A Conversation With
Million-Dollar Copywriter
ARTHUR JOHNSON

Arthur, it's Clayton.

I hope it's in a good context.

That's nice to hear.

From what I hear, you and I are as unalike as night and day.

I'm a high school dropout. You graduated Swarthmore with highest honors and have a graduate degree in English from Oxford.

That was what I wanted to be when I was in school. Unfortunately, poets are not remunerated the way a lot of businessmen are.

I sort of had this fantasy that I would be this — it was sort of, I guess, the academic equivalent of wanting to be a rock star.

Yes. My grandfather, who I dearly love and I was very close to, was the Chairman of the Board of Christian Education at the Presbyterian Church in the United States. And he actually developed the Sunday School curriculum that a lot of kids who went to Sunday School in the 50's and 60's grew up with, among other things. He was a great guy. I learned a whole lot from him about people.

No kidding? You're a "preacher's kid." (Laughter)

(Laughter) That's what they say, yeah.

Well, you learn to make friends.

It kind of found me. When I was finishing up at Oxford — going to Oxford was just sort of like a vacation from having to make any career decisions. It was terrific. And towards the end of my time at Oxford, I suddenly realized I'm gonna have this degree, and I either have to go into academia or find something else to do, because if I study any more I'm gonna be unemployable.

So I kind of asked around with my friends, what do English majors do if they don't want to go into academia? And I very much did not want to go into academia, because I discovered the higher up you get, the more politics there are; and politics are something that has never interested me in the slightest.

The answer I kept on getting was "investment banker." And Morgan Guaranty was actually recruiting at Oxford at the time. When I came back to the United States, I was all set to go to New York and do another interview with them, and hopefully get started as an investment banker, and fate kind of stepped in.

I wandered into a bar in Philadelphia under strange circumstances, a bar I've never been to before or since, and I ran into an old friend from high school who was a sculptor at the Franklin Mint. I hadn't seen her in years, and she asked me what I was gonna be doing with my life, and I said I was gonna be an investment banker. And she looked at me and said, "Yeah, you? Get outta here."

She told me that she was actually making money as a sculptor at the Franklin Mint, and didn't I always want to be a writer? And I said yeah, and she said, "Well they pay writers too," and did I have a resume? Of course I did.

One thing led to another, and before I knew it I was hired on as a copywriter at the Franklin Mint. I had every intention of only doing it for a few months until I had enough money to buy a car, rent an apartment, move to New York, and become an investment banker. But of course that never happened.

When was this?

This was in 1976. This was the year of the Bicentennial. I might add, as soon as I signed on at the Franklin Mint, the medallic business went into the dumpster because it had been saturated by all the Bicentennial mailings. And the Franklin Mint did not come out of its funk for about three years. So those were interesting times to be there.

They still did a lot of medallics in the first couple of years I was there, and then they gradually transitioned into porcelain and other kinds of collectibles from there.

By about 1981, I had been working as a copywriter at the Franklin Mint for as long as I wanted to, and I almost left. The last piece I wrote before I stopped being a copywriter there was something which I am still pretty proud of. It was for the Wyatt Earp gun replica; it was a non-firing replica of the gun that Wyatt Earp used in the shootout at the O.K. Corral. And I think that sucker was promoting until at least 2001.

I was underwhelmed. I started out writing the little pamphlets that come with the medals that you receive. The pamphlets try to keep up your interest in the collection that you've subscribed to.

So I wrote a lot about American history and other things that were depicted on medals. Then they upgraded me to writing follow-on promotions for promotions that had already been written by other copywriters.

That was fascinating training actually, because the Franklin Mint had a huge copywriting staff at that time — or at least to me it seemed like a huge copywriting staff — about 10-12 people. And my job as the juniorest of juniors — I was probably the youngest copywriter there by about 20 years — there was one guy that was 10 years older than me, but the rest were about 20 years older than me — and my job was, if they sold an etching, my job was to sell etchings two, three and four to the audience that bought etching number one. And that meant I had to write it in the same style as the guy who wrote the promotion for etching number one.

So I learned how to study 11 different copywriters with very different styles, and I learned how to sound like them. And it turned out to be pretty good training, because you really had to take notice of the niceties of each man's style.

