When a company sells almost $500 million worth of info products via long copy in space and direct mail, it’s worth paying attention.
That’s exactly what Hume Financial did (estimated over the course of twenty years) and these print ads corresponded with the company’s meteoric growth… from successful info publisher all the way into the mutual fund business.
Gary Bencivenga wrote “Announcing an ‘Apprenticeship Program’ for Aspiring Millionaires,” condensed from a successful direct mail piece, and he called the Hume ads “uniformly great.”
This is a complete swipe file of every print ad published by Hume Financial between 1981 and 1986.
Two of the anchormen for both the marketing and the course, Successful Investing and Money Management (SIMM), were Morton Shulman and Andrew Sarlos. They later ran the mutual funds, the Hume Fund and the Hume RSVP Fund, which among other things, had the unfortunate timing of debuting shortly before the market crash of 1987.
Though these ads are from the 1980s, times and trends and may change, inflation and interest rates may ebb and flow, but successful investment and money management principles are fairly constant, so these ads are practically timeless.
And they aren’t merely templates for the investment market but for the home study market as a whole. Pay careful attention to the coupon language and notice how Hume skillfully wraps the soft offer around hard continuity. Hume was ahead of its time.