6 Eternal Truths From 6 Dead Mad Men with Brian Kurtz - I Love Marketing Episode #318

Who else wants six Eternal Truths from six the Greatest Advertising Legends that Ever Lived? Brian Kurtz delivers these and more in this quick episode of I Love Marketing. Brian Kurtz has been a serial direct marketer for over 35 years and never met a medium he didn't like. And while he's had much success, he also must admit that trying to sell subscriptions and books on the back of ATM receipts and under yogurt lids was only a good idea at the time. If you'd like access to the full video presentation in the show notes and and the special resources for this episode, please visit ilovemarketing.com 318 that's ilovemarketing.com 318.

I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish, and this is the I Love Marketing podcast. You know how much I love marketing? I've even named my podcast I Love Marketing. Marketing is both an art and a science, yet most entrepreneurs who attempt marketing don't do it very effectively. There are some in the field of marketing that are truly geniuses, and one of those geniuses is Brian Kurtz. He is both a scientist and an artist when it comes to marketing. Just listen to these statistics. Brian led the marketing efforts at Boardroom Inc. For 34 years. Boardroom is a newsletter and book publisher known for state of the art direct marketing and fabulous products for consumers. Brian took that business from approximately 5 million a year to over 150 million a year at its height. Now that's what I call genius marketing. What's also genius about Brian Kurtz is how he's learned his craft and how he's helped improving his marketing skills. Now he helps others become even better marketers. Brian has studied almost every great marketing mind that's ever lived and figured out how to apply their principles from the past to the present business environment. And yes, Brian is my friend. I've known him for at least 20 years and he's a longtime member of Genius Network and he's from New York City. So Brian's title is six Eternal Truths from Six Dead Madmen. Please help me welcome a marketing genius, Brian Kurtz.