Absolutely. Back then, Franklin Mint ex-employees used to call Franklin Mint the P & G of high-ticket direct response. It was a terrific experience.

At that time, Franklin Mint was an international corporation. When I came there, they had this international headquarters in London, and they folded that into the headquarters in Franklin Center. So there were people from all over the world — Japan, Germany, Australia, England, and France — all running around at the Franklin Mint. Apart from anything else, they were really fun people, and we had a really good time. But also, you just learned so many things about other marketing disciplines from elsewhere in the world.

Oh, yeah. If you want to ask what my single greatest influence as a copywriter is, it must be those ads in the backs of comic books in the 50's. I loved those ads for sea monkeys and Uncle Miltie's Ant Farm. And if you take a look at that sea monkey's ad, it really holds up. It's a great ad, and it's so much fun.

And there's stuff like the little alligators, and the real monkey that could fit into a teacup. And of course, Charles Atlas.

Sure, absolutely. That's one of the early areas of direct response, and not many people actually talk about that. That's really cool. I hadn't thought about those ads in years.

And I think they're still wonderful. They're a whole lot more fun than a lot of the ads that people mention — for example, "They laughed when I sat down at the piano." That's a wonderful ad, but it's not as much fun as the sea monkeys.

So after a bunch of years at Franklin Mint, you became V.P. of two divisions there.

Yes. I was about to quit because I was really tired of writing collectible copy. They put me in product development, and then the Franklin Mint got acquired in 1985. Up until then it had been a division of Warner, and Warner sold it to a couple that took it private.

They promoted me to V.P.; they fired a lot of other people. And they put me in charge of the female collectibles division, which at that point was the turkey division; it wasn't doing anything. And I increased their sales through a combination of dumb luck and some skill, and the fact that we had nowhere to go but up.

I increased their sales by about 40% in one year. Then they fired the guy in charge of male collectibles. That's a funny story, by the way, because the guy they fired is now the CEO of QVC Network and still a really good friend of mine.

But they fired that guy, and they hired another guy, and then they fired him, and then they put me in charge of male collectibles. And I always joke to Doug — the CEO of QVC — that I thought I was lucky not to get fired.

But that was certainly the best career move Doug ever made.

So how long did you stay on as V.P.?

I left in 1988, and that was probably the only courageous business decision I ever made.

You were making real good money, obviously.

Yes, I was making very good money. When I quit, I thought I had a pretty lucrative contract lined up; and it turned out, about 10 days before my last day at the Mint, that deal fell through. And so my going away party, I had absolutely no prospects whatsoever.

Well, I had been at Franklin Mint for 12 years, and I really loved working with the creative people, not just the advertising creative people but also all the artists, and sculptors, and all those other kinds of crazy people who used to work there. But the further up I got in the organization, the more it just became going to meetings, and infighting, and dealing with personalities, and that just did not appeal to me at all.

I wanted to do something more creative, so that's why I left. Actually, I might have gone onto another corporation if my freelance career hadn't taken off in a big way almost immediately, thanks to another couple of lucky coincidences of people calling me on the phone.

After I left the Mint, my wife and I just took off in the car for two weeks and drove across the country. We went to all these places I'd always wanted to go to. We went to Wall Drug, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone Park, Niagara Falls, and Cooperstown. And I came back, and there were three phone calls on my machine, and I never looked back.

Great. Who was your first freelance package for?

My first freelance package was actually back when I was at the Mint; that was in the early 80's. A lot of copywriters do freelance jobs on the side, and I was no different.

It happened to be for a magazine called Commentary, which is a small very intellectual kind of publication. By a funny coincidence, about that time there was another gentleman working for Commentary. Actually, I don't know if he was working for Commentary at the time, but it was about that time, maybe a few years earlier. His name was Martin Edelston. (Laughter)

I don't even think that Marty knows this, that I actually wrote the control for Commentary in the early 80's.

So after you left Franklin, you immediately began freelancing. What kinds of companies were they? Were they in the newsletter industry, periodicals, books or what?

Funny enough, the last thing I wanted to do when I went out on my own was to go into more collectibles, and of course that's what I wound up doing.

