Gary Bencivenga – Clayton Makepeace Interview

Clayton: Hi Gary, I really appreciate you doing this.

I like doing this. Especially with somebody as knowledgeable and

Gary: somebody I respect as much as you. So this should be fun.

That’s awfully nice. I spent some time on the phone this morning
Clayton: with Carline. Did she send you the picture of the two of you?

Yes, I looked at it about a half hour ago. What a beautiful picture. I

just wrote her a little note back. I said, “Thanks for the photo,” and
I just wondered how you came by it because you weren’t at the
Gary: meeting.

No. Carline is, or was, one of my copy cubs. I kind of got her started
Clayton: in the business.

Gary: She’s fantastic.

She is – I have her booked up for the next two years with one of my
clients.
You were doing mostly freelance when you were really active.
What I’ve done more of lately is to pick up a client and get involved
in all aspects of his marketing and then bring in other copywriters
to get both acquisition packages done for them and also back-end
Clayton: promotions.

That makes a lot of sense, Clayton. I know that some major clients
now are starting to pay royalties just for those who do the copy
Gary: chiefing.

Right. It’s cool because I get to bring in more copywriters and bring
in more people and do less of that opening the vein and bleeding
Clayton: on the page.

I wish I had thought of this idea. I’d have more blood in my veins.
That’s really a smart way to go. I guess you have to be very careful,
Clayton, about who you decide to bring in on a project because you
don’t want extra work trying to untangle a mess rather than fine
Gary: tuning a few things.

That’s true. Quite often, you find a writer doesn’t work out and so
you don’t return to that writer and end up writing it yourself. But
other times, you wind up finding these little gems. It’s how I found
Parris Lampropoulos and Carline and Bob Hutchinson and Kent
Clayton: Komae.
Gary: Oh my goodness, you have a better farm system than the Yankees.

Clayton: Well, I’ve struck out a few times, too.

Gary: The names you’ve mentioned are stars.

They’re all doing quite well. That’s gratifying. As you know — and I
think we’re of one mind about this — one of the most rewarding
things you can do is to help younger writers get going.
What are you doing now? I know that you’re semi-retired but I
Clayton: suspect you still have lots of irons in the fire.

Yes I do. I really don’t take any client work anymore, with the one
exception of a food and wine newsletter that I’ve become a partner
in. That’s just been a lot of fun. My wife and I are active in helping a
charity for disabled children and we throw a big Hamptons food
and wine party every year.
During that first event, we met somebody named David
Rosengarten who is a TV chef and has a newsletter. And he said,
“Gee, well, I’ve helped you with your charity event, can you just
take a look at my newsletter?” And I said to myself, “Oh, another
guy with another newsletter. They all think it’s so easy.”
But I read the newsletter and just fell in love with it. David is a
brilliant writer. In my view, he’s the world’s best food and wine
writer. He’s so colorful and just makes the subject come alive.
As things wound up, I became a partner in the marketing part of his
business and that’s one thing I’m doing now. So we’re having a lot
of fun hanging out with great chefs at their restaurants, having a lot
of wine and traveling and eating a lot of great food and it’s all part
Gary: of business research. So it’s a lot of fun.

Cool! Why don’t we go ahead and get started with the “official”
part of our interview? Let’s begin by having you tell us a little bit
Clayton: about your background, your family life, childhood, growing up.

I was born in 1946 in Brooklyn. It was a very fascinating time and

interesting place to be because Brooklyn really had been a
bedroom community to New York City — Manhattan. Just on my
street, for example, I’d say, counting both sides of the street, one
block, there were maybe 12 apartment houses at least six stories
high with anywhere from 50 to 100 families in each one.
As the baby boom really exploded, just on my one little block, there
were literally hundreds of kids and every block for miles in each
direction had the same situation. So Brooklyn was just teeming
with kids my own age of every kind of background you could
Gary: imagine. From hoodlums and gangs to kids who would ace a
 perfect score on their SAT when they grew up, and everybody in
between. You got to know and interact with just about every
personality imaginable.
On our floor in my apartment building, next door to us there was a
rabbi with his family. On the other side of us was a man who was
an investigative journalist for the New York Herald
Tribune newspaper. In an apartment on the same floor was a gypsy
woman who always wore a kerchief and would bring us strange
concoctions when one of the children was sick.
It wasn’t a melting pot — it was a melting vat. And when you were
swimming around in this great soup, you couldn’t help but pick up
the flavors and seasonings of many other people and cultures and
backgrounds. It made me tremendously curious about life, and I
think that’s a trait that any writer really benefits from, being
curious. I think it was Ezra Pound, the poet, who penned the line,
“Curiosity. Advice to the young, curiosity.”
Larry King grew up in that same environment, not too many blocks
away from where I lived. Living among so many people instills in
you a curiosity about anybody that you meet. Like Larry King does
on his show, he can be interested in a person from any type of
background and find very interesting questions to ask. That’s a
great trait to have as a copywriter.

It sounds too like you were fairly outgoing to have met and spent
Clayton: time and actually experienced all of these different people.

Yes, I guess so. You could not help but be outgoing when there are
so many people around you. During World War II, not many
apartments were built in New York City — which was also true of
most of the country because of the war effort.
My parents were very lucky to have landed our apartment when
they got married. It was a two-room apartment, just a kitchen and
a bedroom for four people.
So you had to be outgoing because you couldn’t spend much time
inside, in such a tiny apartment. We were out on the sidewalks and
Gary: on the stoops and playing in parks most of our young lives.

Clayton: What did your dad do?

He worked for the New York City Parks Department. He came of

age in the Great Depression and felt there was nothing better than
a secure city job. So he took a job at the New York City Parks
Department. He loved working with flowers and bringing beautiful
greenery to the city.
But he also had a great knack with words and he was an amateur
Gary: copywriter. And one of the things that led me into becoming a
 copywriter was just seeing how my dad would always enter these
contests — 50 words or less on why you like a particular product.
He got really good at winning these contests. He created some
great slogans. For example, he penned, “If it’s Borden’s, it’s got to
be good.” For Gimbel’s Department Store, he wrote, “From pianos
to thimbles, you’ll find it at Gimbel’s.” The most famous one that
he ever wrote was for Rice Krispies, “The cereal with that snap,
crackle and pop.”
Now, he wouldn’t win much for these prizes. There was one
contest that he won when he was young, in the Great Depression.
He won $5,000 during the depths of the Great Depression, which
really helped his family stay afloat for a while. But for these much
more famous slogans he would win relatively minor prizes. This was
his hobby. He would collect all the box tops and send them in with
his 50 words or less slogan and very often would win.
He didn’t create the cartoons for Snap, Crackle and Pop; that came
later from Kellogg’s ad agency, Leo Burnett. But he did write those
words for one of these 50 words or less contests.

Amazing! It sounds like your future was pretty much

Clayton: predetermined.

In an odd way it was. TV started becoming available in households

in the 1950s and I started watching commercials. I was just attuned
to them because my dad was always talking about advertising and
his latest slogan.
Now when I tried to get into copywriting, my first job was in direct
response. I really wanted to wind up doing TV advertising, but the
only opening I could get into was in the direct response
department at Prentice Hall. And I thought, “Well that’s a start and
I’ll get my feet wet here and eventually migrate over to the more
glamorous world of TV advertising” — which still has never
happened, after 40 years.
It was funny when you mentioned that my future was set. The first
assignment I got from my copy chief, he said, “Write a letter about
this book.” It was a biology teachers’ guide. They would sell these
books by mail order to the educational market, to the self-
improvement market, and so on and this was my first assignment.
For each chapter I wrote a slogan. Not knowing any better, I just
imitated what my father might do. And the copy chief said, “What’s
with these slogans? This is not how you sell.” He had to educate me
about the difference between sloganeering and writing direct
marketing copy, which was my start. Since then, I’ve never gotten
Gary: out of the direct response department.
 Actually, there is a big difference in the different worlds of
advertising. Most people don’t understand the reason why much
TV advertising is like it is. Or the reasons why slogans and brand
image advertising are more important. Or even the theory of the
USP, the Unique Selling Proposition, which was initially created to
create better TV advertising.
With TV advertising, the point of sale is far removed from the
exposure of the advertising to the audience. So if you’re watching a
commercial on “60 Minutes” on a Sunday evening, you might not
get to the store until Thursday, so you have to have a mnemonic
device or something very powerful embedded in your mind so
when you do see that product on the shelf, you’ll remember the
commercial.
We in direct marketing don’t have such a heavy burden of having
the sales separated by time and place. We can close the sale right
on the spot. So much of what works in TV advertising — namely
mnemonic devices, or USP, which focuses on one reason to buy —
really doesn’t apply to direct marketing.
I know this sounds like heresy, but I’d much rather have in a good
direct mail package three or four or 10 good reasons to buy, than
to have to sacrifice nine of them in favor of the one USP. The USP
really can be misapplied to direct marketing where you have the
luxury of closing the sale on the spot and can give one dominant
reason to buy but also seven or eight other reasons. You don’t have
to abide so religiously to a single Unique Selling Proposition.

Our 24-page magalogs would be pretty short if we focused on just

Clayton: one selling proposition.

Going back just a little bit, tell me about school. Did you have the
experience of others recognizing writing ability or salesmanship in
Clayton: you at a young age?

