#37 The Most Successful Advertisement in the History of the World!

ISSUE #37 - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 

 http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2019/01/37-most-successful-advertisement-in.html

Posted by Denny Hatch

The Most Successful Advertisement
In the History of the World!

 

Read the 775 Words That Brought in a Staggering $2 Billion

I seriously started collecting junk mail in 1980 and launched the newsletter and archive service, WHO’S MAILING WHAT! in 1984. At some point I took note of a letter that kept coming in to my own mailbox—and was sent to me by my correspondents around the country—month-after-month-after month.

 

“Two Young Men...” letter was written by freelancer Martin Conroy and first sent out in 1974. It was mailed continuously for over 25 years. 

Late in 1991 I phoned THE WALL STREET JOURNAL circulation manager Paul Bell and ran some numbers by him. Transcript:

HATCH: Would you say that the average mail order circulation of the Journal over the past 18 years was about one million?

BELL: [Pause.] Yes, that’s about right.

HATCH: Am I right in assuming that the average subscription rate of The Wall Street Journal over the past 18 years has been about $100 a year?

BELL: [Pause.] Yes, that’s about right.

HATCH: Is it safe to assume that 55 percent of all your mail order subscribers over the past eighteen years have come in as a result of Martin Conroy’s “Two Young Men...” letter?

BELL: We have a lot of other sources—telemarketing, subscriptions from newsstand sales, gift subscriptions, supermarket take-ones, inserts. But, yes, I think 55 percent is a fair estimate.

HATCH:  Paul, one million subscribers per year times $100 equals $100 million times 18 years is $1.8 billion times 55 percent equals $1 billion. If these numbers are correct, the Martin Conroy letter is directly responsible for bringing in $1 billion in revenues to The Wall Street Journal, and is, therefore THE MOST SUCCESSFUL SINGLE PIECE OF ADVERTISING IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD!

BELL:  [Long silence. Then in a small voice.] Uh, please don’t tell Marty Conroy. He’ll raise his prices. 

NOTE: The Two-young men" mailing was control until 2003. This means it brought in an additional $1 billion in the 12 years since this exchange with Paul Bell, during which time the publication no doubt raised its prices. Hence the total revenue of the 775 words in the letter below would be in the neighborhood of $2 billion. That's $25.8 million a word!

 

Dear Reader,

   On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students, both were personable and both—as young college graduates are—were filled with ambitious dreams for the future.

   Recently, these men returned to their college for their 25^th reunion.

   They were still very much alike. Both were happily married. Both had three children. And both, it turned out, had gone to work for the same Midwestern manufacturing company after graduation, and were still there.

   But there was a difference. One of the men was manager of a small department of that company. The other was its president.

What Made The Difference

   Have you ever wondered, as I have, what makes this kind of difference in people’s lives? It isn’t that one person wants success and the other one doesn’t.

   The difference lies in what each person knows and how he or she makes use of that knowledge.

   And this is why I am writing to you and to people like you about The Wall Street Journal. For that is the whole purpose of the Journal: to give its readers knowledge—knowledge that they can use in business.

A Publication Unlike Any Other

   You see, The Wall Street Journal is a unique publication. It’s the country’s only national business daily. Each business day, it is put together by the world’s largest staff of business-news experts.

   Each business day, The Journal’s pages include a broad range of information of interest and significance to business-minded people, no matter where it comes from. Not just stocks and finance, but anything and everything in the whole, fast-moving world of business . . .The Wall Street Journal gives you all the business news you need—when you need it.

Knowledge Is Power

   Right now, I am reading page one of The Journal, the best-read front page in America. It combines all the important news of the day with in-depth feature reporting. Every phase of business news is covered, from articles on inflation, wholesale prices, car prices, tax incentives for industries to major developments in Washington and elsewhere.

(over please)

   And there is page after page inside: The Journal, filled with fascination and significant information that’s useful to you. The Marketplace section gives you insights into how consumers are thinking and spending. How companies compete for market share. There is daily coverage of law, technology, media and marketing. Plus daily features on the challenges of managing smaller companies.

