Old Codger Secrets for Marketing Success

Over dinner the other night, my pals and I had one of those “back-in-the-day” conversations.

Back in the day, we said, people couldn’t stream music on their phones or computers.

We had to buy vinyl records (big as a dinner plate) and play them on bulky record players. If you scratched the record (easy to do), the needle would skip or, worse yet, get stuck.

Then you’d have to climb out of your bean bag chair, trudge over to the record player, free the needle from the spot where it stuck, and resume your listening pleasure.

Back in the day, someone knew what you meant if you said, “You sound like a broken record.”

Start a sentence with “back in the day,” and the young ’uns roll their eyes and dismiss you as an old codger.

They don’t want to hear how hard you had it back in the day. They reject the notion that they have it easier today. They embrace modernity. They celebrate progress.

But here’s the thing… Sometimes we can learn a lot from way-back-when.

Take marketing for example.

Back in the day, you couldn’t sell anything with one click. No impulse buys. No seven-day-free trials that automatically convert to a paid account. No “click to learn more.” No YouTube videos to boost the marketing message.

Old-time copywriters created print advertisements that had to do it all.

The ads encouraged prospects to climb from the sofa, grab a pair of scissors, clip the order form from the bottom corner of the ad, fill it out, find the checkbook, write a check for the amount due, stuff the order form and check into an envelope, fasten a stamp to the envelope, drop the envelope in a mailbox.

That’s asking a lot.

Here are some of the copywriters who did this well: Claude Hopkins, John Caples, Victor Schwab, Joe Sugarman, Gary Bencivenga, Gary Halbert, and Eugene Schwartz.

The best copywriters working today don’t dismiss these copywriters as old codgers. They embrace them as marketing legends. They study and adopt the legends’ strategies and tactics. They know: What worked well back in the day can still work well today.

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