A Discussion With Famous Copywriter Gary Bencivenga - Element two Of six4278598

Izvor: KiWi

I?m sure you?ve heard of Gary Bencivenga.

Just a handful of copywriters inside our era have at any time competed at anywhere close to Gary?s stage in excess of the extended haul. And when our little fraternity held an election right now, Gary Bencivenga might be unanimously elected King.

The subsequent is a component two of my six-part interview with master copywriter, Gary Bencivenga.

Clayton: How did you arrive into contact with the great David Ogilvy?

Gary: I've had the privilege of working with some really best men and women in promotion. But I most likely realized by far the most from John Caples. Right after Caples, I in all probability uncovered most from my to start with several copy chiefs ? names that nobody would ever know. They were being actually wizened duplicate chiefs who experienced found 1000s of break up operate exams and could save you a lifetime of understanding.

The extremely first 1 gave me most likely the top guidance I've at any time gotten. He claimed, ?You?re new to this subject, right here?s the way you?re going to know. On just about every assignment, I?m going to inform you to go to the files. I?m likely to inform you to definitely carry out one handful of ads which have labored like gangbusters. Then I?m heading to tell you the e book titles and information of advertisements that have bombed. I want you to definitely examine those that bombed and don?t do anything at all that they?re executing. I would like you to check out those which were blockbusters and take a look at to assimilate a great deal of whatever they do into your new piece, and that?s how we?re heading to choose just about every assignment.?

It was good tips and also to today when i possess a younger writer or somebody who would like to go into the sphere and desires to grasp the top thing they might do, I inform them to try and do fairly a lot exactly the same issue. I also endorse which they get by themselves a terrific mentor who'll critique their work, these kinds of as I visualize you'd probably do with all the copywriters you're employed with.

Besides that, the easiest way to know is by just likely towards the information or, when you don?t operate at an advertisement company nevertheless, signing up to acquire the publications and provides of good immediate marketers like Agora Publishing, Phillips, Wholesome Directions, Rodale, Boardroom, KCI ? the same old gang of suspects. And just before you know it, you?ll be obtaining a no cost training course from the most effective ads which have been remaining written right now.

That was what my very first duplicate main taught me. I eventually wound up at BBD&O ? Batten Barton Durstine and Osborn. Any individual once explained that company?s name sounded like a man with a suitcase falling down a flight of stairs. BBD&O is where John Caples labored for most of his life. I labored during the direct marketing department there and got to understand him.

He was a fantastic teacher and a incredibly congenial, kindly man. And you can pick up so significantly from reading his books. Even now I like to reread his scriptures of immediate marketing. It?s like the Old Testament. You just read it. It never gets tired. It?s just so fresh and powerful.

Right after dealing with John Caples I got to work at David Ogilvy?s company, Ogilvy & Mather, in their immediate marketing division. And that?s your original question: how I got to operate with David. I never seriously labored with him. It wasn?t like John Caples, where I knew him personally.

David was the head of a giant agency, possibly a single of the biggest four or five agencies inside the world and was quite fond of immediate marketing. He would gather all the copywriters in big groups and teach us the principles. Or we?d have big assemblies around the holidays, and he would notify us what campaigns he thought were terrific from the various departments on the agency.

In that way I acquired from him. But it wasn?t like he would arrive into my cubicle and put his arm around me and go about my duplicate sentence by sentence with me. It had been a lot more remaining in the army with a fantastic general at its command and mastering all you can because you never knew when he would pounce upon your ad as a person of those he was heading to analyze in front of the group. You had to always be on your toes.

Clayton: What have been the lessons that you uncovered from David Ogilvy?

Gary: Ogilvy mentioned that he and Rosser Reeves, who have been two of the greatest copywriters in general promoting of the 20th century, discovered more from John Caples than anyone else. More individuals know David Ogilvy than Rosser Reeves today because of his books. But both Ogilvy and Reeves mentioned that they acquired more from John Caples than anyone else and they shamelessly stole from him and most of the things they espoused came indirectly or directly from him. So there is that lineage of masters teaching other masters.