No, not really. I didn’t seem to excel much in school. I did go to

Catholic school for most of my school years. My Catholic school
was very good about drumming in the basics. We didn’t have music
appreciation or drama appreciation. What we did have, though,
was a constant focus on what makes good sentence structure and
basic arithmetic and later algebra. So it was those basics — how to
construct a sentence, how to diagram a sentence — which, at least
in my experience, gave great understanding of how sentences
should be built and how paragraphs should be built on strong
sentences and how whole essays eventually could be built on the
Gary: same very rational and logical structure. So that did help a lot.
My dad and mom really couldn’t afford to send me to college after
high school. So I had the choice of finding some blue collar work,
like most of the other relatives who had come in generations
before. And I really wasn’t sure. I knew I wanted to do something
with writing because I seemed to have an aptitude for it and, as
you pointed out, an exposure to advertising because of my dad’s
involvement with it.
I got a job writing copy during the day and I went to college at
night. It took me eight long years to get through college at night,
but I did. The thing I’m most proud of my whole life is just hanging
in there for eight years of college at night, though the degree never
really did much for me at all. It really didn’t count because eight
years into a copywriting career I really knew what I wanted to do
with my life. But I’m proud of just having had that persistence.
Maybe a thousand times during those eight years of going to night
school, I would say, “Why am I doing this? I’m not even interested
in these courses. I’ve got a term paper, I’ve got exams to study for,
I have a young family and they need attention, I have a full-time job
and I’m taking work home from that. What am I doing this for?”
But I just kept hanging in, saying, “I committed myself to that and
I’m going to do it and I’m going to see it through.” That habit has
stood me very well through the years. Once I know I make a
commitment to something, it’s going to be very hard to stop me. I
attribute it to that experience of just developing enough
persistence to get a college degree in eight years of night school.
From that I really am a believer in that old aphorism that your
thought becomes your action —your action becomes your habit,
your habit becomes your character, and your character becomes
your destiny.
I had found that whenever I wanted to develop something,
whether it’s a habit of becoming a better copywriter in some way
or just some other type of self-improvement, this line of thinking
really helps.
Maybe I’m jumping ahead here, but I had really a great leap in my
development as a copywriter when a famous writer whom you
know, Daniel Rosenthal — I worked with Dan for a while —
introduced me to the book Think and Grow Rich. I was learning my
craft very well until then, but I had never really been opened up to
these ideas about how to enhance your own mind power for any
reason including making your own mind work better. So that book
was really a turning point in my life as well because it opened me
up to many other self-improvement books.
The secret’s right there in the title, Think and Grow Rich. It starts
with your thoughts, and then your thoughts become actions, and
 your actions become habits, and your habits become character,
and character becomes destiny. So that line of reasoning really has
helped me throughout my life.

Clayton: What subject was your degree in?

Gary: I have a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature.

Clayton: Great. How did you come into contact with the great David Ogilvy?

I have had the privilege of working with some really top people in
advertising. But I probably learned the most from John Caples.
After Caples, I probably learned the most from my first of several
copy chiefs — names that nobody would ever know. They were
really wizened copy chiefs who had seen thousands of split run
tests and could save you a lifetime of learning.
The very first one gave me probably the best advice I have ever
gotten. He said, “You’re new to this field, here’s how you’re going
to learn. On each assignment, I’m going to tell you to go to the files.
I’m going to tell you to bring out one handful of ads that have
worked like gangbusters. Then I’m going to tell you the book titles
and files of ads that have bombed. I want you to look at the ones
that bombed and don’t do anything that they’re doing. I want you
to look at the ones that were blockbusters and try to assimilate
much of what they do into your new piece, and that’s how we’re
going to take every assignment.”
It was great advice and even to this day when I have a young writer
or somebody who wants to get into the field and wants to know
the best thing they can do, I tell them to do pretty much the same
thing. I also recommend that they get themselves a great mentor
who will review their work, such as I imagine you would do with
the copywriters you work with.
Other than that, the best way to learn is by just going to the files
or, if you don’t work at an ad agency yet, signing up to receive the
publications and offers of great direct marketers like Agora
Publishing, Phillips, Healthy Directions, Rodale, Boardroom, KCI —
the usual gang of suspects. And before you know it, you’ll be
getting a free course in the best advertisements that are being
written today.
That was what my first copy chief taught me. I eventually wound up
at BBD&O — Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn. Somebody once
said that agency’s name sounded like a man with a suitcase falling
down a flight of stairs. BBD&O is where John Caples worked for
most of his life. I worked in the direct marketing department there
Gary: and got to know him.
 He was a great teacher and a very congenial, kindly man. And you
can pick up so much from reading his books. Even today I like to
reread his scriptures of direct marketing. It’s like the Old
Testament. You just read it. It never gets tired. It’s just so fresh and
powerful.
In fact, I was having lunch with David Deutsch once — great
copywriter — and he said, “You know, I try to keep up on my craft
and instead of reading maybe 100 books, Gary, what I think I
should have done with much of my learning time is read 10 great
books 10 times each.” I thought that was a very trenchant
observation because books by Caples and Ogilvy and Claude
Hopkins, those are the ones you really need to read more than
anybody else.
After working with John Caples, I got to work at David Ogilvy’s
company, Ogilvy & Mather, in their direct marketing division. And
that’s your original question: how I got to work with David. I never
really worked with him. It wasn’t like John Caples, where I knew
him personally.
David was the head of a giant agency, probably one of the biggest
four or five agencies in the world and was very fond of direct
marketing. He would gather all the copywriters in big groups and
teach us the principles. Or we’d have big assemblies around the
holidays, and he would tell us what campaigns he thought were
great from the various departments at the agency.
In that way I learned from him. But it wasn’t like he would come
into my cubicle and put his arm around me and go over my copy
sentence by sentence with me. It was much more being in the army
with a great general at its command and learning all you can
because you never knew when he would pounce upon your ad as
one of those he was going to analyze in front of the group. You had
to always be on your toes.

Clayton: What were the lessons that you learned from Ogilvy?

Ogilvy said that he and Rosser Reeves, who were two of the
greatest copywriters in general advertising of the 20th century,
learned more from John Caples than anyone else. More people
know David Ogilvy than Rosser Reeves today because of his books.
But both Ogilvy and Reeves said that they learned more from John
Caples than anyone else and they shamelessly stole from him and
most of what they espoused came indirectly or directly from him.
So there is that lineage of masters teaching other masters.
Many of the lessons that Ogilvy would preach came directly from
John Caples — mainly that your headline is 80% of the sale in space
Gary: ads. And I make that distinction because sometimes people
 mistakenly apply that to direct mail. In direct mail, Ogilvy said, your
format is even more important than your headline. And I have
certainly found that to be true as a magalog almost always outpulls
an envelope with the same headline on it.
So that was one great lesson in space advertising: your headline is
80% of the sale. And your format is equally as important in direct
mail.
Other lessons — Ogilvy loved to write with charm. He said, “You’ll
never bore somebody into buying something,” so he would fill his
copy with charm. He taught this mostly by example. If you ever
read any of the great ads written by David Ogilvy, you’ll see they’re
very tightly written. He wrote a whole series of ads to help sell
clients on joining his ad agency — “How to Write Advertising that
Sells,” “How to Write Food Advertising that Sells,” “How to Write
Travel Advertising that Sells,” and so forth. He loved, as did the
nuns in my Catholic school, nouns and verbs. He wasn’t big on
adjectives and fairly despised adverbs, such as “very.” Almost
always you can dispense with the word “very.”
He wrote tightly written ads that were charming and very
interesting. He would do great research on whatever product he
was selling and come up with fascinating facts about it. He wanted
his ads as interesting as articles and he wrote them that way and
expected his copywriters to do the same.

Arthur Johnson told me that one of his biggest secrets is

understanding that the ad needs to be entertaining to a degree. To
Clayton: keep a person reading for 24 pages.

Yes, that’s true. However, it can also be a trap. Rosser Reeves, who
wrote and theorized about TV commercials, warned about
“vampire video,” where sometimes the entertaining element can
run away with the ad and you come away from the commercial
remembering the joke, but not the product. For example, take the
famous campaign for Alka-Seltzer, “I can’t believe I ate the whole
thing.” It was one of the most entertaining campaigns, but it turned
out to be one of the worst campaigns ever for Alka-Seltzer because
after they really went gung ho with it, sales plummeted.
As you know, we have a much stronger discipline in our work, so
entertainment has to be used carefully. You have to leaven in just
the right amount because you can’t let it run away with itself.
While a touch of entertainment, like a pinch of salt, can add flavor,
the main meal in advertising is well-targeted information of great
interest to your prospect, which has a natural connection to what
you’re trying to sell. Many ads try to be entertaining with
Gary: extraneous elements, which really don’t lead to a closed sale. But if
 you can make your copy interesting with thoughts and facts that
not only are extremely curiosity provoking and interesting but also
help you close the sale, that’s really getting good.

Clayton: Tell me a little bit about how you became a freelancer.

