Engagement and Strategic Indirectness
The Most Powerful Selling Secret of Them All

One of the 15 or 20 books I’ve been working on is tentatively titled Great Copy: What Makes Good Advertising Great!

It’s an ambitious book, gathering answers to that million-dollar question from the best* copywriters alive. (*Best, as in “most successful,” as in those who have in their careers generated the greatest volume of sales.)

I’m getting valuable assistance in writing the book from Mindy McHorse, the editor of The Barefoot Writer, hands-down the best e-magazine that exists on copywriting, copywriters, and the copywriting lifestyle. Mindy probably knows more of today’s top copywriters personally than anyone else. She’s also, through her many years of heading up The Barefoot Writer, extremely knowledgeable about the many different approaches, methods, and styles that today’s best copywriters employ in the breakthrough copy they continually produce.

The book is almost done. We are waiting for two or three more submissions, including one from me.

Because I wrote the Introduction, which touches on many of the ideas that are fully articulated in later chapters, I felt that an additional essay from me would be superfluous. But then, a week ago, I changed my mind.

I had spent several hours in a meeting reviewing a draft of a sales letter written for our Paris office. The meeting began well, and then happily morphed into great as our conversation started moving away from the specific problems and challenges of the manuscript we were critiquing to bigger, even universal, questions and answers about how copywriting is done, step by step.

We realized after the fact that we should have recorded the meeting so all the participants could have had a transcript of what was said. But since that didn’t happen, I did the next best thing and wrote a longish memo detailing the four main topics we had talked about.

Below is the first part of that memo. It addresses a question that is at once the most naïve and most important one that came up that day:

If there is a “most important” secret of persuasion – i.e., of copywriting success – what would that be?

Here is my best recollection of how I answered that question that day:

Yes, I think there is. At least there is an answer that works best for me. And that is this:
The most important thing you can do to persuade anyone of anything is to begin your conversation with them by scrupulously NOT selling it.

Almost anything is better than beginning with a sales pitch. You can entertain the prospect. You can inform the prospect. You can surprise the prospect. But never begin by selling the prospect.

The way to write great copy – i.e., to be a great salesperson – is to let the prospects sell themselves.

“Let the Prospects Sell Themselves” – What Does That Mean?

It means structuring the prospect experience so that not only does it not feel like a sales pitch, it isn’t even recognizable as a sales pitch.

How do you do that?

Very simply. You do anything but begin with a sales pitch in mind.

And How Do You Do That?

In our book Great Leads, John Forde and I (using my pen name Michael Masterson) suggested that of the hundreds of possible ways to begin a sales presentation, there are only six that work consistently, regardless of what you are selling, where and when you are making the sale, and to whom.

Three of these ways we defined as “direct.” And three we defined as “indirect.”

If you want to be an A-level copywriter… if you want to write advertising campaigns so successful people will pay you what you ask to write for them… if you want to leverage your copywriting skills to develop a multimillion-dollar direct marketing business that puts you at the top of the creative income ladder and protects you from the vicissitudes of whatever market you are in, you have to not just learn but become skillful at writing all six of these ways to approach potential customers.

You have to be able to use those sales leads as skillfully as you would have to use a hammer, a screwdriver, a saw, a drill, and a measuring tape if you wanted to be a master carpenter.

And if you want to go beyond that. If you want to get yourself up to the virtuoso level. If you want to become the one copywriter out of a hundred that can make not just a couple hundred thousand but a million bucks a year, you must master, really master, at least one indirect lead.

Why Is the Indirect Lead So Important? 

Indirect leads can do things – subtle but enormously powerful things – that direct leads can’t.

For example:

* Indirect leads can start a sales conversation without any hint that a sales pitch will follow. The conversation begins, but the prospect doesn’t feel (and may not even know) that it will lead to a sales pitch. And because the prospect doesn’t feel like he’s about to be sold, the very natural psychological resistance he has to being sold does not arise. Instead, he reads or listens with an open mind and a willing heart.

* Indirect leads, due to their nature, provide the prospect with a quid for the quo (his attention). And they do so without stating it out loud. In telling a good story or sharing an amazing fact or revealing a secret, the copywriter is giving the prospect something of value – even if it’s only a few minutes of intrigue and entertainment.

