Gene Schwartz

Stop reading this blog unless you want to march in my army

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How do you overcome somebody’s confirmation bias?

That’s something I found out today in a provocative article titled the “Curation/Search Radicalization Spiral.”

The article tells the story of a 13-year-old Jewish kid from Washington D.C. who became a true-believing moderator of an alt-right subreddit.

The story itself is less interesting than it sounds. What is interesting is how Mike Caulfield, the author of the article, explains how this kind of “grooming” happens.

How could a Jewish kid from a liberal family be persuaded to join a far-right community, made up of people who are often hostile to Jews?

And more broadly, how is it possible to overcome somebody’s confirmation bias… and implant ideas that were once inconceivable?

I won’t repeat Caulfield’s entire argument here. But the gist is the idea of gradual curation. Here’s how it works:

1. A person (the mark, for short) goes to a subreddit or a Facebook group or somebody’s blog.

2. There he gets exposed to a curated claim. This is a claim that is carefully selected, provocative, but not threatening to his world view.

For example, the 13-year-old above was accused of sexual harassment by a classmate. So maybe he came across a claim on Reddit that said, “Study in Cambridge Law Journal reports up to 90% of rape allegations are false.”

3. At this point, the mark is intrigued but also a bit cautious. So he goes on to verify the claim for himself by doing a quick Google search. There it is, “Rumney, Philip N.S. (2006). ‘False Allegations of Rape’. Cambridge Law Journal. 65 (1): 128–158.”

4. Mind is blown. Now the mark is ready to repeat the process one level down… with another curated but more provocative claim, which gets him closer to the alternate reality.

None of this is news to marketers. Curating facts is what good direct response copy is all about, and Gene Schwartz wrote about “gradualization” back in 1966.

There are even copy tricks to simulate verifying something yourself. But maybe it’s a bit tasteless to give you a step-by-step here, since we started by talking about the radicalization of a 13-year-old.

So instead, let me tell you what I personally get out of this. It might be relevant to you also:

The upshot for me is to avoid curated content as much as possible. That means turning off social media… news sites… and I hate to say it, newsletters like mine.

Because everybody has an agenda. And if you give somebody a freeway into your mind that’s open 24 hours a day, every day, it gets harder to resist that agenda.

You start being groomed… and the next thing you know, you might be marching in somebody else’s army, fighting somebody else’s war, fully convinced it was your idea all along.

A simple 3-hour “trick” which 100% makes your bullets better

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Today is the last day of the bullets course I’ve been running. We will wrap it up with an important lesson. Let’s start with a bullet by David Deutsch:

“Restore night vision — with a berry. See page 76.”

Which berry? Here’s what it says of page 76 of the book David was selling:

Night Vision

* Eat blueberries when they’re in season. They can help restore night vision.

* You know the old joke about carrots being good for your eyes? Well you’ve never seen a rabbit wearing glasses. Eat two or three carrots a day (raw or cooked) and/or drink a glass of fresh carrot juice. It’s excellent for alleviating night blindness.

* Eat more watercress in salads and/or drink watercress tea.

David’s bullet is an example of the teaser mechanism I wrote about yesterday. But that’s not the point I want to make today.

Instead, look at all that other stuff in the source material.

Why did David choose to focus on the berry? Why didn’t he highlight the proven “Bugs Bunny cure” for night blindness instead? And why didn’t the bullet read,

“Restore night vision — with this delicious tea. See page 76.”

Who the hell knows. But I can take a guess. Let me set up my guess with two facts about two other expert copywriters. First, here’s Gary Bencivenga, writing in the royal “we”:

“When it comes to strong copy, we’ve seen again and again that the most persuasive ads arise from thorough research. We’ve established this general rule — accumulate seven times more information about the product than we can use.”

Second, there’s Parris Lampropoulos. I heard him say in an interview how he also follows Gary’s 7x research rule above. But from what I understand, Parris takes it one step further.

Parris will also write 7x the bullets he can use in his copy. This means that for a magalog with a 100 bullets, Parris will write up to 700 bullets.

So now we get back to those night-vision blueberries.

It’s very possible that David did write up bullet with a “Bugs Bunny cure,” or something like it. But when comparing it with the berry mechanism, he simply thought the berry sounded better.

The fact is, in any decent book or course or other info product, there will be a bunch of problems that are addressed… a bunch of solutions offered… and a bunch of factoids you can twist and highlight about each of these solutions. Each of those can make a new bullet.

You don’t really know which combination will sound the best until you try it out. And you also don’t know which one will work the best once you have it in the actual promo, surrounded by other bullets. Which leads to today’s bullet lesson:

Lesson 11: “Write many more bullets than you need.”

How many more?

That’s up to you. David and Gary and Parris wrote copy where millions of dollars were on the line. In that case, it makes sense they put in 7x extra work.

