Watch the video above or read below.

Matthew Burns:
All right, Steve, you challenged me last time. You said, “Okay, next episode, we have to do one on The Wall Street Journal direct mail piece.” Thanks for sharing that. I went and took a look at it, and I went and found a little bit more on it. What an awesome letter, man.

Stephen Semple:
It ran for 28 years.

Matthew Burns:
Just to drum up subscriptions, just to get more people to buy the paper.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Matthew Burns:
You had shared with me, what’s the number? A huge number.

Stephen Semple:
It has been attributed to $2 billion of subscription sales, this letter. It was the control for 28 years. What a control is, companies that are really sophisticated, they’ll run an ad. And at the same time, they’ll run a test ad. Then they look at the results of the two. If the test ad beats the control, it becomes now the new control.

Matthew Burns:
Right.

Stephen Semple:
What you’re always trying to do is beat the control. For 28 years, it was unbeaten. It ran for 28 years, this ad. This direct mail piece.

Matthew Burns:
I’m going to put up on the screen, the beginning of this letter. Then we can talk about it, and why it worked and why it didn’t work. Take a look at this.

“Dear Reader, on a beautiful, late spring afternoon 25 years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students, both were personable, and both, as young college graduates are, were filled with ambitious dreams for the future. Recently, these two men returned to their college for their 25th reunion. They were still very much alike. Both were happily married, both had three children, and both, it turned out, had gone to work for the same Midwestern manufacturing company after graduation and were still there. But there was a difference. One of these men was a manager of a small department of that company. The other was its president.”

Graduated from college at the same time. These are identical dudes. They’ve got the same hopes, and dreams, and goals. Nice disposition, hard-working, blah. They’re living their best lives, and they’ve stayed the same, and then they get their invitation for their 25th college reunion, graduation reunion. They go back, and they realize that they work for the same company, they’ve got the same amount of children. They’re married, they’re happy. Life is great. And then there’s a difference. One’s a president and one’s a middle manager. Wall Street Journal did an amazing job putting this story together.

Stephen Semple:
If you think about this, this is a story as old as time. This is a parable story.

Matthew Burns:
Right.

Stephen Semple:
Where the moral of the story is get The Wall Street Journal. They also did a good job, later on, in terms of giving the details of the Journal.

Matthew Burns:
Right.

Stephen Semple:
In other words, they started with the emotion first. Sequencing is always important. Start with the emotion first, we buy emotionally, we justify intellectually. They did a great job of emotion, and then move to justification, and then offer. Emotion, justification, offer. That’s the sequence. Too often, people go justification first. No. It’s emotion, justification, offer.

As I said, it’s a story as old as time and it’s a parable story. It’s great. It’s drawing upon all those things. But here’s the thing. I’ve seen this letter copied a whole bunch of times, variations.

Matthew Burns:
Lots of variations.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, variations of it. Often, not successful. I was at a marketing conference that was being run by a very, very famous direct mail guy by the name of Dan Kennedy. Dan Kennedy’s awesome.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Someone asked Dan Kennedy, they said they tried to do this and it didn’t work. They tried to replicate the idea of it and it didn’t work. Dan Kennedy pointed out that there’s one key ingredient that makes this whole thing work because of the emotional state that you’re put in that almost everybody misses.

Matthew Burns:
What you’re saying is anybody watching us right now should be taking notes?

Stephen Semple:
They should be taking notes.

Matthew Burns:
It’s all I’m saying.

Stephen Semple:
There’s this one key ingredient, and it is the line, “Recently these men returned to their college for their 25th reunion.” That’s everything. Because think about it. How do we feel when we’re going to a reunion? Whether we’re going to one, or whether we went to one.

Matthew Burns:
Nervous.

Stephen Semple:
Nervous. What do we want to do at the reunion?

Matthew Burns:
Show off.

Stephen Semple:
We want to peacock. We want to show off. We want our lives to be better than… Look, if I’m driving my car to the reunion, if I’m driving my Porsche to the reunion, I’m getting it cleaned on the goddamn way.

Matthew Burns:
Right. You’re not wearing track pants. Nobody wears track pants to their reunion.

Stephen Semple:
Right.

Matthew Burns:
Because everybody can afford track pants, but you’re wearing the best damn suit. You went out and bought a new suit for your reunion.

Stephen Semple:
You bought a new suit.

Matthew Burns:
Or a new dress.

Stephen Semple:
You got the car cleaned.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah, right.

Stephen Semple:
You got the car cleaned, your shoes shined. You are showing up looking your best.

Matthew Burns:
Right.

Stephen Semple:
Because you want to look good to your peers. There’s a whole pile of emotions in that. There’s fear, there’s envy.

Matthew Burns:
Envy’s a great one.

Stephen Semple:
There’s desire, “I want to be like that.” Then there’s also confusion because, “I was in school with that dude. He’s not that fricking smart. How come he’s-”

Matthew Burns:
“He’s not better than me.”

Stephen Semple:
“He’s not better than me. How come he’s pulling it down?”

Matthew Burns:
Right.

Stephen Semple:
There’s confusion. All of that is captured when you set it around a university or high school reunion.

