Breakthrough Advertising Secrets – Gene Schwartz

My notes from Eugene Schwartz' presentation to Rodale Publishing…

I have about an 85% hit ratio.

Working with a client

"I'm going to sit and I'm going to listen and you're going to talk… He talked about four hours… And I just sat there… taking notes.

I wrote the ad (that night). I couldn't give it to him that same night because he would thin it was worth nothing. So I put it away for two weeks, and seent it to him.

It was his thing. It was his idea. It was his conception. It was his vision. All I did was write it out.

Writing process

After 33.33 minutes, the alarm goes and you stop. You don't do anything from that moment on, for 5 minutes.

If you are in the middle of a sentence you really leave that sentence go. If you lose it, you list it. That's too bad. You are under the command of something higher than you.

Simple, dramatic, move-gut copy.

I do ugly layouts. Why? Because in a beautiful world, ugly stands out.

I read the book. Four times. I underline so intensely that I get 40 or 50 pages of notes out of those readings.

Find your readers hidden desires. They are hidden, because your reader doesn't want to really talk about them, but they are in the subculture, hidden culture, under-culture of our civiliisation. That's why you've got to read the things that people buy. Anything that people buy. Vanity Fair. You've got to read Vanity Fair, People Magazine, The Weekly World News… because it shows the extend of people's ability to believe.

You have no client but the audience.

Creation vs Connecting

Creation is a lousy word. It's a lousy word that confuses what you really do to perform a simple little procedure. Creation means create something out of nothing… only God can do that

Let's talk about connectivity – connecting things together. New means never joined before.

The creativity is in your market and in your product, and all you are doing is joining the two together.

Prospect Insight

One hour a day, read. Read everything in the world except your business. Read junk. Very much junk. Read so that anything that interests you will stick in your memory. … Get all the very low stuff. Low culture makes big money. There is your audience. There is the language. There are the words that they use.

Everybody you're out there writing to is a good soul. They really want to be nice, honest and successful. They want to be happy.

Listen. And every time they say something, you nod. And memorize specific statements, so you can feed them back to them in the same conversation. In that way, the person goes into a talking frenzy…. People become hypnotized by their own stories.

He may logically know he can't do that, but he would love to do it… People want to believe.

You are presenting a showcase for your product. … You want the person to be able to look through the copy like the person is able to look through the glass in athe showcase and see the prodcut inside.

Let's talk about 'finding' the headline. (not creating!) The headline depends strictly on how long it gets you to stop the person and get them going… a headline doesn't sell. It has nothing to do with selling… You must prepare. You've got a whole mailing piece to sell. The more tie you have, the more you can sell.

Adjectives are where you carry your emotion. Adjectives are gut words. Description words. Feelings words. Very important words.

You are not writing to a private person. You are not writing to a bunch of people. You are writing to a number of people who share a private want. Remebmer that… And you are addressing them as if they were the only person in the world.

You grab their attention. You send them into the mechanism. The first reward; pain-proof. Now that you've got proof, you've got to demonstrate. Demonstration is a form of proof… Demonstrations are sending the products to the person.

It can be very hard if you work at it too hard. It can be very easy if you flow along with it. You can't create demand for anything because demand is too large for you to create. The demand has to exist before you even walk into the picture… If the demand isn't there, no matter how great a copywriter you are, you are going to fail. You cannot create demand. You can only channel demand.

Test

I've been doing copy now for 35 years. I've sold millions and millions and millions of things. What does my experience allow me to say about the power of an ad? … Absolutely nothing!

You must remember that. You don't know anything about how an ad is going to pull. The only way you can tell is to get a test cell.

Copywriters should be completely conversant with statistics and returns.

I don't believe in focus groups or anything else. Only the test can decide.

Copywriters are crazy. And you want them crazy. They go for the big kill.

Originally posted 2008-07-29 11:42:12.

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