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Gary Halbert · whole document (15)

2005 - 11-14-05

# 2005 - 11-14-05

From:

North of Jewfish Creek

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.