Cutting Through The Clutter With Your Marketing

Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we're going to be learning from Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer as we talk about cutting through the clutter with your marketing. We all know the marketing messages that we are receiving are constantly bombarding us, and if they're bombarding us, they're definitely hitting our end customer. So if your marketing isn't carefully crafted to your target audience, you can't assume that you're going to have their focus for long, if at all. This is how you cut through the noise with real-world examples, no matter what medium you use to spread your message. This information is going to help you get the advantage you're looking for.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

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Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless.

His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world is We know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Well, hello, Diamond members. This is Bill Glazer, and I'm being joined by, once again, Dan Kennedy on today's call. And today's topic we're gonna talk about is cutting through the clutter with all your marketing and advertising messages. And Dan and I thought it was particularly an appropriate topic for us to be talking about now because, you know, clutter has become— it's not getting better or less of it, it's getting more of it. I know that, you know, many years ago when I used to— when I first used to do presentations about outrageous advertising, I got the stats that people are actually seeing over 3,100 marketing advertising messages. They're either seeing them or hearing them or reading them every day, over 3,100. And now with the proliferation of online, with so many much more email and so much more websites, I can't imagine what that number is today, but it's got to be probably a multiple of 3,100, which is just crazy. And at the same time, it's, you know, as I said, it's not going to get any better. And I think that we all have to become more aware of that. And we used to need to take some steps in our marketing and advertising to make sure that we do get, you know, cut through the clutter. And Dan, I'm going to sort of first turn this over to you because I know you've had a lot of preparation. And if you could just sort of make the opening comments and then we'll go from there.

Well, I think you're right on in the consciousness about how much competes for attention, whatever those numbers are. I mean, temporarily we're in an environment where there's less quantity in the mailbox. There's less full-page ads in a lot of print media, but overall the amount of media is up and the diffusion of audience by separate media is sort of a whole new problem in that, you know, there aren't 3 television stations, there's 300, and people that are interested in cooking are over in one place and people that are interested in science fiction are in another. TV really has become the magazine newsstand and of course online there's an endless diffusion. And so the clutter now is not so much within a media as it is the proliferate amount of media that there is competing for everybody's attention. And you combine that with attention span issues and people being increasingly desirous of skipping over marketing messages and tempted to do so. ABC this fall is the first TV network to begin experimenting with selling advertising as a bottom of the screen or top of the screen crawl. During broadcast programming rather than as commercials. It's a reaction to people skipping commercials. So you have that going on and you have a little bit of recession resistance in the sense that people try and keep themselves out of environments where they're going to be tempted to spend. And when you put all that together, it's just a more and more and more challenging task to confront, to command the attention of those you want the attention from long enough to have a chance with them.

