The Greatest Marketing Secrets Of All Ages

Surefire Marketing

If you look back to the great ad men of this century you’ll find some incredible

marketing strategies you can dust off and use for your own business. I hope you realize,

human nature does not change. Human beings will continue being sold by the same

appeals that have been used for centuries.

The same things that made people buy 10,000 years ago will continue to work

10,000 years from now. It just doesn’t change. That’s why I want to take you back to

the old master’s teachings and let them “write” this special report for me (hey, I need a

break anyway).

Well, let’s start with a guy who shares my birthday (exactly 83 years earlier) and

my birthplace (Russia), his name is Maxwell Sackheim. Sackheim wrote a spectacular

book on marketing called “My First 60 Years in Advertising”. Very out of print and I

finally tracked it down after 3 years. For those of you interested in learning about the

marketing strategies of Maxwell Sackheim there’s another book called “Billion Dollar

Marketing” published by Jerry Buchanan which is excellent. You can get that through

www.amazon.com.

Anyway, Max is best remembered for an ad that ran for 40 straight years. That is

absolutely incredible. The famous ad has the headline “Do You Make These Mistakes

In English?” It was done for the Sherwin Cody’s course on English. For an ad to run

for 4 decades without a change to the copy is an incredible feat. And remember this was

run by a savvy mail-order advertiser who counted coupons and tracked results. So you

know this ad continued to make money.

One of Sackheim’s most effective techniques was making the advertiser a

“character”.

He would typically write the ads coming from the client’s mouth (in their

language) directly to the reader. A down home personal approach.

Here’s what I mean. One of Sackheim’s most famous clients was Frank E. Davis

“The Gloucester Fisherman”. For him Sackheim wrote direct mail pieces and later ads

that read like this:

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“There’s no use trying. I’ve tried and tried to tell people about my fish, but I

wasn’t rigged out to be an ad writer and I can’t do it. I can close-haul a sail with the

best of them. I know how to pick out the best fish of the catch. I know just which fish will

make the tastiest mouthfuls, but I’ll never learn the knack of writing an ad that will tell

people why my kind of fish -- fresh caught, prime-grades right off the fishing boats with

the deep-sea tang still in it -- is lots better than the ordinary store kind.

“But I can’t explain it, at least you can taste the difference. So you won’t mind,

will you if I ship some of my fish direct to your home. It won’t cost you anything unless

you feel like keeping it. All I ask is that you try some of my fish at my expense and judge

for yourself whether it isn’t exactly what you have always wanted.”

This kind of copy sold tens of thousands of tubs of mackerel all across the

country. And the reason this type of advertising succeeded was due to the character of

an authentic Gloucester fisherman personified by Sackheim.

Does this technique still work?

You betcha’. Several years later a copywriter named G. Lynn Summer wrote an

ad for a pair of pear growers. The ad with the headline “Imagine Harry and Me

Advertising Our Pears in Fortune!”