Many of the lessons that Ogilvy would preach came directly from John Caples ? mainly that your headline is 80% of the sale in space ads. And I make that distinction because sometimes people mistakenly apply that to direct mail. In direct mail, Ogilvy reported, your format is even more important than your headline. And I've certainly found that to be true as a magalog almost always outpulls an envelope using the same headline on it.

So that was one wonderful lesson in space advertising: your headline is 80% of the sale. And your format is equally as important in direct mail.

Other lessons ? Ogilvy loved to write with charm. He stated, ?You?ll never bore someone into buying something,? so he would fill his duplicate with charm. He taught this mostly by example. Should you ever read any of the great advertisements published by David Ogilvy, you?ll see they?re very tightly created. He wrote a whole series of adverts to help sell clients on joining his ad company ? ?How to Write Marketing that Sells,? ?How to Write Food Marketing that Sells,? ?How to Write Travel Advertising that Sells,? and so forth. He loved, as did the nuns in my Catholic school, nouns and verbs. He wasn?t big on adjectives and fairly despised adverbs, these types of as ?very.? Almost always you can dispense with all the word ?incredibly.?

He wrote tightly written ads which were charming and quite interesting. He would do terrific research on whatever product he was selling and appear up with fascinating facts about it. He wanted his advertisements as interesting as articles and he wrote them that way and expected his copywriters to perform precisely the same.

Clayton: Arthur Johnson told me that 1 of his biggest secrets is understanding that the ad needs to be entertaining to a degree. To keep a person reading for 24 pages.

Gary: Yes, that?s true. However, it can also be a trap. Rosser Reeves, who wrote and theorized about TV commercials, warned about ?vampire video,? where sometimes the entertaining element can operate away with all the ad and you arrive away from the commercial remembering the joke, but not the product.

As you know, we use a substantially stronger discipline in our work, so entertainment has to be used carefully. You have to leaven in just the right amount because you can?t let it run away with itself. While a touch of entertainment, like a pinch of salt, can add flavor, the main meal in advertising and marketing is well-targeted information of great interest to your prospect, which has a natural connection to what you?re trying to sell. for those who can make your copy interesting with thoughts and facts that not only are extremely curiosity provoking and interesting but also help you close the sale, that?s truly obtaining good.

Clayton: Tell me a little bit about the way you became a freelancer.

Gary: After working in the Ogilvy agency, I was ready to go out on my own and try to make some big bucks as a freelancer. I had heard of other copywriters accomplishing quite well and I received a call from an executive headhunter who mentioned, ?Gary, I know you?re thinking about likely out on freelance but there?s this little ad company up in New Rochelle, New York? ? which is a suburb of New York City, about 45 minutes northeast ? ?that is looking for anyone just like yourself. Why don?t you go see them even though you?re thinking of likely out and accomplishing freelance??

So I went to see them mainly because of a letter that Dan Rosenthal, the company?s owner, had created to this headhunter. It mentioned, to ?attempt and persuade anyone who truly knows how to write salesmanship in print because if they do, we treat the copywriters at our agency like salespeople. In fact, our top copywriter in this article this past year has made? ? this is in these days?s money ? ?$750,000 a year.?

It wasn?t that high, it had been about a single tenth of that but that?s what inflation has done. This was within the early 1970s. So at that time a salary of $75,000 was equal to about $750,000 right now. That?s what Dan Rosenthal was making just from commissions on his advertising and marketing.

I wasn?t making anywhere close to that, so I thought maybe I should see these folks. If nothing else, maybe I could freelance for them. But Dan convinced me to join him by saying, ?No, it?s not seriously in your best interest to go into a freelance career still. Why don?t you hang out with us? We are applying methods of salesmanship in advertising that?ll go way beyond what most men and women have even discovered still and you?ll have a chance to make some seriously good money.?

So I did go with Dan and I lasted there for about five years. I became a copy chief and a creative director and then he wanted to possess a whole new path in his life. He wanted to move to California. But our copy department was in New Rochelle, and he tried to make that work for a while but it had been really cumbersome to have copy through a department which was half in New York and half on the west coast. We didn?t have email then, I don?t even think we had fax machines.