Yeah, and you know, and not only are we so overwhelmed with the amount of messages that we get, is, again, when I typically do a 60-70 minute presentation at a live event on outrageous advertising, I always make the point that people are so overwhelmed. But I also make the point that specifically the type of advertising that I like to teach, which is this outrageous advertising, that people are also really bored. And so because they're getting so many, which leaps to this thing about how much you're getting. So it's not only you're getting so many messages in front of your eyes, but they're so bored with seeing so many of them that that also makes it more difficult to get their attention because they're just like, they're numb to the whole thing. And then the second, the next thing I would say about this is that people, because they're bored and most things in life Most of our lives are not doing the kinds of tasks that are kind of making things exciting through most of the day that we are doing our things. People do like to be amused because they like to have a little chuckle on their face every now and then. So figuring out how you can actually humor them somewhat, which is not conflict with our topic of next month, but actually how you can get their attention by they look at that and say, gee, that's kind of cool. That works really well. And of course, the last part I always make from the front of the room when I teach this is the fact that buyers are buyers and that if you can cut through the clutter, which leads to my next point which is so critical, if you can cut through the clutter and you can actually Combine that with the kinds of Glazer Kennedy marketing, or let's just call it direct response marketing. When you combine that together, then any kind of a buyer, when you can cut through the clutter, that can really— you'll get a much better response because of the fact that people actually just buy this thing. I always tell the story that the 5-page handwritten sales letter that I originally wrote, and this is back now in I believe 2002, and that won me the RAC Award at the time, the Retail Advertising Conference. And that 5-page handwritten sales letter, I sent it out to about 10,000 customers of my menswear store. And that thing definitely cut through the clutter. It was sent out in pretty close to a blind envelope, which was a number 10 white envelope. Handwritten address on it, return address from Bill Glazer. I think it was actually B. Glazer. It wasn't— not the mention of my menswear store on the outside of the envelope, live stamp. So it got in the mailbox and pretty much opened up, but at the same time, in the menswear business, and you got to always think about who opens the mail, and this really is important to this topic of cutting through the clutter. So one of the things I was always fighting in the menswear business is the man was typically not opening the mail. When I get home at the end of the day, Karen hands— she goes through the mail and she hands me the mail that pertaining to me. And then she's even— which, which is a conversation that we've had often— is she's often pulling out stuff that is addressed to me that she doesn't think that I would want to see, although I really do enjoy seeing quote-unquote junk mail, but she's handing me what's my segment of the mail. And the thing that we were always fighting in the menswear business was we got to get past the wife to get it eventually to the man, and we had an unusual menswear store that we actually had more— 85% of all of our buyers were men because in most menswear businesses it's actually 65% are women. So my point being is that That thing got opened up. It was a 5-page handwritten sales letter. It got read and it got responded to, but not only did it get responded, but the kinds of people that responded to it are not the kind of people that you would normally think would respond to a 5-page handwritten sales letter. I mean, people that were coming in were like presidents of banks and presidents of Fortune 1000 companies and lawyers and accountants and on and on. I mean, it was like people that you would normally say, which Dan has always made this point, is that don't assume that your buyers are too sophisticated for the kind of marketing that will cut through the clutter. It's like, again, buyers are buyers and people are people and everybody kind of responds to this kind of advertising. So Dan, I talked a little bit about outrageous advertising in order to cut through the clutter, which is one of my favorite topic. So what are some other ways that people can sort of cut through the clutter in their marketing?

Well, I think— look, I think there's two basic paths, right? So one is sort of trying to secure attention of people who are, for any number of reasons, not heavily predisposed to giving you or your or your topic attention. And so, not even though they're your customers and they're on your— or they were your customers and they were on your list, certainly not everybody and probably hardly anybody is getting up in the morning hoping they're going to get a piece of mail from the clothing store and are not necessarily in any way, shape, or form predetermined to pay attention pay attention to it. And a lot of marketing, regardless of media, is in that category. And so all this thought is given to how to get people who may not want to pay attention, may be distracted, may be busy, may think they're not interested in this topic, how do we get them to pay attention? If you think about television, That's why celebrities are used in infomercials, because you might not ordinarily stop and watch a show about pots and pans, but since George Foreman is standing in it smiling and doing things, you may stop for a few minutes, and now we have a chance, right? It's why you use lumpy objects in direct mail and why sometimes you might use FedEx instead of mail and on and on and on. The other path is, really has more to do with who than how. So the other path has to do with trying to be reaching out to people who are predetermined to pay attention to you and your message and have a high probability of being so interested in that message that it will leap out at them. Even if buried in clutter. The leap out example that everybody has had in their life, everybody understands, is you buy some kind of car that you haven't noticed on the road at all hardly, and you think you bought something that is pretty unique, and after you own it now, every place you go you see another one of them driving down the road.. And it wasn't leaping out at you before. Now it's leaping out at you. It was always there. And so interest causes things to rise out of the clutter, sort of like a magician can levitate a card out of a deck. And so that path is really all about who is the prospect and being able to narrow in on somebody who has enormous predetermined, pre-in-place, if you will, interest in what it is that you bring to the table. So if you own the mail order business that puts out the catalog called Wine Enthusiast, the task is pretty obvious. You better be delivering that into the hands of people people who are in fact wine enthusiasts or you're in trouble. If you're just mailing that catalog cold to a list that is demographically correct— age, gender, level of affluence— but not necessarily known to be wine enthusiasts, your cost of sale is going to be astronomical and you're not going to be successful, and almost no matter what you did coming from the other direction to try and help it, you'd still be unsuccessful. If you mailed the catalog inside a wine cask, if you attached corks to it, if you FedExed it, almost no matter what you did, you still would not be profitable. Conversely, if you have exactly the right who to send that to, you really don't have to be all that creative or imaginative because if that catalog is in a great big stack of 30 catalogs that accumulate all week and now the person is shuffling through them and throwing some in the wastebasket and some not, and they're genuine wine enthusiasts, that catalog is going to rise up right out of the clutter like a card rises out of a deck, and everything else may go in the trash, but it won't.

