Gene Schwartz

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.

Woody Allen and Mark Ford walk into a library together…

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“I don’t enjoy reading,” Woody Allen said once in an interview. “But it’s necessary for a writer, so I have to do it.”

Preach, Woody.

I’ve always found reading is one of those things I do out of responsibility, not enjoyment.

But do you really have to read to be a successful writer? Or at least a successful copywriter?

I don’t know. But I heard two expert copywriters talking today. And their opinion seems to be yes.

The two copywriters in question were John Forde and Mark Ford. You might know them as the two guys who wrote the book Great Leads, which is up there with Cialdini’s Influence and Gene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising as elementary education for a copywriter.

So John asked Mark, where do you get your big ideas from?

Reading, said Mark.

Not by swiping what worked before. Not by intuition. Not by some magic spark of creativity.

Instead, Mark reads. And when something makes him excited and interested, he takes note, and he uses that idea, in some form, in his own writing.

Which might sound pretty simple. Or even cheap. But hold on. Because here’s a second tip from the same interview:

Mark says Googled reading won’t lead you to a big idea. You’ve got to read books.

Yes, it’s work. Maybe even unenjoyable work. But so what? Read lots of books, carefully, and you can make lots of money as a result. And as Woody Allen will tell you:

“Money is not everything, but it is better than having one’s health.”

But here’s what not to do:

Don’t read my daily email newsletter. It won’t lead to your next big idea. And it’s not enjoyable.

If you don’t believe me, or you want to judge for yourself what my daily emails are like, then click here.

Jab, jab, right hook — for sales copy

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Gary Vaynerchuck has this famed marketing idea of “jab, jab, jab, right hook.”

The idea is to give value a bunch of times (the jabs) before making any kind of ask from your audience (the right hook).

I don’t subscribe to this way of splitting up value and sales.

But I do think this “jab, jab, right hook” approach can make sense in straight-up sales copy.

Fact is, when you get in the ring with your prospect, his defenses will be strong. If you try to hit him right on the nose with your most powerful claim right away, he’s just going to duck and weave and keep his guard up.

So what do you do instead?

Well, this ties into the discussion of gradualization from my post yesterday.

In a peanutshell, you jab your prospect first with a bunch of softer, less powerful, but more believable claims. Let me give you an example:

“How Doctors Stay Well While Treating Sick People All Day Long”

That was the headline of a successful magalog written by Parris Lampropoulos.

What do you think this headline is about?

Odds are, you think of clever ways that doctors avoid getting the common cold.

And that’s pretty much how the copy leads off. Here’s a breakdown of the beliefs and claims that Parris cycles through in a few paragraphs:

1. The official line is that doctors don’t get sick because they wash their hands all the time

2. But it’s not true! Studies show that three out of four doctors don’t wash their hands between patients, and over 2 million patients get sick in doctors’ offices

3. The truth is that doctors actually rely on herbs, folk remedies, and non-standard cures to keep from catching infections

5. And doctors also use these “forbidden treatments” to lower their cholesterol, get rid of pains, and prevent cancer and Alzheimer’s

Whoa! Did you catch that?

We started out talking about clever ways doctors use to keep from getting the common cold. Now we’re talking about preventing cancer and Alzheimer’s.

And over the next couple pages, it gets more extreme.

Parris shows you how there are proven but non-standard treatments, not just to prevent cancer and Alzheimer’s, but actually to cure these killer diseases.

For this audience, that’s the right hook. It takes an A-list copywriter like Parris to hold off on this knockout punch long enough that he can be sure to land it, plum on the nose.

In the words of Gene Schwartz, who first wrote about this process:

“This fact — that your most powerful claim does not always make your most powerful headline — is a paradox that many copy writers still cannot accept. Mail order advertisers, however, have a simple way of proving it. When a power-claim headline doesn’t work — for reasons either of Awareness or Sophistication — they immediately split it against a second head, with far fewer claims but far more likely to be believed. Then they build a belief bridge from this second headline, to the same exact claims they featured in the first, but now anticipated by careful preparation every step of the way.”