To be more specific, an indirect lead will only work if it is intrinsically interesting and emotionally appealing. Learning how to write successful indirect leads is about learning how to figure out what story or secret or fact would be intellectually and emotionally engaging to the prospect.

When the copywriter does that, he creates a subconscious sense of appreciation and even gratitude in the prospect, which triggers a reciprocity impulse which can be satisfied by buying the product.

What Are the Ingredients of an Irresistible Indirect Lead?

Successful selling is not, as some copywriting pundits have suggested, based on appealing to the prospect’s most basic human instincts. (Fear and greed are the ones most commonly cited.)

Unless we are unfortunate enough to live in a war-torn or famine-wrecked country, most of our buying decisions are not made in the reptilian (instinct) brain, but in the limbic brain, the center of our emotions and the source of our emotional intelligence.

In this enormously complicated network of interlocking feelings, the strongest are seldom mentioned in books and articles about copywriting. I’m referring to such feelings as shame, embarrassment, jealousy, envy, loneliness, self-doubt, and so on – the kind of feelings that, however uncomfortable they may be for the prospect to discuss in public, are nonetheless enormously powerful factors in the process of making a buying “decision.” And those are the feelings that indirect leads are so good at stimulating.

For example…

* Indirect leads can arouse feelings that relate to how the prospect feels about himself and his situation in life, including thoughts about the cause of problems he has and the “enemy” that is behind them.

* Indirect leads can intensify negative ideas and prejudices the prospect has about social institutions (e.g., government, church, schools), as well as big, abstract ideas like war and peace, civil responsibility, gender roles, etc.

* Indirect leads can even create or enhance prejudicial thoughts and feelings the prospect either doesn’t have or doesn’t realize he has, and that can be done in real time – i.e., while the prospect is reading the lead!

I’ll make the point a second time because it’s 100% true and 100% fundamental and yet most people getting paid as marketers and advertising copywriters don’t really understand it: More than 90% of our buying decisions are complex. They involve not only the instincts that dwell in the reptilian brain, but the tempest of emotions living in the limbic brain, as well as the uncountable ethical and pragmatic commandments scattered around in the graveyard of the neocortical brain.

To write great leads, the copywriter must deal with that complexity. And he must do it – strongly and deeply – before the product or service being sold is even mentioned.

You can learn to become a master of the indirect lead by understanding the basics of each of the three kinds:

1. You can tell the prospect a story he would like to hear. (Example: Porter Stansberry’s “Railroad Across America package”)

2. You can make an intriguing statement or prediction. (Example: Porter’s “End of America” package)

3. You can tease him with a secret he’d like to know.

The benefits are obvious:

* You will get much less resistance from the prospect because you will not have triggered his built-in bias against being sold.

* Not only will you get less resistance, you will get a greater emotional buy-in.

* You will have a higher immediate response rate, and ultimately a higher customer lifetime value.

* You will have “trained” your prospect to respond to a specific kind of indirect lead, which you can be sure he will respond to in the future. And that will make subsequent sales to him easier.

Don’t Be Intimidated by the Challenge

I have been teaching, coaching, and revising direct response copy for more than 40 years. During that time, I’ve worked with at least a thousand copywriters – in large groups and small groups, but mostly one-on-one. I’ve worked with beginners, journeymen, and masters. And I’ve worked in dozens of different industries, selling everything from cars and aluminum siding to diet plans and vitamin pills, from watches and jewelry to televisions, computers, cellphones, golf clubs, toys, and tools, and from information products to investment newsletters and clubs.

And in every case, when the challenge was to grow the business quickly, the solution was always to locate the hottest product in the hottest sector of the industry and sell it through a marketing campaign that began with a sales approach based on either an emotionally compelling story, a an intriguing statement, or a secret.

Speaking of Copywriting Secrets…

Carline Anglade-Cole, one of the top copywriting coaches I know, has just published an e-book for freelance writers called How to Write Kick-Butt Copy: Straight Talk from a Million-Dollar Copywriter! It’s chock-full of sage but practical advice, like the following:

“Sometimes it’s just better to walk away – than to take a stand that will ultimately zap your time… resources… and energy. And ultimately mean nothing at the end.