   The Journal is also the single best source for news and statistics about your money. In the Money & Investing section there are helpful charts, easy-to-scan market quotations, plus “Abreast of the Market,” “Heard on the Street” and “Your Money Matters,” three of America’s most influential and carefully read investment columns.

   If you have never read The Wall Street Journal, you cannot imagine how useful it can be to you.

Save $30 On Your Subscription

   Put our statements to the proof by subscribing for a full year right now and save $30 off the regular subscription price. That’s right, order now and you can receive The Journal for an entire year for $99.

   Or if you prefer, a 13-week subscription is only $34. It’s a perfect way to get acquainted with The Journal. Either way—one year or 13 weeks—we pay the delivery costs.

   Simply fill out the enclosed order card and mail it in the postage-paid envelope pro-vided. And here’s The Journal’s guarantee: should The Journal not measure up to your expectations, you may cancel this arrangement at any point and receive a refund for the undelivered portion of your subscription.

   If you feel as we do that this is a fair and reasonable proposition, then you will want to find out without delay if The Wall Street Journal can do for you what it is doing for millions of readers. So please mail the enclosed order card now, and we will start serving you immediately.

   About those two college classmates I mention at the beginning of this letter: they were graduated from college and together got started in the business world. So what made their lives different?

   Knowledge. Useful knowledge. And its application.

An Investment In Success

   I cannot promise you that success will be instantly yours if you start reading The Wall Street Journal. But I can guarantee that you will find The Journal always interesting, always reliable, and always useful.

                                                                 Sincerely,

                                                                Peter R. Kann

                                                                Publisher


PRK:eu
Encs.

P.S. It's important to note that The Journal's subscription may be tax deductible.
       Ask your tax advisor.

© 1991 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Observations About People and Copywriting

By Martin Conroy

(From an email exchange with Denny Hatch, 1997)

 Martin Conroy, circa 1960s

If you’re trying to find out what makes people tick, you might take a look at the Seven Deadly Sins from the old Baltimore Catechism.

Remember them? Pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth. Of course, the deadly sins are all bad and all extreme and all no-nos.

But there’s an unsinful, unextreme side to every one of them where you can see how good and honest people act and react:

• On the sunny side of sinful pride, for example, nice people still take normal, unsinful satisfaction in what they are and what they have.

• Short of deadly covetousness, people have an understandable desire to possess some of the good things in life.

• Instead of sinful lust, there’s good old love that makes the world go ‘round. 

• Without raging in anger, good people can still feel a reasonable annoyance with bad people and bad things.

• Without getting into gross gluttony, normal men and women can have a normal appetite for good food and drink. 

• Short of envy, there’s a very human yen to do as well as the next guy.

• And as for sloth, who isn't happy to learn an easier way to do things.

• The Seven Deadly Sins. If you want to know what makes people act like people, they’re worth a look.

OBITUARIES

 

Martin Conroy, 84, Ad Writer Famous for a

Mail Campaign Is Dead 

By MARGALIT FOX  DEC. 22, 2006 

Martin Conroy, an advertising executive who without recourse to glossy paper or fancy graphics created one of the most enduring ad campaigns of all time, died on Tuesday in Branford, Conn. He was 84 and lived in Madison, Conn., and Captiva, Fla.

The cause was complications of lung cancer, his son Martin Peter Conroy said.

Mr. Conroy’s masterwork never appeared in newspapers or magazines. Nor was it broadcast on television or the radio. It was a letter — a simple, two-page letter. It begins:

“On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students, both were personable and both — as young college graduates are — were filled with ambitious dreams for the future.”

Then, a small note of foreboding:

“Recently, these men returned to their college for their 25th reunion.”

Mr. Conroy’s letter is a subscription pitch for The Wall Street Journal. Written in plain language with the inexorable pull of a fairy tale, the letter is widely considered a classic of direct-mail marketing, sent to millions of people in the course of nearly three decades.

Although The Journal kept no statistics on the letter’s effectiveness, its sheer longevity, direct-mail experts say, is its own best testament. With minor variations, Mr. Conroy’s letter was in continuous use for 28 years, from 1975 to 2003.

