frank kern interviews clayton makepeacemakepeacetotalpackage.com.s3.amazonaws.com/guru... · frank...

1 © 2009 All Rights Reserved

Frank Kern Interviews Clayton Makepeace Frank: Hey, everybody, Frank Kern here. I hope everyone’s doing well. I’ve

got on the phone with me a guy who is consistently making me look bad. He’s doing that by selling way more stuff online than me and all of my fancy guru friends put together really.

He’s doing it largely by e‐mail. I’m starting to take personal offense. I

want to get to the bottom of it and see how he’s doing it and see what’s going on. His name is Clayton Makepeace. He is a big, big, super‐fancy marketing guy. He’s usually out of our sphere of awareness in terms of just strictly Internet marketing stuff.

Clayton’s been around forever. He’s written some of the most

successful ads and promotions in the world. He’s now switched his attention to selling things on the Internet. He has, therefore, started selling more stuff than us!

Damn you, Clayton Makepeace, but welcome to the call anyway. Clayton: Thanks, Frank. I’m doing great. I just want to pay my dues for being

on this call by mentioning that pretty much all I’ve done is hung on every word you’ve ever written and copied you shamelessly.

Frank: Alright. I think everyone should know that I specifically asked Clayton

to say that! Clayton: [Laughing] Do you want me say the thing about you inventing the

Internet, too?


Frank: That was in my mind. Al Gore and I are telepathic and he picked up on my thoughts and stole my thunder really.

Clayton: I thought he was just stealing your thunder, yeah. Frank: I don’t know why he’s like that. He’s insecure, I guess. There are a bunch of big numbers flying around with your name

attached to it. What’s the scoop here? Tell me they’re inaccurate, please, so I can feel better about myself. I thought I was doing pretty good until I heard about what you’re doing.

Clayton: Last year we did somewhere around $80 million in sales online.

That’s for two different clients combined. You and I were chatting just before the call ‐ that on some of these campaigns that tend to run four to six weeks in length we pulled in as much as $10.5 million. Just last month we did a campaign where we pulled in $2.5 million in just three days. It’s just really been great.

I’m working primarily with client’s customer files, so the people

we’re talking to are well‐qualified. I have to qualify this by saying that I’m talking to people who have been around and who have bonded with my clients over a period of months and in some cases many years. We’re really happy with the numbers.

Frank: I guess so. I mean, it’s a pretty good start – $60 or $80 million or

whatever. Damn it! I thought I was cool. I was like, “Yeah, I’m doing $20 or $30 million.” There you go ‐ having to mess up everybody!

Why don’t you leave us alone? You know what I mean? We’re trying

to look cool – what the hell! Does any of this stuff involve launches or whatever? I guess since

they’re already customers you can sell to your customer base. What’s the context in which these campaigns are being run?


Clayton: I just wrote about this. I think really the whole thing with Product

Launch Formula is that not much of what’s really in the formula is new stuff. I think what’s happened here is I look through what Jeff’s done with Product Launch Formula. He’s just done an excellent job of collecting and then codifying triggers that cause people to buy what direct marketers have been using for decades. Jeff’s genius is in pulling it together and adapting it to the web in a way that’s really powerful. There is a lot of similarity between what Jeff does and what we’ve done for that reason. It’s not based on the medium. It’s not based on anything really but human nature and acknowledging what captures people’s attention and what motivates them and what causes them to act.

I actually started doing this before I ever looked into what Product

Launch Formula was all about. Our mutual buddy, Rich Schefren, last November kind of piqued my interest in it. I finally took a look at Jeff’s material and thought it was absolutely brilliant, especially since I saw so many techniques in there that I was using in my launches, but I picked up some good new ideas too from him.

Our campaigns on our house file here tend to run four to six weeks in

length. They are centered around an online event of some kind. A lot of product launches are pretty much centered around a free gift or a series of free gifts that you’re going to give people. What we do is we spend a week to two weeks at the beginning of every campaign not selling anything, simply using e‐mail to invite people to come to an online event.

