Direct Response Copywriting Swipe File

What does a gorgeous, “over-the-hill” international model do when sales of her new book are flat as a pancake and she’s got no idea how to turn it around?

Simple. If she’s Oleda Baker, she calls Eugene Schwartz.

This is the 1973 ad for “The Models Way to Beauty, Slenderness and Glowing Health” which eventually sold over 60,000 copies with the help of Gene Schwartz’s pen.

The caption beneath her photo is very effective. “This is an unretouched photo of 39 year old Oleda Baker, author of this eye opening new guide.”

Later versions of this ad capitalized on this even more by putting her exact age…year, month and day into each ad.

It worked so well, Gene went into the cosmetics business with Oleda Baker. So well in fact that she’s using the same positioning 34 years later.

Here’s the full sized ad.

Interestingly, her husband was the adman who came up with the line: “Let your fingers do the walking.”

The following comes from a five page story entitled, “The Creators,” in The Capitalist Reporter circa 1975. The article covered three of the world’s greatest mail order copywriters. Paul Michael and Joe Karbo were the other two writers, besides Gene Schwartz.

When copywriter Gene Schwartz decided to go ahead with the promotion of the book Sex May Be Dangerous to Your Health, his staff, he says, “wanted to throw me out the window.” And just how bad they felt about the spreading about such a rumor is evidenced by the fact Schwartz’s offices are 11 floors above Madison Avenue.

Schwartz grinned, took another gulp of coffee and said he didn’t concur with the thesis of the book either. “My staff and I were in agreement. We all think sex is marvelous”.

“The point is, if a person has an idea which is kooky, not correct, who’s to say he has no right to be heard?”

Along the lines of that belief, Schwartz has written promotional copy for, and published books by past presidents of the American Medical Association and by chiropractors – who are mortal foes of one another indeed.

Schwartz was discussing one of the oldest questions about advertising and about those who, like himself, write advertising copy: is it ethical and what are his own ethics?

First, he says, he won’t do anything illegal. “Controversial, yes. Illegal, no”

Then, he won’t write ads for bad products – or ads that in themselves are bad. The latter he compared with being an athlete who to win must stay in shape. It’s just the same in copywriting, he says. If you loose your honesty – and if you break these rules you do – you can’t write good ads again, any more than an athlete who allows himself to get out of training can hope to win a gold medal.

It was not all that long ago that Schwartz was broke and his ethics put to the test: He was offered $7,000 to write promotional material for a land deal. He turned down the offer he says, because he didn’t believe in the proposal put forth by the man with the $7,000.

Schwartz isn’t broke anymore of course. His copywriting skills have been rated as about the best in the business, and included among his fans is Paul Michael. He commands considerable fees. “Before I pick up a pencil I get $3,500,” he says. And if the piece he creates pays off, the client shells out an additional $4,500. Among his triumphs: a campaign for a self propelled fishing lure, which purportedly made $500,000 for his client, and his ads for a newsletter called Boardroom Reports (“Read 300 Business Magazines in 30 minutes), which helped to sell 60,000 subscriptions at $36 a year.

Although he has been involved in a variety of mail-order products – “You name it, we’ve sold it” – Schwartz specializes in marketing information on self-help topics such as health, dieting, memory-aids, and money making. He runs a group of companies that sells this information in a variety of forms, including books, pamphlets, newsletters, audio cassettes, and video tapes. He says he most enjoys “mail order money machines – successful products that generate equally successful spin-offs. As he explain it, a book can lead to a newsletter, the testimonials for which can lead in turn to a catalog, all of which produce mailing lists of names which can be rented.

The practice of taking a book that has sold poorly in stores and promoting it successfully through mail order is now commonplace, but Schwartz claims to have originated this technique in 1961. How to Get Thinner Once and For All had sold only 7,500 copies in book store. After his mail order campaign sales rose to 150,000.