But what if you’re just starting out? Well, it might make sense even in that case. Here’s a quote by another master of bullets, Gene Schwartz:

“This is what makes success. There’s nothing else in the world that makes success as much as this. I will take the best copywriter in the world who is sloppy and careless, and match him against a good copy cub, and two out of three times, the sloppiness of the great person will be beaten by the carefulness of the other person. […] The person who is the best prepared and the most knowledgeable makes the most money. It’s so simple!”

I can tell you this personal tidbit:

For my lesson yesterday on teaser mechanisms, I wanted to feature three examples. And so I took my own advice, and I dug up 21 examples of teaser bullets, and the source material behind each of them. It took me about three hours of work to do all the research and analysis.

So was it worth it?

I think so. It’s how I could see the (now obvious) lessons I found yesterday.

But like I said, today’s is the end of this bullets course.

This doesn’t mean there are no more bullets lessons out there… or that I’ve stopped researching and writing them up. Quite the opposite.

The fact is, I want to create a new version of this course, which actually gets you practicing these lessons instead of just reading what I write. This new course won’t be free and it might be expensive… well, at least when you compare it to free.

Anyways, I’ll write up an offer page for this in a few days. And I’ll send it out in an email so you can see for yourself — assuming you’ve been eating your carrots — whether it’s something you’re interested in or not.

And if you want to get that email when I send it out, you can subscribe here to my amazing email sending service.

The round red balloon of sophistication and awareness

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Imagine a round red balloon, filled tight with air and floating in the middle of a room.

Got that image in your mind?

Ok, then let me explain why it’s important.

You’ve probably heard of Gene Schwartz’s ideas of market sophistication and awareness.

These two ideas are critical in writing advertising that sells. That’s because they tell you how to 1) get your prospect’s attention and 2) have him believe you, at least for a bit.

In a nutshell, sophistication is how skeptical your prospect is. Awareness is how much time he has spent researching his problem.

But here’s the trouble. I learned about sophistication and awareness years ago. And today, I still don’t have a 100% intuitive grasp of these ideas. I always have to “count on my fingers” when it comes to adding up where my market is in terms of these two measures.

Maybe I’m just not very smart. Even so, there are other problems with sophistication and awareness.

For one thing, these are two separate dimensions. That’s complicated. One dimension is simpler and more elegant than two.

To muddle things more, sophistication and awareness are not orthogonal. If somebody has zero skepticism to your claims… odds are good he hasn’t spent much time researching the problem.

And also, parts of the awareness and sophistication scales are not relevant to most sales copy. You’re probably not getting hired to write to a stage 1 awareness market (“$4 off Safeway pork chops this Friday!”). And if you are, you’re not getting paid much for it.

Which brings us back to that round red balloon floating in the middle of a room.

That’s my image of the typical direct response market. It combines sophistication and awareness, at least the parts that are relevant to sales copy. And it forms one simple, easy-to-understand-and-visualize dimension.

And for people who are subscribed to my email newsletter, I went into detail about how the red balloon of sophistication and awareness works, and how it simplifies things. But it’s not something I am willing to put on my blog.

Why? Because it might scratch your itch a little too well. Because frankly, my goal with these blog posts is to get people onto my email lists, where I can have more direct and immediate contact with them.

If you don’t ever subscribe to anybody’s newsletters, I can understand. And fare well.

But if you do occasionally subscribe to newsletter’s, then consider subscribing to mine. If you do decide to try it, here’s where to go.

Chanelling mass muppet behavior to make yourself a millionaire

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I don’t know if you heard the news… but there was a kerfuffle in Washington, DC yesterday.

A bunch of men and women dressed like muppets took off-piste selfies all around the Capitol building, in spite of the meek protests of Capitol building security.

What gets me is that this kind of thing can happen in 2021.

We have a large state built around national security.

We have billions of cameras blanketing every inch of our nation…

​We have tens of millions of authorized and unauthorized wire taps to get secret info while it’s still secret…

​​And we have millions of highly trained men and women sitting in dark offices, all around the country, who are supposed to detect and predict this kind of thing and stop it before the muppets even take their first step towards a riot.

And yet, it doesn’t work. That’s why we still get spectacular and unpredictable kerfuffles like the one yesterday.

One useful thing I learned in college is that there are systems that are so complex that their behavior is pretty much impossible to predict. The only way to know what these systems will do is to let them run. Large groups of autonomous agents, such as humans, often fall into this category.

So if we can’t predict or prevent massive events like this, what can we do? Well, all we can do is run with them when they happen, and try to end up on the surface when it’s all over. As marketer and copywriter Gene Schwartz put it:

“The scientist did not create the energy of the sun; hut he can direct that energy into the explosion of an atom bomb. The speculator did not create the enormous growth of the electronics industry after the war: but he can ride that growth to produce a fifty times increase in his capital. And the copy writer does not create the desire of millions of muppets all over America to storm the Capitol; but he can channel that desire onto a particular product, and make its owner a millionaire.”