They need to register for it, but registration is free. We create a

sense of obligation because they’ve registered. Once they’ve


registered we pretty much leave them alone until the event actually happens. They receive a confirmation of their registration and that’s pretty much it. The clients I work with have e‐zines that go out in the morning and then we send promotional e‐mails in the afternoon. In the editorial we continue building up the upcoming event and how great it’s going to be and how important it’s going to be.

Frank: What’s the ‘editorial’? Is that a section in the e‐zine or something? Clayton: Right. The e‐zines are 100% editorial. There’s never a pitch in them

because one of them is in the financial field and the other one is in the health field. Let’s take the one that’s in the financial field because that’s the biggest. Every single day – six days a week – you receive an e‐zine. In this case it’s called Money and Markets. If anybody wants to really see how these campaigns unfold, just go to www.MoneyandMarkets.com and sign up for the e‐zine and you’ll receive all the materials. You’ll be able to create a nice swipe file.

The morning issues of Money and Markets are entirely market

commentary – what’s going on in the economy, what’s going on with the various markets: the stock market, the currency market, and the commodities market. It tries to clarify the day’s events for people and let them see the direction that things are going and where the opportunities and dangers are.

That’s just content, content, content. We get a very high open rate.

In those e‐mails we might have a P.S. about the upcoming event with a link, “If you haven’t already registered, register here.”

http://www.moneyandmarkets.com/


Then in the afternoons we have dedicated e‐mails that go out to the file that just sell the living daylights out of the event – all the reasons why if they don’t attend they just might as well shoot themselves.

I’ll talk a little bit about the events themselves in a minute, but that

gives us a period of a week to two weeks during each cycle where all we’re doing is begging people to accept something of value for free. We’re not banging the list every day with, “Buy this. Buy that. Buy the other thing” so we’re building trust. We’re building momentum for the event. We’re bonding with our people. We’re demonstrating our goodwill. We’re creating an obligation and balance. We’re doing all of those things that Jeff talks about.

Then the event happens. We work very hard to vary the format of

the events to keep them interesting. Our first event early last year was a live conference call. We had an advisor in Berlin, one in Brazil, one in Shanghai, and one in the United States. These guys were calling in to report on what’s happening in those markets.

At the time, those stock markets were just exploding in size. The

people who were investing there were making money hand over fist. We used the drama and the intensity and the ‘boots on the ground’ idea there to really create excitement around these stock markets around the world.

All of the events go on for about an hour. There are typically 45‐50

minutes of just content. The last 10‐15 minutes are an offer of a product that helps you capture this opportunity.

After 45 minutes of the report from Brazil and from Berlin and

Shanghai and we had one other guy overseas, pretty much the listeners were in a kind of a lather about the opportunities overseas. At that point we had a very low‐key portion that just basically said, “What’s the best way to profit?”


We segmented our file so the people who had bought from us before

were offered a $2,500 product that helps them trade options on stocks in those markets. For our leads and low dollar buyers on the file, they were offered a $1,000 service that gives them buy and sell signals for exchange traded funds in those markets. We stratified the file that way. That was the first one. Then we did pretty much a straight‐up webinar that was two of our advisors talking. It was on the currency markets and how to make money with the dollar falling with the euro and the yen and the pound rising against the dollar.

That was a fun campaign because in our launch we were able to use

pictures of the Fed Chief, Ben Bernanke, the guy who’s printing all this money to bail out stupid lending institutions that got greedy and by doing so destroyed the value of the dollar. We had an enemy and that really energized our people. That event was a very simple webinar. It followed the basic template of the preceding event.

Our third campaign last year was on the opportunities and

commodities in natural resource investing. For that one we had a panel discussion – a bunch of people who were experts in that area following the same template.

Last month, again, we did one for currencies. We have a new advisor

on that one. Right now we’re planning one for next month that will be interactive

where people will be able to ask questions. There will be a live audience. The whole thing will be on video. We’re really excited about that one. It’s called The Forex Forum.


