1. Introduction

2. Maxwell Sackheim
    2.1 Personal Profile
    2.2 Book-of-Month Club and Negative Option Plan

3. Victor O. Schwab
    3.1 Personal Profile
    3.2 Copywriting Formula and Copy Research

4. Lester Wunderman
    4.1 Personal Profile
    4.2 Gold Boxes and Insert Cards--New Direct Marketing Media Techniques

Bibliography

2. Maxwell Sackheim (September 1890-December 2, 1982)
2.1 Personal Profile
     Maxwell Byron Sackheim was born in 1890 in Kovna, Russia, but he came to the United States at an early age with his family. As a little boy, Sackheim did not like school at all; only sports could attract his attention. However, he went through a change and began to appreciate good reading and writing, after he received a set of Shakespeare’s works from his mother on his 16th birthday (Danna, 1994).

     Sackheim started his career in advertising as an office and errand boy at the Long-Critchfield agency in Chicago. While working at the Long-Critchfield, an agency aimed at agricultural markets, Sackheim had a chance to learn how to write advertising copy. His wrote first advertising copy in 1906 for Kendall Company’s Spavin Cure product for saving horses. Soon he also did some copywriting of mail-order advertising for farm products such as horse collars, manure spreaders, incubators and stump pullers.

     Sackheim worked as an assistant advertising manager at Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1913, then moved to J. Walter Thompson in 1914, and Ruthrauff and Ryan in 1915, where he met his partner of Sackheim and Scherman advertising agency, Harry Scherman.

     Sackheim joined Brown Fence and Wire Company in Cleveland, Ohio as advertising manager, after Harry Scherman and he sold their agency. Sackheim stayed in Brown Fence and Wire until 1944 and became president. He founded his own agency, Maxwell Sackheim and Company, in 1945, a year after he moved back to New York. Sackheim retired to Clearwater, Florida in 1960 and died in 1982 at the age of 92.

2.2 Book-of-the-Month Club and Negative Option Plan
     Maxwell Sackheim was a creative thinker who invented many successful advertising concepts in direct response advertising history. Two of his best- known unique selling propositions are the "Book-of-the-Month Club" and the "Negative Option Plan."

     The "Book-of-the-Month Club" was derived from Little Leather Library, developed by Sackheim and his partner Harry Scherman in 1914. They offered a set of 30 imitation leather-bound books at a price of $2.98 by mail. In the headline of an ad, it said "SEND NO MONEY! " And they sold 40 million books by mail in 3 years. In 1926, they formed Book-of-the-Month Club to sell books on a subscription basis. However, the business was not doing very well in its infancy; many books were returned or canceled. The partners decided to change the plan, and the "negative option plan" came into play. In his book Billion Dollar Marketing, Sackheim mentioned that the "negative option plan" was started with one thought in mind, "that of removing resistance on the part of the prospect to order merchandise which he wanted but which through normal delay, inertia or whatever you want to call it, was put off until eventually the purchase was missed entirely" (Sackheim, 1995). Thus, they decided that they should notify subscribers in advance about the book selected, giving them a detailed description of it and allowing them two weeks to reply. If subscribers did not tell them "No" within two weeks, they would presume that subscribers were saying "Yes" and sent out the book. This idea has built many mail-order companies into multimillion enterprises.

3. Victor O. Schwab (1898-March 22, 1980 )
3.1 Personal Profile
     Schwab was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1898, son of Letitia Cochrane and Albert James Schwab. Victor Schwab once said that he was born a "rathskeller guy," referring to the German community in which his family lived (Spielvogel, 1958). In his youth, Schwab dropped out of high school and tried clerical and stenographic work. He became a typist and learned to take shorthand. In his 1962 book, Schwab described his early career attempts as "flat, stale and unprofitable vocations" (Schwab, 1962; Danna, 1994).

     At the age 19, Schwab enrolled in Columbia University as a night student, where he met Maxwell Sackheim and his life was changed. At that time Sackheim was a copy chief with Ruthrauff and Ryan, a leading mail-order advertising agency of the day. Because Schwab could take shorthand, he was hired by Sackheim as his private secretary. Sackheim was highly skilled in writing mail-order advertising copy and also had worked in the agency specializing in mail-order advertising; as Schwab worked with him, he soon "developed into a wonderful mail-order copywriter" (Sackheim, 1975).

     In 1928, Schwab and his partner Robert Beatty took over the Sackheim and Scherman agency when Scherman and Sackheim decided to give it up. As Sackheim recalled in his book, My First 65 Years, "The boys had no money, but Scherman and I, anxious to get into our respective new enterprises, turned the agency over to them at a price representing only the actual book value of the business, payable over a period of years" (Sackheim, 1975). The agency later was renamed Schwab and Beatty. Schwab left the agency in 1962 and retired to Torremolinos, Spain. In 1972 the agency was acquired by Marsteller Inc., which then was bought by Young and Rubicam. Schwab died on March 22, 1980 from the effects of a stroke.

