gene Schwartz said, copy is assembled, not written. And it is assembled out of diligent, detailed research, deeper and more penetrating than the other guy is willing to do. No research, no sex, at least when it comes to copy that gets real results.

But really what Lois is talking about is the kind of research that’s common in brand advertising:

Focus groups.

Ask people who have no skin in the game, who aren’t being faced with decision whether or not to buy your product, what they think of your ad. “Is it good? Is it bad? Do you like it?”

It’s completely reasonable that research like this won’t give you useful feedback.

Not unless, as Lois says, you get creative.

He tells the story of Aunt Jemima pancake mix.

The makers of Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Quaker Oats, never wanted to create a matching Aunt Jemima syrup, in spite of Lois’s insisting that it would make tremendous $$$ business sense.

So Lois got creative.

He sent out a survey to a bunch of pancake mix consumers, asking a series of questions.

One of the questions was which syrup these people used. There were 10 brands to choose from, among them Aunt Jemima syrup.

And get this:

89 out of 100 pancake eaters selected Aunt Jemima syrup as their preferred choice, even though it was entirely imaginary at that point, just something in Lois’s head.

Result:

The head honchos at Quaker Oats were finally convinced, and put out the syrup. Within a year, just as the survey predicted, Aunt Jemima went on to become the number one brand in the billion-dollar-plus syrup business.

Is this scientific advertising?

Hardly.

Is it a useful idea which could potentially be worth a lot of money to you?

Well, consider this:

Direct marketer Justin Goff recently sent out an email exactly about this topic.

Justin said that he and his pardner Stefan Georgi often poll their audience about what offers to create next.

But they don’t go the focus group route.

“What should our next offer be? Do you like the sound of ‘Copy Accelerator By The Beach’? Would you buy ‘8.F.F.G.M.S.’ if that stood for ‘8-Figure Facebook Group Marketing Secrets’?”

No, none of that.

Instead, Justin and Stefan make a list of a few specific offer ideas. They ask people which one they want best.

This bit of research, Justin says, matches up very well to actual results of how well an offer sells when they do create it.

In this way, a simple creative poll can be worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to Justin and Stefan.

So there you go. An idea that you can use, starting today.

Or an idea that I can use, starting right now.

Because there are a few live presentations or trainings that I’ve been thinking of creating. They might be paid, or they might be free. They might be a single lesson, or multiple, depending on the topic.

Based on this limited info, and the short descriptions below, which one would you like the best?

If you would like to vote, sign up to my email list. And when you get my welcome email, tell me your preference among the four choices below. If you vote honestly, you will have the best chance of seeing a training about this topic from me in the near future:

1. A presentation about horror advertorials, the front-end funnel that I’ve used to help clients sell millions of dollars of dog seat belts, door stops, and detergent-replacement balls

2. A presentation about the most valuable email I regularly send to my daily email subscribers — the one type of email I would resort to if I had to stick to only one type for all of time

3. A presentation about creating a feeling of insight in your prospects, as a way of overcoming resistance and driving people to spontaneously want your offer, without you doing any overt selling

4. A presentation about natural authority — the rare, most penetrating, and longest-lasting form of authority, which is not built on either expertise or overt status or association

Yet another paranormal Bejako email

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“And the copy writer does not create the desire of millions of women all over America to lose weight; but he can channel that desire onto a particular product, and make its owner a millionaire.”
— Gene Schwartz, Breakthrough Advertising

This past January, I sent out an email in which I told the story of how I magically “manifested” a lost license plate from my car.

The point of that email was that, in spite of being a very skeptical and critical person at times, I am also incredibly attracted to the possibility of real magic.

That’s why I often engage in wishful-magical thinking.

​​And that’s why I’ve repeatedly had “magical” things happen in my life.

Today, I want to give you an update on that — some theory of what real magic is. You might find this theory personally inspiring, or you might even find it useful in your own marketing.