“It’s the ‘Hamlet,’ the ‘Iliad,’ the ‘Divine Comedy’ of direct-mail letters,” James R. Rosenfield, a direct-marketing consultant in New York and San Diego, said in a telephone interview this week. “It’s had a longer life, to my knowledge, than any other direct mail in history.”

Alan Rosenspan, the president of Alan Rosenspan Associates, a direct-marketing concern in Newton, Mass., uses Mr. Conroy’s letter as a teaching tool in seminars.

“I ask people to read out loud the first paragraph of the letter,” Mr. Rosenspan said by telephone. “And what’s astonishing to me is that they never stop at the first paragraph. They keep on reading. And I tell them: ‘You have just proven why this letter’s so powerful. It’s a story.’ ”

The direct marketer’s task is to reel readers in — gently, firmly, imperceptibly — and keep them reading, despite the looming maw of the wastebasket. Mr. Conroy’s letter does so by spinning the hypnotic story of two young lives fatefully diverging. Here is what comes next:

“They were still very much alike. Both were happily married. Both had three children. And both, it turned out, had gone to work for the same Midwestern manufacturing company after graduation, and were still there.

“But there was a difference. One of the men was manager of a small department of that company. The other was its president.”

Strikingly, the letter nowhere says that the man who made good read The Journal. But the message is resoundingly there, between the lines.

“It doesn’t start off by saying, ‘Be rich beyond your wildest dreams and dominate your fellow human beings,’ ” Mr. Rosenfield said. “But the very obvious, palpitating subtext — it’s barely even a subtext — is greed and envy. So it’s a lovely combination of a hard-sell letter nested inside a kind of soft shell.”

Martin Francis Conroy was born in Manhattan on Dec. 13, 1922. In 1943, he earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., and afterward served with the Army in Germany. He worked as a copywriter at Bloomingdale’s and on the editorial staff of Esquire magazine before joining BBDO in 1950; he later became a vice president there. He left the agency in 1979 to work as an independent consultant.

Mr. Conroy is survived by his wife, the former Joan Crowley, whom he married in 1949; eight children, Ellen McNamara, of Stamford, Conn.; Janice Albert, of Seattle; Martin Peter, of Hong Kong; John, of Manhattan; Thomas, of South Orange, N.J.; Dennis, of Darien, Conn.; James, of Fairfield, Conn.; and David, of New Milford, Conn.; a sister, Ellen Gruppo, of Darien; and 14 grandchildren.

Besides The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Conroy’s other accounts at BBDO included The Boston Globe, General Electric, Sheraton and Tupperware. But more than anything else, it was the Journal letter that made him storied in his field.

“I have won 20 direct-marketing Echo Awards,” said Mr. Rosenspan, referring to the international award given annually by the Direct Marketing Association, an industry group. He added:

“I would trade all of them to have written this letter.”

###

Takeaway to Consider

• Direct marketing guru Axel Andersson did the obvious arithmetic and discovered $2 billion divided by 775 words equals $2.58 million per word. "I can't imagine any other literary work in history making that much money unless, perhaps, the Bible." He added, "And that took 2000 years." 

• Over the 28-year lifespan of the "Two Young Men..." letter, scores of freelance copywriters and agencies were paid thousands of dollars by The Wall Street Journal in attempts to beat this fabled control. It supposedly lost to an occasional test effort now and then according to rumors. But like Cisco Houston's wonderful folk song, The Cat Came Back, the two young men kept showing up in the WHO'S MAILING WHAT!  archive until 2003. 

Specifications of the Mailing

• Outside Envelope: 4" x 7-1/2," one color (black), glassine window lower right.
• Letter: 7" x 10-1/2", two-over-one (all black with Kann signature in blue on back).
• Order Card: 3-1/2" x 7," two color with detachable Guarantee.



P.S.  This past week I emailed Paul Bell and asked how The Wall Street Journal paid its circulation copywriters. Paul’s reply:

Denny:

The letter “Two Young Men,” was in use as the control mailing during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I arrived in the WSJ circulation department. Marty Conroy, who at one time was a regular copywriter at BBDO and later went out on his own, was on an annual retainer. I don’t recall the annual fee we paid to him.