3.2 Copywriting Formula and Copy Research
     Schwab held that "the primary function of words is to sell and that themes that do not move people immediately are not likely to improve with repetition" (Ad age, April 7,1980). The headlines he wrote got to the point and brought the reader to the content of the copy. Such examples as "The Secret of Making People Like You," "67 Reasons Why It Would Have Paid You to Answer Our Ad a Few Months Ago," and "How a New Discovery Made a Plain Girl Beautiful." Schwab was also a man who liked to share his insights with people. In his speech to the New York Newspaper Promotion in 1940, Schwab revealed that mail-order advertising appeared on Sunday papers would be more effective than that of weekday ones. He also mentioned that advertisement placed on the back page of magazines would have better results (New York Times, December 5, 1940).

     In his series of five articles titled "How to Write a Good Advertisement," which appeared in the 1941Printers’ Ink, Schwab introduced a five-step copywriting formula. The first instructed copywriters how to write copy that would attract people’s attention. The second article told copywriters to "show people an advantage" in the content of the copy. The third told copywriters to provide a support statement of "what your product will do for people." The forth article suggested copywriters to convince prospects to "grasp" the product’s benefit. Finally, Schwab instructed copywriters to "ask for action" in the copy (Danna, 1994). In fact, these formula were not Schwab’s original ideas; Clyde Bedell in his book, How to Write Advertising That Sells, had mentioned similar concepts. However, how he put these ideas into practice was original to Schwab, and he later developed these ideas into his own book by the same title, How to Write a Good Advertisement (Danna, 1994). This book was described in 1962 by James D. Woolf as "an event of importance to every advertising man" (Ad age, April 7, 1980).

     Reader’s Digest’s former advertising manager, Walter Weintz, once said that Schwab was "a pioneer in modern copy research" (Weintz, 1987). Schwab was committed to measure the advertising effectiveness versus actual sales by using coupon codes. The agency placed a coupon order form, which contained coupon code, in every advertisement. When the coupon returned, they could track which advertisement it came from. The agency also recorded numbers on ruled cards. These coupon codes were used as a means for the agency to determine results by the headline used and track the effect of copy appeals, layout, and action closings (Schwab, 1942; Danna,1994). Schwab said, "The record of results entered on these ‘case-history ‘ cards is consulted by us for guidance in the preparation of new copy and in the purchase of new space" (Schwab, 1942).

4. Lester Wunderman (1920-- )
4.1 Personal Profile
     Lester Wunderman was born in New York City in 1920. He grew up during the Great Depression. He saw how people in those days lived in panic and wept from fear as they lost their jobs and savings. That was also a point of his life where he "developed a different way of looking at the world" (Wunderman, 1997).

     Wunderman grew up in a poor family. His family often moved around in order that they could get many month’s free rent. Because apartments were hard to rent out during the Depression, many apartment landlords offered one or more month’s free rent to attract tenants and increase the renting rates. According to Wunderman, that was how he "first learned about giving premiums in exchange for a long-term commitment to purchase, knowledge that would eventually create billions of dollars of profitable advertising" (Wunderman,1997). After Wunderman graduated from college in 1937, he found a job as an office boy with Herman Steinberg’s collection agency, where he developed a view of direct marketing, on Madison Avenue. Wunderman joined Maxwell Sackheim and Company in 1947, because Sackheim told him, as Wunderman recalled in Being Direct, that " he would teach [Wunderman] about the mail-order advertising business as nobody else could and [Wunderman] would learn how to make advertising pay" from him (Wunderman, 1997).

     Wunderman left Maxwell Sackheim agency in 1958 and formed Wunderman, Ricotta and Kline, Inc. (WR&K) with his bother Irving, Ed Ricotta and Harry Kline. It quickly became one of the leading direct response agencies with Columbia Record Club and Time-Life Books as their first clients (Direct Marketing, May 1988). The agency then was merged with Young and Rubicam in 1973, because Wunderman believed that this would be "the best way of advancing the idea of direct marketing" and would "give [WRK] access to [Y& R’s] major clients, which would, in turn, add to the credibility of direct marketing" (Wunderman, 1997). Wunderman, Ricotta and Kline later was renamed Wunderman Cato Johnson, which now is the largest direct marketing organization in the world, with annual billings of more than $1.8 billion and 69 offices in 39 countries (Mill Hollow Corporation, January 26, 1998).

4.2 Insert Cards and Gold Boxes--New Direct Marketing Media techniques
     Wunderman developed two notably techniques of direct marketing: insert cards and gold boxes for the Columbia LP Record Club. In order to increase the number of new members for Columbia Record Club, Wunderman felt that conventional media were not sufficient; they had to exploit new channels to reach more people. They thus made extensive use of magazines by inserting post-paid card into magazines. They then discovered dramatic success with the four-page, full-color card-stock ads inserted in the center of TV Guide, which at the time America’s fastest-growing magazine. TV Guide was Columbia’s most profitable medium. Since then it also has become the most popular media buy in direct marketing (Wunderman, 1997; Direct Marketing, May 1988).

     In 1977, Wunderman developed another idea called "Gold Box" for Columbia Record Club. The idea was originated as support advertising, demonstrating that people would subscribe after viewing the television commercials. What they did was to print a yellow bar (which looked like a design element)---gold box---at the bottom of the coupon. The commercial ran concurrently and revealed where the "gold box" was in print ads. People who saw the commercial would get an additional free record of their choice if they sent back the membership application with the box filled. In doing so, the agency could measure how many people who took actions were motivated by the television commercial. Also, the "Gold Box had made the reader/viewer part of an interactive advertising system" (Wunderman, 1997; Direct Marketing, May 1988).

Bibliography

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