Oh, another thing too, this is a book that everybody should have, if you don't know

about
it, this area code 3122566067.
This is SRDS, you know, my voice is going, isn't it?
And this contains nearly every mailing, a description of every mailing list that's
available
in the United States, thousands of them.
And I tell you what, your library has it, you want to do something very useful,
just
go down and browse through it.
Go down to any big library, tell them you want the SRDS list book, there's also one
for newspapers, magazines, trademags, and just go through this book.
And the reason for this, one of the things that you want to become, you want to
become
a student of markets.
And you know, if you go through here and you find out that 10,300,000 people buy
diet
pills every month, and 10,000 buy weight gain pills, that tells you something,
doesn't
it?
It tells you something you don't have to guess about.
Format is critically important.
On direct mail, I want to tell you something, I was sent to Las Vegas one time,
someone
wanted me to sell some vitamins, this guy who had inherited a lot of Colonel
Sanders
money, invested in a warehouse full of high-priced vitamins and they wanted me to
sell them.
And I wasn't very interested, but I was very much interested in another promotion
that
was there.
And the guy said he didn't want me to rework this because it was already working.
I told him it was working in spite of itself, and he'd done everything wrong except
print
it in Chinese.
Well he hired me, wrote me a big check, and I dearly loved that part, and I flew
back
to LA, started working on the plane, and it's a 45-minute flight from Vegas to
here.
But I was done by the time I touched down.
I said the same things he had said before, but I reformatted it to the A-pile
concept
that letter brought in about $96,000 more per month with my change, which is $1
million
more a year because of the format change.
Now if that's true of direct mail, what can we surmise about newspapers?
Guess what the people of America, how they go through their newspapers?
Yes?
That's all right.
The SRDS phone number?
Okay, let me pull it out here.
It's 312-256-6067, 312-256-6067.
Guess what how the people of America read their newspapers?
Standing over a waste basket.
Now this, how many pages, this is Sunday's LA Times, 405 pages.
How many people do you think read this entire newspaper?
There is not one advertising agency in the United States who has not listened to
Sir
Gary Halbert, the Prince of Brent, who knows how to get maximum readership from a
full-page
newspaper ad.
There are two secrets to that, assuming you're running a full-page.
Number one, make it look like an article.
And number two is to get that ad printed on the front of a section.
Now you can't always do it, but you can do it a lot, and if you can't get the
front,
you can get the back.
Now what conventional wisdom will tell you, and substitute idiotic for
conventional, is
that you should advertise your full-page ads where it makes the most sense.
If you're selling horoscopes, it should be you're running a full-page ad, it should
be
in the astrology section, if you're selling baseball gloves and you're running a
full-page
ad, it should be in the sports section, not so.
Because not only do they stand over a wastebasket, it goes like this, you know, you
say, honey,
will you give me the metro section, and yet, and you pull it out and she hands it
to him,
and will you give me the business section, et cetera, incidentally, if you want to,
you
will be amazed at the nine, seven, six numbers on the front of the classified
section.
But as they go through this, they will sort the paper like they sort them out.
Because who has time to read 405 pages?
And I don't even have time to read my own new book.
So if you can, if you've got a long story to tell, try and buy full pages, and if
you
can, try and get the front or back of section.
Not to me about that, Blake Thomas is also a good guy to talk about that.
Now let's suppose that you can't run a full-page ad, you don't want to spend that
much money,
or your story can be told in a much smaller space.
What should you do then?
Everything else being equal, what you want to do is, first, never forget to make
your
ads look like articles, but everything else being equal, instead of having a big
square
ad up here, have a long, skinny one column or two column ad.
Now the reason for that is that your ad will extend up here over the fold.
And the stuff that's at the top, at the top of the paper, gets a much higher
percentage
of readership than the stuff that's at the back.
So when you're buying paper, try for right-hand side editorial.
But if you're doing less than a page, try and make sure that your headline appears
above
the page, above the fold, excuse me.
Now, this ad was written by a very dear person who sleeps with me, and it ran last
Tuesday
and it's doing extremely well.
Where did it appear?
Paulette wrote this ad.
It appeared on the front of a section in the Herald Examiner.
What does it look like?
An article.
What does the headline say?
A hard-nosed millionaire reveals dot, dot, dot how to use the new tax law to get
rich
in real estate.