So I have— well, I have it— I mean, in terms of the who, I've got sort of a really big shortcut for Diamond members to think about in terms of who specific to topic that Dan and I talked about actually wasn't on one diamond call. It was such an important topic that we took two diamond calls to go through it, which was the whole— the two diamond calls that we did on the referral program. And this is really valuable on this whole topic of cutting through the clutter because it gets to this point of who. And when you ask people for referrals, it's best when you have now the new referral names, I guess they're referees, is that the right term?

Referees.

Referees.

Or pray. When the referee/pray receives your first message, think in terms of cutting through the clutter, who should that message come from? And it's always better if that first, at least first message, and perhaps even all of them, comes from the person who referred, not from now you, the entrepreneur business owner who's trying to get that prospect/referee/prey as your customer. So again, going back to my menswear days, we would, we had it, we had it figured out in the sales cycle when we would be asking our customers for referrals, and then the first 2 letters that would go out to the new referee would always in the headline be mentioning the fact that it was such-and-such, whatever name of our customer, we had suggested that them and their name would be the kind of person who would also benefit from shopping at my store. Now today with the internet, it's even easier to do because there are programs that are set up on your internet, on your emails, and also on your websites where people can actually fill out names of their friends and family members and coworkers, their names and email addresses that would— where information can be forwarded to them, and in the first email historically gets forwarded from the person who's filling out the name, so that invitation becomes from the person that they're familiar with. So again, this topic of cutting through the clutter, it goes, you know, you're thinking about how, you know, who is it that they would see a message that would be welcome to them, and it's constantly figuring out, okay, let me figure out how to use this in my marketing, and again, referrals, this is a real real, real good place to use it in your marketing.

Well, you know, the specific way that that applies to direct mail specifically is that the two questions people have most when they get unsolicited direct mail or direct mail from a new source are always, Why am I getting this? And how did they get my name? And, and when you, when you answer that with, with something that relates to personal interest, you again immediately kind of rise up out of the clutter. For many, many years, we taught chiropractors first of all, to always have a mandatory class for new patients that they had to come to as a group, and if they didn't come to class, they got fired as a patient. So that, depending on the volume of your practice, every week or every 2 weeks you were doing an evening class, and of course they were encouraged to bring a buddy, so that was a referral tactic is really what it was. But at that class, the doctor would collect names and contact information for referrals. That was the place to do it, and you helped them. Who do you know who complains constantly of back pain? Write them down. Who do you know who complains constantly of headaches? Write them down. Who do you know who works in a job who does a lot of heavy lifting? Write them down. So at the end of an evening, a doc's got 10 lists from 10 people who were there, 6, 7, 8, 9 prospects on each list, you got a pretty good little batch of prospects. Now the lazy guy sends out the same brochure and the same letter. If he's smart, the COVID letter or the lift note goes from the patient, not from him, as you've just described, so that the outer envelope can come from the patient, not from him. But the real lazy guy does no more customization. The smart guy customizes everything so that the ones who have— that are known to be complaining about back pain all the time, everything in that envelope from what's in the lift note and the headline onto the enclosures, everything's about back pain. The person who works in a job who does a lot of heavy lifting, everything's talking about working in a job that does a lot of heavy lifting., and it bumps response for all sorts of reasons, but one of the reasons it bumps response is that it now is not treated as part of ordinary clutter because it directly relates to personal interest, keyword being personal. And most people's marketing now, again, regardless of media, has to do with general interest rather than personal interest. And so everybody is trying to get by one way or another with a message that covers a collection of people with different interests, or at least different priority rankings of interest. Rather than finding a way to pinpoint the right message for you, which is a different message than the right one for me, even though we both may be headache sufferers or we both may be back pain sufferers or we both may be buyers of clothing. And, you know, as you pointed out, online media gives you new and different opportunities to do this. A lot of people don't take full advantage of. But clutter really means a pile of stuff that is not of great interest to me, or I have no reason to believe contains anything of great interest to me that I have to deal with, sort through, sift through, process, get rid of. That's really what it means. When somebody says their garage is full of clutter and they finally got to clean out the clutter because there's no place to park the car, They don't mean that their garage is full of stuff of enormous personal interest and value to them. They mean that there's a lot of trash there to be thrown out. And so personal interest gets us into a different category altogether, regardless of how much may be around us in the same place, same stack, same media.

