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Lawrence Bernstein's Blog on Direct Response

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Mail Order Ad by Gene Schwartz’s Copywriting Mentor: Cecil Hoge

Mail Order ad by Cecil HogeIf you’ve heard the story of a young Gene Schwartz working one day in the mail room and a few short years later becoming a mail order millionaire, then here is an interesting ad.

It was written in 1975 by the man who showed Gene the ropes in the early 50s, Cecil Hoge, the founder and president of the Huber Hoge, Inc.

The promise of this ad is essentially a stone’s throw away from the internet marketing pitches that plague us today…but there’s a key difference.

Most of those offers lack the sophistication of even hinting that they might not be for you.

Not here. [Read more…]

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Copywriting: Headline Nightmares

Whenever I interview a prospective copywriting or consulting client, one of the first questions I usually ask is: “who’s this product for?”

And more often than I’d like to hear, I get the answer: “it’s for everyone.”

Experience has taught me to defer on such projects because the prospective client has no idea who his or her target market is. And that signals there’s usually a basket of oversights and problems in addition to this biggie.

Conversely, when you ask the question, “who’s this product for?” and get an answer like, “it’s for single executive women who live in Tribecca, have aspirations to be a managing director and spend their summer weekends in the Hamptons,” then this is as green as lights get. [Read more…]

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Wrinkles FEAR Her

Helena Rubinstein came to the United States as a penniless Polish immigrant who went on to build one of the largest cosmetics empires in history.

And direct response advertising played a key role in pushing her products at retail stores from coast to coast.

This ad was created by Ogilvy and Mather in 1952 and is part of an incredible series of 20 or so “page-one advertorials.”

Unlike ordinary advertorials, which are ads formatted to look like editorials or news, these ads are laid out like page one of a major newspaper. [Read more…]