Ron Lynch: Direct Response Lessons From Selling $3 Billion Of Product On TV And How To Use Them To Grow Your Business

Technology is almost analogous with improvement, and that means that what’s effective yesterday can still make an impact today. Dubbed as a unique creative force in the marketing space, Founder of Big Baby Agency, Ron Lynch, takes growing businesses through TV infomercials to the next level.

Ron has worked with household brands in the industry and has sold over $3 billion worth of products with infomercials. This episode covers detailed strategies and technicalities to making an effective infomercial for today’s consumers.

Some Topics We Discussed Include:

• How Ron Lynch got into the business
• The difference of infomercials and short forms
• What makes an effective infomercial
• Writing a show from scratch
• Benefits of testimonials
• Techniques for getting the most effective testimonials
• The difference of selling to men and women
• The changes that the internet brought to sales
• BigBaby’s client profile

To learn more about Ron Lynch and how infomercials can grow your business, visit www.BigBabyAgency.com.

About The Guest: Ron Lynch

His combined background as a retail operations expert and a filmmaker made direct response marketing the obvious landing pad for his passions. He has experienced the joy, pain and reward of generating over three billion dollars in retail revenue for his clients and partners.

The experience he has in building real brands through direct response marketing venues is far-reaching and robust.  Ron specializes in the launch of innovative products including housewares, skincare, natural medicine, pharma, hardware, pain relief, technology, entertainment IP and personal growth IP.

Ron Lynch: Direct Response Lessons From Selling $3 Billion Of Product On TV And How To Use Them To Grow Your Business

Welcome back to my little profit kitchen folks. It is my distinct pleasure to welcome and let you eavesdrop on a conversation I'm going to have with my guest Ron Lynch. Ron has been a friend of mine for a couple years.

I've seen him work. I was dazzled by what he has been able to do. I was lucky to get somebody with Ron's experience and knowledge in direct response TV and more specifically to get on here and talk about direct marketing at the highest levels.

This is the levels of infomercials, where hundreds of thousand dollars are at stake. Ron happens to be a 15-year veteran of the infomercial industry. He has worked on some of the largest brands and campaigns that you've seen along with some of the household products that you see every day.

He has worked with industry greats such as Billy Mays and other folks that you may be familiar with. The last we spoke, I’ll let him correct me if I'm wrong, he is responsible for I believe over $3 billion of sales from the shows that he has created in the direct response TV ads through multiple channels.

Ron is a guy that I met a couple years ago because I read his book Buy Now, I forget what the subtitle was, but like creative ways to get people to buy your stuff, is a different title. I’ll have Ron correct me on that.

What I was amazed by is it gives a breakdown with case studies. How the direct response TV industry works. How to find the source products, great ideas, understand if a product will work well, to understanding how to test using direct response TV and then roll it out into retail.

It was an amazing book that I was fortunate enough to get a hold of him and negotiated an infomercial between one of my clients and Ron and his team.

I got to be on the set the entire time watching Ron work his magic scripting out the show that did air on national television and see how much effort detail and genius went into crafting the message.

I'm excited to bring Ron on the show. Since I know that most of my audience are entrepreneurs and marketing executives and have everything from small to big businesses, but most of you guys are involved in the digital online marketing space to some degree.

I wanted Ron to talk about how the big world of direct response television and show creation can translate to folks selling things online or if they're looking to break into TV and if that makes a good decision for them or not. Without any further ado, Ron Lynch, how are you buddy?

Thanks, what a great introduction, I want to meet that guy.

Yes, that was off the top of my head and it’s from the heart, I enjoyed meeting you the first time I walked on the set with Drew and I loved watching you work.

Coming from a guy like myself, who I've created a lot of offers and done a lot of video sales letters and slaved over the copy. How to create these 20 to 30 minute video sales letters and how much work that took.

It made me appreciate when I watched you directing Drew’s show how important language, how important body language was, how important all the little aspects were.

I knew that one day look I am going to sit down and tap into your expertise and find out how I and other people can do what we were doing better. Thanks again for being on the show.

Sure, thanks for having me and I’ve gone through your other podcast. I got to say I’m honored to be in this collection of folks you have. If this is the only blog you’ve read from Brad, you need to go follow to the rest of them because there is a wealth of information at Bacon Wrapped Business.