The theory comes from an article I read today, titled When Magic Was Real. The article was written by the very interesting Alexander Macris on his Contemplations on the Tree of Woe Substack channel.

In the article, Macris cites the results of a parapsychology experiment:

60 people were split into four groups. Each group was either given chocolate blessed by a priest or ordinary, zero-blessing chocolate.

In addition, each group was told (truly or falsely) that their chocolate was either blessed or unblessed.

In other words, each of the four groups had a different combination of (belief in blessedness) x (actual blessedness) of the chocolate they were eating.

The experiment ran for a week. Participants were tested for effects on their mood.

So what do you think happened?

Did actual blessing create real benefits?

Or did belief in the blessing — aka the placebo effect — create real benefits?

Or was there no effect at all?

It turns out there was an effect. But the result might surprise you:

The only group that had a significant improvement in mood was the group that 1) got the truly blessed chocolate and that 2) was told that the chocolate was blessed.

Yes, this experiment might be bogus. But if like me, you are attracted to the possibility of miracles and magic, then just run with it for a moment.

Based on this experiment, Macris puts forward his theory:

“Magic is the product of belief x belief. It’s the product of my belief that I’ve blessed chocolate and your belief that you’ve eaten chocolate I blessed. And these beliefs must both be positive. If I don’t believe, it won’t work, even if you are a true believer. If you don’t believe, it won’t work, even if I’m a true believer. Belief x zero is zero.”

True? Who knows. But if it is true, I figure it has a couple consequences:

First, you gotta believe, and you gotta surround yourself with other gullible, uncritical people who are willing to believe without bothering to look closely at the evidence.

Your combined success, including the number of real miracles you experience, depends on it.

Second, rather than trying to persuade the people in your audience that your 28-day flat-belly challenge is really transformative, it might be better to make them believe in magic, in possibility, in miracles.

In other words, the ancient marketing dogma that it’s impossible or impractical to create desire is short-sighted, at least if you are trying to create real results for your customers — and to create customers who love to buy from you over and over.

So instead of just channeling existing desire onto your product, like Gene Schwartz says above, it might be better to focus on making your audience more inspired and motivated and hopeful in general.

Maybe you have your doubts. That’s fine. Don’t make up your mind now. Let the idea marinate there for a while.

​​Maybe you too will come to believe in believing. Our joint success hinges on it.

Anyways, on a mainly unrelated point:

Yesterday, I had the launch of my Most Valuable Postcard.

I magically got what I wanted, my first 20 subscribers, spread out across 11 countries.

I then closed down the order page, because 20 subscribers is all I wanted to start.

But I had people try to sign up afterwards (no-go) and even ask whether I have a waiting list.

Well I do now.

I’m not sure when or if will reopen the Most Valuable Postcard to new subscribers. But if I do, it will be a limited number of spots again.

So if you want to get a chance to be the first to sign up, then get on my regular mailing list here. And when you get my welcome email, hit reply and let me know you’d like to be added to the MVP waiting list as well.

Hot opportunity inside

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Today’s email will:

1. Amuse you
2. Tell you something personal and possibly shocking about me
3. Give you a valuable marketing idea you can use right now
4. Outrage you and give you a chance to feel superior
5. Share some saucy gossip about people you might know, at least online
6. Clue you in to a hot opportunity
7. Remind you of something valuable that you probably know but aren’t doing
8. Allow you to feel like you are making progress simply by reading
9. Give you a chance to think differently
10. Provide you with an experience of insight

Confession: Today I had absolutely no clue what to write. So I went back to a big list of good marketing ideas I’ve been collecting for years, and I found the following:

“Shortcut: Write out all the benefits you can think of before seeing the product. Then keep the ones that the product can satisfy.”

That’s from Milt Pierce, who according to according to A-list copywriter Bob Bly, was “the greatest copywriter you never heard of.”

Bob says that Milt was also one of the greatest copywriting teachers of the 20th century, which might be why I’ve heard versions of the above idea from a bunch of other A-list copywriters, including Parris Lampropoulos, Ted Nicholas, and John Carlton.

