Eugene Schwartz - Breakthrough Advertising

Eugene M. Schwartz

1. Foreword

Welcome to the most sought after direct marketing masterpiece. This book was recently selling for over $900 dollars usedso I decided to re-issue it. It is a real privilege to bring Gene Schwartzs advertising wisdom back into print. We built a wonderful business based on his wisdom.

He was a special delight and a treat to knowGene was 62 and reminded me of Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead. But Gene had much more charm and wit and a fabulous, unforgettable smile.

Exciting sightwatching the multi-talented geniuss fingers flying over the keyboard creating another brilliant ad. And then hed sit back with that great smile, read it over and enjoy it more and more.

Gene wrote advertising copy for the best direct marketers in America. And then he published a book in 1964 titled How to Double Your Childs Grades in School, following up with How to Double Your Power to Learn and then Breakthrough Advertising in 1966.

He was very cleverhe exchanged his copywriting for access to mailing list names and promoted his own books to them! But then Gene had a stroke in 1978 and he had trouble typing for it affected his right side. But he worked and worked until he became quite proficient typing with just his left hand.

My big ideaRetain Gene as a business consultant instead of a copywriter to guarantee him a regular income. He became very important to us in that new role. He helped very much in the creation of the Bottom Line/Personal concept and of our editorial style. Awesome.

Then there was Gene III, the scientist, always reading the leading-edge science books and belonging to a very sophisticated group that met weekly to discuss the implications of those scientific advances on society.

Finally, there was Gene IVan amazing talent as an art collector, together with his wife Barbara, a famous interior designer. They built a fabulous art collection betting on Hans Hoffman Morris Lewis, Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Milton Avery well before anyone else had heard of them. Their first acquisition was by the color-pioneer Hans Hoffman. It took me years to appreciate Hoffmans work. Barbara also helped me build an incredible collection of photographs that are now at the Art Institute of Chicago. On my first gallery tour with themI discovered a crumpled photo by the Starn twins that had two words on itConfusion/Order. That is what Im devoted tobringing order from confusion. So Barbara and I built a very exciting Lessons in Life collection. I was her first art advisory client. And it is with her generous permission that we bring Genes classic book back into the world.

Martin Edelston

Founder and President. Boardroom Inc.

Publisher of Bottom Line/Personal

January 2004

1. Preface to the Boardroom Edition

This book was first published in 1966what seems to be three lifetimes ago. It was put out by Prentice-Hall, a marvelous house: it sold only a few thousand copies. But since it was published I have had people coming to me regularly to tell me that they directly credit reading this book with their making millions of dollars.

This is amazing enough, but even more remarkable is the fact thatwhen I look back on itnot a single one of these people was a copywriter. Here is a book that is called Breakthrough Advertising and yet was used by men who were not in the business of advertising at all, to make more money than most of us ever dream of accumulating.

How did this happen? Why was a publisher, a financier, a manufacturer of novelties, able to make so very much money with a book that is about putting sentences together? (The financier told me that, within one year after obtaining the book, he had raised his net worth from $100,000 to $10 million). Are the sentences contained in the pages that follow actually that powerful? Can they change the fortunes of men so radically? Are they far more universally adaptable than I had first thought so they are no longer about advertising products, but literally about opening whole new markets for them?

Therefore, eighteen years later, when Boardroom Books asked me to republish this text. I had to study it again, with the fresh eyes of a person who had not read it in all that time, to see what was the real content of my book, and its real effect on its readers. I did. I discovered the secret. And I am using this introduction now to admit my red-faced shame. What I had thought I had written those many years ago was a book on advertising; what I actually put down on these pages was an entirely different book, on a far broader theme:

There is a way to develop an entirely new market for a new or an old product. That way involves a certain number of clearly defined steps. And in this book 1 show you every single one of those steps.

As you may know, all of usno matter what official designation we give the industry we do business inare actually on a deeper level, in exactly the same profession. We are all simply creating or exploiting markets for our products. When the market is born, our business is simultaneously given birth. When it grows so does our share of it. When it is mature, our sales charts develop their first aches and pains. And at that point, if we can develop a fresh new market for that old product, it is exactly as if we achieved the Faustian dream, and enabled that product to drink from the proverbial Fountain of Youth.

We are all primarily conceptual midwives, helping give birth to new markets for our products. All the other functions we or our business, performthe manufacturing, distribution, service, and all the restare simply adjuncts to this vital central process.

We are, in a single phrase, Market-Makers. We sense each new market in its turn. We test and evaluate its size and scope. We gauge its true potential financial strength, and then we focus all the people, all the money and all the desire that makes it up on one ultimate object: our own product.

Most of the time, the market exists before our product, and we simply tap its present strength. But, in this era of constant change, we ourselves may help give it its first viable financial form. We may sense that people want computers in their homes as well as their offices or want to walk around all day with music plugged into their ears or would like to spend three air-conditioned hours in a faraway galaxy, battling with light-swords against evil and tyranny.

Making a market, then, is not as I thought when I originally wrote this book, simply a matter of making an ad. It is also the making of a product. And it is the making of a conduit through which that product can be obtained by the people whom you have made desire it more than an equivalent sum of their money. This book outwardly talks about the sentences that make up the primary appeal of that product to that market. But its true and deeper message is found when it is interpreted as a market-diviner, and a market-intensifier. In other words, its message will show you how to find your dream market, and how to drive it into a national feeding frenzy.

And I have also made an equally important discovery upon reviewing this book since it was first published. The examples in its pages have grown slightly older, but the principles that these examples manifest are timeless. For example, if I were writing this book today, its examples would show more appreciation of feminism, environmental awareness, health and fitness strivingeven the blessed sexual revolution. They would be more open and more frank than they could have been then.

All this is for the goodbut this book is not about reviving todays ads, but creating from scratch tomorrows winners! This book is about avoiding the need for copying or imitating another product or advertisement. So todays examples are as outdated as those of two decades ago. This book is about what happens next, and the fundamental rules of making a fortune out of slightly redirecting that tomorrow.