“For example, if a client refuses to pay you the balance of an agreed-upon project. You could hound him with emails that don’t get answered. Mail him numerous “past due” notices or even threaten to sue him. You may or may not win.

“But what’s the real cost? How much time are you spending to get what’s rightfully yours? How much energy are you wasting complaining about the situation? How much did that time and energy ultimately cost you? And if you ever get the payment – what did you net after all that aggravation?

“Sometimes it’s better to walk away… cut your loss… and use your energy to find a better client who respects you and your time. Don’t allow standing on a principle to turn you into a petty person. Take the higher road – you’ll find fewer jerks there.”

You can read more about Carline’s book here.

What You Don’t Know About the People You Are Trusting to Run Your Business

In our personal lives, we want to believe that our friends and siblings have the same values and sensibilities that we do. If we are caring and attentive, we want them to be caring and attentive. If we are loyal, we want them to be loyal. If we value good hygiene, we’d like them to do the same.

But what we learn if our emotional intelligence grows beyond adolescence is that, when it comes to values, beliefs, and preferences, reciprocity is the exception, rather than the rule.

When I decided to get rich 41 years ago, I had instant clarity about the most important thing I needed to do to start my journey. I realized that, as a mid-level employee of a brilliant and very ambitious entrepreneur, the number one change I had to make was to stop resenting his wealth and self-confidence – to instead train myself to become not only his hardest-working employee, but to be the employee he could trust the most.

If you want to get rich as a Number Two, as I’ve done several times, that’s the formula, the one and only formula, that will work for you.

But as important as it is, that’s not the business secret I want to dig into today. Instead, I want to show you its “sister” secret – a surprising fact that every entrepreneur and business owner should know.

Let’s start with this…

The Difference Between Being a Shareholder in a Business, 
a Manager of a Business, or “Just” an Employee

Early in my career, after moving myself up the corporate ladder to CEO with a minor but significant stake in the business, we went through a growth period when just about everything we did in terms of marketing and product development worked. The business grew quickly, and because my partner/boss wanted to move in that direction, we gradually diversified our product lines horizontally and gradually became a company of six separate profit centers, each sharing the same marketing strategy.

I had to find people capable of managing those profit centers, and I had given up on the idea that I could recruit them from afar. I knew from experience that the most likely way to find the leaders we needed would be to pluck superstar performers from our existing management teams.

The young people I put into the positions were selected on the basis of qualities I’d come to see as significant – not on academic degrees or even years of experience, but on three qualities that I recognized as having been essential to my own success. They had to be smart. They had to be willing to work long days and weekends. And they had to be fearless enough to take on a job that they knew they were at that point incapable of doing with ease.

And guess what? For nearly three years, they all performed very well in their new roles, leading each of their profit centers forward, with revenues and profits growing – although, understandably at different speeds and to different levels, since each was effectively growing in a market that had different economic and commercial dynamics.

But then, as happens inevitably if you are fortunate enough to have a business that endures for many years, the general economic environment began to change, and revenues in every one of those profit centers began to recede.

When this happens in a business you own, your first impulse is to put your head in the sand and hope that whatever is causing the problem will magically evaporate, bringing sales back up to where they were before and giving you the pleasure of having the problem solved without doing anything.

When that doesn’t happen, what next occurs to you is that unless you do something drastic, your business will continue to weaken and eventually go bust.

In this case, I kept my head in the sand a bit longer than I probably should have. But after three or four consecutive months of shrinkage, I called our profit center CEOs together and told them that they had to solve the shrinkage problem fast. “Do whatever you think you should do,” I told them. “I just don’t want to see any red ink on the bottom line.”

If You Are the Boss, 
It’s Your Problem to Solve!

I gave them the liberty to figure out their own solutions, and I didn’t micro-manage their individual decisions. But I did pay close enough attention to realize that some of them were doing things that made me hopeful, while others were doing things that felt wrong.