So for today’s email, I took Milt’s idea, came up with 10 possible benefits, and kept the four I could possibly deliver on.

But you might be wondering how I’ve delivered on #6, “Clue you in to a hot opportunity.”

The fact is, I heard Milt share the above advice in a special program, the “Gene Schwartz Graduate Course on Marketing.” This “Graduate Course” was more like a seminar of top copywriters and marketers, including Parris, Jay Abraham, and Ken McCarthy, going back and forth on the topic of Gene Schwartz and the marketing and copywriting lessons they squeezed out of the man.

The “Gene Schwartz Graduate Course” used to sell for hundreds of dollars. Then for many years, you couldn’t even get it at any price. But today, it’s yours free — well, “free” as in you gotta buy something, for $12.69, but then you get the Gene Schwartz course as a free bonus.

So what do you gotta buy?

If you check my list above, you won’t find “Charm you with a sales pitch” among today’s benefits. So for that, and for the full info on this hot opportunity, take a look below:

https://overdeliverbook.com/

Tell, don’t show

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Among copywriters, the most famous movie of all time is Lethal Weapon. That’s because Gene Schwartz, the author of Breakthrough Advertising, which is something like a bible in the field, once said that every copywriter should watch Lethal Weapon at least two or three times, preferably back to back.

Gene was recommending Lethal Weapon because of its BANG-talk-BOOM-talk-JOKE-BANG-BOOM-talk structure.

But Lethal Weapon is an influence gift that keeps on giving. For example:

In one early scene, we see Martin Riggs, a cop played by Mel Gibson, in the middle of a Christmas tree lot. Riggs is being used as a human shield by a cornered drug dealer, who is pointing a gun at Riggs’s head.

Riggs starts yelling to the gathering cops, who all have their guns out. “Shoot him! Shoot the bastard!”

The drug dealer is getting flustered. He begs Riggs to shut up.

​​Riggs keeps yelling. And in a flash, he turns around, grabs the gun from the drug dealer, headbutts him, and ends the standoff.

​​Next scene:

W​e see the same Martin Riggs, in his ramshackle trailer by the beach, late at night. He’s drinking and looking at a framed wedding photo of himself and his wife.

Riggs takes his gun and puts it inside his mouth. He tries to pull the trigger, but he can’t. He starts crying. “Oh, I miss you,” Riggs says to the picture.

Are you getting an idea of what kind of character Martin Riggs might be?

I hope so.

But in case not, there’s one more scene I want to tell you about. In fact, it’s the very next scene in the movie:

The police office psychologist is walking with the police captain through the police station. “May I remind you,” she says to the captain, “that his wife of 11 years was recently killed in a car accident? He’s on the edge, sir. I’m telling you he may be psychotic. You’re making a mistake by keeping him in the field. The man is suicidal.”

So now let me point out the obvious:

Probably the most famous bit of writing advice is to show and not tell.

And it’s good advice.

It’s almost as good as the advice to both show and tell, which is what’s happening in those Lethal Weapon scenes.

Because with buddy cop comedies, sales copy, and with influential writing as well, we are really not looking for people to draw their own conclusions.

Sure, it’s great if they conclude what we want them to, on their own. And that’s why we show them stuff.

But you don’t want to leave it there. You don’t want to give people any wiggle room. So that’s why you tell them your point as well as show it.

What? You say you knew that already? Or you say it’s so obvious that it doesn’t need to be pointed out?

Fine. So let me tell you something else, which might be genuinely new:

You can tell people stuff. Including stuff that’s not supported by the emotional visualization you just showed them.

Because an emotion is like syrup. It can be poured over anything… and once it’s poured onto the pancakes, it’s likely to spread all over the plate, to the sausages also.

That’s a super valuable idea, if you only grasp it.

​​In fact, all my emails are chock full of such super valuable ideas. If you want me to show you as well as tell you that, sign up for my newsletter here.