Frank: Here’s the deal. It seems to me that you guys are e‐mailing people to register for a teleseminar/webinar or whatever, and then you’re pitching them stuff, right?

Clayton: Right. Frank: That’s not particularly a new model. Clayton: No. Frank: All the guys in our universe do that all the time, but we’re not pulling

in $60 million a year doing it, so what the hell are you guys doing to pull in $60 million a year?

Let’s start at the beginning, alright? In our little world ‐ getting

people to actually show up versus those who register has been a problem. Getting people to even register has been a problem. How are you getting high numbers of registrations, and how are you getting those people to actually attend the event?

Clayton: Last month we had 20,000 people register for the call and just over

10,000 actually showed up. For us, it’s simply the messaging. I think I have an advantage, quite frankly, because what we’re doing is never positioned as being anything – not even in a transparent manner – as anything ‐ that there could be any ulterior motive for this thing other than to help you, our subscriber.

We write the scripts in advance. All of the messaging – both in the e‐

zine and in the daily e‐mails – is entirely dedicated to the benefits of attending this thing. “At the end of this hour, here’s what will be true that isn’t true now.”

We’ll have all of the things that we’re going to cover – and we always

make sure that they are the things that are foremost in our prospect’s minds right now.


The advantage that we have right now is simply that in the investment market there’s news every single day. Our investors are seeing that news, reading the headlines, and they have feelings about those headlines – either afraid because of them or excited about them or they’re confused and they need them clarified.

There’s this constant stream of wonderful fodder that we can use in

our e‐mails that keep everything very fresh. We’re not banging on, “I’ll show you how you can make $1 million” over and over again. We have just a rich texture of things that we can talk about.

I think that’s a huge advantage that we have. That should make you

happy because it doesn’t mean that what we’re doing is so much better necessarily. However, I do think that we’ve got a different market. We’ve got good price points. We have people that are fully involved. Any entrepreneurs on your file who are looking to generate these kinds of numbers really can take a lesson from that.

If you decide to move into a product niche where there is constant

change and therefore headlines and therefore things for your people to deal with, and therefore dominant emotions that they have about those things, then your multiples can be huge. People are really, really engaged.

The other thing that we do that may or may not be different – and

Product Launch Formula anymore has gotten so large; there are so many permutations to it and creative innovations on the basic idea that there is no one way to characterize it. In our launches we have the day of the event where people can attend live and we always on that event give them something they


can do right now – today, as soon as you get off the phone. “Call your broker and do this.”

Five minutes after the event is over, an e‐mail goes to the entire file.

“Wow! Did you see that? 20,000 people signed up to attend. Tony Sagami was incredible. He was on fire from Shanghai. He named his three favorite stocks to buy now. In fact, the event was so good that we’re leaving it online for a few days. It’s very timely, so we can’t leave it up long. If you missed it or want to watch it again, click here now.”

Then we follow within about a week where we have a countdown to

when the recording of the event is coming offline. During that week we’ll typically get as many views of the event that we did on the day that it actually happened. On a 20,000 registration event like we just had, we’ll end up with 20,000 views.

When the event comes down, it comes down. That’s it. You missed it,

but we tend to begin then a countdown to the first recommendations to be issued by the service that we were selling on the event. That campaign will run a week to ten days.

At the end of that we’re typically done. However, if response is still

high, we have done second countdowns from time to time. Frank: The old second countdown trick! “It’s not going away forever. We

meant to say ‘It’s going away forever after we do the second countdown’.”

Clayton: Actually, we have an advantage there too because instead of

delivering a static product that’s going to be the same tomorrow as it is today, these investment services will make one series of recommendations on the 15th and then there’s another series coming up on the 1st.


It’s much easier for us to go back and say, “The next recommendations are on these companies,” and get them all excited about these new companies “but you have to be on board before such‐and‐such a day,” because it’s a serial product rather than a one‐shot delivery product.