Given the common marketing strategy all of the profit centers shared, there were basically three things they could have done to keep their parts of the business profitable.

One was to drastically reduce overhead by eliminating any non-essential procedures and protocols, which would mean closing some departments and firing the people that worked in them. That is never an easy thing to do, even for the most bloodless CEO.

Another option was to cut back on the marketing budget, which is always a sizeable portion of the money you spend.

And a third was to rethink and, in many cases, reinvent the sales and marketing approaches that were in place in a nearly desperate attempt to find something new that would quickly start working well and bring revenues back up.

These are all, in my mind, reasonable courses of action. I knew that if I were a CEO of one of those profit centers, I would do all three.

I would want to cut back on all non-essential protocols and procedures because I believe such activities are not just wasteful, but are more than likely damaging to the rest of the businesses in ways that are not obvious – e.g., creating resentment among employees who are doing essential work and wondering why some of their fellow workers are getting paid as much as or more than they are to accomplish relatively unimportant objectives.

I would also reduce marketing spend. But I would be hyper-aware that when you do that, you are almost guaranteeing that your revenues in future years will get smaller, because most businesses depend on at least a steady, but preferably rising, base of new customers to whom they can sell additional, higher priced “back end” products to preserve and grow the bottom line. (In other words, you must see this option as temporary. You do it because you don’t want to suffer short-term losses, but you abandon it as soon as you can.)

The third option – quickly testing all sorts of new things (new products, new prices, new advertising copy) – is the most immediately beneficial to the business if you can do it successfully. But it is also the most difficult because the reason you are in the position you are in is because the things you know how to do are no longer working.

There is Always More Than One Solution 

What happened in this case was that two of our CEOs executed one option – cutting back on marketing spending. Two others executed two of the options – cutting marketing spending and cutting overhead. And two of them executed all three options – cutting marketing spending, cutting overhead, and pushing their teams to test all sorts of different things to discover something new that would start bringing in new customers.

I don’t have to tell you what happened. You know from what I’ve said so far that the two CEOs who did nothing but cut marketing spending stayed profitable for a while (about a year, if I remember correctly), but then revenues tanked and never recovered. The CEOs that cut both marketing spending and overhead stayed profitable, but at significantly lower levels. And the two CEOs who put all three options into action not only maintained a positive bottom line but continued to grow rapidly.

The Hidden Business Secret

The obvious lesson I learned from that experience is this: When a business starts to founder and/or flounder, the CEO must be willing to do just about anything and everything to get it back on course. And for most businesses, that means reducing marketing spends temporarily, cutting overhead costs almost ruthlessly, and testing every halfway intelligent idea to find a new path forward.

But there is another lesson I learned – a related lesson – that has been just as useful to me in subsequent years, even though it was something that, at first, I didn’t want to believe.

It’s this…

However great the people running your business are – however hardworking, knowledgeable, and skillful they might be – it’s more than likely that their commitment to your business is less than you think. And that matters.

The executives I chose to run our profit centers were among our best employees, having proven time and again to be excellent at what they did. But though I gave them free rein to do what they had to do to turn their rapidly deteriorating bottom lines around, I wasn’t entirely passive in terms of working with them. My partner and I met with them once a month to review their P&Ls, and I met with them at least once a week to talk about marketing and copywriting and whatever else was on their minds.

The situation we were in was as strange and as stressful for them as it was for me, so those conversations allowed me to get an insight into their thinking and, to some extent, their instincts and feelings about what they were going through. And it wasn’t what I expected.

Financially, I was in a comfortable position. I knew I would be able to live, if I had to, without an income for however long as it took to get the business going again. So for me, a big part of restoring sales and profits was a matter of pride. But for some of our CEOs, the slump we were in was an immediate threat to their income and in that a threat to the comfort and security of their families. They knew that they were not in a position where they could forgo even a part of their compensation. They also knew that, if things continued to worsen, they could jump ship and get a senior position with one of our competitors.

In other words, we were invested differently in the future of the company.

For them, making hard decisions about the profitability of their individual profit centers was tied up with considerations about their own income and income security.