The ballpark fee in the late 70s and early 80s was small by today’s standards, as I recall it. I can’t say for certain, but $5,000 seems to stick out in my mind ... and a smaller fee paid to tinker with the letter for subsequent test mailings. Notwithstanding this, remember that Marty was on a retainer and didn’t get the per-letter fee. Later on, perhaps it was 1990 or so, the retainer ended, but Marty stayed as a regular contributor for Barron’s and the Journal. We evolved to paying Marty per letter, thus my comment, “Don’t tell Marty or he’ll raise his price.”

I can emphatically say that at the Journal we bought the unlimited rights to each direct-mail letter and didn’t pay any performance bonuses.

I’m so glad you included the obituary written by Margalit Fox. She was masterful, and went through several phone calls with me to be sure she got the fine points down correctly. It was a masterful tribute to a genuinely good man.

And finally - - the Seven Deadly Sins. Marty said all of life’s foibles and vagaries could be traced to at least one of them.

All the best,

Paul

###

Word count: 2600

 

 

#36 From 42 Years Ago: A Glorious Antidote to the Poisons of Washington, D.C.

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2018/12/36-from-42-years-ago-glorious-antidote.html


Issue #36  - Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Posted by Denny Hatch

 

From 42 Years Ago: A Glorious Antidote
To the Poisons of Washington, D.C.

This is the story of a remarkable sales letter that pulled in over 600,000 subscribers to a new magazine... continually beat the best efforts of the industry’s top writers for more than four years... and most astonishingly, was written by a man who never attempted a direct mail solicitation before or since.
—DH

==============

In 1984, Robert Shnayerson agreed to an interview, and we met in a midtown Manhattan apartment-office. He came in nattily dressed, with a full head of silvering hair that made him look a decade younger than his 56 years. Right away he set the scene of the times.

    Early in 1976, a bloody civil war was raging in Beirut; every night television news was parading a series of decapitated bodies through America’s living rooms in full color. The country was just coming out of shock from Vietnam and Watergate.  In a political aberration, the voters had rejected the Establishment candidate in favor of a Georgia peanut farmer [Jimmy Carter].         

    Shnayerson’s own life was a shambles. He had just resigned from Harper’s magazine after new management had done violence to all he had achieved there. His beloved wife of 23 years had recently died. And he was realizing more and more that he had spent his entire career as an editor “contributing to the misery of the world.” He was ripe for change.

Robert Beahan Shnayerson (b. 1925)

    By coincidence, as he was leaving Harper’s, Shnayerson was approached by a magazine consultant—Arthur Murphy, formerly of Time Incorporated—who had a client interested in starting a new magazine. Shnayerson listened, and liked what he heard—the possibility of a magazine that was upbeat for a change, an elegantly produced a publication that dealt with excellence, achievement and hope, but at the same time, one that “would not be sappy.” Best of all, he would have carte blanche in the running of it, and there was plenty of money to get the thing going.

    Shnayerson went back to his apartment, and on his old Remington typewriter in the bedroom wrote out the prospectus for the new magazine. It was accepted. Agreements were signed promising Shnayerson and his staff a free hand. All systems were go. For a man who describes himself as “a congenital, deep-dyed Irish pessimist,” these were heady times.

    Magazine consultant Jack Ladd was hired to do the computer modeling and get the publication launched, and one of his early dictums sounded vaguely like the Claude Rains’ line in the last scene in Casablanca: “round up the usual copywriters.”

    Several world-class freelancers were brought in to create the launch mailings for subscriber acquisition. In Shnayerson’s eyes, the efforts did not capture what QUEST/77 was all about. And he was right; those initial test mailings did not work.

    Shnayerson asked if it would be all right if he took a shot writing at his own letter. The consultants, marketing professionals and circulation people winked and smirked—smug in the knowledge that editors never beat the professionals—told him to go ahead.

    Starting with his original prospectus, Shnayerson went back to his old Remington and began to spill his guts. Here is his six-page letter, printed on high-quality 6” x 9” tan stationery with the big Quest/77 logo and address in the upper right corner of page 1.

      “I’m Robert Shnayerson, editor of

      QUEST/77 -- a new magazine for closet

      optimists, people who suspect the

      world is NOT going to hell. You’re

      invited to become a Charter Subscriber,

      receive the premier issue and save 25%

      while you're at it.”