You might think that’s a callous and cynical thing to say. You’re right. But it’s also true. If that’s something you can stomach, then you might like unpleasant truths I write about regularly. You can get these bitter pills when you subscribe to my email newsletter.

Burn objections out of your prospect’s mind using nothing more than a tiny success

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What’s the Spanish word for “different”?

I don’t speak Spanish. But here’s a trick:

When a word in English ends in “ent,” you can tack on an “e” at the end. More often than not, you get the right Spanish word.

So try it now.

Tack an “e” onto “different.” You get “differente.” And that’s how the Spanish and about 200 million South Americans would say it in their own tongue. Same with persistente, permanente… you get the gist.

With a few simple rules like that, an English speaker gets around 3,000 words in Spanish for free.

Not bad. Definitely enough for basics of conversation. Also more than most adult language learners ever manage to memorize.

I learned about this in a teach-yourself-Spanish course called Language Transfer. This course is available for free online. But if it wasn’t… everything I just told you would be a hell of a thing to put into a sales letter to promote and sell this course.

Because demonstration is the most powerful form of proof.

And if you can demonstrate to your prospect that he’s already on his way… then much of his skepticism and doubt will disappear.

By the way, this is not limited to language learning only.

As just one example, there’s Gene Schwartz’s famous “BURN DISEASE OUT OF YOUR BODY” ad. It ran successful for over 20 years. I’m sure that part of its success was that, under subhead three, it gives you an exercise you can try for yourself. “Sit or stand, with your hands simply extended in front of your chest…” You will feel the energy flowing, and your heart getting stronger.

One final point:

You don’t need to give away the farm. Just give your prospect a tiny success, right there on the sales page. If you can do that, you will burn objections out of his mind. What’s going to be left is an innocent and pure desire to buy your product… and find out what else it can do.

Ok, now for business:

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Nobel scientists stunned to produce must-read news

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“It will change everything,” said Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute.

“Stunning,” said Professor Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel Laureate and President of the Royal Society. “It has occurred decades before many people in the field would have predicted.”

You may have heard the news published yesterday. DeepMind, an AI project within Google, “solved” the 50-year-old problem of protein folding. (I say “solved” because DeepMind does a good job, much better than anybody else. But it’s not perfect.)

This is a big deal. It will help scientists unravel the many mysteries still hidden in the human genome. It also means that the singularity is near. If you haven’t yet started building your anti-Skynet bunker, the time is nigh.

But let’s talk persuasion.

My point today is that the human brain looooves shortcuts.

We are giant shortcut-seeking machines.

For example, we rarely try to figure out things ourselves. Instead we look around. “What’s that guy doing? Eh, I bet that’s good enough. I’ll do the same.”

Another shortcut we take is to only look at extremes. So The World’s 50 Best Restaurants wields more clout than the Michelin guide. Why? Because it’s easier. There’s only one no. 1 restaurant among the 50 Best. But there are 135 restaurants with the highest 3-star Michelin rating.

You see my point. As Gene Schwartz said, “there is nothing so astounding as the astonishment of experts.” Particularly if those experts are the very top experts, the ones who got a Nobel Prize.

Because when you 1) take experts and 2) make them amazed, you create must-read news. And news is another shortcut that the brain loves to take, right on down to the order page. But that’s another story, for another time.

If you’d like to read that story when it comes out, you can subscribe to my daily email newsletter. It will appear there first.

Let’s play master and servant

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Gary Bencivenga said that sales copy needs to only do two things to be successful. The first is to open the sale. The second is to close the sale.

In a similar vein, I think you need to only do two things to finish any copy project. The first is to sit down to work. The second is to actually write.

You might think I’m being silly, but I’m serious.

To show you how serious, let tell you about a little game I like to play. Maybe you will like to play it too. It’s called master and servant.

Each night, I get out my riding whip, and, in the role of master, I make a list of tasks for the servant to accomplish the next day.

In the morning, I put the riding whip away and, in the role of servant, I blindly begin to follow the master’s written orders.

So I sit down to work on a particular copy project. Thing 1 above is complete.

But now what? The servant is lazy. He will whine and invent excuses. Soon, he will get up and quit rather than starting to do any work.

So in the role of master again, I’ll warm up the servant with some trivial subtasks.

For example, one of today’s tasks was an email for some real estate agents. And so I told the servant, “Open up a new text document. Write SUBJECT across the top. That’s where the subject line will go one day. And then just paste in the three or four URLs you will get research from. That is all you have to do.”

The servant, who is gullible as well as lazy, does as he’s told. “I’m finished,” he says. “Can I go now?”

