Alex Poole

Dear reader,

I was shocked!

OK sorry I’ll stop mucking about.. but seriously though:

Yesterday a colleague (who has in the past been a board-level marketer at some blue-chip companies and for whom I thought I had great professional respect,) not only couldn’t tell me who’d written the classic “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano…” (If you’re even vaguely involved in marketing and can’t complete that headline without thinking, please go immediately to Amazon and purchase Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples,) but admitted he’d never heard of John Caples. Never heard of the man who invented split testing and effectively DR copywriting. OK so my mum probably hasn’t heard of Caples either, but this is a senior marketer with 15+ years experience. Think military general who never heard of the Duke of Wellington, car designer who never heard of the E Type Jag or popular songwriter who never heard of the Beatles.

In fact, this is someone who once had an annual marketing budget far in excess of £1M. Does that scare you? I believe it should.

If you don’t know your subject, you’re an amateur. An amateur with a big budget and big responsibility is a liability. Liabilities topple banks, get workforces laid off and get people’s houses repossessed. Collectively, they damage economies and lives.

I’m no copywriter but neither am I a total slouch in the discipline.

I built a goodly sized list a few years ago with a simple software giveaway. I sold resale rights to an ebook product I created to a well-known UK copywriting expert who kept a lot of my original copy (I don’t mind admitting I was well pleased to see my copy there. Me, a computer programmer indeed!)

So how come? I read up. Simple. Same way I became a competent computer programmer. You want to know how to do something? learn from people who did it well in the past, or are doing it well now. For copywriting I read Caples, Hopkins and Joe Vitale. OK, so I also studied Mark Joyner’s classic Farewell Package sales letter, written by Paul Myers, a lot..

So, if you write something for people to read, please show a little respect for those readers and be sure to have at least a vague clue how to write. And if you call yourself a marketing professional, please at least try to know the basics…

erm.. rant over

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