Dear Reader:

For 20 years I helped edit three of the world’s best magazines: Time, Life, and Harper’s.  Last summer, after five years as editor-in-chief of Harper’s, I took a hard look at my profession.

Journalism had trained me to assume that every day in every way, things were getting worse and worse.  I enjoyed that notion.  Yet all around me was contrary evidence.  New life-styles, inventions, works of art, world records.  The quiet heroism of ordinary people coping, healing, teaching.  The unknown best and brightest in a billion corners of the earth -- unknown because good news isn’t news.

I’m tired of journalistic myopia.  Fed up with publications that appeal to our worst instincts.  Let other editors drag readers through cesspools of mediocrity.  I’m interested in people as they really are -- and could become.

So I’m starting a new magazine about the pursuit of excellence -- the search for the fully lived life, yours as well as mine.

A Fresh Look at Ourselves

QUEST/77 offers a fresh look at the human condition.  It takes a sophisticated stand against fashionable despair and disengagement.  With drama, humor and zest, it argues that happiness lies in expending ourselves for a good purpose.  It brings us back to life, back to our senses, the full use of our minds, bodies and emotions.  It asks: Who among us is admirable and why?  What in our lives is still wonderful, worth celebrating, still excellent?

QUEST/77 is the first magazine to focus directly on mankind’s possibilities with all the wit, clarity and sensibility that this great subject demands.  A superb-looking bimonthly -- stitched at the spine like a fine book, crisp, elegant, richly illustrated in color -- it combines the literary quality of the New Yorker, the exciting photographs of Life and the lush graphics of Audubon.  It appeals to every person who wants to excel, every person in quest of the larger self that lurks within.

QUEST/77 won’t promise to make you healthy, wealthy or wise; beautiful, strong or sexy.  It won’t claim to do for you what only you can do for yourself.  It will show you the best in everything from art to humor, science to sports, It will leave you exhilarated by your own possibilities, or at least enchanted by the performances of others:

• Gifted people in demanding occupations:

athletes, scientists, novelists, actors, inventors, painters, surgeons, explorers -- not excluding feisty eccentrics who create their own worlds.

• Gallant people who personify life, spirit and substance. Free people who value excellence for its own sake ahead of fame, money or safety. Honest people who refuse to cheat, sell out or betray themselves. Joyful people who seize life and never settle for second best.

• All people, famous or obscure, whose achievements bolster our courage, advance our knowledge, delight our minds and refresh the human spirit.

QUEST/77 relishes adventure.  Epic rescues.  Solo voyages.  Treasure hunts.  Business comebacks.  Mystical experiences.  It reveals the human stories behind great inventions like the transistor. It introduces a Japanese daredevil who plans to dog-sled alone across the Antarctic.  Tells you about other quixotic characters who keep trying to fly the Atlantic in balloons.  It explores the most remote frontiers of human potential, from genetic engineering to space colonization.

An Examination of Life

QUEST/77 celebrates grace under pressure.  The examined life is one of its constant themes.  Who among us is astoundingly immune to fear, hate, envy moral cowardice?  What accounts for the agelessness of some beautiful women and great old men?  In our pages you’ll read the moving words of a dying painter who spurned easy money in favor of artistic freedom.  You’ll meet all sorts of people who survived life crises, public ordeals, imprisonment, falls from wealth or power. People who’ve hit bottom and bounced back, setting examples of resilience for all of us.

QUEST/77 asks the world’s finest writers and photographers to describe things they honestly admire, preferably on the basis of personal experience.  All kinds of things: ideas, places, crafts, rituals and customs; examples of artistic integrity, moral courage and intellectual elegance.

We’ll print informed opinions about the “best” wines, beaches and airlines -- as well as the “best” poets, philosophers and presidents.  We’ll give you practical information about sex, health, food and children.  At the same time, we’ll demand the highest standards of taste, writing and performance.

We’ll apply rigorous critical judgment not only to books and films, but also to new fads, laws, buildings, scientific discoveries, political speeches, peace treaties, athletic performances and Supreme Court decisions.  We’ll “review” such things in order to explain why they’re excellent or how they could have been.  We will seize every opportunity to draw distinctions and puncture nonsense.  We will unabashedly separate the best from the worst in all callings, trades and objects.

