A few days ago, a jury in Wisconsin awarded $450k to one Leonard Pozner in a defamation suit.
The defendant in the suit was James Fetzer, the author of the book “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.”
The gist of this book, according to what I’ve seen online, is that the Sandy Hook shooting never really happened. Instead, much like the moon landing, it was all faked.
(In this case, it was Obama and his lackeys, coming after your guns in a roundabout way.)
Pozner, the guy who got the $450k, is the father of a boy who was killed at Sandy Hook.
He sued Fetzer, the author, and won. But Pozner didn’t get these damages because of the insulting or hurtful claims in Fetzer’s book.
Instead, the jury awarded the damages because “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook” claims that Pozner fabricated his son’s death certificate.
In other words, in spite of all the outrageous content that Fetzer put in his book, it was really a technicality that brought him down.
(BTW, Fetzer is a retired university professor. It’s another bit of proof that intelligence has little to do with having an accurate or useful view of the world.)
Anyways, I bring this up because “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook” is just like a direct response promotion.
A direct response promotion can make all sorts of outrageous, ridiculous, or even offensive claims. And that’s quite ok, and even encouraged in some circles.
But you have to watch out for technicalities.
For example, I just got some feedback from one of my clients, about a campaign we ran on Facebook this summer.
The promotion in question was nowhere as inflammatory as “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.”
Still, our campaign was a bit ridiculous, and it promoted a slightly suspect product.
“No problem with any of that,” says Facebook. “But we do have some issues with a few technicalities.”
I’ll give you some examples of the issues we had in my post tomorrow. It won’t be terribly shocking, but it might be instructive, particularly if you’re running ads on Facebook to cold traffic.