Screenwriting & copywriting: “If the structure is unsound, forget it”

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One of my favorite screenwriters of all time is William Goldman, the guy behind The Princess Bride and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.

Writing about his craft, Goldman made the claim that “screenplays are structure.” He explained in more detail:

“Yes, nifty dialog helps one hell of a lot; sure, it’s nice if you can bring your characters to life. But you can have terrific characters spouting just swell talk to each other, and if the structure is unsound, forget it.”

Same thing in copywriting.

You can have all the nifty dialog and terrific characters you want, but if your arguments are out of order, or if you introduce a claim that doesn’t belong, you’re a dead duck.

Maybe you think I’m exaggerating. So here’s a relevant quote from one of the great A-list copywriters of the last century:

“If you violate your prospect’s established beliefs in the slightest degree — either in content or direction — then nothing you promise him, no matter how appealing, can save your ad.”

Ahe A-list copywriter behind this thought is Gene Schwartz. In his book Breakthrough Advertising, Gene wrote that the structure of your ad should be a bridge of belief between the facts your prospect currently accepts, and the final facts you want him to accept. Gene called this process of bridge building “gradualization.”

So how does this look in practice?

Well, in Breakthrough Advertising, Gene gave a line-by-line breakdown of gradualization in a famous ad (“Why haven’t TV owners been told these facts?”).

But that ad is kind of old. So I’ll give you a more recent example.

Except, it’s getting late. It’s time for me to quickly re-watch the swordfighting scene from The Princess Bride, and then get to bed. I’ll share that gradualization example with you, and all its structural wonder, in my email tomorrow.

What, you don’t get my email newsletter but you want tomorrow’s email? No problem. Sign up here.

Baby Internet turning into the Matrix

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Fair warning:

Today’s long post isn’t about persuasion or copywriting. It’s just a kooky and perhaps embarrassing prediction I want to make. Read on at your own risk.

In case you’re still here, I first want to point out a few facts.

Fact one is that some complex systems are made up of simple parts.

Bee hives. Ant colonies. Human brains.

Take a bunch of simple nodes. Bring millions or billions of them together. Allow them to communicate and react to each other.

What you can get is complex behaviors. They are unpredictable, adaptable, and often display something you can call intelligence.

Second thing I want to point out is that the Internet fits this mold.

Like the human brain, the internet is made out of billions of (relatively) simple parts.

All these laptops and servers… and cell phones and routers… and smart toasters and data centers… link together in uncountable ways. They constantly communicate among themselves. They stimulate different patterns of activity. They are always changing and yet they maintain an underlying structure.

In other words, the Internet has the features needed for complex, emergent behavior. It might even have features needed for intelligence. Not a human-like intelligence, but an intelligence nonetheless.

Fact three is that more and more people are claiming the corona situation is a large-scale conspiracy.

I don’t personally believe this. Partly because conspiracy theories are often a dumb answer to complex questions. Partly because I can’t imagine any country or Illuminati-like organization coming out ahead of the current mess.

But I do think the Internet as a whole will profit.

It will get more nodes added to it… more synapses and connections built inside it… more energy and money fed into it. As an organism, it will get more powerful.

Now here’s a fourth and final thing, which I’m not sure qualifies as fact:

The whole corona situation would not have been possible without the Internet as it is today. And by “corona situation,” I mean the pandemic plus the economic and political reaction.

30 or 40 years ago, people got one dose of news a day, and it tended to concern local things more than today. Plus, those news were somewhat filtered. News outlets still paid lip service to “decency” or “professionalism” or “public responsibility.”

Thanks to the Internet, all that’s gone. People get constant news updates, all day long. And the news has become more provocative, shocking, and global.

This meant an unprecedented level of public attention and concern about corona. Long before anybody had any direct experience with the actual virus.

Combine this with the fact that today, everybody’s got a global voice (again, thanks to the Internet). The upshot was a new level of pressure on politicians to do something. So they covered their rumps by making decisive yet short-sighted decisions. And here we are, working from home, communicating by Zoom, and shopping online.