Well, let me turn the conversation over specifically now to online for just a second because online has, you know, has reached this whole issue of getting through the clutter the same as offline has. The only difference between online hitting this issue of getting through the clutter than offline is the only difference is that online got there quicker. So clutter happened a lot faster than it happened offline.— which by the way, before I even finish that, this thought, I wanted to loop back to something, Dan, that you said because— and so this has nothing to do with online right now, but I just want to make sure I make this point. And because I have noticed an appreciable thinning of the— in snail mail in my mailbox than I have than before. Dan, I don't know if you're seeing that or not. Of course, you get all your mail sort of lumped together, but—

No, it's absolutely true. And it's a function of both monetary choice, so it's businesses just not wanting to spend money, period, at the moment, in most cases idiotically, but not necessarily. It's businesses that were able to be profitable with what they were doing in direct mail when spending was freer and easier than it is now, and what was working doesn't, and they either don't know how to or aren't willing to reinvent what they were doing in the media, so they just abandon the media. And it's a function of the explosive growth of online choices. And so as a result of all of those three things, you're absolutely right. The average consumer and the average business is receiving less mail in any given day's mail. The catalog industry has cut back substantially, and that was always a big part of the clutter.

The typical mail stack had, you know, envelope mail, but it also had a lot of catalogs. Well, and they're not only cutting back in terms of frequency of mailing, but they're cutting back in the whole quantity of mailing. So the catalog is not as thick as it used to be because they're— That's correct.

And that really represents— that thinning represents great opportunity for somebody who can get it right.

That was the point I was getting to, which is when you combine, to me, what I think is the The 3 key elements to use this as a huge opportunity, number 1 is send out mail that will cut through the clutter so that it will get noticed and let's just say opened and read, number 1. Number 2 is combine with that direct response principles. So yeah, so if you send out mail and it doesn't get, you know, has all the right direct response principles, you don't deserve to get a good response.

3.

As much as you can, get the who right, which is the mail is going to somebody who wants to receive your message. If you combine those 3 things together, it's a huge opportunity right now in direct mail. If you're not looking at that opportunity and moving to that, you're absolutely crazy. By the way, Dan, you and I in our mastermind groups, whether it's Platinum or InfoMastermind, where we have quote-unquote, these, you know, a portion of them are these straight online marketing guys. A lot of these guys are now gravitating to a component piece of their businesses offline, and they're smart in doing that. And I know, like, you know, one of them actually did a day of consulting with you to really try to, you know, spend most of his time just looking, focusing on that opportunity, and he was smart in doing so.

Yeah, it's actually happened with two of them. I'm sort of like, you know the deal about if you sit outside a café in Paris long enough, the entire world will pass you by? I'm sort of, if I stay in one place long enough, every online internet marketing geek will eventually come to me for direct mail advice. You know, and many of them have.