Frank: So you mentioned the Recommendation Campaign. The reason I’m

asking about this so much is because I’m trying to figure out how to transfer what you’re doing to what we’re doing. Basically I’m trying to steal your idea. I’m very charismatic and good‐looking. That’s really all that matters.

So the product is a thing where you’re recommending stocks or

recommending techniques or whatever. That’s the thing you buy. So are you taking little snippets of it and giving it to people in this Recommendation Campaign, hoping that will be the hook that makes them say, “Damn! That’s really cool. I think I want to buy more of that”?

Clayton: Sure. For example, there’s a campaign that we just did. We had our

advisor calling in from Shensland, China. He was there to investigate a company that makes batteries and has a deal on the table to make batteries for hybrid cars and fuel cell cars for General Motors and three different Japanese automakers. Nobody knows this deal is in the offing.

In our campaign we don’t name the company but we tantalize them

with the facts about the company that make it a no‐brainer. You really feel like, “If I don’t find out what this stock is and buy it, I might as well crawl up and die.” We’re able to work it that way.

I’ll tell you what. If you want to see the power of this thing, there’s a

company that we just talked about on the call. The symbol is CBAK. You can go on BigCharts and do a search for it. You can see last week on Thursday the spike in this stock that happened immediately after


the call. The stock went up, if I remember right, something like 60‐70% in value instantaneously when the stock was named on our call because people ran out and bought it.

Frank: That’s awesome! That’s a rabid market right there. Clayton: It is. It’s a great market. When you talk about your market, you talk

about selling courses on marketing and seminars and that kind of thing?

Frank: Typically. Clayton: I really think something that’s missing in a lot of the launches that I

see in that niche is the freshness and timeliness of those launches. I don’t know what it comes from, but you’re doing marketing all the time. I did see Rich Schefren do this, but you’re doing marketing all the time.

The funny thing about product launches is you’re using Product

Launch to sell to these people. They know that you’re doing that because a lot of them are very savvy. They’ve read Jeff Walker’s stuff and they know what’s going on there. They know what’s being done to them, but the value of the content is so good that they stay engaged. The intrigue and all of the other triggers that you use engage them.

But what if there was something new that was actually happening

right then where they could go online and they could watch you selling something else to a group of people? Or what if you somehow tied what you’re doing into something that’s happening in the news?

Frank: We have something timely we could use right now because the FCC

just made yet another change to the CAN‐SPAM law.


Clayton: There you go. Frank: I don’t know how significant it is, but we could make it out to be a big

deal. You have to, like, use a comma or something. I don’t know what it is, but we could certainly make a big deal about it.

Clayton: Absolutely. That’s serious stuff.

On the fun side, I have a friend whose business is selling online coaching to the top tech companies in the country – Hewitt Packard, IBM, Apple, Cisco, and Oracle. He sells training modules to these people that are very similar in structure to the kinds of training programs that are being done in the marketing niche right now, but they can’t get participation in their online events anywhere near as much as we’ve done. He’s bringing those guys to us now and asking us to create campaigns for them.

As part of that he’s been forwarding all of the invitations that those

people are sending to their customers. They’re abysmal. They’re absolutely horrible. It’s all tech speak. There’s no emotional engagement whatsoever. There’s no deadline. There’s no scarcity sell. There’s no anything that would cause these people to want to attend this event. In fact, their promotions don’t even present the benefits for attending. There’s a huge opportunity there.

Anybody who understands Product Launch Formula can make a

frickin’ fortune not just doing it in the marketing niche, which is getting very crowded and more than a little jaded in some cases, but what if you were to take those principles and apply them outside of this niche?


The conversation we had yesterday was about what if we had the contacts that we had last year when iPhone was launched and were able to create an online event introducing iPhone to retailers across the country? What if we used what we know about the techniques that I use and the techniques that Jeff Walker uses, the Product Launch Formula, to drive hundreds of millions of consumers and hundreds of thousands of retailers and wholesalers to Apple for this great product launch? I think the results would be absolutely explosive.