A fellow named Jeff McKinnon, a really good man, was starting up a doll company, and he wanted help in product development. He offered me a pretty good piece of the action, and I had no other business, so who was I to say no to this?

But I was determined not to be a copywriter; I wanted to be a product developer. So for about the next nine years I didn't really write that much copy. I started doing it because I love to write, and some people asked me, and it was an opportunity to make some quick cash.

The product development business tends to have a much longer turnaround time before you actually see royalties. So in the late 80's and early 90's I did a little bit of copywriting — not a whole lot. I did some very upscale copywriting for a fellow who was selling a database to the trust departments at banks.

I did some work for Meredith, including what is, I believe, still the control for Ladies' Home Journal, although it's been modified many times since.

On one of these upscale financial jobs I ran into a very gifted designer named David Wise, who was to become an enormously good friend to me. He helped me incredibly in getting newsletter and magazine clients for my business, which is primarily what my business is now.

Yes, he did, and it's the funniest thing. I got a call from him one day, and I guess by then we had done just a few jobs together — a couple of jobs for Meredith and maybe a job for Oxmoor House — mostly about women's stuff, cooking, and stuff like that. I got a call from him saying, "You do financial, don't you?" And I said, "Well, I guess." And he said, "Good. You'll be getting a call from somebody at Agora."

And it was someone at Agora who wanted me to promote a newsletter for Doug Casey. And I had never written a magalog before; I didn't tell them that. But I had never written a magalog before, so I just kind of sat down and wrote for three weeks.

And at the end of it, I gave it to Dave, and I said, "Do you think it'll work?" He said, "Yeah, I think it will." And I sent it to Agora, and the contact at Agora said, "Yeah, I think this is our next control."

And then about a month later I got another call from David saying, "You do health, don't you?" He said, "Say yes." I said, "Yes, I do health." (Laughter)

It was a health package for Agora, which also became a control.

And so you might say that David Wise bamboozled me into becoming a successful financial and health copywriter.

I've been out of this market for several years working exclusively with a single client — and I came back in, and all I heard was "Arthur this" and "Arthur that."

So in the last few years, you've really taken the health and financial industries by storm.

As my wife says, "An overnight sensation after 30 years." (Laughter)

Yeah. (Laughter) Other than sea monkeys, what would you attribute that success to?

First of all, I think it's because one strength I have is that I really truly enjoy writing. I love to write; I love the act of writing. I love writing a good sentence. In fact, it's a little bit of a fault of mine. I probably like writing an entertaining sentence better than I like selling the product. But 30 years of life in marketing and product development pretty much beat into me the need to sell a product.

I think that I'm able to sell products in a more entertaining way than a lot of other people are. I think that being entertaining while you are selling is a big key to success in a very crowded marketplace these days, because you really have to buy people's attention.

You can buy people's attention in several ways. One is that you can offer them a great benefit. The problem with offering great benefits these days is that there is so much stuff out there offering totally unbelievable benefits — especially on the internet. And people have gotten burned too often. This had eroded the credibility of traditional benefit-oriented selling. So you really have to be not only benefit-oriented, but you have to be very entertaining.

I think the second reason that I credit is the discipline that I learned when I was in academia. I joke to our friend John Finn that writing a magalog isn't all that different from writing a term paper. You take notes for two weeks, you write for two weeks, and at the end of it you've got a footnoted product.

How many hours a day do you work, I mean actual writing?

Actual writing, probably a maximum of about five hours. After that, my back gives out. And even if my back didn't give out, my brain would give out. I think probably about four to five hours is optimum for me. I find that it's really in hour four that you really start writing the good stuff, and in hour five you continue on that flight path. If you write much beyond that, you can get a little inebriated with your own facility and start writing stuff that really isn't that good, at least that's what I find.

Is there a time of day that works best for you for writing?

Yes, I'm definitely not a morning person. Being married and everything means that I can't keep the hours that I did when I was in school. When I was in school — I'm a very light sleeper, and so I used to do all my studying after about 8:00 or 9:00 when things would start to quiet down. And then I would actually go to sleep at about 5:00 in the morning. And everybody knows that on a college campus, things are pretty quiet between 5:00 in the morning and noon, which is perfect for sleeping. Then I'd wake up at noon and go to my classes, and that really agreed with me. Now I can't do that in business, so I work until about 7:00 in the evening.