For me, there were no options. Although I had the financial independence to not care, I cared too deeply to do anything but everything, including putting pressure on already hardworking people and firing people who were good employees but not essential to the survival of the business.

I had to accept the fact that I was wrong to assume that these good and hardworking executives would fight as hard to keep the business alive as I would. They were willing to do a great many things to see it succeed – and they did during the fat years. But at an important point, their personal interests verged from mine. And that, I continue to remind myself 40 years later, is something I should not only recognize as a possibility but expect as a probability.

A Marketing Secret I Waited 40 Years to Reveal

These were all smart, educated, and reasonably experienced executives – some in marketing, some in product development, and even a handful of CFOs and CEOs. And yet they were surprised to hear me tell them that the first thing that JS and I always did after a successful new product launch was to “knock off” our new product.

“Why would you do that?” their faces were saying. “Why compete with yourself?” And “Wouldn’t it be better to put your time, creativity, and capital into taking advantage of the momentum you have and expanding your sales campaign and claiming the largest possible hold of the market?”

I’ve never been an either-or person. When given an option to do one thing or another, I invariably chose to do both.

And that’s how I approached the marketing situation about which we were talking. I suppose that’s one reason I’d never second-guessed my “secret.”

Having taken advantage of it for so many years, I assumed it was obvious and that every other business owner and marketing chief was doing it.

But that wasn’t the case. On the contrary, what all these smart young people were doing was exactly the opposite of what I believed they were doing. Instead of replicating their considerable success by quickly creating and marketing a second version of it, they were focusing solely on rolling out the one-product campaign and trying to keep their competitors from finding out and imitating them.

This doesn’t work for every business and every industry. It probably wouldn’t work for SpaceX or Lionsgate films or for an Italian restaurant. But it can and should work for many other businesses – especially businesses that make money selling information, ideas, or advice.

And this is it: If you are lucky enough to have a successful launch of a new product, the moment that you can see that it and the campaign you used to sell it has legs, you should create a similar, knock-off product and start selling that into the marketplace – in competition against your own products – as soon as you possibly can.

I learned this secret many years ago when JSN and I were selling systems for handicapping gambling – everything from football games to horse races to the lottery. Our first big hit was a system developed by a British mathematician who had figured out how to improve one’s odds in betting on thoroughbred racing (I think it was). You could say our success with that product was luck in that horse racing was gaining popularity at the time, and so was the idea of betting systems based on math and/or science.

Within three weeks of our first returns, we began seeing other pieces in the mail, competing with our “Professor Harold.” There was Professor Llyod and Professor Henry – and the copy they used to sell their systems was remarkably similar to that of our own.

We were a bit perturbed that so many of our competitors were so blatantly knocking us off. So we sent them a few lawyer letters that they ignored and doubled down on our media buys to try to stay in first place.

And we did. For about three months. Then the knock-off product that was running in second place began renting more names than we were. Which meant that they were making more sales. We continued to put out different versions of our Professor Harold promotions, but as every week passed, we fell further and further behind.

Before we knew it, we were in third place. And after that, for as long as that trend lasted, which was nearly three years, we never regained our lead. It was irksome to see two of our competitors – who had done nothing more than copy our product and our promotion – take away what should have been millions of dollars of revenue for us.

The next time that happened – with a financial advice product about six months later – I didn’t even talk to JSN about what I was going to do. As soon as I could see that we had another big winner on our hands, I immediately wrote another marketing campaign, selling a very similar product with a very similar pitch but with a very different name. That campaign was in the mail in less than three weeks.

And it did almost as well as the first one, coming in at about 80% of the original, which was great for us.

In knocking off our own product so quickly, we were able to get our second promotion out there well before our competitors came in with their knock-offs. So the best they could do for the moment was third place, which made us feel vindicated in a way. But there was another benefit that we hadn’t anticipated, By claiming the first two positions in the market, we had, in total, about 160% more front-end buyers to sell back-end products to. We also discovered, to our immense pleasure, that we could get our highest responses by selling our first product to our second list of buyers, and vice versa.