I think that’s the opportunity here with these online sales techniques.

We’re getting ready to exploit them. I think anybody else that just kind of backs away from the trees for a moment and says, “Where can I find a virgin audience that’s dealing with changes in their marketplace and incorporate these proven techniques?” There’s no doubt that these techniques work like gangbusters in other industries.

I think the people that do that are going to be the first ones to have

$100 million and $200 million launches. Frank: I think the big takeaway for me right now – and this is besides making

the people see a clear reason and benefit for taking action whether that be to buy – is to tie it with things that are already front of the mind stuff. I don’t do it certainly.

I’m on everybody’s list and I don’t really see anything. I see people tie

things to topical stuff that’s going on inside our tiny little niche, but I think people are becoming desensitized to that.

It’s almost like if you tie something to an event that’s in the news the

association between you and what’s happening in the news forms in the readers’ and the prospects’ minds and therefore legitimizes you a little bit.


Clayton: Oh, you bet! Frank: “We’re going to get on here and we’re going to talk about this new

legislation that’s coming up and what it means to your business.” The next thing you know, the psychological connection is made that these guys know what they’re doing because they’re talking about legislation. They must!

Clayton: That has a lot to do with it. Also think about what that does for you in

terms of positioning you as a serious broker in this field. Also put on your copywriting hat. What kinds of headlines and what kinds of e‐mails could you write that would make attending absolutely mandatory about that FTC change, for example?

Just simply ask the question: “Is something you’re doing now – the

way you’ve always done it – capable of landing you in jail in the next 60 days or costing you a huge fine? This is serious stuff. You can’t afford not to attend.”

Frank: Yeah. I really did get sued by the FTC. Damn it! I wish we weren’t

recording this because now everyone will know what I’m up to! Everyone listening, just buy my stuff anyway and we won’t have to go through it. I won’t do the FTC call.

Clayton: It could be topical stuff they’re already aware of, but also it could be

– when I got off on that little tangent about these tech companies that are doing these abysmally promoted online events – where I was originally going with that was that their invitations are so absolutely horrible that every one of them is a case study in how not to do it.

The fact that this just landed in my e‐mail box, let’s tear it apart. “Let

me teach you some lessons on what Apple is doing and what HP is doing and IBM is doing and how they can do it 1,000 times better.”


Again, you’re giving them tremendous value. It’s fresh. It’s new. It’s happening right now. I think that’s good.

Giving them insights or a peek into how you function when you’re

working on an actual campaign other than your own is good. People love that. You’re being presented with a new problem and the solutions that you’re coming up with – all that stuff is dynamic. It’s moving. It’s not the same old, “Let me make you a millionaire” kind of stuff.

I think that works. Frank: It’s stepping away from the noise a little bit as well. I think that our

invitations are getting to be the same old thing. Let’s talk about getting people to attend the event. You got 20,000

people to register for the big one that you were talking about. How big was the list you were sending out to?

Clayton: 200,000. Frank: So 10% responded. We don’t get that. At least I don’t and I’m pretty

good at this stuff. I’ll get maybe 5% – half of that. Do you think it’s a case of the market that I’m in and a lot of people

listening to this – which is the Internet marketing market – are getting pitched so many teleseminars and online events that they’re just not ‘falling for it’ (for lack of a better word)? Or do you think we’re doing something wrong in the inbox?

Clayton: There are a lot of things that I think can be done and a lot of reasons

why what we do works very well. We’ve covered a lot of them. There’s topicality and the fact that the information is dynamic. We’re not just appealing to one emotion or one desire – greed. We’re appealing to fear.


If you don’t make the right moves in the financial market you’re

going to lose money. They’re already invested. We have that going for us.

There’s another thing too. The Product Launch Formula is so

powerful – just the strategy – that it’s produced very good results for the people who have used it and used it correctly. There is a reason why one launch does $20 million and another one does $250,000. There is more than one reason – the product, the size of the niche, and all of that plays into it too.