I get up, I work out for at least an hour, I have a nice long leisurely breakfast, and I try to read something uplifting while I'm having breakfast. And that's actually important for the writing, too, is to read good stuff before you start writing.

What kinds of things do you read?

I tend to read stuff that is either historically really interesting or that is beautifully written, and it's very often fiction. I do that, number one, because I don't want to be thinking about my work; I don't want to be thinking about advertising. I want the right half of my brain to be able to take a little rest from that, and I want to be able to soak up other kinds of writing that is not advertising, which is very important to me.

From what you said, it's pretty easy to draw the conclusion that you're great at soaking up other writers' styles, picking up little phrases — maybe not the phrases themselves, but the mood in various types of writing, and your ability to emulate.

Yes, I'm kind of an unconscious mimic that way. I think it's just part of my makeup that I'm a pretty good parakeet. And so I have to be careful sometimes about what I'm reading. And I often try to key what I'm reading to what I'm writing.

For example, when I was writing my control for Dr. Douglass' Real Health, he's got a very wry sense of humor, and I really wanted to get that into the promotion. His whole thing is that he's such a skeptic, and he takes real pleasure in being a skeptic. And I didn't want to make him sound like he was coming down hard on people or anything, so while I was writing that I was reading books by P.J. O'Rourke.

Does she work in a similar field or is she in another field?

No, she works in a similar field. She does different kinds of writing than I do, but she works in a similar field, and we share some clients too, but she's got her jobs and I've got my jobs.

We launched Health & Healing together back in the 90's.

Oh, wow

That's how we met. So she's a brutal critter.

Yeah, well that's what you need, don't you?

Yeah, you really do.

(Laughter) Oh, that's shattering.

That's a good question. I obviously think that the headlines and cover are the most important elements. Strangely, I try not to think about them in most cases until the last few days that I'm working on the project. So I guess you could say that I work on those for a month for a magalog.

What I like to do is start out by writing the stuff that is the least important, or maybe has middling importance. And then only in the last few days do I tackle the stuff like the introduction, headlines, and that kind of stuff. So in that way, I guess you could say that I think those are very important.

Even more important, though, than any headlines or words, I think, is the whole concept of the promotion and the strategy behind it. You really have to know what you want to do before you start putting pen to paper. You want to know what your strategic goals are.

If you can figure out all the substantial points you want to make, then you will not get obsessed about style as long as you can get them down, and you won't have that much writer's block. I'm a firm believer that writer's block comes from not having anything to say. If you have something to say, you'll be able to say it.

I really owe that to David Wise who has been my art director on so many projects. He's actually got a very good head for copy. And I should have mentioned him as someone that I will often show the copy to, obviously before I show it to a client.

Yeah, there are not too many designers that I would allow to do that, because some designers don't have that kind of thought process, but David does. Some years ago when I was pestering David about what the headlines ought to be and trying to brainstorm with him, he said, "Why are you worrying about this at this point? You should be worrying about that in two weeks."

And I said, "Really?" He said, "Yeah." And I don't know if he was just trying to get me off the phone or not, but I took him seriously, and I tried it, and it worked like crazy. It was great. Once I discovered that I didn't have to write the headlines before I actually wrote the unimportant stuff, it was so liberating.

I've written about this in our e-zine several times, but one of the pieces that you've done that I admire the most is your current control for Dr. Douglass.

One of the reasons I admire it so much is it came along at a perfect time in the marketplace, when consumers had been just absolutely bombarded with all kinds of outrageous health claims for the last — well, since 1990, when we launched Whitaker.

I was kind of forced into it because Dr. Douglass had come to Agora from a different publisher, and so he had all of these newsletters that I could look at as deep background, but I couldn't use them to put together premiums or anything.

So all I really had to sell — it was a launch essentially — and all I really had to sell was based on reading his books and talking to him.