JSN was – as you can imagine – very happy with my decision to knock off our own product and seize the two top positions in that marketplace. It became standard protocol for our company. And for a while, when we had an especially strong new product launch, we would create two knockoffs and seize all three of the top spots.

It was almost amazing how well this worked. We quickly gained the lion’s share of that market and kept it until the trend ended. The combination of being first and second gave us a host of unexpected marketing advantages, such as priority positioning, lower list rental fees, and more cooperation from list brokers generally that made it virtually impossible for our competitors to catch up with us.

Over the long haul, the response rates for those knock-off promotions were between 60% and 80% of original. And if I remember correctly, we never did knock off promotions with a response rate of less than 50%. Since we were making good money on 50%, it made the rollout simpler, safer, and much larger.

A $100 Million Question: Are You Fish or Are You Fowl? 

One of the biggest advantages I had in my business education was the mentoring I received from JSN – first, as an editor of financial information, and then, eventually, as his partner.

In the late 1980s, after we had built our newsletter publishing business from a start-up to the second-largest in the industry, I could see he was getting itchy to expand the business horizontally, to get into magazines and TV advertising, but also to begin selling physical products.

I had just begun to read the popular books about business management, and one of the commandments all those gurus seemed to agree on was this“If you get too greedy and grow too quickly by taking on too many different products, or even product types, you will lose your hold on the market and risk a fast slide down to the bottom. The best way to have success and maintain it is to stick to selling the products and services you have always sold because you know those products and how to sell them. In other words, don’t be distracted by all the shiny objects.”

That made perfect sense to me. That was exactly the formula I had taken to bring our business from just a few million when I started to more than $30 million at the time.

And so, whenever JSN brought up the topic of selling anything other than financial newsletters, I’d remind him of this commandment. And because he, too, understood the sense of it, he allowed me to focus on the one thing we knew how to do and were doing.

But then one morning he came into my office, shut the door, and said:

“I’ve been thinking about our conversation about sticking to one product line. But I’ve been thinking about what we both do well and what we like to do, and I don’t think it’s publishing financial information.”

I asked him what he meant. He sat down, learned toward me, and asked what became a game-changing question.

“Mark,” he said. “We have to decide.”

“What?” I said.

“We have to decide whether we are fish or fowl.”

“Meaning?” I said.

“We have to decide whether we are financial publishers or marketers.”

“I thought we were both.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. And then he recounted for me the many conversations we’d had in the previous years – how excited we’d always get when we were figuring out how to position a new product to appeal to current market trends, and how much fun we had writing the advertising campaigns and structuring the offers.

“Yes, those were great conversations,” I admitted.

“Tell me when we ever had so much fun talking about the technical or fundamental aspects of the stock and bond strategies we were selling.”

I shrugged as if to say, “You have a point.”

“We have to decide. Fish or fowl?”

“As in,” I said, “financial publishers or…”

“Or direct-response marketers!”

In truth, I would have preferred to think of myself as a student of stocks and bonds and a publisher of information. “I’m in publishing” always felt good to say when I was asked what I did for a living. “Direct-response marketing” had a very different and much less prestigious ring to it.

But I was a junior partner. I held, at that time, about 20% of the equity and 20% of the voting power. JSN had always been kind (and smart) enough to never allow that to factor into his final decisions. He’d always told me that if I ever gave him a hard “no,” he would respect it, and he always did.

So I never indulged myself in saying no to any of his ideas unless I thought they were seriously dangerous to our business. In this case, I didn’t feel that way. On the contrary, I knew at a gut level that he was right. And so, I acquiesced.

Within twelve months of that conversation, we had sold off all our financial newsletters.

Meanwhile, we were very busy selling all sorts of other things: off-brand perfume and cosmetics; inexpensive watches and jewelry; radios, cassette players, and little, portable TV sets.

And within another year. we were selling betting systems, astrology and psychic counseling, and a magazine about playing the lottery.

We had grown our publishing business from nothing to $30 million in less than seven years. And we were proud of that. But four years later, as “fish” (or was it “fowl?”), our revenues exceeded $130 million!