Back in the 1960’s Schwartz became involved in what he remembers as one of the greatest experiences of his life. Appalled by the fact that a group of black children who were bussed to a school on New York’s Eastside couldn’t read, he went to Harlem to teach remedial reading and also to find out why such a problem existed with obviously intelligent children. Typically, he found the answer, and later published, How to Double Your Childs Grade in School. Although he didn’t publish a book about it, four years of teaching these kids gave him a chance to teach three, white, middle-class teachers a parallel lesson; he took them through a course in advanced algebra which left the three feeling how dumb they were, a major problem is why the kids couldn’t read. Then he explained how algebra worked, and the teachers self assessed dumbness vanished.

Schwartz’s working days fall into three different parts. In the afternoons, he goes to the office and runs his corporations. In the mornings he stays home, thinking up concepts and writing copy. Sometimes at night, even, he will leap out of bed, rush to his book lined den and scribble down the ideas and themes which woke him. He keeps a diary in which he records such themes; on the second day of the month, he already filled out half a page.

Schwartz believes that mail-order’s “get-rich-quick” reputation is a fair one. “This is still one of the most accessible and easily entered of all businesses. Anybody can do it. All you have to know are the techniques and traps,” he says. He says it’s impossible to lose unless you go crazy – and yet at the same time believes that an element of craziness is necessary to be really creative. But, “you don’t have to be intelligent to be brilliant,” he says. “Brilliance can be taught and learned.”

Schwartz and his wife, who is a successful interior designer, live in a sumptuous apartment on Park Avenue. Their home is filled with their collection of modern American Paintings and Sculpture and in fact was decorated to complement the art.

Being broke is a memory even though Schwartz doesn’t believe that he himself is any different today even though he is one of the country’s top-paid copywriters. He points out that his father always said he had no money sense – and died disappointed.

The year was 1969…the place was Manhattan.

While flower children were frolicking in nearby Central Park, an unusual event was taking place at the Commodore Hotel in midtown.

The event was called the “Seminar for Future Millionaires.” Yes, long before Joe Sugarman, Gary Halbert and Jay Abraham set foot on a seminar stage, mail order magnate, Joseph Cossman gave the first direct marketing seminar for the general public.

Even though this ad is nearly forty years old, it’s not very different from most seminar promotions today…except perhaps it’s better written and gets to the point in 1/10th the time.

Of course, Joe Cossman hired the best copywriter for the task, Gene Schwartz.

Today, a million doesn’t sound like much, especially with the US dollar slipping 16% this year. But at that time, it was worth close to $7 million in 2007 terms (and convertible to gold.)

So the claim and title of the seminar were a strong pull and backed up by world class copy.

This is your personal invitation to a “Seminar for Future Millionaires.” It is given by America‘s most successful “Start-from-Nothing-Millionaire”…E. Joseph Cossman, who started a spare-time business for himself with a kitchen table for his desk, a few hundred dollars and an idea. And who today, at the age of 49, has retired with over $1,000,000!

And the most important fact of all…Joe Cossman made this one million dollars, almost completely by mail order, using other people’s effort and money and in less than a few years from the time he was working as a $65-a-week shipping clerk with “no future.”

Let me repeat this fact again: Just a few golden secrets — secrets you are going to learn at the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan on Saturday, April 26^th netted this man over $1,000,000

Gene Schwartz’s bullets are terrific. I like this one:

• An introduction to one of the cleverest (and laziest) men in the United States. He works from 4:30 to 7:30 five nights a week — and earns over $12,000 a year. His gimmick: a stroll through a shopping center parking lot, a couple of part-time high school kids, and an irresistible message written on a 5-inch by 8-inch card.

Among the things I’d love to know about this event are:

• What was the turnout?
• Who were the attendees? (Was an adolescent Jay Abraham scratching his goatee in the third row?)
• If there were product sales…were they as shameless and vulgar as they are today?

I’m afraid we’ll never know.

Here is: “One Day With This Man Could Make You Rich!”

Here is the 1968 space ad Eugene Schwartz wrote for Dr. Henry Bieler’s book, “Food Is Your Best Medicine.”

This ad is still an excellent model for an advertiser in the health and wellness market.

Everything you’d expect in a Gene Schwartz ad is here:

* The irresistible “Try-Before-You-Buy” offer.

* Gene’s hallmark “future pacing.”

* The big promise to change your life overnight…under the guidance of a world class medical authority.

“Food Is Your Best Medicine”