I appreciate that. Let’s get a bit more back story to you. I want it to come from you like the experience level that you’ve got. Break it down, how did you get started in the business?

I have a weird background that naturally drove me to this place. When I was in college, I was an ambitious person and I got my first patent for a product. That was an exercise product, when I was in college and wanted to make an infomercial.

I had a job in a grocery store, I was a grocery store manager. Eventually I became chief operating officer in that grocery chain and learned brick and mortar, but I always had this desire to want to advertise.

The interesting thing about the grocery businesses is that it is narrow margin business, so you have to learn how to make money in the last 1%. You have to learn how to sell. I learned all of the things of P&L and business mechanics from that industry.

When I jumped into making television commercials and infomercial specifically years ago, I have that kind of knowledge inside of me, I also had a background in filmmaking. I often tell people, “I was a failed child actor.”

Did you have that actual spot or something on TV?

Yes, my first job, I was hired by Robert Altman. I played a role on the Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which nobody probably saw.

It was made for TV CBS version of the Herman Wouk story of the Caine Mutiny Court-Martial which is a play that Herman Wouk wrote. It was released on TV about the same time as the Oliver North stuff was going on.

It was interesting that’s why Altman made the film was that it related much topically to the Oliver North scenario. Out of that I ended up getting the sad cards.

My first audition I got a job and got a sad card and then I went on to make another thirteen movies with little tiny bit roles, but I always stayed on as a crew member as a PA and learned how to make films.

Here was the perfect storm of a filmmaking and a retail background. You put those two things together and you landed infomercials. That is how I got started. A friend of mine known in that agency.

I have written a movie and auctioned it to somebody and he said, “You wrote a movie, could you write a TV commercial?” I said, “Sure,” and I did. I wrote his commercial for Space Bag and it worked well, so I’ve changed careers.

I became a creative director in ad agency and went after making infomercials for the next succeeding years. It’s been a very fun and rewarding career.

Tell me about some of the other infomercials you've worked on for other folks’ frame of reference, as I said you worked with Billy Mays, right?

Yes, I worked with Billy Mays, I launched Orange Glo with him. I had done a lot of other background spots with Billy as well from the creative side.

I have spent a lot of time with him. People think of him as being a pitchman. He is a good creative, he had good ideas about offer and good ideas about how to make big demos on TV exciting.

He helped me a lot with one of my first hit shows called the Total Trolley which was a convertible ladder, it was a stepladder. A four-wheeled furniture dolly, and a hand truck with one new tool. It was a tool that was built for women.

It’s a unique category and we came up with incredible demos for that show. It won the infomercial of the year ERA, Electronic Retailers Association, in our industry which was gratified and we sold a lot of stepladders.

Total Trolley was one of my first shows. I worked with Kevin Harrington and Shawn Fay on the FlavorWave Deluxe Oven which you probably seen it on TV, it’s kind of a glass dome oven, it almost looks like something you’d store a cake in and infrared bread oven.

I went on to do a SmartWare which was the first flexible silicone bakeware sold on television that was successful, four or five people had tried it and we figured out how to do it. That was exciting.

Light Relief which just came off the air after 14 years on the air with Robert Wagner, it’s infrared pain relief device.

You work on that? That was yours?

I created that show and have the design patent on that product. That was cool to be involved with and then that segued into a lot of larger companies’ products. People found out about us.

We ended up working with companies like Johnson & Johnson and SC Johnson Wax and Coleman. I probably done 300 shows, 100 long form infomercials, 200 short form infomercials and strategy for a bunch of companies as well on space.

Speaking to readers out there, this is why you should pay close attention. Ron has worked on some of the biggest brands as well as launching things like the Light Relief, like the Total Trolley. These companies don't have $100 million in marketing budgets.

When you're doing this, you have to make sure you get things right. As I mentioned to you in the past, which it’s kind of funny every time in my business, I’ve come out with an offer and most of my colleagues do who focus on Internet marketing primarily.

We come to this world prewired to make everything all about us. Click To Tweet

We will come out with an offer and spend a $500 or $1,000 test budget on Facebook whatever just to see if it works but give me an idea. When we came out with Drew Canole’s infomercial, you guys did a test. What was the test budget on that typically?