After working at the Ogilvy agency, I was ready to go out on my

own and try to make some big bucks as a freelancer. I had heard of
other copywriters doing very well, and I received a call from an
executive headhunter who said, “Gary, I know you’re thinking
about going out on freelance, but there’s this little ad agency up in
New Rochelle, New York” — which is a suburb of New York City,
about 45 minutes northeast — “that is looking for somebody just
like yourself. Somebody who knows direct marketing and worked
at Ogilvy, or knows the Ogilvy style of advertising. Why don’t you
go see them, even though you’re thinking of going out and doing
freelance?”
So I went to see them mainly because of a letter that Dan
Rosenthal, the agency’s owner, had written to this headhunter. It
said, to “try and persuade somebody who really knows how to
write salesmanship in print because if they do, we treat the
copywriters at our agency like salespeople. In fact, our top
copywriter here this past year has made” — this is in today’s
money — “$750,000 a year.”
It wasn’t that high, it was about one tenth of that, but that’s what
inflation has done. This was in the early 1970s. So at that time a
salary of $75,000 was equal to about $750,000 today. That’s what
Dan Rosenthal was making just from commissions on his
advertising.
I wasn’t making anywhere near that, so I thought maybe I should
see these folks. If nothing else, maybe I could freelance for them.
But Dan convinced me to join him by saying, “No, it’s not really in
your best interest to go into a freelance career yet. Why don’t you
hang out with us? We are applying methods of salesmanship in
advertising that’ll go way beyond what most people have even
discovered yet and you’ll have a chance to make some really good
money.”
So I did go with Dan and I lasted there for about five years. I
became a copy chief and a creative director and then he wanted to
have a whole new path in his life. He wanted to move to California.
But our copy department was in New Rochelle, and he tried to
make that work for a while but it was very cumbersome to get copy
through a department that was half in New York and half on the
west coast. We didn’t have e-mail then, I don’t even think we had
Gary: fax machines. We had a very rough form of a fax machine …
Clayton: The old Qwip machines?

Yeah that’s what it was. I couldn’t remember the name. One page,
long time to send, and for some reason a horrendous garlic smell
oozed from the machine.
Dan and I, along with several other good copywriters, worked
together for about five years. It was sort of like the Beatles. We had
a great team for about five years, and then it was just time to go
out on our own, in our own direction. So that’s when I went out on
my own.
It was about 1977 and by then I really knew what I was doing. I had
spent about 10 years, prior to teaming up with Dan, learning from
these great copy chiefs at Ogilvy & Mather and a lot from John
Caples so I had a lot of street-smart copywriting tips.
And with Dan, we formulated a system that was really very
powerful, and with those two things together — we virtually could
not be beaten. We took out an ad that said, “Announcing an ad
agency that guarantees to beat your best ad by at least 10% or you
pay us nothing.”
We were so cocky that we even said, “You test us and if we don’t
win, not only won’t you have to pay us anything, we will pay for
whatever you spent to test us. In other words, if you take out an ad
in the Wall Street Journal and you spend $10,000 testing our half of
the test — and our half loses — we’ll give you $10,000. That’s how
sure we are we’re going to win.” We got a lot of clients that way.
Mainly it was due to our methodology of focusing on the key points
that make direct marketing copy work.
So after that, I went out on my own and I did very well with what I
Gary: learned at the agency.

Clayton: Did Dan have Silver and Gold Report at that time?

Yes, yes. In fact, Dan was the owner of that company because we
also would launch our own products as well as do work for other
clients. So, sure, yes, he was the publisher of that newsletter.
We had so much success and so many opportunities because we
were among the few people who knew what we were doing. We
were like alchemists who could turn products into very successful
businesses because of the direct marketing knowledge that we had.
Gary: It wasn’t widely known, not nearly as well known as it is today.

Can you tell me a little bit about the approach or the template that
Clayton: you and Dan used?

It wasn’t so much a template, it was just applying everything very

Gary: religiously that we had learned from studying Claude Hopkins and
 Rosser Reeves and David Ogilvy and John Caples and several other
great masters of selling in print. More than anything else it was
what Dan would call the “CRIT” system, which was short for
Critique System.
I think you’ve worked with Dan, haven’t you, Clayton?

Clayton: Sure have.

Gary: I’m sure you’ve heard that word, that odious little word, “Crit.”

Clayton: Were his crits as ruthless back then as they are now?

Gary: Yes, yes.

He’s sadistic. He takes joy in making his crits as insulting and

Clayton: negative as possible just for the fun of it.

I know. I have the scars, believe me. But it was a great system. You
had to be on your toes. For those who don’t know what we’re
talking about, it was a system by which the writer would distribute
his copy to everybody working in the ad agency — the receptionist,
the account executives, the art director — anybody else who could
be persuaded to read it.
Everybody would take their best crack at ripping the ad apart. Now
this sounds like a devastating experience, but you develop a thick
skin after a while. Most of the time, it would be up to you to accept
or reject the criticisms that were coming back at you. All the people
involved in the process would do their best to rip the copy apart, to
point out holes in the argument, to say, “You’re not convincing me
here, I don’t believe this for a second, this offer makes no sense,”
and so forth.
Every possible mistake from grammar and spelling to psychological
missteps or paragraphs that didn’t connect well, paragraphs that
went on without subheads, all of it noted. Everything that could
make something less readable or just annoyed anybody for any
reason or just made them not want to read any more. They’d say
things like, “You’re boring me here” — and that would be a
comment in the middle of one paragraph. You’d distribute the
work this way in the copy department which is itching to vent some
of the fury that they have just been put through because they
Gary: recently went through the same process.

Clayton: You nailed them last week.

 Exactly. It’s payback time. As weird and as sadistic as it sounds, it
produced fantastic copy. It didn’t produce fast copy by any means,
because you would go through many, many drafts this way until
almost everybody in the place said, “Wow, this is singing now. I’m
ready to sign up for this myself.”
So it was a very cumbersome, lengthy process. Sometimes clients
would be on the phone month after month yelling, cajoling,
begging, “When is my copy going to be ready?” And we’d say, “It’s
being worked on, it’s being worked on.” When it was finally
finished, they’d have a campaign that they could run for years and
out-pull virtually anything else they’ve ever run unless they were
very lucky beforehand.
This was the system we followed. We had a lot of knowledgeable
people take out their blue pencils and just scratch out or question
anything that they didn’t like. But then after a time you learned to
internalize that process. You probably do it in a nicer way, Clayton
— but I’m sure with the people that you mentor that you point out
weak spots and shore up areas that need more proof or persuasive
Gary: arguments or whatever. I’m sure you do that.

Absolutely, and it really honestly just depends on what kind of

Clayton: mood I’m in.

I’m sure that’s not true. For the process to work, you have to be
intellectually honest. Evaluations should not change with your
Gary: mood.

Well sometimes I look at it as a creative writing assignment,

especially when the copy’s boring. Then I’ll dive in and get rather
verbose with my crits. Other times, you’re right, you’re looking for
credibility, you’re looking for persuasiveness, and you’re looking for
Clayton: specificity.

I think the biggest enemy we face today is not weak headlines or

artwork. It’s the tremendous amount of clutter that you have to
compete against. When you look at your e-mail this evening,
you’ve got maybe 100 e-mails that need attention and each one
was crafted lovingly and with lots and lots of care — and you
couldn’t care less. You’re just deleting each one with a very quick
trigger finger. That’s an enemy that we have to face rather than
going to a very receptive audience and having them judge us
paragraph by paragraph. You don’t even get a hearing much of the
Gary: time these days.

You had a fantastic article in one of the early issues of Bencivenga

Clayton: Bullets on, if I remember correctly, the two most important words
 in advertising. You said, it’s not “you,” it’s not “free,” it’s “yeah,
sure.”

I gave a seminar at Rodale once. I had the good fortune to never

have lost a split run test at Rodale against some very tough
competition selling books for the book division. I competed against
Gene Schwartz and most of the top names out there, and I never
lost.
So they called me in to ask, “How are you doing this? Tell us the
approach that you’re following.” So I ran through a whole list of
headlines from their advertising, as well as many other examples
from our daily lives. For example, what politicians promise every
November — “I’m never going to raise your taxes and I’m going to
give you universal health care” … “I’m going to get rid of crime in
our schools.” And what does everybody say once that’s out of their
mouths? They say, “Yeah, sure.”
That’s the biggest problem that most B-level copywriters face.
They’re always looking for ways to increase the strength of their
headline, and the easiest way, apparently, is to increase the hype
or ratchet up the promise. But usually that’s going on in the wrong
direction because you’re sounding more like the politician who is
promising an even more undeliverable promise. Since everybody
out there is looking for a way to dismiss you as quickly as they can
because they’ve got 100 other messages to get through, as soon as
they see an over-promising headline, that is the first permission
that they have to just blow you off.
You’re usually much better with an under-promising headline. A
great example that I learned in the days that I was working with
Dan Rosenthal was for one of our clients who sold gold and silver
coins and bullion. In this case it was an ad for silver. The headline
was a famous headline that ran for many years, “Why the price of
silver may rise steeply.” Thinking I was such a hot-shot copywriter, I
said to Dan Rosenthal, who I believe was the author of that
headline and the great, great ad that followed it, I said, “Why are
you saying, ‘may rise’? You should test a headline that sounds a
little stronger, a little bolder, such as ‘Why the price of silver will
rise steeply.’ That way it sounds, Dan, like you believe what you’re
predicting.”
So we tested my version and, of course, it bombed. It’s
counterintuitive, but “Why the price of silver may rise steeply”
outperformed “Why the price of silver will rise steeply” maybe by
200%. And the body copy was exactly the same for both versions. It
went into why inflation and why a silver shortage is about to exert
Gary: irresistible pressure under the price of silver to cause silver prices
 to go higher. It gave every reason why silver was going up. It was
full of proof and full of facts and full of figures, plus an opportunity
to send for a booklet on how you can profit on the coming rise in
silver prices. As I say, it created land office business on the strength
of that ad but I could never understand why “may rise” pulled so
much better than the more forceful “will rise.”
But it’s because of that disbelief factor. Most investors are savvy.
So as soon as you promise something that really is unknowable
such as “will rise,” they know that you can’t predict the future. But
when you build in a little bit of understatement, you suck them
right in.
So I’ve learned to apply that principle in many, many headlines.
One of my best headlines for Hume Publishing was “Get Rich
Slowly.” I created an enemy out of all of the get rich quick
investment courses and opportunities out there by saying, “Look, if
you’re tired of all the hype, this is the course that you should be
buying because if you got $2,000 to $3,000 to put aside each year,
this is a course that could easily get you to the $1 million mark. It’s
not going to happen in three, four or even five years, but if you
want to retire with $1 million and can only put $2,000 aside in an
IRA each year, this is how it’s done.”
That ad was virtually unbeatable for several years with a headline
that the client didn’t even want to test, “Get Rich Slowly.” They
said, “Gary, have you lost your mind? Who wants to get rich
slowly?” So I said, “Look, people are so tired of ‘get rich quick,’ it’s
not believable anymore.” Nobody buys without belief, so if you
advertise something that can be believed, then most of the battle is
already won.