Does everybody know the show Mad Men? If you don't know the show Mad Men, it was a show about advertising men in the 50s and 60s. That was the time when everybody went out to lunch, had three martinis and they chain smoked. And they also did advertising that wasn't accountable. They did general advertising. That was brand, that was image. Everything. That gives me hives. I always say general advertising gives me hives. So When I was given the opportunity to do a book with Craig Simpson called the Advertising Solution, I said, well, could these be my mad men? Because I don't like general advertising. I like direct marketing. I want direct marketing, meaning I want measurable response. I want accountable advertising. So when Craig came to me and said, well, we're going to profile these six legends in our book, I'm thinking to myself, well, I don't want a bunch of mad men. And then I knew these six guys. And I will tell you that these six guys defied everything about general advertising. And they actually are all direct marketers and they were the precursors of everything we do today. And what I want to do today is I'm going to use the quotes. Robert Trialdini has inspired me to use quotes. I'm going to have a quote for each of these mad men and I'm going to give you an eternal truth from each of them off that quote. There are many more eternal truths from each of them in the book, but I only have time to give you one, perhaps because Joel told me I shouldn't do more than one. Just kidding. I knew I shouldn't do more than one. So madman number one, Claude Hopkins, wrote the book Scientific Advertising in 1923. That book is 100% relevant today. I implore you to go buy it on Amazon right now. Well, after I'm done speaking. And he died in 1937. So what are we going to learn from this guy? You know, there was no Science in 1923. There were no spreadsheets, there were no computers. He wasn't analyzing his mailings. But this guy understood direct marketing in an era where it wasn't fashionable to be a direct marketer. So the eternal truth from madman number one. We cannot go after thousands of men until we learn how to win one. And it amazes me. This guy paid postage and printing like I did, and yet he understood the concept of one to one marketing and really understanding your customer. Whereas how many online marketers today do one size fits all email marketing? Same message to their whole list. Which is nuts. Which is nuts. Separate 10 minute talk. I'll do that at another time. This guy's a genius. Madman number two, David Ogilvy. This mug, by the way, is available at Cafe Press. And on the reverse of this mug is one of my other legends and one of my other mad men. But David Ogilvy, Robert Cialdini talked about him yesterday. The father of modern advertising, David Ogilvy, actually was a direct marketer trapped in a general advertiser's body. This guy understood direct marketing. And I knew it because I got into the business in 1981 and when I got into the business, all the big ad agencies on Madison Avenue were developing direct response divisions. Direct marketing divisions. Ogilvie and Mather Direct was one of the first. This guy got it and everybody sees him as a general advertiser. So my eternal truth from David. The consumer isn't a moron. She is your wife. Think about what Dean said yesterday about how did it make my customers feel. And I jumped on that yesterday because that's like something I told Dean. I share it all the time. It's so important to understand your customer at that level. And David Ogilvy was a slave to research. He researched everything before he wrote a story. And I'll talk about that in a minute. Some more. But that's my eternal truth from David. Madman number three, Robert Collier. Robert Collier wrote the most important book on sales letters ever written. It was called the Robert Collier Letter Book. Again. He was even before the Mad Men. He was in the 40s and 50s. Actually. Craig Simpson and I, and Craig did most of the legwork. Have done you a service if you ever get my book. Because you don't have to read Collier's book. And it's a snooze. It's like 600 pages. And we took all the stuff out of it and I turned it into a checklist of everything that you should have in a sales letter that's written then and it's applicable now. Here's truth. There is nothing you can say about a 50 cent cigar that you cannot say about a 5 cent one. And what I want to stress there. And I was having a conversation with Elaine yesterday about how her superpower is good for almost anybody that comes to her. She can change someone's life in a day. Right. But I was trying to. We were having a conversation about that you could explain it in a different way to this person. And now you've got a whole new market and a silo and you can do the different silos and still deliver the same thing on the back end. That's an eternal truth that we all need to understand. If you knew it already. Great. It's a big reminder. Madman number four. John Caples. I put his ad next to his picture because he's known for this ad. They laugh when I sat down at the piano. But when I started to play. This guy is no.1 trick pony though. This guy wrote the book called Tested Advertising Methods. This is like the father of testing. This is the guy who understood ab list testing, which is what, the foundation of everything that I've done my whole career, and any good direct marketer today does. And there's creative awards named after him. I mean, I never met him, but I assume he was an awesome dude. His eternal truth. The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments. The world's best seed. They forgot to tell us why they should buy the world's best lawn. Think about that. And Paris knows this better than anybody. When you put arrogance and you start confusing the confidence yourself as a copywriter with arrogance and that. I know what to tell you before you tell me what you want. You're dead. And actually, I think it also points out that humility is a very important factor in marketing. You got to be confident, but you got to be humble. And you also have to sell. Transformation. The lawn is the transformation. It's not what I think about. And it's benefits versus features. Eternal truth. Madman number five. Geno Schwartz, as Frank Kern would say, and this is the other side of that mug. Eugene Schwartz is my homeboy. Eugene Schwartz was also one of my mentors, actually a mentor to Michael Fishman as well. And Gene wrote Breakthrough Advertising Brilliance. Breakthrough, two of the most important books ever written. And they're about copy. They're about creative. And lo and behold, they're about human behavior. What did Robert Cialdini talk about yesterday? That was a PhD copywriting course, as well as a course on human behavior, Right? I thought it was. And Gene Schwartz was the man. One thing I'll tell you quickly about Gene, and I can tell you I could talk about Gene forever. But Gene, his favorite magazine to read was the National Enquirer, and yet he used to read academic journals. He read everything. He had the biggest library. Michael and I were both at his house. Biggest library. I think the West Wing in the Beauty and the Beast. Go to the library in the West Wing. So Eugene Schwartz read everything, and yet National Enquirer was his favorite because he wanted to know how people ticked. And that's what made him a great copywriter. Also in his obituary. If you read Gene Schwartz's obituary, there's one paragraph about him as a direct response guy, and the rest of the obituary is all about him as, like, one of the greatest art collectors of all time. Why is that? Because he was eclectic. He read everything. He knew everything. And that's what makes a great copywriter. I think Paris is sitting there going, yeah, that's me. Yeah, you're close. Eternal truth from Madman 5. Breakthrough Advertising is not about building better mousetraps. It is, however, about building larger mice and then building a terrifying fear of them in your customers. Gene Schwartz was a really nice guy. This is not about, like, beating the crap out of your customers. What this tells you is that paranoia is not a psychosis. It's survival. We talked a bit yesterday about the survival mechanism in our brain. Gene calls it the chimpanzee brain. This is so critical, and it ties right into what Dean was talking about yesterday. If you have a passion for what you're doing and you need to get it out to the world, why wouldn't you want to use any means necessary without being illegal, without being immoral, to make sure that you get it in the hands of your customer? Jay Abraham pounds that into my head every single day. And Dean was pounding it into us yesterday when he talked about marketing stamina. Madman number six, Gary Halbert. You've heard of him, right? Any problem in the world can be solved with a great sales letter. But what's interesting, and I'm going to let. I'm not going to talk a lot about Gary. I mean, Joe, he was Joe's mentor. And I think Joe could talk a lot more specifics about Gary. But the amazing thing about Gary, he is the godfather of copywriting in a lot of ways. And so the eternal truth I have from him is the most important thing is a hungry market, not a brilliant burger. And I used him as the sixth one I wanted to share with you because all six of these guys wrote copy, but they all understood that it was actually more about the list. It was more about the market. They weren't just gonna write great copy. You write great copy to the wrong list with the wrong offer. Zero percent chance of success. Write mediocre copy to the perfect list, perfect offer. You got a decent chance, and you will make some money, as many Internet marketers have found. And Gary understood this. Oh, one more thing. Facebook didn't invent everything. So somebody did a podcast with me, Paul. I've done podcasts. And so I did a podcast with a guy, and I got into this deep discussion about regression modeling and how we modeled for direct mail, and it got really granular. And he puts it up on Facebook, and it was all about lookalike models and all this stuff, and he puts it up on Facebook. And somebody comments in the thread and says, wow, great interview with Brian Kurtz. I thought Facebook invented lookalike models. Mind blown. And I'm not going to be grandpa at the picnic, nor am I going to tell you to get off my lawn. But I will tell you that if you understood regression modeling like I understood it, the questions you would ask of the person buying your Facebook advertising would be completely different. So bonus, eternal truth number seven, adapt your techniques to an idea, not an idea to your techniques. And that's Bill Bernbach. He's not in my book, but he is a seventh madman and he is dead. It's an amazing thing. You don't go, you don't say, I'm going to do Facebook advertising. You go, I've got a product or a service that I want to share with the world. Where's the best place that I should advertise? Advertising opportunities are now infinite. So anybody know who painted this? It is Picasso. It's not a typical Picasso. And actually it was painted in 1921. Robert Collier was 36 years old at the time. So I believe it's called reading the letter, but I think it's I'm going to change the name. It's reading the Robert Collier letter. And the reason why I have Picasso up here is I'm going to give you a quote to sum up and it's actually a quote that Michael used in a presentation he used at BehaviorCon a few years ago. And I think it really ties in everything that I've talked about. Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist. Go forth and multiply. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this episode of I love Marketing. For more about the Genius Network annual event, please visit geniusnetworkevents.com that's geniusnetworkevents dot com if you would like access to the full video presentation, the show notes and the special resources for this episode, please visit ilovemarketing.com 318 that's ilovemarketing.com 318.

Sam.