After I had done that, I kind of said, "You know, I don't really see any new miracle cures here." And then I said to myself, "What do I really like about this guy?" And I said, "I guess what I really like about this guy, that he's got a really good sense of humor. He's a cantankerous guy, but he makes it appealing, and he's got a really healthy skepticism about everything." If Health & Healing is alternative medicine, Dr. Douglass, I think, is contrary in medicine.

And I said, "How can I make this appealing?" Instead of making him sound like some Old Testament prophet, what if I made him sound like Will Rogers, this lovable guy who gives you this disarming smile and cracks a joke about something, and you realize that's a much better way to demolish what you're opposing? And when I discovered that, then subtly all of my own frustrations with everything I'd read in alternative and mainstream medicine for the last 10 years came pouring out. So in a way I was just venting.

That is so important. That is one of the things that I'm always trying to do when I approach a package, is to get inside the emotions of my prospective audience, and particularly with reference to how they feel about everything — their family, the political issues of the day, and how they feel about all the junk mail they're getting in the mailbox.

I really want to get behind that and find out what they're frustrated about, what they're afraid of, what gives them joy, and what gives them pride. And then I try to become them. And I think part of that came from writing collectible copy.

There's a lot of bad collectible copy out there; it's really easy to write bad collectible copy. It's very formulaic, and I'm sure somebody could create a computer program to write the collectible copy you mostly see in Reader's Digest and TV Guide these days. But to write really good collectible copy, you're writing about something that doesn't really have any benefit at all.

So all you've got to go on are emotions.

So many copywriters today begin by reading books on how you have to focus on benefits throughout all of your copy. I came up through the fundraising area.

And I didn't have a product. I had no benefit. So what I had to do early on was to learn to focus instead on emotions.

Well, the first thing I try to do is get a very good handle on what the product is, and what really differentiates it from everything else out there in the marketplace.

Now if it's a publication, that is a lot more difficult than if you've got a physical product. I think writing for "hard products" like supplements or collectibles or something like that is easier in a lot of ways because you really know what the product is, it's very defined.

When it's a publication, it's a lot less defined, and you are gonna define it in some ways. But I start out by trying to figure out, if it's a brand new product, how it's gonna differentiate itself from everything else in the marketplace. If it's an established product, what made it so successful, and why is it sufficiently unsuccessful for people to want to hire me to promote it. First I try to get the context, and that takes a day or two.

And then I spend about a day or two studying the control, if there is one, and other current controls in the marketplace to figure out what I have to be better than. I take that really seriously; I think you really have to do your homework in that particular area.

Even if you despise the current control, which is easy to do if you're a successful copywriter, and we're all arrogant or we wouldn't be copywriters. We wouldn't have the guts to put a word down on a word processor. But you have to think of the control as the Bible, and you have to think, "Okay, this must be working," and in each case, you've got to figure out what you can say that will top that.

And then you really have to do a lot of research on the product itself, and you have to find out more about the product than even the client knows, and that's what takes the bulk of the time and preparation.

And after I've done all that, then I sit back and try to construct the mind and emotions of the audience in myself. It's almost like a method acting approach. You really want to feel their pain and what they do. That's how you start. Then, and only then, can you start talking to them.

Well, it helps to know a lot of people. And I think that's one of the reasons you can get better and better the older and older you get, because you've met more and more people, and you have a wider experience with a wider range of people.

Hopefully you get to learn about these people through your everyday life. And every time you're writing about somebody, one of the things I do when I'm trying to get into the mind of the prospect is to say, "Who do I know that most resembles this prospect, and how would I talk to them?"

And if I'm lucky, it's a loved one with whom I do talk, and with whom I have a lot of empathy, because you have to love the prospect too. And if it isn't, then you have to fall back on things like books and movies and other ways of getting to know people that are not quite as satisfactory.

There's a great movie called What Women Want with Mel Gibson where he's an ad executive, and he was trying to get an account.

And his daughter comes home, and he's wearing pantyhose as a way to get in touch with female customers.

I love that movie. My other favorite one on advertising is called Crazy People, with an ad exec who gets put in a mental institution, and before you know it he's got all the inmates writing copy.

I've been thinking a lot about this. The clients that I write the best copy for are the clients that "adopt" me and embrace me the most. They sort of treat me as if I'm a member of their team, and introduce me to everybody else on the team, and ask me if there's anything else I'd like to know about the product, and trust me to make a contribution.

