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Gary Halbert

Lovingly referred to as the Prince of Print, Godfather of Copy and the Alpha Shitweasel, Gary Halbert was a successful and experienced copywriter, arguably among the best in the world. He earned huge sums through his copywriting, book sales and stock picking services, including the popular fee-based Gary Halbert Letter.

For some debatable reason, Gary had a bad habit of collecting money while never delivering products. As most people paid him using checks and money orders, refunds through a credit card weren’t possible, so he just didn’t bother. Needless to say, this business practice eventually earned him a stint in the big house in 1984 for fraud.

Hubert Selby, Jr.

Best-known for his novels Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and Requiem for a Dream (1978), Selby worked on his fiction every night after his a succession of day jobs as a secretary, gas station attendant, and freelance copywriter.

Even though all his work was written while he was sober, Selby battled severe drug problems. In 1967, his heroin addiction landed him in Los Angeles county jail, where he spent two months for heroin possession. After his release from jail, he kicked the habit and stayed clean of drugs and alcohol until his death, even refusing morphine while in serious pain on his deathbed.

Ralph Ginzburg

A taboo-busting editor and publisher who helped ignite the sexual revolution in the ‘60s, Ginzburg was the force behind Eros magazine, a quarterly hardbound periodical containing articles and photo essays on love and sex.

Ginzburg had an innate talent for the mail-order business, writing attention-grabbing ads that combined his business and publishing instincts with social activism. In fact, his imprisonment on obscenity charges for Eros’s distribution, decided by the Supreme Court, was not because of his publications’ content but for their promotion.

Louis Victor Eytinge

Anyone who believes that exceptional copywriting requires a killer instinct will appreciate the story of Louis Victor Eytinge. Witness the introduction from this murderer-turned-promotional-copywriter’s own book on copywriting, Letters which Get the Business, published in 1914:

Louis Victor Eytinge, the writer of the excellent articles which compose this book, is a life-termer in the state penitentiary at Florence, Arizona.

Eytinge’s life was colorful to say the least. He was expelled from Notre Dame University for writing bad checks and kicked out of the US Navy for stealing. While he served time for these and other similar acts, ultimately it was the murder of Joe Leicht that earned him a life sentence in 1907. It seems Joe was poisoned with chloroform, stripped of valuables and abandoned in the Arizona desert, adorned with a handkerchief bearing an embroidered letter ‘E.’

At the time of his arrest, Eytinge was beyond caring, as he was “then in the last stages of consumption, a drug fiend and apparently did not have long to live,” according to the San Francisco report. Once in prison, clean and cared for, he embarked on an enterprise that not only gave him a reason to live, but one that later brought him wealth, a stint as a Hollywood screenwriter and won him his freedom.

Eytinge became a copywriter.

Laid up in the prison hospital, where he was expected to die from his tuberculosis, Eytinge became increasingly bothered by mosquitoes and was determined to do something about it.

Since he had no money for netting, he cut the names of two curio dealers out of the advertising pages of a magazine and wrote to them, offering to sell horsehair trinkets – hat bands, watch fobs, etc. – made by himself and the other prisoners. It worked. As did a career’s worth of sales letters he crafted during his incarceration.

Eytinge was finally released from captivity in 1923, winning his freedom by hiring a good lawyer using the money he earned from his sales writing.

The moral of these stories? Not sure there is one. But I’m pleased to be in the company of these characters and happy to know that my skills as a copywriter may one day be my ticket into or out of The Big House.

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If you said Facebook or Twitter, i.e. social media, you would be incorrect.

With all the (continued) hype about social media, it’s still in face-to-face conversations where people discuss products and services the most.

As you can see from this survey, even mobile and landline phone conversations (ear-to-ear?) rank very high.

Lesson for marketers: have an integrated approach to your marketing efforts. Leverage the visual advantages of online with the passionate persuasion of the human voice offline.

Hat tip to Tom Frisby of Czarnowski for the eMarketer chart.

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In the movie "Case Study: LSD," a hot dog turns into an angry troll. Now that's an arc.

I’ve been wondering this for years, because as I explained to a client recently, while I think case studies are valuable, I think the case study format is tired. And I see a lot of tired writing plugged into case studies.

I like Jack Price‘s answer to this question on Quora. He writes:

“A common mistake is to describe the benefit in such glowing terms that it strains credibility. A better strategy is to describe the arc.

Definition: The arc is the range of change from beginning to end.

How much did the hero (client) change from the beginning of the story (before engagement) to the end of the story (after engagement)? That’s the arc.

Rule: It’s not the size of the arc that matters, it’s the amount of change that creates the emotional impact.

For example: you figure out a way for Bill Gates to earn a million dollars. It’s a lot of money, but he already has billions. Not so impressive. If you figure out a way for an unemployed factory worker to make a million, that’s impressive. There’s a big arc to talk about.

Rule: The greater the arc (amount of change) the greater the emotional impact.

The mistake writers make when they try to maximize the size of the arc is to concentrate on how impressive the benefit is at the end. It tends to sound like an exaggeration.

A better strategy is to concentrate on the beginning. What weakness was the client experiencing? What was the depth of the need? What did the client desperately want? What naive plans had they pursued and abandoned?

You can go just about as deeply as you wish in dramatizing the “before”, and it doesn’t sound exaggerated. In fact, it sounds empathetic.

Then when you describe the “after” picture, the reader perceives a greater arc and experiences a greater depth of emotional engagement.”

The problem I see here, however, is that not everyone has a case study story with a big enough amount of change to be, er, game-changing. Sure, the client may have suffered some unmet need, some strategic problem that they really had to overcome in their business. But all too often, the case studies I see out there show a result that is similar in nature to results achieved by competitors serving similar clients.

That said, considering the arc and degree of change is a very good idea. But I’d like to see clients invest in case studies that go beyond copywriting and a few screen shots. I’d like to see interviews in video, animation, motion graphics. You know, the kind of stuff we’re readily using these days to create dynamic and superior content. Those would be case studies worth engaging with.

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