The quality of the copy, the quality of the messaging, and the way

the copy is written and the subject lines and the headlines in the e‐mails, and a copywriter who knows enough to create texture in a campaign where you have some e‐mails that are very warm and intimate and other ones that are just all flags flying and trumpets blaring – a copywriter who knows how to write copy.

I think what’s happened a lot in the product launch field is because

the strategy itself was so powerful, the copy took a back seat. When you combine great sales copy with great strategy, that’s when you get exponential results.

I’ve seen this happen in other industries before. I was at Bill Guthy's

house a few weeks back, of Guthy‐Renker, the big infomercial company. We were chatting. I asked him, “What do you do with the name of the customers? You’re selling 100,000 $300 juicers a year and another 100,000 Vanna White tooth whitening kits a year and Victoria Jackson’s stuff. You’re bringing in hundreds of thousands of new customers. What do you do with these customers after they buy?”

He goes, “What do you mean ‘What do we do with them’?”


I said, “Don’t you send them other offers or do anything to bond with

them and keep them buying?” He said, “No. We never figured that was worth doing.”

I said, “Bill, you’re leaving 90% of your money on the table.” He didn’t care. They were making so much money on the front end

that it had never occurred to them that 90% of their business was still waiting for them to develop it. Product Launch Formula is in the same place today. The strategy itself has been so powerful – and I know you’ve been involved writing copy for other people’s launches. If I heard right, you’ve helped with the biggest launches in this field. That was because you came in and said, “Okay, you’ve got a valid strategy. Let me kibitz a little bit on the strategy with you and I’ll do the copy.” The combination of great copy with great strategy is what has made those launches the biggest in your industry.

That’s what we do with our clients. We bring in the strategy. We give

them killer copy at every level and the combination of the two is absolutely explosive.

Frank: It sounds like we’ve gotten the ‘strategery’ pretty good. Clayton: Yeah. Frank: I think you’re right. I think we do lack copy. I think what happens with

us is we just copy each other’s copy. It’s kind of like back in the 80’s when you had the players with two cassette players built in so you could make a copy of the cassette and pass it on to your buddy.


The next thing you know, 20 dudes later they have this copy of a copy of a copy and it sounds horrible. I think that’s what we’re doing.

I have a niche business and the sales letter for that niche business –

and by niche I mean non‐Internet marketing related stuff – is a rip‐off of John Reese’s Auction Secrets letter. I’ve got friends of mine who rip off my niche letter for other completely non‐related things that was a rip‐off originally of an Auction Secrets sales letter. We just rip‐off, rip‐off, rip‐off. Eventually you’re absolutely right. We really don’t sit around and think that much about the copy anymore. I think copy is king. I don’t know who said that – maybe Carlton. He said, “You can take everything away but give me a crayon and a legal pad and I can scribble out some stuff and hand it out to people on the street and get my fortune back because of the importance of copy.”

If you were to advise us – and you are advising us right now – what

do we do? What are some things that we can do? Clayton: There’s a lot that you can do. Really there’s a lot more than we can

handle on a telephone call. The techniques for writing headlines that have worked so well in direct mail and in print ads over the years work well as headlines on the web and also work great on subject lines.

Let me just endorse something that you just said. In direct mail I’ve

had the occasion to do a couple of things. First, mail the same promotion to the same names 30 days apart and see the attrition that occurs. It’s typically 20‐30%. By mailing the same copy to the same names 30 days later, I lost 30% of my response to those names and therefore my money.


I’ve also plagiarized myself and written entirely new packages but using the same basic themes and tested that against a control. I’ve seen a similar reduction in response.

When one copywriter or product launch guy or marketing guy is

emulating somebody else’s copy and the copy doesn’t feel fresh or new, it therefore doesn’t feel sincere. The market has a long memory. Let’s face it: A lot of the people that you guys are marketing to in the marketing area – these guys are also everyone else’s customers.

They saw the letters that you’re plagiarizing and they know that

you’re plagiarizing. Coming up with something fresh can create an instant incremental increase in response at every level. You’ll get more people in. More people will attend. More people will convert. More people will come back for a second sale.