Test budgets for long form infomercials tend to be around $15,000 to $20,000. That’s what we call a two-week test, media is booked Monday through Sunday, that's the media week.

We typically book media through two weeks and you budget up over the weekends, when people are home, when the long form infomercial time is more available. It’s more prevalent and available on the weekends. On top of that, that’s the media budget.

Your show has to be complete; you have to have taped ups done. That’s a few thousand dollars, and you have to have a call center set up. You have to have a filming center set up. Getting to that first weekend with media plus you’re looking at $30,000 to $40,000 expense of just getting into the business.

You know what I thought was eye-opening for me when I read your book was how on many of these products, the goal of the infomercial, most the money does not come from the infomercial sales.

It's getting that into retail, it's launching the brand awareness, getting the traction. It’s thinking about all the multiple channels that you get in that's what the DR TV drives, that's true right?

It's different in every case. I would say that if you wanted to paint it with a broad brush that is exactly right. You have to have a long-term strategy that includes all of those channels.

I do experience people and clients that have something that’s specifically infomercial driven alone. It must survive on infomercial and the website that supports the infomercial.

I have a fair amount of clients that still do that, but what requires there is a super unique USP. You have to have a product that is unique. It has to have the pricing mechanics to be able to support the television, so that's important.

I guess that’s why people come to us because we have the experience to do that in a number of ways that we deal with the things that already have retail distribution and things that have no retail distribution.

Let's talk about pricing mechanics to support television, what do you mean by that?

Television is not cheap, but the supply chain isn’t cheap either. Let’s say you have your product or your widget cost $20 to manufacture.

If you go to the traditional route of retail you take your product to distributor who doubles the price, who takes it to a marketer that doubles the price that takes to the retailer that marks up 30%, so your $20 cost of goods is now in a $99 retail product. That's generally how retail works.

There is a lot of what they call key-stoning involved in retail. People doubling the price to get their markup along the way, the product touches a lot of hands. In direct response, you’re cutting all of that out.

That doesn’t mean that you can drop your priced down to $22, however. TV media becomes your fulfillment channel. You need that money that's between the $20 and the $99 to fund media, to fund fulfillment, to fund your call center, and to pay for all of those things.

You can do that successfully. That's how the business started and people are still doing it that way, but you want to have a four-time markup to a six-time markup if possible on television.

People confused infomercials in short form. They are two different things. They function the same way, but there's one minute and two-minute commercials and the proper nomenclature for that is short form or spots.

Then the infomercial is 5 minutes or 30 minutes, there is a five-minute time out there.

How do you choose five, twenty minutes? Do you typically film a twenty-minute version and then cut out the pieces to create a five-minute version and then test to see what converts better or how do you typically gauge what you should do based on the product?

It works in two directions. If the product needs a lot of explanation and it has the proper pricing mechanics to support them like a 30-minute infomercial. A 30-minute infomercial contains testimonials and it contains a couple of CTAs or calls to action.

If that show is successful, then you’ll go back and you’ll cut that show down to a five-minute which typically involves the CTA and maybe some lengthy testimonials or a bevy of them.

Conversely, you can have short form products, one-minute and two-minute products that work well. If they work, you'll extend that time by adding more testimonials to that and putting them in a five-minute time frame.

The unfortunate thing about five-minute infomercials is that the inventory is not that great in the marketplace. There is not a lot of stations that sell the five-minute format.

It's a secondary sell for everybody whether you start with the one or two minutes, whether you start with a 30, it’s the second tier.

How would you make that decision though? Granted yours might be based on gut reactions, but are there any rules of thumb for should we start with the short or start with the long?

It’s not budget-related, one is pricing mechanics but secondly, it's how long of an explanation does the viewer need to make a decision to buy. If your product is very simple, putting it in one-minute or two-minute spots is ideal.

It may be like you got a new set of toenail clippers. You don't need a twenty-minute infomercial.

That's right. There's a lot of things that are out there that are infomercials that people don’t recognize are infomercials. Eharmony ads are infomercials. They lead you to eHarmony and you purchase your dating package. Charles Schwab infomercial, one of ours GoPro.

GoPro’s are infomercials and there are some like 30 seconds long, they’re buying DR time. The thing that qualifies them to buy that time is some mechanism of consumer collection at the end of the spot.