I think that’s fascinating, and I think it kind of ties into that the
“Lies, Lies, Lies” package you did for Mark Skousen’s Forecasts &
Clayton: Strategies, which you must be tired of talking about.

No, no, not at all. Most people probably don’t even know that
Gary: package but yes, you’re right …

Clayton: That is the classic of financial newsletter promotion.

Oh thank you. That was extremely successful and ran for many
Gary: years.

And it was really wonderful because there’s not even a hint of a

benefit in your main headline. It simply seized on a resident
emotion — the skepticism and frustration of investors who had
heard it all, tried it all and were continually disappointed. And then
Clayton: in the deck copy, you came on with “Why we investors are sick and
 tired of these things that are happening to us.” And then the real
payoff was, “How getting richer is the best revenge.” I’m doing that
just from memory — that’s how powerful it was.

Gary: You remember it better than I do.

Clayton: My goodness, when was that?

Gary: It was the early 1990s.

Yeah, and I still remember that headline. I can still visualize the
Clayton: package and the wonderful cartoons they used.

That was an example of humor actually working in copy. We took

every target of anger that an investor can have — lying politicians,
with a cartoon of a classic looking politician, taking an oath to the
flag, and if you look closely, his fingers are crossed. And he says, “I
Gary: promise never again to raise taxes.”

Clayton: And the broker in a pinstriped suit behind a desk, smoking a cigar.

And the guy from the IRS was Darth Vader. The cartoons were just
wonderful and that added a little bit of that entertainment factor
you were talking about before but in an appropriate way. It was
Gary: part and parcel of the sale.

There were a couple of things that I loved about that. One was the
little phrase, “we investors” in the deck copy. Because it
immediately got Skousen on the side of the reader, it immediately
Clayton: made us friends.

That’s so true. I’m so glad you picked up on that, Clayton, because

that is a great technique to use. Instead of the usual “I’m trying to
sell you something,” which sort of sets up immediately in the
reader’s mind a you-versus-me mentality, I found a way to shift
gears by saying, “it’s you and me against these other guys.” And if
you can create an enemy in your copy, that’s what happens. You
set up a three-point discussion and you come around from your
side of the desk to be on the reader’s side of the desk and then it’s
you and the reader against the enemy that you’re railing against.
It’s a very effective psychological and copy technique to use
because it takes the copywriter out of the role of trying to sell the
prospect something and puts them both on the same side, as if the
Gary: copywriter were a friend, consumer advisor, and helper.
 There’s another thing about that headline that’s very instructive,
especially as I look back on it now. People often wonder why Rush
Limbaugh, for example, is so successful. He has no real product to
sell. He doesn’t make your life better in any way. There are no
benefits, really, for buying his books. But the service he provides
for you is that he puts your thoughts and your feelings — assuming
you’re in agreement with his politics — into words. He gives you an
outlet for the emotions that you’re feeling about the things that
are happening in the country. That emotional release is valuable to
people, and as a result, 20 million people listen to him every week
on the radio and buy his books and newsletters and so forth.
I felt that the “Lies, Lies, Lies” package did something very similar
and it did it beautifully. It was one of the first-rate resident emotion
packages that simply went to a group of people who had strong
feelings about the subject at hand and spoke to those feelings, and
by doing so, validated them. But they were actionable feelings and
you were able to come back with a solution, a way to assuage that
frustration in those people. I felt that was so much more powerful
than simply going back to them as one more direct mail package
promising huge profits.
It was wonderful and it opened the way for me and also for every
other copywriter I’ve talked to, to begin thinking about how much
more powerful emotions are than a mere intellectual argument in
Clayton: terms of making a sale.

That’s a very astute analysis, Clayton. I think what helped me to

create that package — and this is something I do before I start any
assignment — was to ask, “What are we really selling?” And you try
to come up with different answers to that question. We’re not
really just selling a newsletter, which is 12 sheets or eight sheets of
paper a month. What are we really selling? If it’s just a newsletter,
everybody had always answered, “We’re selling investment tips.”
But since there was so much competition from other copywriters
and other publishers selling the same kind of investment tips, I
reasoned if we change the answer to the question “what are we
really selling?” we can open a whole new way to talk to our market.
Let’s think about it. What are we really selling when we sell a
newsletter from an investment advisor who wants to advise you on
the most important financial decisions of your life? Well you’re
really selling a set of values, a partnership with somebody that you
have to trust. The best way to come to trust somebody is to see
that they do share your same values.
I call this the “Credo Technique of Copywriting.” The first issue
Gary: of Bencivenga Bullets is about this technique. In fact, in that bullet I
 say what I believe about advertising. I believe advertising is
designed to sell and not to win awards and applause. I believe you
can always sell with integrity. I give the other beliefs, very strongly
held beliefs that I have about advertising and that accomplishes a
couple of things.
Number one, it tells what I’m about and if you have the same
values, then we’re a match. So I sell you on me before I try to sell
anything else. If you sell not only the end product that the advisor
or the person behind the product of service is offering — whether
it’s the chiropractor who’s selling his services or attorney or
whoever it is — but also mention the person’s values that you also
feel very strongly about, you sort of bond with them in a way that’s
much more powerful than any list of how-tos or other types of
bullets purely based on information. You’re bonding with them on
a level of trust, which makes you different from every other person
out there who is just trying to sell something because they want to
sell it.

You probably don’t remember, but in the early 1980s, you and I
had a telephone conversation. I was with a company called Security
Clayton: Rare Coin.

Gary: Oh yeah, that’s coming back to me now, yes.

Clayton: You are my mentor, by the way.

Gary: Oh, I didn’t know. Well thank you, what an honor.

I read Rosser Reeves and Ogilvy and Caples and the rest, but
without a doubt, the greatest advances in my career have come
Clayton: from reading you.

Thank you, Clayton. What a compliment. You have just made my

day. Thank you. Considering how high you’ve carried the banner,
Gary: that’s quite a compliment. Thank you.

Well, studying every one of your packages has been just eye
opening for me, and I remember telling you in that conversation
that one of the things that struck me was that you consistently
Clayton: made a friend before you asked for the sale.

I think you have to do that because people don’t buy from other
people unless they believe them and unless they trust them. If you
don’t sell yourself first, you’re trying to short circuit the process by
just rushing to the bottom line, rushing to the close of the sale too
Gary: early.
Salesmanship has changed over the years. It used to be, in the days
of Elmer Wheeler and “Sell the Sizzle and Not the Steak,” the life
insurance agent or the real estate broker would try to corner you
and answer every objection you could raise and just out of
exhaustion, the hapless prospect would buy the policy or agree to
do whatever the salesman wants – buy the encyclopedias or the
pots and pans that the door-to-door salesman was selling.
But you know something? You don’t see door-to-door salesmen
much anymore. I haven’t seen one in years. You don’t see the Avon
Ladies anymore. You don’t see life insurance agents going around
door-to-door anymore. Why is that? It’s because salesmanship has
changed. We’ve all been marketed to so much, we won’t stand for
being manipulated that way anymore. As a prospect, you just won’t
put up with it. People don’t like to have to buy because they can’t
come up with a clever answer to the life insurance agent’s
comeback. We’ve evolved because we’ve been marketed to so
much over the last several decades. We’ve evolved from a nation
of much more manipulatable prospects to tough customers and the
whole nation is like that.
So if you just try to come onto people with the same old forms of
salesmanship that used to work 10 to 20 years ago, they just don’t
work anymore because a) you don’t have my trust; b) you don’t
have my values; and c) you’re not my friend – and I’m not going to
buy from you unless I first have those feelings. So you’re not going
to just trick me into buying with snappy comebacks to my three or
four reasons I’m not sure that I want to buy.
There’s a great movie about this called "Boiler Room," where they
show how these people who used to do telephone marketing from
the boiler room would have scripts with the snappiest comebacks
to anything that the person might say about why they may not buy.
They would try to embarrass people into making an investment
over the phone. That way of selling, in most cases, has gone by the
boards. It’s dying.
This is especially true in our field, where we try to sell to 1,000 or a
million people at once. They could blow us off without us even
knowing about it just by tossing our mail or clicking “delete.” Given
that, I think that the best way to be selling anybody in the
marketplace now is to win a friend first and the best way to do that
is through an e-zine.
More and more, ice cold direct mail packages sent to ice cold
prospects are going to fare poorly compared to promotions sent by
people who have an e-zine relationship with somebody. And by
that I mean an e-zine that really gives very high value as opposed to
selling so much. I counsel people in all markets of goods and
 services to really develop a relationship with their prospects
through a very valuable e-zine. Hold back on the selling. Just resist.
Rein the selling in for a while. Establish a relationship of giving very
valuable helpful information first and then introduce the sales
later.
Even with e-zines, I get so many of them now, and I don’t even
open them much anymore. I send most of them to an e-mail
address I have at a place called Spam Arrest. And at Spam Arrest, I
go through all my marketing-oriented e-zines and I’m sure I’m not
untypical in this way. They’ll give me a listing of the latest e-mails
that I have – 25 at a time – whether they’re e-zines or personal
messages or whatever. And I’ll just go down and I’ll check them all
to be deleted. And then I’ll uncheck maybe three that I’ll want to
read, out of 25. And the others get automatically deleted when I hit
the return key. I delete them all just based on the subject lines. And
we all do this.
Even very top marketers have entered a place in my mind, and I’m
sure in the minds of lots of others, where I automatically don’t
open their e-mail anymore because I know I’m just going to be
pitched something. I only open those e-zines where there’s going
to be honest to goodness nuggets of information, not just another
sales pitch. So most of the people out there, even with e-zine
marketing, they’ve gotten the technology right but they don’t have
the psychology right.
Just as you say, win a friend first and then try to sell later. It’s so
much easier to sell something to somebody who you have a
relationship with. So the first sale that you have to make is that
relationship, not the product. You just put it so well before, you
first want to make a salesperson a trusted friend rather than
somebody who is just selling you a product.

