2005 - 11-09-05

Peace.

Dear Friend & Subscriber,

Last week I posted a newsletter on this website which I titled simply "Water". That newsletter consisted almost entirely of an ad I wrote several years ago.

The newsletter described how a genius named Carl Palmer had made himself wealthy several times and how he was prone to chronic boredom unless he was working on an exciting project. The ad also told about his creation of a marvelous new product which could save millions of lives and was needed by virtually every human being on this planet.

In that newsletter, I told my readers the ad had ran twice as a full-page in Investors' Business Daily.

Then I asked my readers to email me their comments about the ad and how well they thought the ad did.

I have never before had such a high percentage of my readers make such idiotic guesses about how well they thought an ad performed. The people who made truly insane guesses were those who worked in financial services... and sadly... those people who identified themselves as copywriters and/or direct response marketers.

The more analytical the response, the further it was from the truth of how the ad performed and why.

However, all is not lost. A handful of my most astute readers (just a tiny handful) got it exactly right.

Listen up: The ad is very confusing and deceiving to people with a first-rate marketing mind. You pretty much have to have a world-class marketing mind to understand the genius of that ad.

First, I will tell you how well the ad worked. It attracted an enormous number of qualified investors who, by my estimate, were willing to pony up in the neighborhood of $400,000,000 to participate in this project.