Dan and I along with quite a few other good copywriters, worked together for about five years. It absolutely was sort of like the Beatles, we experienced an awesome team for about five years, and then it was just time to go out on our own, within our own direction, so that?s after i went out on my own.

It absolutely was about 1977 and by then I really knew what I was carrying out. I experienced spent about 10 years, prior to teaming up with Dan, finding out from these wonderful duplicate chiefs at Ogilvy & Mather and a lot from John Caples so I had a lot of street-smart copywriting tips.

And with Dan, we formulated a system which was definitely pretty powerful, and with those two things together ? we virtually could not be beaten. We took out an advert that claimed, ?Announcing an advert agency that guarantees to beat your most effective ad by at least 10% or your pay us nothing.? We got a lot of clients that way. Mainly it was due to our methodology of focusing on the key points that make immediate marketing duplicate get the job done.

So following that, I went out on my own and I did incredibly well with what I discovered with the agency.

Clayton: Did Dan have Silver and Gold Report at that time?

Gary: Yes, yes. In fact, Dan was the owner of that company because we also would launch our own products as well as do function for other clients. So, guaranteed, yes, he was the publisher of that newsletter.

We experienced so much success and so many opportunities because we were being among the few people who knew what we were being accomplishing. We had been like alchemists who could turn products into incredibly successful businesses because of the immediate marketing knowledge that we experienced. It wasn?t widely known, not nearly as well known as it is currently.

Clayton: Can you convey to me a tiny bit about the approach or the template that you and Dan used?

Gary: It wasn?t so a lot a template, it had been just applying everything incredibly religiously that we had discovered from studying Claude Hopkins and Rosser Reeves and David Ogilvy and John Caples and various other terrific masters of selling in print. More than something else it absolutely was what Dan would call the ?CRIT? system, which was short for Critique System.

I think you?ve labored with Dan, haven?t you Clayton

Clayton: Absolutely sure have.

Gary: I?m positive you?ve read that word, that odious little word, ?Crit.?

Clayton: Have been his crits as ruthless back then as they are now?

Gary: Yes, yes.

Clayton: He?s sadistic. He takes joy in making his crits as insulting and negative as possible just for the fun of it.

Gary: I know. I have the scars, believe me. But it was an awesome system. You experienced to be on your toes. For those who don?t know what we?re talking about, it had been a system by which the author would distribute his copy to everybody doing work in the advert company ? the receptionist, the account executives, the art director ? anybody else who could be persuaded to read it.

Everybody would acquire their ideal crack at ripping the ad apart. Now this sounds like a devastating experience but you develop a thick skin after a while. Most of the time it will be around you to definitely accept or reject the criticisms that were coming back at you. All the men and women involved while in the process would do their best to rip the duplicate apart, to point out holes inside the argument, to say, ?You?re not convincing me right here, I don?t believe this for a second, this offer makes no sense,? and so forth.

Each possible mistake from grammar and spelling to psychological missteps or paragraphs that didn?t connect well, paragraphs that went on without subheads, all of it noted. Everything that could make something less readable or just annoyed anybody for any reason or just made them not want to read any more. They?d say things like, ?You?re boring me below? ? which could be a comment in the middle of one particular paragraph. You?d distribute the work this way during the duplicate department which is itching to vent some of the fury they have just been put through because they recently went through precisely the same process.

Clayton: You nailed them last week.

Gary: Exactly. It?s payback time. As weird and as sadistic as it sounds, it produced fantastic duplicate. It didn?t produce fast copy by any means because you'd probably go through many, many drafts this way until almost everybody from the place claimed, ?Wow, this is singing now. I?m ready to sign up for this myself.?

So it was a quite cumbersome, lengthy process. Sometimes clients could be on the phone month right after month yelling, cajoling, begging, ?When is my copy going to be ready?? And we?d say, ?It?s remaining labored on, it?s getting worked on.? When it had been finally finished, they?d possess a campaign they could operate for years and outpull virtually anything else they?ve ever operate unless they were extremely lucky beforehand.

This was the system we followed. We experienced a lot of knowledgeable persons consider out their blue pencils and just scratch out or question just about anything that they didn?t like. But then soon after a time you figured out to internalize that process.

To be continued in Section 3

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