Many of my secrets are embodied in this particular ad.
How to looks like an article, news in the headline.
If possible, I don't use ordered coupons.
I use them a lot, but sometimes I don't, and this ad looks like it's going to be
very
successful and it's Paulette's first newspaper ad, and she's secretly very thrilled
about
it.
Another thing that you want to do, it's important in any ads, and it's especially
important
in long copy ads in newspapers, is most people will see above the fold, but some
people will
only see below the fold.
What you want to have, remember what I said about a PS that you should restate the
headline?
You should have subheads, little miniature headlines breaking up your copy.
That's the stuff in bold.
I don't know if I have an example of that here, but yeah, I do.
Between the paragraphs, what you will learn, free bonus, et cetera, et cetera, it
provides
what I call I-relief.
Now I will tell you a good trick with your direct mail.
After you finish preparing your direct mail, hold it out, and you do this with your
ad
at arm's length like this, and look at it and see if it looks easy to read.
The way to make it easy to read is use short sentences, short words, short
paragraphs,
subheads, and do not ever hire a graphic artist or an ad agency to do your layouts
for you.
Do you have any questions about any of this so far?
Yes?
You said, or in the question there, if I could just talk about some of the
photographs, it
should be at the top, and the headline doesn't go up, I was out of it, and why is
it in here?
I said what?
In here it says that the photograph should be above the heading, the headline.
In where?
Where are you?
In that test.
Oh, I see.
Okay.
I didn't prepare that test.
I will tell you the conventional wisdom there, and I think it's accurate.
You know, many times a photo is really the headline, like the tax guy that had the
picture,
the boozy me woman, but if you have a photo, the best place to, one of the most
highly
read pieces of that page will be the caption under the photo.
So I don't use photos a lot in ads, but when I do, you want to put the captions
underneath
there, and a lot of people say that you should put the headlines underneath it.
I never have, I don't think I've ever had an ad where the photograph ran the width
of
the paper.
I always put them off to the side.
If you will look in there, you'll see some ads I worked on with Blade Thomas for
the
Burt and Men of Beverly Hills, and you'll see the photograph is off to the right
there.
Yes?
I have a thing in my newsletter that says, down with awards for graphic design, up
for
response, what you would probably, look, you know, this is not a course on how to
be creative.
I don't think that's what you came here for.
This is a course on how to sell, and graphic artists don't know how to sell.
There aren't any rich graphic artists.
Graphic artists know how to draw, and what he wants to do is to create an ad that
will
make people go, ooh, and ah, you know, and that's a dangerous thing to fall into,
because
I tell you something.
I used to hang out a place in Mass in Ohio called Mike's Bar, and I would walk in
there
with all my brilliant efforts, you know, and I'd give it to the guys in the bar,
because
they were just normal guys, and they and their wives made up my prospects of what
stuff I
was selling back then.
And if the guy would read it and say, oh, God, Gary, you sure can write, I wish I
could
write like you.
You're brilliant.
I knew I had a failure on my hands.
On the other hand, if the guy would read the ad and say, gee, I never knew about
all that
stuff about Social Security, where do I get that book?
Then I had a winner.
The main thing that you don't want designed to do is to get in the way of the
message,
and the way to avoid the design getting in the way of the message is to make it
look
like a normal letter or like the normal editorial content of the publication that
you're happening
to sell.
And that's also a good idea for TV.
I'm going to stop right now, at least stop my lecturing, and I'm going to take
whatever
questions that you have so far, and we'll take a brief break after that, we'll take
a lot of questions, as many as you have, if there's any reason, and then we'll come
back
and wrap up.
Yes?
Talking about artists, one thing I ran into is they try to use strange type styles
that
are in vogue, and it's very hard for people to read these things.
Is that a very good point?
That is a very good point.
You can win awards for type styles.
I think as a block of medium, great to balance the photo visually.
Speaking of gray, very seldom do you want to use what's called reverse, bright type
on
black.
I mean, I might use it to accent a phone number or something like that, but you
don't want
to use that.
And let me tell you, the general rule of thumb on type is that type should look as
close
as they will allow you to the type of the publication.
And what your letter should look like, incidentally, is not as though they were
done on a computer
with a dot matrix print wheel.
It should look like it was done on your secretary's IBM Selectric typewriter.
For the continuation of this program, please go to the next cassette.