Copy is king. Every new media that comes out, the medium itself

attracts enough attention that anybody can throw any piece of crap up there and it’s going to work, but the same cycle happens. The fields get crowded, the promotions begin working less and less well, and if that hasn’t happened already with Product Launch, it will.

Somebody says, “Hey, what if we used better copy? What if we

actually paid for some sales copy or went to school and studied how to write great copy – how to grab attention, how to convert that attention to readership, how to engage a prospect in my e‐mail, and how to move him to action? What if we really went to school on that and learned how to do it well? Wouldn’t that give us an edge over our competitors?” In every single case, the answer has been yes.

By the way, Frank, we’ve just done a report on all of this. It’s free. It’s

called The Copywriting Conspiracy. Anybody that wants it, you’re welcome to have it.


I have a couple of recommendations. First, if you haven’t read our e‐zine, The Total Package, I strongly suggest that you check us out because we have almost 500 articles in our archives about how to write copy and how to solve the copywriting problems that you run into every day. They’re totally free. You don’t even have to opt in. Just come on over and go to the archives and start reading.

The second thing is we have a report that we’ve just published. Tony

Flores, one of my associates, just wrote on this very subject. It’s called The Copywriting Conspiracy. It goes into tremendous detail about how better copy can multiply the response to product launch promotions by an order of magnitude.

Frank: That’s pretty hard to beat right there! That’s really what you do. I

think probably 80% of the people listening to this, your name is either very new to them or they haven’t heard of you. The reason why is because you’re one of these extremely hard core real guys – as opposed to those yahoos working in their underwear – that really does this stuff in the real world.

How long have you been in the game? Clayton: 37 years. I wrote my first sales letter 37 years ago. It was fun. I didn’t

get paid for it. I just did it for fun and it worked. I got into film and television production. I moved to Los Angeles and took a job there with a major studio in 1974 when the recession was basically killing film and video production.

I found myself with a child and a pregnant wife and no income. I saw

an ad for a small direct response marketing agency in Palos Verdes that needed a copywriter. I’d written for a lot of the film work that I had done so I said, “Hell, I could do that, so I went in and auditioned and got the job. That’s how I started.


Frank: So 37 years and how many millions do you think your stuff has

brought in? Clayton: The last time we actually sat down and counted, we were up to

about $1.5 billion in total sales. Frank: Serious? Clayton: Yeah. We’re still adding a $100 million or more to the peg every year.

Yeah, it’s been great. It’s been a lot of fun. These days I’m doing it for 10% of revenues. Every time I sell $10

million worth of product, I get $1 million for myself. That’s very nice. But you’re right. I think your observation is correct and I think that

comes through, too. The thing is that I spend three or four hours on weekends writing an article for The Total Package and all the rest of my time is spent actually in the trenches designing the strategy, writing the copy, counting the money, figuring out what we did wrong, and then going out and doing it again.

I do it for clients who then pay me 10% of sales in return for doing it,

so I’ve got a lot on the line. I’m not one of those guys that just promotes his own products. I know you’re not either. You learn a lot more that way.

Also one of the things that you learn a lot from is for most of those

37 years I was a freelance copywriter, which meant that Phillips Publishing or Agora or KCI or Rodale Press or Nightingale Conant would call me up and say, “Gary Bencivenga (or Jim Rutz or one of the other top writers) has a real high control for Deepak Chopra’s product and we wonder if you’d like to try to pick the living daylights out of it.”


If you accept the job, you’re going against the very best copywriters in the business. If you beat them, your royalties can be enormous. For example, I just wrote a direct mail piece two years ago for a health company that sold $60 million worth of product and mailed 60 million pieces. I received a $50 per thousand royalty. For every thousand pieces that were mailed, I got $50. That was $3 million for a month’s work.