And that’s what I feel that you’ve done whether by design or just
intuitively in so many of your packages. In the Skousen package,
the line “We investors are fed up” was that way because friendship
is quite often based on commonality. Instead of the vaunted expert
touting his past successes, you just climb in the boat with the
prospect. “What are we going to do with this problem?” And that’s
Clayton: wonderful.

And I feel that’s so much easier to do once you’ve established an e-

zine relationship with your prospects. You can capture names very
easily with an e-zine if you give good information and use that as a
basis for growing your own list.
You’ve seen this, I’m sure, Clayton, in your work. Who do you get
Gary: most of your business from? It’s not from people who are just
 walking in the door for the first time. It’s from clients that you have
a relationship with. When they think of a new assignment, you’re
probably booked up for 10 years but whether it’s you as a writer or
you as the copy chief or creative director on the assignment, they
don’t even have to think twice. Because they know you, they like
you, they trust you, and you’ve gotten great results for them. So it’s
not even a question of, “Should we use Clayton for this?” It’s, “Gee,
can we get on Clayton’s schedule?”
I’m sure you’ve had that experience. And it’s the same for
everybody who has sold anything over a period of time. We’ve all
found that it’s much easier to sell something to somebody who’s
satisfied with the relationship with you and with your past
performance. And that’s one of the most important principles of
marketing and yet so many people just ignore it.
So many people in the Internet marketing world just want to find
that one hot product to sell, make a fortune, then find another hot
product to sell in a totally different market. But business just
doesn’t work that way. You really need to find a product or service
from which you can get lots of repeat business because that’s the
most profitable and easiest business – when people are coming
back to you again and again. I’m sure that’s worked for you in your
business. It has worked for me in my business. For 25 years, the
same people were keeping me as busy as I could be.

Gary, I would be fascinated to hear about your process when

you’re approaching a package. Everything from the ways you
identify themes or the approaches you want to address to one of
the things that you just said that I think you could probably do a
500-page book on – the concept of “What are they really buying?”
Clayton: What are you really selling?

Gary: Right. You’re not selling grass seeds, you’re selling a greener lawn.

Clayton: You’re not selling drill bits, you’re selling holes.

Exactly right. But you can really expand that. As I was saying before,
you’re not just buying a newsletter. I want to buy a relationship
with somebody, one person I can trust in this investment world,
where everybody else is on commission trying to sell me
something. Boy, I would really appreciate a relationship with
somebody who is truly objective and doesn’t have any product
they’re going to sell me except their advice. That’s what I realized
we were really selling with Skousen, and it’s why that package was
so successful.
So if you dwell on that question more deeply than the next
Gary: copywriter might, “What are we really selling?” you’d be surprised
 at the answers you can come up with. Major, blockbuster
breakthroughs.

I notice in a lot of your financial packages for Phillips, for example,

you were selling things like simplicity or reliability, consistency,
growing reliably richer and those kinds of things instead of just
Clayton: selling the obvious, which was the big profit.

Right, exactly. Because most people don’t put their serious money
into risky, “ten bagger” opportunities. Again it gets back to knowing
your market – and some of this I can elaborate on as I answer your
question about the process. But it really comes from knowing your
market well, as to what most people in that market believe, and if
you try to exceed their level of belief, you’re going to lose them. I
learned long ago that the only people who invest and who
therefore are going to buy an investment newsletter are people
with money.
Most people with money are probably over 50 years old because
you usually need that much time to accumulate a substantial
amount of money. Furthermore, they really don’t want to lose it.
So they’re very risk averse, though they may like to hear about the
occasional investment that goes through the roof.
Sure, there is a sub-market of people who really are into that – the
way casino gamblers are red hot for that kind of information. But
most investors, by and large, want a safe way to invest their nest
egg, their retirement money, and they’re not going to bet it on a
penny stock. They might take a flyer on a penny stock, but if you
could address the main portion of their wealth, they will really
reward you handsomely.
To get back to your question about my process – it’s probably a
little bit unusual, but it is more encompassing than you might at
first think you would hear from a copywriter.
I mentioned before about how Think and Grow Richand similar
books and tapes have influenced me. I’m probably Nightingale-
Conant’s biggest customer. But I think every great achievement
begins in the mind first, before it manifests itself in the material
world. Think and Grow Rich – well, how do you grow rich? At first
you have to start with a thought that you want and intend to grow
rich, and the same holds true for a great breakthrough in a
package. But let me back up for a moment to the very start of the
process.
This doesn’t happen anymore because I’m not taking clients
anymore, but when I was taking clients, the phone would ring and
somebody would ask if I’d like to do this assignment. And I’d say,
Gary: “Sounds interesting, send me everything you can on it. Let me get
to know it.” And I would receive everything and go through it very
carefully. I especially wanted to see the advertising that’s being
used for it. In terms of the advertising, I will call upon my
knowledge of the craft that I’ve developed over all these years.
What I really want to know about the advertising is whether or not
I see an easy way for me to beat it. If the advertising was created
by somebody like Clayton Makepeace, it’s an immediate turnoff. In
fact, there are about five or six writers who I would feel that way
about, and you’re certainly at the top of that list.
If Clayton Makepeace has written the advertising, and you’ve done
a bang up job, but this client is just getting greedy and curious to
see what somebody else can do, I’m not very interested. I’ll know
right away if it’s your work, Clayton, even if you didn’t tell me you
wrote it. I could usually tell. I can certainly tell if a great writer has
written it and if a piece is a great piece. And if it is a great piece, I’m
much less interested in competing against it. After all, why should I
waste my time with a much lower likelihood of success? We’re not
in this to prove how macho we are by taking on all comers. We’re
in it to maximize our return on investment.
That’s like Warren Buffett. He doesn’t try to turn every wacky
investment into a superstar performer. He says, “You don’t have to
swing at every pitch. I’d sooner let 1,000 bad pitches pass me by at
the plate – there are no balls or strikes – than swing at every pitch.
I just want to swing at the one I think I can whack out of the park.”
I’m the same way. I like to see a great product suffering from really
weak advertising. That’s my perfect scenario. It’s just as Warren
Buffett wants to see a great investment that the rest of the world
doesn’t realize is a great investment yet.
At first I would look at the advertising and the product to see how
strong the product was and how strong the advertising was. In
terms of the advertising, I can tell if it’s strong based on my
knowledge of the craft, just all the things that we copywriters learn
over time. You learn to recognize good headlines and good offers
and good guarantees.
So I apply that screen to the assignment and see if I can find a toe
hold somewhere. If it’s fairly well written, do I see a toe hold? Do I
see someplace where I can beat it? So I’ll analyze every part of the
package. Is the headline very strong or is it just fair to middling? If I
can find myself coming up with something that I could pretty much
realize is going to be stronger in that department, well that’s a plus.
Then I’ll look at the body copy, the bullets, the offer, the guarantee,
the premium, every component in there and if I can come up with a
good feeling that I can beat each one of those components, then
it’s a slam dunk. Then I can beat the overall response rate because
 the package is nothing more than the sum of its components and if
I can see my way clear to improving upon each component, then
it’s a slam dunk that I’ll beat the whole thing.
So I’ll look at the advertising through that screen. I’ll also – and this
is where a lot of copywriters go astray – look at the product from
the point of view of my product knowledge. And this is why I think
it’s so important that copywriters should specialize in certain parts
of the marketplace. I don’t think there are many copywriters who
can be equally successful in all areas of the market, with all
different products. Especially not when there are other very well
trained copywriters in every other market that they’re thinking of
entering.
I’ve always been very knowledgeable about health. I’ve been a
health nut for about 30 to 40 years. And, just because that’s where
most of the work was, I was always into financial products. So I
know those two marketplaces very well. I know what will generally
sell. I know lots of tests that didn’t perform well – and that
knowledge is very valuable in knowing whether this product is
valuable or not. This marketplace is always changing so you have to
keep up on what investors are reading now. You’ve got to know the
books and newspapers that they’re reading and understand what’s
on their minds now. You’ve got to keep up with what’s happening
in the economy and what they’re worried about. Once you reach a
certain level of knowledge, it’s fairly easy to keep up with the
marketplace.
If I’m really comfortable with those two things: 1) that I can beat
the advertising that I see in front of me or at least have a
reasonable chance of doing so after doing a lot of research; and 2)
the product is a strong one with great credibility elements to it and
some great reasons why the prospect can benefit from this, then I
feel very confident about it and I’d be willing to take the
assignment.