Summing it all up:

The Internet has all the preconditions for a kind of real intelligence.

The Internet played an active part in the development of the corona situation.

The Internet stands to profit from the same.

So you can see why I said this post is kooky and potentially embarrassing.

I’m not 100% saying the Internet is an intelligent entity that consciously fanned the flames of corona for its own benefit…

But my prediction is that it’s gonna get there, some time soon.

I compare it to a newborn baby, crying because it’s hungry. It does this instinctively, but the response is nourishment and growth.

Soon enough though, the baby stops crying and learns how to speak. A few years later, it grows up and turns into the Matrix.

Are you still with me? I’m impressed by your perseverance.

If I didn’t manage to convince you with my sci-fi scenario above, well, then it’s my fault.

But if I did manage to (somewhat) convince you, then I want to point out a persuasion lesson after all. It’s Gene Schwartz’s idea of gradualization. In Gene’s words:

Every claim, every image, every proof in your ad has two separate sources of strength:

1. The content of that statement itself; and

2. The preparation you have mode for that statement — either by recognizing that preparation as already existing in your prospect’s mind, or by deliberately laying the groundwork for that statement in the preceding portion of the ad itself.

If you’re still reading, you might be interested in knowing I write a daily email newsletter. (Working together, you and I can help the Internet become stronger.) If you’d like to sign up for it, click here.

Why 30 minutes is better than 2 minutes

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How do you get a penthouse on New York’s Park Avenue, a world famous art collection, and an all-around very good life?

Ask copywriter Gene Schwartz, because he had all three.

Gene paid for it all with his direct mail copywriting, both for clients and for his own publishing business.

Gene’s secret to success?

Hard work.

How hard?

“I work three hours a day,” Gene said, “every single day for five days a week. That’s all I work.”

I don’t know about you, but I feel three hours a day is something even I could manage.

But enough chop licking.

The real reason I bring up Gene Schwartz is because I re-watched an old presentation he gave at Rodale Press.

The presentation was interesting through and through. But what really caught my eye was one of the questions asked at the end.

​​It was very much connected to an issue I’m seeing with the ecommerce emails I write a lot of. I’ll talk about that another time. For now, here’s the question Gene faced:

Back in the 90s when this all happened, Rodale was running 2-minute TV commercials to sell its books. People bought these books in good numbers. But they didn’t buy very many books after, which is where all the profits are made in direct response.

So the question to Gene was, why do these TV customers not continue to buy as well as those who get one of Gene’s monster direct mail packages?

Gene responded:

“Think of what the person has committed who buys your book. If I send them this monster [holds up one direct mail package] or this monster [holds up another], well, this person really and honestly spends 15 minutes to a half hour on this thing. He really devotes a great deal of time to it. So what he’s not doing is just sending you a check for $29. He’s sending you 30 minutes. When you get a person who gets two minutes, he’s not doing anything like that.”

Gene summed it up by saying, “Different type of person. Different type of commitment.”

Here’s what I get out of this:

One of the most common questions by marketing normies is, “Why are those sales letters so long? Nobody will read that.”

The typical answer is that some people do in fact read it, and that’s how long it takes to convince 2% of them to buy.

That’s part of the answer, but it’s obviously not the whole answer. After all, Rodale sold the same books through 2-minute TV ads and 25-page direct mail pieces.

The other part is there in Gene’s response. Different marketing selects different groups of people as your customers. And it actually changes the psychology of those customers, not just in the moment when they order your product, but for the future as well.

You’re not just pushing benefits. You’re training people to be better customers. So if anybody asks you why you write those ridiculously long sales letters (or all those stupid email) that nobody ever reads, tell them the truth:

Because it’s the only way to pay for a Park Avenue penthouse, working just 3 hours a day.

Speaking of stupid emails — I write a daily email newsletter. Since you’ve just spent two minutes reading something I’ve written, you might be committed enough to get on it. If that’s the case, here’s where to go.

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/