First Issue: A Collector’s Item

The first issue of QUEST/77 will appear in February 1977 and I’m determined to make it so memorable that you’ll be torn between displaying it on your coffee table as a collector’s item -- and cutting it to pieces to send clippings to your friends.  In the pages of this premier issue and those to follow you will find:

• Spectacular pictures and firsthand reports by eleven young Americans who climbed Mount Everest and wrote about it exclusively for QUEST/77.

• A special 16-page section on Courage.

• World famous photographer W. Eugene Smith analyzes his 10 best photographs...six top American artists revealing their favorite painting and how it influenced them...Sam Keene: are humans inherently evil or potentially good?...a salty British adventurer’s incredible sailboat trip across South America...Loren Eisley: the difference between holy and unholy science...Green Liberation: how ex-city women are faring on the land as self-subsistent farmers... J. B. Rhine on his 50 year search for ESP...the inside story of America’s five women airline pilots...Lox with Love: how to run a great delicatessen...a photo essay on Seattle, the nation’s most livable city...profile of a master teacher: Robert Penn Warren...the next Guinness Book of World Records telling us the latest human accomplishments.

• Plus: Max Lerner on Thomas Jefferson, America’s only philosopher-king...Frederick Busch: a day in the life of a country pediatrician...George Plimpton on the art of football coaching...the adventures of two English girls who canoed down the Congo River alone...Stan Lee on why he invented Spider man...Paul Goldberger: America’s 10 best designed buildings...Mark Vonnegut on megavitimin therapy for mental illness...Richard L. Rubenstein on what torture does to torturers...Richard Ford: The world’s best fly rod maker... Sam Posey: Why I Quit Auto Racing...James Cameron on living with a bad heart...Harold Schoenberg: how to raise a musical prodigy...John Cole on living in a solar house...Edward Luttwak on the pursuit of excellence in elite military units, from British Commandos to the Israeli raiders in Uganda.

• Plus: Fiction by Cynthia Ozick, Tom Boyle, Roberta Silman, Paul West, Gerald Jonas, Martha Saxton...Poetry by John Updike...Book Reviews by William Saroyan, George V. Higgins, Margaret Drabble, Richard Poirier, Leslie Fiedler, Victor Navasky, Murray Kempton, Anthony Sampson, Maxine Kumin, John Gardner, Joy Williams, Gary Wills.

QUEST/77 may awe you -- achievement does that -- but it will never bore you, never preach windy sermons.  It will be realistic, specific, entertaining -- full of lively writing, great pictures, good thinking and a sense of playfulness.

If you’re ready for a new magazine that talks up to its readers, not down to them...embodies the excellence it pursues...provides a relief from slackness and slobbism...makes you feel larger, not smaller...then you’re ready for QUEST/77.

Charter Subscriber Privileges

On newsstands, QUEST/77 will cost $2.00 a copy or $12.00 for the six issues.  But when you reserve Charter Privileges in advance by mailing back the enclosed card now, you gain in these valuable ways:

Immediate Cash Savings.  Instead of $12.-- your rate is just $9.00.  Right away, you’re ahead $3.00 -- a savings of 25%.

Perpetual Savings.  You’re guaranteed preferential rates in perpetuity -- always the lowest possible price on renewals and on any and all gift subscriptions.

Volume I, Number One.  Your subscription starts with the premier edition -- the issue most prized by collectors, most likely to increase in value.

Full Refund Guarantee. If ever QUEST/77 lets you down, just cancel and get all your money back -- a full refund of 100% of your current subscription.

PLEASE DO NOT SEND MONEY NOW.  We prefer that you hold off payment until you’ve had a chance to assess the premier issue.  To see for yourself whether it delivers what it promises.

But don’t hold off your reservation.  We’ll be printing only so many copies of our Volume I, Number One issue -- no more. To avoid disappointment or delay, the enclosed reply form should bear the earliest possible postmark -- today’s if at all convenient.  Many thanks!