Well, now I want to shift back to my point I wanted to make about online. So my point I was making before is that this whole clutter got there quicker. It was much, much, much quicker. And then by the way, the next evolution which is social media, it's even getting there even quicker. So the whole social media clutter is happening even faster than email and website clutter happened. And that's a topic for the InfoSummit during the social media day. But I want to talk specifically about online for a second because, you know, It used to be, if you used, and correctly so by the way, if you're using your online as a list building strategy, which is a very, to me it's one of the 3 component parts of successful online marketing. Number 1 is traffic, number 2 is building a list, number 3 is conversion. There's 3 pieces to it. And if you're looking at it as an online list building strategy, it's much, much, much harder today to accomplish that than it was before. I mean, it used to be, if you go back to the early days of the internet, let's say, you could just put a little thing up there that says, "Subscribe to my ezine. Put your name and email address here," and you would get a lot of opt-ins. Well, today if you do that, you're going to get like almost nothing. So it's— so you got to really figure out how you can cut through the clutter in order to make offers for somebody who is willing to give you their name and email address because people are much, much more resistant to giving you that today. So without that, you really can't follow up. I'll tell you just out of a fact, for example, right now in the midst of my new book promotion, there are actually two places on the marketing funnel where people give us their name and email address. One of them is the opt in to go to find out about the book, and the second one is when you go to the order page. And in both of those cases, we have follow-up funnels in order to market to the non-buyers. And I think I announced at Platinum last week, Dan, that over 20% of all the book buyers are coming from the follow-up funnels, not from the first-time visitor. So getting back to this situation with what what we'll call squeeze pages, which is the common name for the opt-in page. Today, in order to cut through the clutter and get somebody to give you their name and email address, you have to think about what can you do to make that quote-unquote giving you— them giving you their name and email address, the thing you're giving them in exchange for that as irresistible as you can possibly make it. A guy who was very early figured this thing out, Platinum Member Frank Kern. If you look at his stuff that he's doing, it's in order to get somebody to give you their name and email address. It's not about, you know, give me your name and email address so I can send you to my sales letter and sell the hell out of you. It's usually about giving you— let me give you my— give me your name and email address so I can give you this really big thing in exchange for it. Right now, as we're recording this,— and many of our Diamond members probably have seen this because I'm sure many of you are on Frank's list. It's about going to the video to learn how him and his cousin, I think, made $4.8 million in a launch. So you get to watch the video. Russell Brunson at the Super Conference last year, he made a point during his presentation. It's about, you know, give me your— you know, fill this out and I'll teach you the one biggest secret you need to know to fill in the blank. And so with all of your businesses, it's a question of if I said to you, what's like the one biggest secret that you could give out about— somebody needs to know about doing business in your category, I'm sure all of you can get there quickly. And if you can't get there quickly, you should be able to get there quickly with that one big secret you can give out. With my book site, for example, When they fill out the quote-unquote squeeze page, and I made the point before, it's not that you get taken here to only find out about the book. What you're really told is you immediately will get an instant download of my most outrageously successful sales letter ever. That's the big thing that we're giving. And so think in terms of cutting through the clutter online because I know, Kim, You know, online is a topic that we don't talk about as much, but in terms of online is you need to really work harder at that today online, and you've got to think in terms of what can I give back to entice somebody to actually give me that information. And of course, that could work offline as well, but go ahead, Dan.

Well, I was going to say it begs a really interesting way to think about marketing. In general, every step of it, in every media, that, that really the way people sabotage themselves and wind up with disappointing results is always by, by, by, by being governed by assumptions that in many cases are quite logical but nonetheless flawed. So like earlier today, one of my calls, we're talking about exhibiting at trade shows, and the assumption is if somebody takes the trouble to come to a trade show and takes the trouble now to walk up and down the aisles of the trade show, it's a reasonable assumption that they're actually looking for something. And will be reasonably receptive to the booths that they pass. However, the behavior of most people at trade shows defies all of that. They stay in the center of the aisle so they don't get too close to any booth, and they do everything they can to avoid making eye contact with anybody who's working in the booths, which It defies any common sense about why they're there, but yet it is the reality. And you would think that somebody that was on a mailing list about a particular topic might be eager to get anything about that particular topic. You would think that somebody that went to a website about a particular topic would be eager to provide their email address to get more information about that particular topic. And so all these assumptions in every place, they're the things that get in our way and cause us to underestimate the difficulty of each step of the task and therefore make tactical mistakes like not offering enough irresistible value to get the contact information in the example that you gave, or not strategizing the envelope enough in order to get the envelope opened., or not working on the order form enough in order to get the order, even if they get all the way to the order form. And online, we know there are bailouts all the way at that stage of the game. So it's really important to question every assumption that you have about every step of your process and how people will react to it as they move from step to step to step.