Matthew Burns:
Yes. I think it’s the one thing that you can wrap this story around where everybody has the exact same emotion.

Stephen Semple:
That was the interesting thing. I’m in a room with a couple of hundred people, and Dan Kennedy lays that out. He said, “How many of you who went to a reunion felt that way? How many of you did not go to your reunion because you felt that way?”

Matthew Burns:
Because you felt that? Exactly.

Stephen Semple:
Between those two questions, every hand in that room was up.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
You leave that out, and you set it somewhere else, it’s not as powerful.

Matthew Burns:
Dan Kennedy’s brilliant. But I think that’s a brilliant observation. It’s one of those things. They did a really good job too in what made the difference. It’s not intelligence. It’s not your access. It’s nothing. It’s not your attitude.

It’s funny. Angela Duckworth, just one of my favorite psychologists, she wrote Grit. It’s just all about wanting it more.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Matthew Burns:
It’s all about doing everything you need to do to not become comfortable in life, and just for gold. I think that’s what they’re saying. “We’ve got the knowledge, you just have to come and get it. Just come and get it.”

Stephen Semple:
This is also a very important point that you make there. I think now, if I was at Dan Kennedy’s, I would say, “Dan, there’s one more important ingredient.”

Matthew Burns:
Oh?

Stephen Semple:
I hadn’t thought about it until you just brought it up. If people go back to a previous episode that we did where we compared two Apple ads. What we noticed is one ad gave hope, the other actually made their customers feel bad.

Matthew Burns:
Right.

Stephen Semple:
That’s the reason why it failed.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
By saying it isn’t about native intelligence, or talent, or dedication, it isn’t that one person wants success more than the other. Guess what? Find that person who’s striving for the success and doesn’t have the success, you’re not making me feel inferior.

Matthew Burns:
At all.

Stephen Semple:
What you’re saying is, “Oh, no. You’re as good as that other dude.”

Matthew Burns:
You brought hope.

Stephen Semple:
“It’s just that you’ve missed out on this one thing.” You’ve actually still made me feel good and brought hope.

Matthew Burns:
Right. Listen, it goes to desire. What’s the desire? What’s my desire? My desire is to look good, to be successful, and to be treated with admiration by my peers. If you’re in business and you want to make it in business, just get the knowledge from us. And at the very least, you got one step up on the guy that doesn’t read it. It’s the smallest thing you can do, but we’ve got it for you. You just didn’t know, so now we’re telling you.

Stephen Semple:
They’ve managed to pack all of that emotion, all of that crazy emotion into the returning to the college reunion. Made us feel that desire.

Matthew Burns:
That’s right.

Stephen Semple:
Put us in that place. Reminded us that, yeah, there’s people we’re going to bump into who are more successful and we’ll go, “What the hell?” Then now, what I have is I have the device that will create the transformation for you, The Wall Street Journal. For the low, low price of 80 bucks a year, or whatever it was. $200 a year, or whatever it was.

But what’s really interesting, and again it goes back to this whole thing, stories sell when you understand the emotional ride that you want to take somebody through and the transformation that you want to make happen. In this case, the transformation didn’t happen, the hope for the transformation happened. We held out the hope because we used a parable story. Parable stories don’t use transformation because one person’s transformed, the other hasn’t. The moral is what’s the difference between the two.

Matthew Burns:
The reason why that’s so powerful is because it allows the reader to self-identify.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Matthew Burns:
They get to self-identify. “I’m choosing that, oh man, I’m in middle management, and I’d really love to be president.”

Stephen Semple:
Right.

Matthew Burns:
That’s where I want to be, so now I know my next step. They self-identified, and then they moved, then they take action. That’s why it was such a successful ad for so long.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s an amazing ad. It’s a story. It’s got a beginning, it’s got a middle, it’s got an end. One person transforms, the other doesn’t. Here’s the key missing ingredient to transformation.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
They package all of it into the right emotions by setting it at a reunion. And I still make you feel good by saying, “Yeah, it’s not you. It’s not about being smart. It’s not you. It’s this other thing that you’ve missed out on. And it’s that thing that you’ve been pondering on. How come he’s successful and I’m not? He reads the Journal, you don’t.”

Matthew Burns:
Direct mail, I always hated direct mail. I did. In all of my marketing career leading up to even joining the Wizard of Ads, I hated direct mail. You’ve been able to open my eyes that, if you do it right and you do it for the right reasons, you’ve got the actual right reason to use direct mail, you’re not just trying to get eyeballs because it’s so darn expensive and it’s never done right. But you need to make sure you’re doing it for the right reason.

I just had a conversation with a client yesterday, literally yesterday, who said to me that they’re getting ad credits from one of their suppliers. They were asking about, “How can we best use that? Because we want to do a direct mail piece.” I said, “Great.” I said, “How much money do you have? Is it $1 million ad credit? Because you’re an HVAC company, and you cannot speak to everybody enough through direct mail to make it work.” You’ve been able to show me with enough clients now that there’s some really good spots to use direct mail. And when it’s written like that-

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, it works.

Matthew Burns:
It breaks through.

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