                     Cordially Yours,

               /s/  Robert Shnayerson

         

                     Robert Shnayerson

                     Editor

The letter broke every rule in the book. Start with the lede or Johnson Box (the section above the salutation, a visual device reportedly invented by the great freelance copywriter Frank Johnson).

   

   “I’m Robert Shnayerson, editor of QUEST/77 --

 

    Having read thousands of mailings from 1984 through 1987, I cannot remember one long-term control that started with “I.”   According to Axel Andersson, who has analyzed the Johnson Box of more than 300 successful direct mail letters, the most common word is “you”; never “I.”

    Bob Hacker’s operative rule here:

 

        The consumer doesn’t give a damn about you, your company  
        or your product. All that matters is, “What’s in it for me?”

 

    Yes, many exceptions exist to Hacker’s, such as Martin Conroy’s 25-year control for The Wall Street Journal which brought in close to $1.5 billion in subscription revenues.  Conroy’s lead:

        Dear Reader,

        On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years 
        ago, two young men graduated from the same college.   
        They were very much alike, these two young men...

    In analyzing this masterpiece, Hacker pointed out that where the typical magazine offer hits hard on product and price, Conroy had adapted a technique used by fund raisers who involve the reader in a powerful story. Fr. Bruce Ritter of  Covenant House used this technique in his “dirty lady” letter.

    Dear Friend,

    A lady should never get this dirty, she said.

    She stood there with a quiet, proud dignity. She was
    incomparably dirty -- her face and hand smeared, her
    clothes torn and soiled. The lady was 11.

 

    Yet, Shnayerson plunges ahead, with prose buoyed by his enthusiasm and absolute belief in what he is doing. And clearly, the letter is coming from Shanyerson, so it does seem personalized and you suspend disbelief.

Other Broken Rules

• Long paragraphs that create “gray walls” of type.

 

• Preachy copy. (e.g., “I’m tired of journalistic myopia.”  
   “Fed up with publications that appeal to our worst instincts.” 
   “Let other editors drag readers through cesspools of

     mediocrity”).

 
   This is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter telling the country we 
   were all were suffering from a general “malaise.”

• Much of the copy is more cerebral than emotional (e.g., 
  “The  examined life is one of itsconstant themes.”  “Who among  
    us is astoundingly immune to fear, hate, envy, moral 
    cowardice?...”). 

 

• The letter is full of “it” copy (“It introduces...” “It reveals...” 
   “It will be realistic...”). 

 

   Letters are supposed to be full of “you” copy, not “it” copy. 

 
• The letter must be quickly scannable: that is a reader should 

    get the gist of the proposition by reading the (1) eyebrow, 
    (2) lede paragraph, (3) crossheads, (4) wrapup, (5) P.S.  If 
    not, send it back for surgery, because without a strongly 
    integrated skeleton the body of the argument will slump. 
     —Malcolm Decker.

 

•The QUEST/77 letter is emphatically not scannable or easy 
  to read.

 

• Shnayerson compares QUEST/77 to other magazines—
  (“it combines the literary quality of the New Yorker, the 
  exciting photographs of Life and the lush graphics of
  Audubon...”)

• Generally, you want to stay away from talking about the 
   competition; it’s imperative the prospect focuses on your 
   benefits rather than those of others.

 

• A direct mail letter with no P.S. is inconceivable. 

  
• Always include a P.S., say experts.  It can restate the  
  guarantee, premium offer, or major benefit or make a 
  provocative point that kicks the reader back into the letter.   
  Use a hanging indent—the entire message is positioned

  to the right of the P. and S.  —Don Hauptman

Wow.

    The letter pulled an astonishing 6%. (Success in direct mail is typically 2% response.) By Shnayerson’s own admission, the promotional copy was better than the first issues of the magazine itself; where the magazine was slick and glossy, the letter had an earthiness that gave voice to the feelings of those who received it.

 

    Over the next four years, a string of tests went against it, written and designed by top guns in the industry. Meanwhile, Shnayerson’s control went through many variations: a sweepstakes... even a hokey computerized version... as well as new copy tests.

    But for all the tests and razzle dazzle against it—like the cat in the old folk song—the original letter kept coming back, its raw emotion and bold honesty simply overpowering the competition.  
   “Even today it still mystifies me,” Shnayerson said, “why those top guys couldn’t beat it.”