Dan, I actually have a question for you, and here's the question. Right now, the most successful thing that's happened in the automotive business, the new car automotive business, and if you haven't seen this, you've got to be living under a rock, and actually I think it just ended, but they're doing this thing called Cash for Clunkers. And been hugely successful. I mean, hugely flawed also. I mean, I was talking to my client yesterday who owns a huge Ford, Lincoln, Mercury store here in Baltimore, and, you know, he's owed over $400,000 from the government and has got 100-and-some clunkers sitting in his back lot that he's not going to demolish until he gets his money from the government, even though, in spite of the Despite the fact that even if he doesn't get the money from the government, he's still stuck with them cars. But huge flaw. However, sold a ton of cars. Sold a ton of cars and cut through the clutter. I mean, the promotion cut through the clutter. There's no doubt about it. I mean, whereas car dealers were trying to do stuff for, you know, anything they could think of doing prior to this, last time they saw these kinds of run on sales was back when they offered— they first offered zero financing, which now today is kinda commonplace, but back then it was like special.

And that was its problem. It created its own new form of clutter.

Yeah, as this will too. Yeah, I mean, which is kind of interesting because the conversation I had with the guy who owns the dealership yesterday was he's now going to Ford and suggesting to Ford that, okay, You know, government's not willing to pay out any more $4,500, but why doesn't Ford make this their next offer, which will— will you still do the cash for clunkers?

We'll just give you the $4,500 off. Lexus, by the way, has got a very shrewd counter ad campaign that I don't know the results of, but my suspicion is that it's successful. I don't know if you've noticed, but— No, I haven't. They're running TV and print that— and I'm now not going to say it as elegantly as they do because I didn't actually write it down— but the premise of the commercial is really all about appealing to who you are as much or more than selling the car. And it basically says that ordinary people, mere mortals, buy what's on sale or what they have a great coupon for, but you probably want to buy your dream car. Now, they say it much better than I just said it, but their point is we don't sell cars to the kind of people who want to drag a clunker in and get $4,500 for it. You're a different animal, and therefore you want a Lexus. It's very well done. And they've been running it all during the Cash for Clunkers program.

I'll tell you something interesting about it, because I've seen the numbers from the Ford dealer. What's really interesting about it is, first of all, they've sold many, many more cars than they ever dreamt. I mean, 10 times more, I'm not kidding, than they ever dreamt they would sell. So they're real happy. Of course, they're not happy about not having $400,000 in their bank account. But they're real happy. But the second thing is that what they expected was that the people that drove in the clunkers were going to have terrible credit, because they figured a guy who had a car all this time, he didn't have credit. And they found just the reverse. They found that the people that actually brought in the cars had better credit than their typical customer's credit was, which kind of suggests that it has nothing to do— the fact that you kept a car for a long time has nothing to do at all with the fact that you couldn't afford a car. That wasn't your mindset to go out and get another car. I also, by the way, you were telling me about the Lexus offer. I knew it was going to happen because I was thinking it, but I saw it for the very first time in our Sunday paper this past week, and it was one dealer was now offering double cash for cars. So, you know, you get $4,500 from the government and then $4,500 from him. So that's the next evolution I've seen. But I guess my— getting back to my question that I have for you is, uh, is why do you think that cut through the clutter when you're dealing in an industry that's constantly in promotion mode? So now this is now yet a new promotion.