In GoPro's case, they have a contest that you enter and that appears at the end of every ad and says, “Every day we give away complete suite of our products, you go online to enter.” That's their DR mechanism.

There’s got to be DR mechanism were you’re collecting consumer data directly and that’s what qualifies you for DR time, so it’s a 1-800 number or URL.

To clarify for any of the readers out there who are just getting started in understanding what direct response is. The big difference between traditional commercial that you might see for a branding one is you’re trying to get awareness of the product.

Direct response has a call to action that can be measured, so like Ron is saying, if they know that they've aired this spot at noon on Sunday.

Then they can see their traffic spike leads spike phone calls etc. You can directly attribute that called action to a specific response and you can gauge what your return on investment is, that’s one of the main differences, one has a measurable call to action.

One of the other things people mostly don’t realize is you see a 1-800 number on TV and you don’t realize that that same product has 300 1-800 numbers all over the United States.

They can identify exactly which airing the viewer responded to. That helps to find the media metric going forward and refine what media is purchased.

It's an amazingly dialed in process, but that comes from having to spend so much on media costs. I got so many questions and I want to keep this coherent for the readers but also for myself.

In your mind what makes a product a good candidate for an infomercial either short form or long form. How do you pick?

There are two things that I look at. One is the standard where our industry started. Is this a product that 60% to 80% of the public could want neither use? Is it is a fairly universal broaden of product? That would be criteria one.

Criteria two would be, does it have the financial mechanics to support that. Criteria three is does it have a definable USP, is it unique? We like selling innovation that’s typically what I look for in a product first. Is it innovative, is it something that nobody else has?

The fourth thing which has become the more modern element we try to add is does it have a media channel that specifically supports it.

If you can't qualify with the first qualifier, 60% to 80% of the audience needs it, maybe only 20% of the audience needs it that might be okay if that 20% has a specific media outlet that they aggressively view and watch and you know that you can place the media there.

 

It’s like sports product on ESPN.

Reverse mortgage product, that's a popular product in the industry right now and has been for a while. Reverse mortgages appear on a specific type of media.

What would be an example, new shows, Fox and stuff like that?

That’s exactly it. Fox is a great one for that. You see some of the walk-in bathtubs and things like that as well. Fox is the place to go for stuff like that.

You have worked on products that number one that you’ve done it as an agency, so the entrepreneur, the business owner comes in and says, “We’re going to hire you to do this for us.”

You’ve also done entrepreneurial ones where correct like these are your products or you own part of the company?

Yes, I have a stake in them somehow, I’ve done both of those. Again, those individual ones I look for innovation.

If you were starting right now just completely with no clients or no products, what’s the first thing that you would do to say, “I'm good at creating these spots and you know that’s creative, and I’m going to find a product to go sell and put my expertise behind.” What would you do first there?

There are a couple of places I look. I go to trade shows and specific trade shows, home shows, home and garden shows.

Any place where there's a specific niche, where products are being represented that may be smaller, where someone has a booth. They have something that’s developed that they can sell. They don't have the marketing savvy or the know-how, some mom-and-pop comes from that.

I found a product about ago at a health show and it was a nutraceutical product for sleep, Tootsie Roll that you eat before you go to sleep and I’m like, “It’s chocolate that's nice, it’s a Tootsie Roll that's nice, and it makes you sleep and it’s got no drugs and you wake up not being groggy, that’s great.”

I met with the owner, he was a bootstrap operation and we created an extremely affordable commercial with him and put it on TV and it’s working nicely for him.

I never heard of that. What’s that called?

The product is called Sleep Squares. One of the challenges with that was he didn’t have a budget yet, he is battling with pharmaceutical companies over that same space.

We did a simple animated spot which if you saw it you wouldn't know that we did it because we lacked a ton of funding which was the truth, but we presented it in a way that it looks like a pharmaceutical agency was doing it, it had the legitimacy of a pharmaceutical in that.

Those are great products to have because they have continuity associated with them, and that might be an example of what you were talking about earlier where you don't necessarily have the financial mechanics on sale one, but future sales help drives the business.

Is this a product that you had a stake, whether it was the company or the performance of this product as well?

Yes, I did take a stake in the company.

Have you ever done that or you just went out and sourced your product and said this is the Ron Lynch product, I’m going to put all the pieces together yet?