Like you, I imagine, I always have an incentive in my compensation

agreement where the better I do for the client, the more money I
could make myself. I really want a very strong likelihood of long-
term success with it. Assuming all of those factors are positive, the
next step I would take is to envision a blockbuster success. As I said
before, every achievement begins in the mind before it manifests
itself in the material world, so I would envision a great success.
In my mind, I would hear my client calling me in two months saying,
“Gary, you did it again. This is unbelievable. The phones are ringing
off the hook. The postal trucks are lining up, bringing these bags of
Gary: orders in. Oh man, the next time you’re in town you have to let me
take you to dinner.” I would envision the entire phone call with a
thrilled client absolutely jumping up and down with how thrilled he
was that I wrote the package and how the responses are just
pouring in, burying his mailroom with checks and orders.
I would see this whole vision in my mind. I would taste the
celebratory dinner that I was going to experience with my wife,
Pauline, to celebrate this latest triumph. Your subconscious mind
wants to manifest the images you place before it with great
emotion. So indulge your fantasy about success.
See the accomplishment in the rehearsal studio of your own mind.
Tell your subconscious, “This is what I like to experience, help me
do it!” So if you start celebrating before you’ve even put pen to
paper or fingers to keyboard, just getting that very exciting vision of
how you’re going to experience success, it frees up tremendous
subconscious resources for you to achieve that success and very
effortlessly also.
You’re effortlessly teaching your mind what’s going to be
happening. Your subconscious mind, as Maxwell Maltz taught
in Psycho-Cybernetics, is a goal-striving mechanism. When you give
your subconscious a target that you want to hit, it will pull into
itself and eventually share with your conscious mind all kinds of
resources that you never knew you had within you to make that
happen.
This is the goal that you’re telling your subconscious mind that will
be enjoyed and experienced in a month or two, six months, or
whatever your time schedule is for completing the job and having it
tested. This is what’s going to happen. Most writers don’t go
through any preliminary stage like this. There are lots of ways to do
it, but whatever methodology or ritual you have for doing this, the
key is envisioning the success even before it unfolds. That very
process helps the steps unfold and you want to make it very vivid
to your senses because that will make it real to your subconscious
mind.
You want to feel the emotion especially. You just want to close
your eyes and feel how great it’s going to feel that you’ve chalked
up another big winner and that the word is getting around in the
industry that “Wow, this guy is almost unbeatable. Almost
everything we’ve given him, he hits a homerun for us. He’s
unbelievable.” You just fantasize about all of these things. You
combine that with your knowledge of the craft that you’ve
accumulated throughout the years and you combine that with the
specialized knowledge of the marketplace. If you combine those
three things, I can guarantee you’ll almost be invincible.
 How can anybody else beat you when you have all that going for
you? We’re not like athletes where, mentally, they reach the peak
of their knowledge just at the very time when their physical skills
are going into decline. The quarterback at age 35 knows so much
more than the young rookie about how to read a defense and how
to craftily send a receiver downfield for a touchdown pass. His
mind is so much further ahead and educated than a rookie
quarterback just out of college. Unfortunately for people who earn
livings from physical skills, their physical skills deteriorate at the
very time when their mental powers are at their peak.
In copywriting that doesn’t happen. We need to always build on
our knowledge base. Over time you must build these three key
areas of knowledge.
First the knowledge of what works in direct marketing, your
knowledge of the craft.
Second, your knowledge of a given marketplace – whether it’s
health or finance or chiropractic, or whatever interests you or
wherever you’re getting your current work from.
And third, the knowledge of how to unleash the competitive and
great instincts that you have within you that you don’t even know
about. It’s the 90% of your mind that you don’t normally use. Once
you unlock that 90%, if you add that to the mix of knowing your
craft and market, you will be virtually invincible in whatever you
chose to do.

Clayton: That’s wonderful.

I’m sure, Clayton, that I’m not telling you anything you don’t know
because when I look at words that you write for your clients,
there’s no way I want to tangle with that stuff. I’m sure there are a
Gary: lot of other copywriters who feel the same way.

Clayton: That’s very kind. Psycho-Cybernetics is one of my favorite reads.

You’ve never told me that, but in a way I knew it. I knew it because
you couldn’t produce at such a high level without the tailwind from
your subconscious mind. You’re at an emotional level when you
write. And that can only be achieved through your subconscious
mind, which is, in effect, channeling the desires, hopes and dreams
of a lot of other subconscious minds. It’s only when your
subconscious mind is engaged that way that you can produce work
of the compelling power that I see you produce. Not having ever
known that about you, I knew that you must have been somehow
harnessing your subconscious mind in a way that most copywriters
Gary: don’t.
 I have my entire life. I think part of the process for me too is
envisioning early in the process the client being completely blown
away by the first draft. Understanding the purpose of the first draft
is to have a second draft and a third. The purpose of the final draft
is to accomplish all of the other things – career growth and the out-
Clayton: of-the park homerun and all of that.

I also spend time thinking about under-promising and over-

delivering to the clients as well as the longer effects. I’ve also found
that one of the little ideas in Psycho-Cybernetics that’s extremely
valuable in terms of allowing your subconscious to work, is getting
away from the work in one way or another. Napping, for example.

That’s very true. That’s when your subconscious gets the chance to
connect with the conscious as Gene Schwartz put it. He used to talk
about that all the time in his methodology where he would put
himself in front of his typewriter or computer and not put any
pressure on himself to do anything. He used a little time clock and
he would punch in 33 minutes, 33 seconds on it, just so he
wouldn’t have to punch in more than one button on his timer. And
every 33 minutes and 33 seconds he would get up and go for a
stretch and when he came back for his next 33 minutes and 33
seconds, somehow the answers were ready for him. To relieve the
stress and pressure of having to write great copy, Schwartz had
only one requirement. He had to stay in his chair for the entire 33
minutes. He didn’t have to work on the copy if he didn’t want to,
but he didn’t allow himself to work on anything else or to answer
the phone or to read the mail.
That’s the same process. You have to get away from it so the
subconscious can give you the answer it’s just dying to give you but
can’t because your conscious mind is so rigidly trying to force the
issue. So when you open those channels by napping or getting
away from it, the subconscious at that point can whisper the
answer in your ear and it just bubbles right up to the conscious
Gary: mind.

I wrote the Health & Healing launch package in one day by a

swimming pool in Huntington Beach and I did it just that way. I
wrote for an hour and I swam for an hour. I wrote for an hour and I
swam for an hour. By the end of the day I had a complete first
Clayton: draft.

Isn’t that amazing? Oh, Gene Schwartz, in recommending that very

methodology, said that’s how Mozart used to compose his
concertos and symphonies. It’s obvious, of course, that Mozart was
Gary: a genius, but people were amazed at the process he used. He
 would play billiards – I think billiards is what they called it then.
And Gene Schwartz said that Mozart would hit the billiard ball with
his pool cue and then write some notes. It was an activity that got
his conscious mind off of what he was working on and then by the
time he went back to the music notation, the next phrases were all
right there, he didn’t consciously have
to think about it.

How many hours a day would you write? Is there a hard and fast
Clayton: rule?

It’s hard and fast. I always believed that if I can get three hours of
quiet time, I can achieve anything in the morning. And those three
hours includes researching. In the research phase – once I’ve
agreed to take something on – I’ll devote about 40% of my time on
the project to research, maybe 40% to writing the first draft, and
then 20% for polishing and rewriting after that.
I love to write. I guess I’ve had an aptitude from an early age. And
once you get successful at something, you really feel like you have
the aptitude to do it. I really do like the writing process. Winston
Churchill said that he hated writing but loved having written. A lot
of people are that way; they hate the process of writing. But I enjoy
it.
Once you get into a rhythm and a groove, as I’m sure you have over
the years for approaching your assignments, it’s not that hard. If
you do enough research, the writing comes fairly easily.
To answer your question, I would usually like to do three hours in
the morning, and I still try to do that. I still get a little antsy if I
don’t. I wake up and get three hours in on something, like a major
project that I want to work on.
Those early morning hours are, to me, the most productive time,
especially if you can harness in the subconscious before you go to
bed. You just go to bed reading something over and posing a
question you’d like to have solved by the morning. Your
subconscious mind tends to millions of cellular and biological
transactions every night. You’re breathing and swallowing and
goodness knows what else, literally millions of other activities. It’s
nothing to give you a headline by the morning if you just say, “I’d
like a good headline on this in the morning. I’ve just read it over
and I have no idea, so you come up with it. You’re the power
behind whatever my conscious mind does, so give me a good
headline or ten or twenty in the morning and I’ll just be ready with
my notepad.” And that’s pretty much what happens.
I know Dan Kennedy has said that’s how he is so productive. He’ll
Gary: tell his mind what he wants to have written when he wakes up in
 the morning and it all flows out like a computer dump. It’s not like
you’re sleeping fitfully – it’s totally subconscious. If you let too
much time go by, however, if you don’t get to your writing until the
afternoon, you might have lost it. That’s why I like to do my writing
first thing in the morning because my mental computer’s been
running all night with whatever I wanted to write about and it just
pours out almost word for word.

Clayton: Absolutely. It’s amazing because I do the same thing.

Gary: Do you really? Wow.

Years ago I got into the habit of going to bed very early around
eight o’clock and getting up at four in the morning when there
would be no sounds in the house, no distractions, no phones
ringing and be able to just totally engage in the work without
Clayton: interruption for several hours.