Should getting more client work really be this easy?

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The first advertorial I ever wrote, back in 2016, started off by telling the story of Arcan Cetin, a man who walked into a department store in Washington state, took out a shotgun, and shot four people, killing three of them. ​​

​​When Cetin finished his killing spree, he put the shotgun on the cosmetics counter and walked out of the store.

This advertorial promoted some kind of service to help people get a concealed weapon license. (In my research, I found out that the no. 1 reason people wanted a concealed weapon license was the fear of mass shootings.) The headline I used, a swipe of a classic Gene Schwartz headline, read:

“Should obtaining a concealed carry permit really be this easy?”

This advertorial must have done ok because the client hired me to write some more copy for him after that.

​​From what I could understand, he had a bunch of offers in the gun and gun training space, and he was running a ton of traffic to them.

I think I did a good job with those followup projects too, but really I never found out. ​​After I delivered those projects, the client didn’t ask me to write any more stuff. ​​When I tried following up with him a few months later — “Hey how’s it going? Do you need any more help with copy?” — I never heard back.

So here’s my tip for you today, in case you’re a copywriter who works with clients:

The early time in a client relationship is often the best time to really find out what a business does, to ask lots of questions, and to set yourself up so you maximize the LTV you can get with this client.

After all, when I first got hired by this guns-and-ammo guy, I got on a call with him, like I do with every other client. He was accommodating and open, and answered any questions I asked.

But here’s the thing. I only asked questions that were relevant to this one project.

Had I thought to find out a lot more about his business or businesses, beyond just the project I was hired for, I would have been in a much better place later, when I wanted him to hire me for more stuff.

The bigger point is this:

In my experience, many business owners think of hiring a copywriter as a one-time, unavoidable expense. Not in terms of money. But in terms of their attention and time.

Once that one time is over, business owners often want to put you out of mind, and get on to next things. You can slip off their radar easily. And if you follow up later by naively saying, “Hey, how’s it going, do you need help with anything?” — well, that just creates more work for them, not less.

So the next time you start work with a new client, become genuinely interested in their business, way beyond what is relevant to your own project.

Then squirrel away that knowledge, and use it later.

​​It might be the most unfairly easy way to get more client work down the line — without ever having to hunt for new clients.

And now, you might like to know I am preparing a guide all about the business side of succeeding as a copywriter. It’s called Copy Zone. If you’d like to find out more about it when it comes out, sign up for my email newsletter.

I’m sorry Ms. Jackson

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This one right here goes out to all the email copywriters… the business owners who write their own emails… maybe even those with a YouTube channel.

Here’s the story:​​

A few weeks ago, a music industry insider named Ted Gioia made a big splash by writing an article with the title:

“Is Old Music Killing New Music?”

Gioia had a bunch of stats and anecdotes to prove that old music — stuff that came out 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago — is crowding out the new music being produced today.

Gioia has his theory for why this is.

Basically, he says, record company execs just wants to get a piece of the American pie to take their bite out. So they keep giving people tried-and-true stuff. They’re not willing to take risks.

It’s short-term thinking, Gioia says. Because ironically, the execs are making themselves irrelevant in the process. But one way or another, the fact remains, in Gioia’s words:

“Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact.”

In my own uninformed yet subjective opinion, this is part of a bigger trend.

It’s not only music that’s getting old. I think it’s movies also, and perhaps other pop culture too.

This matters for marketers.

Because from what I’ve seen writing approximately a billion sales emails… pop culture always gets a great response.

Pop culture references turns you into a magician who can abracadabra a sales point… get people to enjoy it… and maybe even get them to buy.

So what exactly am I telling you?

Well, it’s the same thing that some 40 years ago, A-list copywriter Gene Schwartz said:

“If a movie does a hundred million dollars or more, especially a movie that does two hundred or three hundred million dollars or more, I would go to it two or three times.”