That's—

why do you think that thing worked? Do you think it— well, let me ask you, let me I mean, not even premise why you think—

why do you think? Well, I think predominantly I think it worked because, as opposed to other rebates and discounts and so forth, is because it was perceived as, understood as, coming from the government, not coming from the car dealer. And so the normal skepticism about the discount or rebate merely representing a price inflated to allow me to give you your own money back didn't exist. And the car industry is, you know, it has totally destroyed any sense of price believability so that no consumer really believes a sticker price. And, and when— and so all of the normal rebates, and you get to buy at employee pricing, and you get this factory cash back, and all that— you used the word early in the call— there's a certain numbness to it. I mean, it's so ordinary, and it is there ever-present all the time. That the market is pretty much numb to it, and this they weren't numb to because it really came from a different source. Um, and then secondly, the idea— the greed issue— the idea of you getting a lot more than what you were trading in was worth. I think was motivational. I mean, which may or may not have been true, by the way, in some cases, but the perception that you were getting $4,500 for something you would never be able to get $4,500 for in a traditional trade-in environment, I think was persuasive. And because of all of that, you know, it grabbed attention. The third thing, I guess, is because not only was it promoted commercially, as any discount rebate offer would be, but it was promoted by the news media as news relentlessly. So the publicity factor of this was tens of millions of dollars worth of free advertising.

Well, you know, that's very interesting. You know, to your third point, actually I have something to say about your first point and your third point. I'll go backwards. Your third point, you know, Bob Parsons, who's the founder of GoDaddy and now operates GoDaddy, and actually for any of you that are listening, he's coming to speak at the Outrageous Academy workshop in January, and he makes the point point when he speaks is that his TV commercials that he bought originally for the Super Bowl, he got more, much, much more play out of that by the fact that the Super Bowl would not run the ads, but that the media kept showing the ads of the ads that the Super Bowl wouldn't run. And so he got all this free publicity that really, you know, was the thing that really skyrocketed his business. Business way, you know, way, you know, because before that he was struggling to be in the business of trying to sell domain names. And he was not— today he's number one. I mean, and it's not like it's rocket science what he does versus what other people do. So yeah, I think that, that free publicity thing is, is a great point. But your number one point about the fact that it came from a, from a third party of the government in this particular case was really— would have been what I would have said, Dan, as far as why I thought it worked. But I think all three of your reasons combined are more true than just the one that I would have gone to right away. But it does— the point I want to make about that is that the smart marketer now wants to look at that and say, okay, how can I apply that to my business? In order to cut through the clutter. And so obviously you can't go out running around out there saying that this message comes from the United States government, because if you say that, there's a good chance they won't let you like that. So, but you can sort of like, you know, do what I call sort of ethical S&D when you do that, which is like, for example, you know, again, example right in the book. I showed what I call the fake official-looking mailing that I did for my menswear store. And now I've seen other people do it, which now is, you know, I created an envelope that came in brown paper and it looked like something the government would send out, but it wasn't from the government. It actually came from— I'm trying to think off the top of my head— but it was something like the compliance department at Gage Menswear or something like that. So it's as close as I could get to making the thing look like it was important and official from a third party. So, you know, using that kind of a strategy is smart to look at a campaign like Cash for Clunkers and say, okay, I can't— how can I come as close to emulate that in my business as I possibly could? The other smart thing to do is to figure out how you can apply Cash for Clunkers to your business. So like if you look at, in the September No BS Marketing Letter, when you guys get it, there is a little hot sheet that's clipped to the front of that newsletter, and you'll see how we've applied Cash for Clunkers cleverly to our business. So now there's a real good example of how you can do that, which, by the way, Dan, I don't think I discussed this with you, but I actually applied the idea that you sent me to the newsletter. So that's how we're doing it. And the third thing I would tell you, that, you know, if you want to sort of go back again to this, where this thing is coming from— so obviously if you don't want to do the from the government or from a fake-looking government thing, well then think in terms of what Dan said before, which is, you know, now use FedEx envelope, which I'm always amazed at how many people are really cheap and using FedEx envelopes if the transaction size can warrant it. But now, you know, you get this FedEx that's coming in to you, you know, delivered by FedEx. Well, that's the same kind of thing is now this is coming from something that is positioned as it must be important if it's coming in a FedEx. So again, that's a real shortcut for so many folks.

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