Yeah that’s what I like. I still wake up naturally, no alarm clock. I

wake up with the morning light and sometimes I wake up 4:30 or
5:00. We’re on the east coast out in the Hamptons – the sun comes
over the ocean really early.
I used to stay up late. I used to do very well being a night owl but
Pauline wakes up really early. She bolts out of bed at 5:00 or 5:30 in
the morning. When she does, I find it hard getting back to sleep so I
had to get in sync with her rhythm. And once I did, I found it much
more productive for me to wake up at that time anyway, using the
night as a time when I just sleep soundly and let my mind review
whatever it’s reviewing to give me my answers in the morning.
Early in the morning too, as you say, there’s no phone ringing. But
you’ve got to train yourself not to get into your e-mails and see
what’s happening. There are so many things that tug at your
attention. Try to get into the discipline of – and I’m saying this
obviously for your listeners or readers who don’t do this, because I
know you must already do it – training yourself to focus on one
major task at that precious, most productive time of the day.
That’s really the 10% of the day that’ll give you 80% of your results.
So you should really save it for that most important assignment
that you’re working on at that moment. Then the rest of the day
will be phone calls and e-mails and meetings and things that come
up or people coming to the door. You know a million things that
distract you, but at least you will feel very productive for that day
because you’ve logged your two to three hours first thing in the
morning, and you’ve got something to show for that day. And if you
could do that pretty much every day, it’s amazing how much you’ll
Gary: write, how much you’ll produce.
 I also find that the work we do on each package is easily divided
into two camps: 1) the creative work; and 2) the detail-oriented
work. And quite often they require two very different aptitudes. I’ll
tend to focus on creative issues very early in the morning. Then,
when I feel my creative energy flagging, I move to more detail-
Clayton: oriented tasks such as research and other things like that.

I couldn’t agree with you more, Clayton. In my mind the tasks break
down the same way. I like to reserve the really tough problems for
that high energy period in the morning. And I find they usually get
worked out right away. But you have to have that focus, that clarity
– almost like a still lake – to follow the thread of a new creative line
of thought. And then there’ll be many parts of a package that are
just much more mundane things, but are just as important in the
long run because you need the foundation for the brilliant, creative
idea that leads off the package.
I call that “grinding out the yardage.” Instead of a beautiful Hail
Mary pass that covers 70 yards at once – which I toss in the
morning – this is just three feet and a cloud of dust … three feet
and another cloud of dust. For the rest of the day it’s a series of
small gains. It’s just grinding out the yardage, reading the stuff
that’s got to be read, capturing a little bullet from this paragraph
and the next one and the next one after that. It’s rote mechanical
work and it’s time consuming, but it’s got to be done. But if you put
Gary: those two halves together, that’s where the power is.

We’ve already taken a half-hour longer than I promised but I would

like to ask you one final question. Let’s discuss the client
relationship. A lot of the people who will be reading this are people
who hire copywriters and work with them. What are the things the
client can do to help you produce stronger copy, and do it more
Clayton: quickly?

That’s a very good question. Over the years I developed a “please

don’t do this” list. Here’s an example:
“Suppose I work my tail off to produce a breakthrough package for
my client and it becomes the control. Eventually, that new control
starts to weaken. At that point, they will often invite some other
writers to take their best shot at beating me.”
What would gall me is when another writer would look at my
package and then capture every essential concept almost in the
same sequence of conceptualization and put it into “his” package.
He’d put different words around it of course, perhaps add a
different premium or two, but his package is really just a mirror
Gary: image of what I’ve done, with just enough changes that he, under
some guise of fairness, could call it his package and not mine
anymore. In other words, the words have changed, but the
concepts really haven’t. Or if he did add a concept or two, they
probably didn’t help or hurt that much. I call this “barely legal
plagiarism.”
Basically, in effect, the writer does a mirror image of my package
under his name. That would drive me crazy. The point is – and this
goes back to my “please don’t do this list” – I would tell clients,
“Look, if you want me to reserve my best ideas for you, don’t let
this happen. It’s for your benefit as well as mine.”
How does this hurt the client? Well, there are many writers out
there who, if you let them be lazy, will be bone-lazy. If you let them
get away with just mirroring what somebody else has done without
breaking new ground, you’ll never get anything else out of them –
even when you demand it. They’re always going to take the path of
least resistance because everybody in life seems to have more
work than they can handle. And if you’re a client who settles for
somebody merely imitating somebody else’s package, that’s the
only thing you’re going to get from that writer. If you spoil each
writer you work with that way, you’re never going to get original
breakthrough packages.
It also de-motivates your best writers. It de-motivates me to give
you my best ideas. After all, if I have a breakthrough concept, why
would I give it to a client who would allow it to be swiped, when I
have other clients who will protect my ideas?
This isn’t a legal issue, by the way, where the imitative writer
violates the rule of copyright. The person does change the words
but the melody is pretty much the same. So I have no legal
recourse – and really have no desire to go after the client or the
writer legally anyway. I have better things to do with my time.
So, it’s not a legal issue, it’s an incentive issue. I say to my clients,
“When you let other writer’s swipe my ideas, what have you done
for my incentive to give you the next blockbuster idea? You’ve just
trained me to give it to somebody else who will protect me – and I
don’t want to do that. I don’t think you want me to do it to you
either. You don’t want me to go elsewhere with my best ideas. If
you want to protect the flow of great ideas, by all means test other
people but don’t let them get off easy by taking either half or two-
thirds of my package and just rewording it and cheating everybody
in the process, including the lazy writer himself. The writer
shouldn’t, for his or her sake, be allowed to do that because then
they’re not being forced to come up to their best level of originality
and thinking.”
 That was a bugaboo and I’m sure you’ve seen that too, Clayton.
You have a great control package and all of the sudden arriving in
the mail is a package that sort of looks like yours, all the same
ideas…

Clayton: It’s paraphrased. They just sat down and paraphrased your copy.

Some hot new writer! The client may even say, “Wow Clayton,
you’ve got to meet this guy, he’s really good.” Meanwhile you’re
thinking, “Yeah he must be my kind of guy, he sounds so much like
me!”
That’s one. And I have another. I didn’t have this so much after I
got a reputation and people would learn to trust me. But earlier in
my career, people would retain me and then want to tell me what
to write. Ogilvy had a great saying for that. Whenever a client
would try to dictate the copy or come up with some cockamamie
headline that Ogilvy knew wasn’t going to work, he would say,
“Look, why keep a dog and bark yourself?” I look at it the same
way: “If you hired me to do this, just let me do it and then judge me
on that basis. Don’t try to dictate to me what I should write and
judge me on whether I succeeded or failed. At the very least, let me
have my own test. I can try to work with what you have your heart
set on working, unless it’s really atrocious.” I don’t want my name
on a package that’s atrocious.
Of course, very often a client has a really great idea and you
shouldn’t resist that. You should run with it. Sometimes they’ll have
an idea that’s not so great and you think it’s not going to work, but
who knows? Maybe he’s onto something, but give me another shot
at something [else], which I feel has a much higher probability of
working.
That’s another thing that I’ve always done through my career is
take at least two swings at the ball. I would tell a client, “Look, in
researching this, I’ve come up with several ideas, any one of which
could work. My favorite is a very high-probability concept, but I
have others I’d like to test, as well.” You want to always put your
best efforts forward. You always want to have house odds. It’s like
casinos and gamblers are both participating in the same activity.
They’re both gambling but the casinos always make money and
gamblers almost always lose. Casinos always rake in good fortunes
just by slanting the probabilities in their direction ever so slightly.
So I say to the client, “Let’s do that on your package. For Package A
I’m going to employ every high probability technique I know that
has created breakthroughs for other people over my career in this
business. And I’m going to take certain powerful techniques from
Gary: other peoples’ packages that I see working. Everything that I can
 bring to the table to raise your probability of having a homerun, I’m
going to put in this package. That’s Package A.
“But over here in the second package, Package B, I’m going to
break a rule or two. We’re going to really get original. I’m going to
use most of the same high probability bullets and offers and
premiums and subheads but maybe I’m going to try a headline that
has never been done before to give you that element of freshness.
So grant me two test panels and I will double your chances of
succeeding.”
The smart clients say, “Sure, it’s not going to cost me that much
more to test the second panel, and the benefit I gain is that I’ve
virtually doubled my chances of success.” The point is, every now
and then, that second package will win.
Now, most of the time the high probability tests will win. That’s the
one with the big benefit headline, an expanded subhead – I’m
telling you the formula that I’m sure you probably follow, Clayton –
curiosity-provoking bullets, a great credential up front, and so
forth. Following all the way through, it looks very interesting to
read, under a hot subject, emotional language all the way through
– all the things that we pack into our magalogs and other formats.
So that will be the high probability one.
Also, I love to test something that is really different, something
radically different. Even in the offer, the back-end, maybe instead
of charging $200, let’s test $3,000 for this. Who knows? It might
just work. It could be anything that could, if it works, gives you a
whole new business. Sometimes, not as often as the high
probability one, but every now and then you hit on one of those
and it really is a blockbuster. So I call that my package insurance.
I never want to go naked into a test without my high probability
version because, for everybody, that usually will be the winner. But
you don’t want to cut yourself off from those riskier packages that
every now and then open up a success unlike anything that
anybody has ever seen before.

That’s wonderful. I wish I had thought about that in the early going
because whenever I was going up against the control, I was always
torn by that question. It was always an either/or for me. It was, “Do
I try something radically new and different and pick the smaller
odds, or do I go with a high probability concept that is more of a
Clayton: sure thing?”

Yes, that’s exactly the choice you face. Most packages that are
working utilize concepts that have come before. So if you’ve come
Gary: up with a concept that you’ve never seen, it’s probably not a good
 sign but it could be a great sign, we just don’t know. The odds are
small but the payoffs could be much greater.

Just a bonus question: as far as I know you were the first to really
Clayton: exploit magalogs.