That sounds awfully vague, but I think the clients I can do the least for are the clients that hold me at arm's length, and give me a contact, and that is the only person I talk to, and it's often somebody who is not very senior. And then you are really only gonna be as effective as your contact enables you to be.

And if the contact is not a senior talent in the company, then you are really crippled. So I think that if you're a client and you want your copywriter to write the best thing possible, introduce him or her to as many senior-level people as possible — I should say senior-level people who actually have an influence on the creative decision-making in the company.

I hesitate to say this, because unless you're a really strong copywriter, that can totally overwhelm you. You're so overwhelmed by what all these important people want, that you don't even think about what the prospects want. But when you get up to our level, I think it's really important that you are able to talk to these people, to these decision-makers.

They're fantastic at it to a fault.

My first few jobs with Boardroom, I went through a lot of pain just getting to know what it was that Marty wanted out of a package.

After a few go-arounds, when I was able to figure out what he wanted, and he was able to figure out that I was gonna sell a lot of products for them, we got along like a house on fire, and now it's a great relationship. Now they'll share anything with me, and they're only too anxious to help me figure out how to home in on it.

One of the great moments in working with Marty, for me, was on my second job for Boardroom — this was probably in the early to mid 90's — and I needed to ask Marty a question. I called him up, he gets on the phone, and he says, "What did I do wrong now?"

He was so vulnerable and so friendly, and it was really easy to work things out with him because of that attitude.

Yeah, it is. I should say my first three jobs were painful, but they were also very successful, and we did work things out. But I was new to them, and they were new to me, so we had to figure each other out.

I think the most common blunder is telling people stuff they already know. I think that if you approach advertising these days from a strictly classic advertising background, you're probably not gonna be interesting enough for people to read. I think the threshold of boredom is a lot lower these days.

When I open my mailbox and see stuff that looks like stuff I've seen before, and it's saying stuff that I've heard before, into the wastebasket it goes. I think these days, sin number one is to be boring. Sin number two is to not be credible. But if I had to choose between credibility and interest, I'd choose interest any day.

Yeah, I think a lot of packages are overwritten. In general, I see a lot of really good writing out there, but the stuff that irks me is when — suppose a package actually has a headline that really grabs me and is saying something different. If I open up a spread and the copy doesn't move real quickly, they lose me.

I think that particularly when people are writing long-format copy — also in short-format copy, but especially in long-format copy — I think a lot of copywriters feel that they're writing by the pound, and that they have to plod through a lot of details in order to fill out this enormous magalog. And I think that if you're doing it right, the package should be so tight that there's not even room to take out a sentence without it losing something, and I don't see a lot of copy that's written that way these days.

Yes. It started when I was in the copy department at the Franklin Mint. I actually had some opportunities to edit people, but I was so young at that point that I was a horrible editor.

When I went onto the product side, and writers had to write stuff for me, I really learned to look at the big picture, and I really learned to work with the copywriter to help them write better copy for my product. I guess that was a starting point.

And then in the 90's when I went on board with this collectible doll venture, which was a startup, I had it specified in my contract that I would not be expected to write copy. I wanted to be a more important player than a copywriter. Then I was very much mentoring every copywriter that I worked with to try to dig down into the essence of this doll we were talking about, which is a very emotional kind of selling.

And then for a long time I wasn't doing it — after about 1997, when my career in writing for magazines and newsletters and other publications really took off. I was not doing that much, but I've started doing it again just very recently. I find it kind of rewarding. When it works, it's even more fun than writing your own copy, because you get to just write the fun stuff.

Two words: John Finn.

I may be great at selling other people's stuff, but I'm not nearly as good at selling myself as John Finn is.

I have known John for a few years now. When he approached me, the very thought of having an agent didn't appeal to me. One of the things that I've been really blessed with is that I've never really had to solicit work. It's always come to me.

So when John Finn approached me and said, "I want to be your agent," I was a little skeptical, but I went ahead with it because he seemed to know a lot of interesting and very successful people like you. Almost immediately my income increased, and it's had a ripple effect on the rest of my business too.