That’s not just bragging. I want you to understand that’s how

important copy is. The mature companies who have been doing this for a long time and understand the power of copy are thrilled to be able to write checks like that to copywriters. That’s how important copy is in the success of their campaign.

Frank: It’s not even a ‘chase them down’ kind of thing. I think we’re still in

our infancy in the Internet world. Clayton: Absolutely. Frank: That’s all I’ve ever done within the marketing scheme of things for

about ten years. I think when it comes to copy and salesmanship and persuasion, we’re still in the beginning of the game.

Our little microcosmic world of the Internet marketing niche has seen

lots and lots of the same promotions run over and over again with a different wrapper on it, so it makes sense to believe that, “Oh, people are starting to get jaded.”

I think that the Internet as a medium has not seen just outstanding,

awesome copy in 99.99% repeating of its markets out there. I think anyone who comes in and can actually write and write really well and gives enough of a damn to not copy each other’s stuff (oftentimes half‐hazardly, not even knowing how the promotion of their copy did in the first place) can just take over.


Copy is the absolute fundamental piece, period. There’s nothing

more important. Clayton: Absolutely. I don’t know this to be true, but if product launch

promotions are not working as well as they once did, it’s actually a good thing. If it hasn’t happened yet, when it does happen it’s going to be a good thing because it’s then and only then that it will cause people who tend to get lazy – because product launch is pretty easy once you get the copy.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to write the copy. They say it’s

like opening a vein and bleeding on the page. The people who have gotten fat and happy sending out mediocre materials are going to find themselves in a position where they have to learn copywriting principles in order not just to grow but to survive.

That’s the healthiest possible thing for the industry. It’s only when

people start doing that that they’ll realize the full potential of Product Launch Formula.

I’m absolutely convinced that people right now – even the most

successful people who are doing it – still have no clue as to how profitable it can really be if that great strategy was combined with great sales copy.

Frank: It’s kind of like we’ve got a Howitzer canon and we’re sticking .22

caliber bullets in it. Clayton: Exactly. Frank: So everyone can get themselves really big bullets by going to your

site and getting all kinds of free stuff, which is awesome, dude. Thank you for paying attention to our little circle here in the Internet world.


Clayton: Well, thank you, man. It’s been a lot of fun. Frank: $60 million dollars a year or whatever it is, man, damn it! We all

thought we were cool. You come in here and it’s like the kid down the street. His dad gives him the family car and he’s washed it and waxed it. Then you pull up in your new 911. Damn, dude! We thought we were cool. Some old car with a new paint job on it and Clayton has his 911. What the hell!

Clayton: I’ll tell you someone else you should talk to – someone who makes

me feel very small. That’s a guy named Drayton Bird. Drayton was David Ogilvy’s partner. He was managing chairman of Ogilvy‐Mather Direct. He’s still working with Richard Branson at Virgin Atlantic and a bunch of the other top companies in the UK and Europe.

He’s an absolute delight. The two of you will really love each other.

He’s just outrageous and very self‐effacing. He’s bought himself a new Rolls‐Royce every year since the 1950’s and he’s trained every Creative Director of every major agency in Europe. He’s a real trip.

You need to meet Drayton and introduce him to your people. Frank: I’ll do it then. Is he from the UK? Clayton: Yes. Frank: Okay. Yeah, that guy is awesome. I’ve been to his site and read some

of his stuff. It’s hilarious. He comes across as kind of crotchety. Clayton: He’s just hilarious. His e‐zine is called Bird Droppings. He says right on

his site, “I have five children. Most of them were mine.” He’s just hilarious. Look him up. You’d really enjoy talking to him.

Frank: Cool, man. Thanks again, dude, for doing this call. I demand everyone

to get the free stuff that you’ve offered to them. If they don’t get it


they’re silly and they should go do something else like become insurance salespeople. Get out of the way, you know!

Clayton: I want to thank you for having me on today. It’s been a lot of fun. Frank: Cool, man.

frank kern interviews clayton makepeacemakepeacetotalpackage.com.s3.amazonaws.com/guru... · frank...

Documents