No, actually not. That honor belongs to Jim Rutz, the copywriter,
and Ed Elliott, the designer. They did the first magalog for Personal
Finance. I did the second one for Personal Finance, which beat
theirs. But as soon as I saw that format, my eyes lit up. These guys
discovered a format so powerful I don’t even think at first they
knew how powerful it was even though it did become a control. I
had a standard number 10-package control for Personal Finance for
KCI. They came in with a magalog. On the front was a cartoon of an
investor with a dartboard and he was picking his teeth with one of
the darts and on the dartboard were the various investments.
I had the background from Ogilvy and Caples who said to never
make your space ad look like an ad – always make it look like an
article. Ogilvy had tested this and when a space ad looks like an
article, his very scientific readership study showed that 500% more
people read the ad than if it looked just like an ad. In other words,
headline, body copy, call to action –– every word is identical except
the layout. If you run in The Wall Street Journal and you make it
look pretty much like a Wall Street Journal article, even if they slap
that slug on there that says “Advertisement,” you’ll get a 500%
boost in readership for that ad.
And that was pretty consistent across all the space ads that he
tested. That means right out of the gate you get a 500% increase in
readership by making your ad look like an editorial article. Caples
has always preached the same thing. As a matter of fact, in one of
his books, he tells about a test in Reader’s Digest. I think it was an
81% increase in actual orders for Reader’s Digest when it looked
like an article instead of a typical ad.
There’s lots of evidence for space ads but I could never think of a
way to harness that same principle with a direct mail letter. As
soon as I saw that first magalog, I knew these guys had done it. And
they didn’t realize they had done it because very few magazines
have a cartoon on the cover. So they found a very entertaining and
informative format but most magazines really look like magazines
with a photo on the cover, like Business Week or Forbes or Time.
Magazines aren’t cutesy with a cartoon – so I saw my opening, my
toehold. I went back to Personal Financeand said, “Look, I know
you’ve got a new format and I can do that format too. I’ll make
mine totally different with different copy. I believe my existing copy
Gary: is still very strong actually but there’s this great new format.” And
they asked, “What do we even call this format?” I said “Well, it
looks something like a magazine but it sells like a catalog, so let’s
call it a ‘magalog.’” So I named it, but it was Jim Rutz and Ed Elliott
who invented it.
Now, what I did for mine – having had that training from Ogilvy and
Caples saying to camouflage your ad and make it look like an article
– was to make our magalog look just like Time magazine. We gave
it a red border. We used a real photograph – not a cartoon of an
investor. It looked just the way Time magazine might. We put a real
photograph of a headshot of Richard Band. He looked like the
“Man of the Year” on the cover of Time. We said something like,
“Hottest investment opportunities of the next year,” and the
bullets said “Great opportunities in treasuries, page 5; Once in a
lifetime real estate opportunity coming up next year, see page 7,”
and so forth.
We had all the same body/copy articles on the inside as my
previous direct mail package, but we made them look like real
articles with photographs. And then the copy read like an article
written by Richard Band, the editor. Let’s say we’re talking about
real estate. We talked about which forms of real estate are hottest
right now and said, “By the way, we have a special report on how
to make money in single-family homes. They’re great investments
for the small investor. You’ll get that report free for signing up
with Personal Finance.”
For every article, whether it was on bonds or stocks or whatever,
we had a little tie-in to a premium. But the article was a real article,
it gave a lot of good information. This new venue, called a magalog,
was very valuable to read itself.
When I asked myself, “Can I beat Jim Rutz’s package?” I saw that I
had a much better cover. We had a bigger, broader table of
contents just the way a magazine does. And we had lots of
photographs throughout that looked more like a magazine. So
when I analyzed all the components of my package versus Jim’s, I
felt pretty confident that I was going to win, and I did.
When we started rolling out, Time called up and said, “You’re using
our red color on your cover.” And we said, “What do you mean
your color? How can you copyright a color? You can’t copyright a
color.” And they said, “We have a lot of lawyers who say we can.”
Vickie Moffett at KCI didn’t want to get involved in a big legal
tangle so when they mentioned their lawyers, she said, “Well, how
do you feel about blue?” They said, “Blue’s okay, that’s not our
color.” So we went with blue, and it went almost as well, not quite
as well but still it was a giant hit for several years.
 All of us remember what a huge lift we got when we started testing
magalogs. I was in 6 x 9s at the time and was running very long
copy, up to 24-page sales letters. But going with magalogs really
radically changed how I wrote my copy as well. Instead of being a
sales letter, I was now writing value-added copy that rewarded the
reader for plowing through my 24 pages by giving him practical
Clayton: things that he could use now.

Gary: That’s very true. That immediate gratification is very important.

Yeah. Everyone’s looking for the next big format breakthrough

Clayton: though.

I really think it’s here already. I think it’s the e-zine. I’m finding that
with the clients that I’m a partner with, I almost don’t want to do
direct mail anymore. It’s too tough to send a 24-page magalog to a
prospect who doesn’t know you. I don’t think direct mail will ever
be dead, but rising paper costs, rising printing, and rising skepticism
argue against people responding to cold mailings that are trying to
sell them something right on the spot. I think these factors argue
instead for an elongated courtship of an e-zine that is of great value
– where the selling process starts more subtly, a lot more softly.
Perhaps in the future the most profitable use of much direct mail
will be to drive people into an e-zine relationship.
Direct mail is also destined, inevitably, to become the province of
higher-cost products. When I started, you could sell a $12 book by
direct mail and make a lot of money. You can’t do that anymore.
My first freelance client was a little company called Farnsworth
Publishing and we sold a lot of books. I would write a space ad that
would run in The Wall Street Journal on estate planning or some
form of investing or how to buy a small company or other very
esoteric subjects. We also had an active direct mail campaign for
the same book, a #10 package and a letter selling a book for $12 or
$19. You couldn’t possibly cover that cost today, you’d go in the
hole.
That bar is constantly being raised. I think pretty soon it’ll be very
hard to make money on a $39 offer unless you’ve got a very
healthy back-end and are willing to break even or even lose a little
money up front. Again, it depends on what you’re selling.
I think one of the great things that you did, Clayton, for Phillips
Publishing was your package for Health & Healing. It wasn’t just a
homerun, it was a grand slam World Series winning blast in the
bottom of the ninth inning. That’s how memorable your Health &
Gary: Healinglaunch package was for Phillips.
 That package built that newsletter to astronomical heights. I don’t
think anybody could’ve ever envisioned that. I’m sure that Tom
Phillips never thought that this little newsletter on health that he
just launched as an additional product to have, would become the
towering profit maker of Phillips Publishing.
But not only that, it was such a perfectly natural vehicle for selling
vitamins and supplements to those who are signing up for the
newsletter. So the newsletter in effect became a paid
advertisement. The prospects would literally pay to receive
additional offers for supplements and cruises and everything else
that you would want to sell associated with Dr. Whitaker, who is
the editor of the newsletter.
So you had 500,000, or however many subscribers they had in
time, each one paying $50 a year to start with, and I guess those
prices ratcheted up over the renewal period. I can’t even do the
arithmetic. I think that would break my calculator just to figure out
the money they were making on the subscriptions. And then
there’s all the money coming in from supplements and vitamins
and all kinds of arthritis remedies and water filters and all the other
back-end products. That was just a gigantically profitable business
that you helped them create.

They only thought I wrote that package. That was a Bencivenga

Clayton: package from beginning to end.

Is it too late to tell Tom this because I understand he was just made
extremely wealthy by the sale of that company? Maybe somehow
Gary: you can finagle for me a slice of what he just received.

Clayton: We sold between one and two million subscriptions in three years.

Wow. Clayton, I had nothing to do with that. We all learn from each
other and I learn from you and that was your homerun totally
Gary: unaided by me.

I think this interview should be absolute must-reading for every

soul in the direct response industry, Gary. Your insights are
staggeringly brilliant. Is there anything else that you’d like to add
Clayton: before we close?

No, that’s it, Clayton. When I was coming up through the ranks of
the direct marketing agencies in Manhattan – Ogilvy & Mather,
BBDO and a couple of others – my favorite time of the week was on
Friday afternoons when most writers would kick back and just meet
in the copy chief’s office and shoot the breeze about great
Gary: campaigns and funny art directors and neurotic account executives
 and other comical gossip. We’d just tell jokes and learn from each
other about advertising.
Mostly we young guys just shut up and listened because the old
timers had so many great war stories of campaigns that were
breakthroughs and how they were developed and funny characters
they met along the way, like the art director who slept in his cubicle
because his girlfriend threw him out and he had no place to go and
that’s the real reason why he was so early for work in the morning
– he lived in his cubicle.
Those sessions were just so instructive and I think this is sort of the
modern day equivalent of that – where two guys just talk shop on
the phone and if we can help others save some time by avoiding
the mistakes we made, so much the better.

I just want you to know, Gary, that if there’s ever anything at all
that I can do for you all you have to do is ask. I don’t know what
plans you have for Bencivenga Bullets or future products or
Clayton: services or educational tools or whatever, but just count me in.

The Bullets are free and I offer them to anybody who wants to
learn what I know. Just go to www.bencivengabullets.com. I want
to leave something of a legacy, partly to carry on in the same
tradition of those great old copy chiefs who taught me. You don’t
have to know thousands of things to be a really good copywriter.
A relatively small handful of insights as your guideposts will save
you years of effort and save clients perhaps hundreds of thousands
of dollars in their testing. Those are the secrets I share for free in
Gary: the Bullets.

Clayton: Gary, thanks a lot, I really appreciate it.

Gary: Okay, Clayton, it’s been great. Take care.

Clayton: Take care. Bye.