The story doesn’t end there. I eventually went back into the publishing business – selling financial newsletters, but also selling travel books and magazines, academic books (in English and French), membership clubs, and eventually real estate and hotels. And that part of my career was a ride from a business with revenues of $8 million to $100 million in less than seven years and more than 10 times that much 10 years later.

So today, when people ask me what I do for a living, I say, “Publishing.” But I know in my heart what I really do – and that’s marketing.

Recognizing this has given me a secret power – the understanding that I have the ability to learn how to sell anything, even all sorts of things that seem at the surface to be completely unrelated. And I will always attribute that to that first fish vs. fowl conversation I had with JSN so many years earlier.

Next issue, I’m going to tell you about one of the marketing secrets I learned along the way that has been instrumental in taking and holding a dominant position in many markets. It’s something that I have been doing for so long that I was surprised to learn that one of my major clients – ironically, a financial publisher – was not aware of it.

Stay tuned.

The Pareto Principle in Action 
Knowing Where Your Profits Come From

My three days at Courtomer (see “Notes from My Journal,” above) was great on several levels.

After more than ten years away from it, I got to see the chateau that I knew from way back in its current state – as a beautiful and comfortable country retreat for business events and family reunions.

I reconnected with 35 or 40 colleagues I rarely see these days because they are working from remote outposts in Europe and the Far East. I was reminded that despite the immensely valuable tool that Zoom is, there is nothing quite like spending time with people with bodies.

I’m on a bus now headed back to Paris and my brain is buzzing with new ideas, as well as great old ideas I’d somehow forgotten.

One of these ideas came from Rory Sutherland, a senior exec at Ogilvy & Mather and a much beloved advertising expert who is frequently on talk shows about business in the UK.

We were talking about market testing – i.e., running several different ads simultaneously in different media to see which version is strongest. Rory said that he follows what he calls the 70/20/10 rule – i.e., that in developing marketing plans for clients, he allocates 70% of the marketing budget towards existing ads that are working, 20% to ads that are new and different but only marginally, and 10% to ads that are far away from what has traditionally worked to see if there might be some new appetite out there in the market that has not yet been discovered.

I think that’s a very smart allocation model – giving the business (and the marketing department) a good chance to make incremental improvements and a remote but still possible chance to make radical improvements, but without risking taking a beating on the bottom line.

I also like the idea because a similar ratio has occurred to me many times when discussing the Pareto Principle – the justly famous idea that in almost any endeavor, 80% of the positive outcomes arrive from 20% of the inputs.

I love the Pareto Principle because of its simplicity. (I’ve been using it since I discovered it because it’s so widely applicable and so often transformative.) Many times, when thinking about how it applies to profits, I’ve come to a similar conclusion – except my ratio is 80, 15, and 5. Twenty percent of the effort made will indeed create 80% of the profits. But if you look more closely at that 20%, you’ll find that 50% of the 80% comes from just 5% of the input.

Four Popular – but Really Bad – Ways to Manage Your Most Valuable Employees 

I’ve written many times before about how just about everything the experts recommend for boosting employee morale and productivity doesn’t work when it comes to executives and creative workers. In fact, most of the time, these practices only make things worse.

I will go into each of them in detail at some future point. (If you’re especially interested in any of the following, let me know and I’ll make sure to write about it.) But for the moment, I thought I should put them down briefly, in case you happen to be paying someone in your HR department to do any of it.

1. Making compensation entirely non-discretionary. In my early days as a manager of hundreds of people, I fell in love with compensation schemes that were automatic. Except for a few categories (line workers and certain kinds of salespeople), these were always problematic and required intervention by me to straighten out the problems. Later, I learned that my eagerness to adopt automatic rewards and salary increase schedules was motivated by my desire not to do what a manager must do: have many sometimes difficult conversations with all direct subordinates.

2. Being there for your employees’ personal problems. Being the boss is similar in several ways to being a parent. The most important: As a boss, your job is to boss. You can’t be a good boss and a good friend at the same time. Taking on that role may make you feel good temporarily. But you will end up causing yourself all sorts of awkward and unnecessary problems and causing your friend/employee to be angry with you.