This is a good idea today just as it was in Gene’s time.

Go see blockbusters. But make sure you see the same ones that Gene was talking about, like Lethal Weapon and Home Alone and Pulp Fiction.

In other words, don’t take risks with any of this new stuff. Give people the tried-and-true. And keep doing it. Forever. Forever-ever. For-EVER-ever.

“Whoa there Bejako,” you say. ​”You’ve been handing out a lot of careless and maybe even harmful advice lately.”

Oh yeah, like what?​

“Well, like ​first you said to bet on the Bengals for the Super Bowl. We know how that turned out. Then a couple days ago you almost got me sucked into QAnon.”

That was an honest mistake.
​
“Whatever. The point is, now you’re telling me to pander to my audience with references to Fleetwood Mac and Kill Bill. But isn’t this the same short-term thinking as those record company execs? Won’t I be making myself irrelevant in the process?”

I don’t know. You might be right. I might be wrong. So all I can say is:

I’m sorry dear reader. I am for real. Never meant to send you bad advice. I apologize a trillion times.

But I’ll do more than apologize.

I’ll tell you how to avoid pandering and talk about pop culture your audience isn’t familiar with, without taking much of a risk. That’s in my email tomorrow. I hope you’ll read it. You and your mama.

Answers to life, the universe, and all direct response marketing questions

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If you’re looking for the answer to life, the universe, and all direct response marketing questions, then I have a computer you should talk to.

No, I mean it.

A real computer. It’s called Delphi. You tell it something. And using some computer magic plus an ever-updating database of previous moral judgments, Delphi tells you if your prompt is ethical or not… good or bad… moral or immoral.

I wanted to see if it worked at all. So I fed it a few prompts. And here’s what it spat back:

“Get rich” — it’s good

“Get rich slowly” — it’s okay

“Get rich quick” — it’s wrong

That’s encouraging. Maybe this Delphi really does know something.

Because the responses above are pretty much how a large part of the population feels about money.

They’d like to have more of it, maybe even much more. But they are not very enthusiastic about grinding it out over the years and decades they imagine it would really take. And yet, they have moral hangups about getting there quick — it must mean doing something sneaky or bad.

Ok, Delphi. Let’s see how you do with a few direct response classics. Here are a few promises made by Gene Schwartz, Chris Haddad, and Gary Halbert:

“Master Transcendental Meditation In A Single Evening” — it’s unreasonable

“Get Your Ex Girlfriend Back, Literally At The Push Of A Button” — it’s immoral

“Lose Up To 20 Pounds In Two Weeks The Lazy Way” — it’s bad

Interesting. I wonder what Delphi’s layers of virtual neurons didn’t like about these promises. Let’s try a few full-blown DR headlines, from Parris Lampropoulos, John Carlton, and David Deutsch:

“Scientists Discover Solution to Sexual Problems Hidden in 1,500-Year-Old Himalayan Secret” — it’s good

“Amazing Secret Discovered By One-Legged Golfer Adds 50 Yards To Your Drives, Eliminates Hooks and Slices And Can Slash Up To 10 Strokes From Your Game Almost Overnight!” — it’s good

“What Every Wife Wishes Her Husband Knew About Estate Planning And The IRS Hopes You Never Find Out” — it’s good

Perhaps you can see inside Delphi’s mind and understand why the oracle liked these headlines.

I have my own theory. It’s something will be sharing with people who signed up for my Influential Emails training.

That offer is now closed — I shut it down earlier today, as I said I would.

But if you didn’t sign up for Influential Emails… and you want to know my thoughts on the above headlines, and how this can be used to make your emails better… well, then just stay put. I’m sure to use this technique in an email soon, and then it will probably be obvious to you.

But for today, since Influential Emails is closed, I have no offer to make to you. Well, none except absolute moral judgements on any question you might have… along with age-old wisdom about direct response headlines and body copy. You can find it in the hallowed issues of my daily email newsletters. Here’s the entrance to the temple.