So the master gives him a few more easy subtasks. And a few more. Soon enough, the servant is huffing, puffing, sweating, and working, without realizing that time is passing and the project is moving forward, under his own initiative. Thing 2 above is complete.

Gene Schwartz said that you have to work hard to succeed. He then clarified. You don’t have to work long hours. You just have to work hard, with great intensity.

But how do you do that?

I subscribe to the idea, which I first read from Cal Newport, that procrastination is at bottom uncertainty. Uncertainty about what you have to do. Uncertainty that it will work. Uncertainty that such a massive project could ever get finished.

So much thinking. So much personal attachment. So much stress. No wonder you can’t get any work done.

That’s why it helps to split your personality into two. Hammer and anvil. Master and servant. It’s a lot like life.

“I’m finished. Can I go now?”

Yes, you’re free to go if you like. But if you want to give your servant some useful reading to do later, click here and subscribe to my daily email newsletter.

How to succeed in copywriting more than the other guy

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Legend says that, as Wall Street titan Bernard Baruch was nearing the end of his long and influential life, somebody asked him how he did it.

How did he herd a bunch of U.S. presidents and countless other bull-sized egos, and get them to go where he would? Baruch’s answer was simple:

“Figure out what people want, and show them how to get it.”

Interesting. Except… Did Baruch really say it? Just like that?

That’s how the story was told once, in a closed-door session of top copywriters and rich and powerful direct marketing execs.

But I wanted to use this anecdote in a book I’m writing. So I decided to find some context and proof for this quote. And there went a morning, about two hours of work, straight out the window.

First, a random Google search… then more in-depth reading about Bernard Baruch… then searching through a database of old newspapers and magazines… and finally downloading several BB biographies.

Nothing. The closest I found was a similar Dale Carnegie quote, along with other blogs that refer to the same second-hand source (Gary Bencivenga’s farewell seminar) that I already knew about.

In the end, I gave up and told the anecdote much as I told it above. But I started it with, “Copywriter Gary Bencienga once told a story…” Because I couldn’t confirm that the damn story really was true, or that the quote really was as Gary B. said it was.

So were the two hours of fruitless research a waste?

Yes. But I don’t regret it. I enjoy researching and obsessively tracking down original sources. The fact I get to do it is a perk of how I make money.

But wait — there’s more!

Because I’ve long had a feeling that obsessive research can be a competitive advantage. It can surface gold where you’re only looking for silver.

And along these lines, I hit upon the following quote today. It’s by a man who took his obsessive copywriting research… and turned it into a Park Avenue penthouse and a world-class modern art collection. Take it away Gene Schwartz:

“This is what makes success. There’s nothing else in the world that makes success as much as this. I will take the best copywriter in the world who is sloppy and careless, and match him against a good copy cub, and two out of three times, the sloppiness of the great person will be beaten by the carefulness of the other person. […] The person who is the best prepared and the most knowledgeable makes the most money. It’s so simple!”

In case you want to be knowledgeable and prepared, at least when it comes to marketing and copywriting, you might like my daily email newsletter. Click here if you want to subscribe.

What I learned from copywriting

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

Back when I had an apartment, it also paid for my rent.

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

It’s 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 that’s 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 keep browsing this blog… or you can sign up for my daily email newsletter.

“Reach the maximum limits of your full potential market”

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“This is exactly how I ended up having to get stitches for the first and only time in my life.”

This spring, I had to sell a knife-sharpening gizmo. It was faster, cheaper, and easier to use than a whetstone.

But who cares?

There’s tiny demand for knife-sharpening gizmos of any kind, and it’s unlikely that many people will be swayed by a feature comparison.

What I needed to do was to expand the universe… to take it out of the small space of people who are looking for a better (or any) knife sharpener… and into the much bigger world of people who use kitchen knives but never give a thought to sharpening them.

So what to do?

I ended up telling a story involving a dull chef’s knife, a green bell pepper, and a cut that required four stitches. I created a problem in the reader’s mind where there wasn’t one.

“Dull knife? Yeah, I really don’t care.”

“Sliced-open finger? Geez, what can I do to make sure this won’t happen to me?”

In general, you don’t want to sell to people who are indifferent to the problem you claim to solve.

The only reason you ever would want to do this… is because you are very greedy. Because in most markets, the segment of indifferent prospects dwarfs the knife-sharpener connoisseurs. As Gene Schwartz wrote in Breakthrough Advertising:

“What do you have left [after you can’t talk about your product]? Your market, of course! And the distinct possibility that by broadening your appeal beyond price, product function or specific desire, you can reach the maximum limits of your full potential market; consolidate splinter appeals; and increase the sales of your product at a fantastic rate.”

That’s all on the topic of indifference for today…

Except, I want to ask if you consider yourself a marketing high-flier?

Because a lot of marketing high-fliers are joining my email newsletter these days. If you want to find out why, click here and try it for yourself.