3. Playing close attention to your employees’ work quality. If your job includes teaching your employees the initial ropes, take your time and do it properly. And as soon as that’s done, tell them that, from then on, it will be up to them to do their job well, to solve the problems they encounter, and to come to you with questions only when they have figured out a few possible solutions. To get the best out of anyone in a working/ creative environment, you have to make them responsible for doing their jobs by using their own intelligence and ingenuity. If you continue to hover, you will reduce your employees to mechanical devices and yourself to a line manager that can never move up in the ranks.

4. Employee-of-the-Year Awards. This may be the dumbest idea ever. I’ve encountered it several times in my career. And in every case, it turned out to be a disaster. I am confounded by what kind of idiot came up with this idea and what kind of idiot bosses thought/ think it’s a good one! It’s not hard to figure out what’s wrong with it: You make one good employee happy and dozens of equally good employees angry and possibly looking to work elsewhere.

Making America Great, the Peter Thiel Way

I knew very little about Peter Thiel. I knew he was one of the founders of PayPal. I knew he took some of that money and invested it in a new startup called Facebook, among others (LinkedIn, SpaceX, etc.).

I didn’t know he was gay. I didn’t know he was Republican. And I didn’t know he was reviled in Silicon Valley.

Click here for an interesting interview with him from Bari Weiss.

AI vs. Copywriters 

A colleague recently took up the subject of how AI is going to affect advertising writers. He fed some commands into Chat-GPT, seeking to get strong headlines for a particular financial topic. The machine spit out a dozen titles in no time flat. They were all decent, he admitted. Some were stronger than others, but none was exceptionally strong.

I looked at his examples and agreed with him. None of the headlines generated were amazing. But most of them were, IMHO, solid. Solid to good. They were B’s, representing probably 90% of what you would get from most professional copywriters, including top B2B copywriters.

I think they were in the B range because the algorithms Chat-GPT uses are still based on simplistic instructions. The best headlines take a level of imagination that Chat-GPT is not able to achieve… right now.

Overlooking the Obvious 

Something is going wrong with your business. Usually, you know how to fix it. This time, you are flummoxed. You try everything that has worked before. No luck. What else can you do? You can hire a consultant!

You hire the consultant. They study the situation and recommend a solution. But the solution is a set of very basic ideas you already knew. The bill is expensive. You feel like you’ve wasted a lot of money. But because you’ve spent the money, you put the recommendations in place. Astonishingly, they work. The problem is resolved.

What the heck happened? This essay by Scott Young explains what’s going on.

How Safe Is Your Business from Employees Like This? 

I don’t know if this is real. This guy is so charismatic, I suspect he’s a professional actor.

Take a look at this video:

This may be a con, but this sort of thing does happen. In fact, when a business gets to a certain size – say, 1000+ employees – claims of racial discrimination and sexual harassment become commonplace. Even if you have a strict code of employee conduct and even if you have a hiring practice that gives preference to minorities.

I remember the first time this happened to one of the businesses that I was a partner in. The accusation was so implausible, and the claim of innocence by the employee accused was so credible, that I wanted to not just resist the claim but sue the claimant.

The claim, after all, was a smear on the reputation of someone I knew and trusted, as well as on our company. But when I suggested my course of action to corporate counsel, he said, “We can do that, if you want. But it will cost us at least $50,000 to cover the legal expenses. Or we could settle it now for $10,000.”

I was willing to spend the money. But the rest of the board was more pragmatic. “We could lose. We might be wrong. And who wants to risk $50,000 when we can settle for $10,000?”

We settled for $10,000.

This became standard operating practice. And each year the claims arrive. We rarely bother to review them anymore. It doesn’t matter who is lying. It’s cheaper to pay off the claimant and fire the accused.

I understand the logic. But I wish we had not let the bottom line determine our protocol. I can imagine a hack doing a hit piece on us, pointing out that we must be encouraging sexual harassment and racism. How else to explain the fact that we have settled out of court 20 times?

I sent the above video to our CEO, saying, “I guess the lesson is that if you make it easy and profitable for people to extort you, some of them will.”

He replied, “Not surprising. We have found the book How to Sue Your Employer and logs on perceived misconduct in people’s desks after they were fired.”