 

    In retrospect it’s obvious why the professionals kept losing. Quite simply, Shnayerson was a good writer who had become totally involved in his product and passionately  believed in it. And when that kind of involvement and passion burns through a piece of copy with such literate ferocity, you can chuck all the old rules right out the window. 

 

    No one could beat Shnayerson!

The Demise

Three years later the magazine was called QUEST/80. The mailings had come full circle and were back to the original invitational size “I’m Robert Shnayerson...” 

     The Rapp & Collins Agency was hired to come up with some new marketing concepts. They began talking about a Quest Award for people who did outstanding things and trying to build it into something akin to the Academy Awards.

The Giraffe Society 

  

Instead, Shnayerson came up with the "Giraffe Society" to honor those people who weren’t afraid to stick their necks out. He created a special issue devoted to 25 people who had stuck their necks out in the past year. 

 

What’s more, he invited readers to become members of the society for $2 each, and to nominate people they knew who had stuck out their necks. From among 350,000 subscribers came an immediate $30,000 cash, 15,000 applications for membership and an avalanche of letters, every one of them as passionate and earthy and moving as Shnayerson’s original. That was an unheard of 4.3% response to a casual cash-with-order offer! He had found an extraordinary constituency of Americans yearning for excellence long before “In Search of Excellence” became a catch phrase.

 

         But in November of 1980 the whole thing blew up. According to Shnayerson, the magazine’s backers—The Worldwide Church of God, a Christian fundamentalist organization headquartered in Pasadena, California, who had originally promised complete hands-off treatment—now began to exert editorial pressure. Shnayerson and his staff quit. Advertising dried up, and the magazine died several months later.

Takeaways to Consider

• Bob Shnayerson had two problems with QUEST/77: He was probably ahead of his time and he obviously had the wrong backer.

• Reread his 1977 letter and see if it doesn’t resonate with just as much power some 42 years later. 

 

        I’m tired of journalistic myopia.  Fed up with publications
        that appeal to our worst instincts.  Let other editors drag 
        readers through cesspools of mediocrity. I’m interested in   
        people as they really are -- and could become.

Dissatisfaction with the media today is rampant.  Everyone knew what Donald Trump was and elected him anyway (thanks to an estimated $3 billion free coverage by the ratings-crazed lamestream media).

    Congress is an embarrassment.

    Bob Shnayerson got it right; the politicians and talking heads today have it wrong. He was able to get inside the heads of the people he was writing to and talk directly and conversationally with them. And relate to them in a powerful way that resonated in the deep heart’s core. Okay, Donald Trump's speeches and tweets resonate with his private electorate—the hardcore one-third underclass.

    I believe the majority of us are desperate for a publication like QUEST/19 today.

 

• Bob Shnayerson said it best to me when I interviewed him: 

 

    I believe if you’re gong to be the editor of a new magazine, 
    you—the editor—must try to write your own direct mail 
    letter, even if you’re a terrible writer. You have to think 
    through what this magazine is... what the benefits are to 
    the subscriber... and then write a 4- or 6-page letter with
    all the passion and intensity of your last will and

    testament, as though it were going to be carved in stone 
   and signed with your blood.

       Even though this letter may never be mailed, you will 
   have created a document that your circulation copywriters,
   your advertising promotion people and your editors can work 
   from. It’s an absolutely essential step in any magazine start-up.

           

So, Why Limit This Concept to magazines? 

Logic dictates this would be an invaluable exercise no matter what the product or service—consumer, business or fund raising.

• Whether you’re a banker with a new mortgage offer... and insurance underwriter with a new policy... a product manager with a new piece of merchandise... a merchandise manager with a new catalog.... a fund raiser with a new cause... or a broker with a new investment opportunity... you should sit down—however painful it may be—and write your own deeply felt “I’m Robert Shnayerson...” letter to serve as your credo, constitution, wiring diagram and marching orders for everyone involved in the project.

• Who knows... you might find yourself with a winning promotion (mail, space ad or digital) that beats all the so-called “experts”—just as Bob Shnayerson did!

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