Typically, I do that with partnerships because the prop development is expensive and the funding side of it is expensive, so I work in conjunction with the Consumer Goods Company out of California for a number of years.

That's where the Total Trolley product came from. The SmartWare was a product that I work with and Light Relief both.

I had a stake on those products and that we found them, we created them, we designed them, we created names and logos, we did a couple of pillows as well. I have done that maybe half a dozen times.

When you say that sometimes doing a licensing deal with these folks like if you find a great product and they're just selling them on their own at the trade shows, out of their trunk and local retail, would you typically come in and try to obtain a license to create?

That happens. That’s one of the types of deals we do. Most of our consumers are from our book. People read our book and go ahead, “I think my product works as an infomercial.”

They call and then they find out what the costs are whether it’s a short form or long form and some people get a little skittish about the cost.

If it is something that I believe in, then I’ll take down my costs for an ownership stake in that product. I’ll take that risk along with them. Again, it’s got to be innovative. It’s got to be something that believes in and we shared the risk in some of those sometimes.

Let's get into some of the creative aspects of it. We’ve talked about how you pick a product. One of the things I know from knowing enough about the business if anything but a great ability to demonstrate visual.

That's what’s killer. That's what makes all the greatest infomercials is the stunning visual, like the crazy glue or gorilla glue, the guy hanging from the ceiling.

That gets to the type of shows that there are. I’ve broken this down into categories, and what you’re talking about is the strong demo shows.

The tool shows, the fixes shows, the household appliance shows and the cooking shows, those are the kickass form of demo shows. That’s one silo of shows.

You could look at the Proactiv and go, “Proactiv is not a great demonstration show, it’s got before-and-after,” but you know it’s pouring benzoyl peroxide on the skin. That’s not very exciting, but it’s a very effective show. That’s a whole new category.

There are shows like that are essentially a form of testimonial shows and works well for things like Proactiv, nutraceuticals, and pain relief where you stack up a whole bunch of consumers that had great experiences and have before-and-after stories or photos, weight loss shows work that way.

That's a whole another silo to itself, and there are talk shows. There are some successful infomercials for IP products. This would appeal to a lot of your readers. There are lots of good spaces we made in infomercials inexpensively doing talk show formats.

On real estate investment, all of the IP type of products that are out there. Tony Robbins, for a matter, that's an IP product, intellectual property product that did well in a talk show presentation.

Then there are presentation products where a person takes a format, almost like a Ted talk and you're filming a presentation of someone super talented like Tony Robbins or Jack Canfield.

You can put that on television with a CTA and you're taking part of the product in a way and putting it right in front of the customers, it’s almost like taking a product for a test drive.

I won't reveal unless you reveal, but I know that you're working with an IP expert in a certain area and you’re going to be doing a show there and it’s in the health and wellness field that's as much as I’ll reveal on this, but what format are you taking there, are you going talk show, presentation?

We’re going to do a presentation. This is a person is well known nationally and globally, an expert in an IP field and they produce a number of different types of programs that bring personal success.

We’re going to take that person's presentation. I have so many hours in skill at presenting and the show will be them presenting in a seven-minute pod in Act I.

The six-minute pod in Act II, and then a two-minute pod in Act III. Those are spaced apart by testimonials and the CTA describing the pitch and the sale of the product.

Does pod stand for something, an acronym?

No, it means pod. It’s a segment of the show.

The best testimonial you can have is people’s own story. Click To Tweet

Are you going to be having that in front of a live studio audience, I've seen some of those presentations?

Yes, this person is used to doing live studio audience and I like that format because the performer, the talent feeds off of that and so does the audience. The material is engaging and we may be able to have in that audience people who had utilized that product that can speak to it with honesty.

Let's dive a little deeper into these four types of shows. Are there any general show writing formulas or template like you said?

There's seven-minute pod in the middle of testimonial and called action in six-minute, two-minute? How do you start with a blank piece of paper to someone who writes their show?

I do it backwards. I reverse engineer it. First of all, I’ll say, “I'm a person that never buys anything from television, infomercials or anything because I don't believe anybody, I think everybody is lying to me.”

That’s the conceit that I bring to the writing process is first, I must convince me because I'm very inconvincible, so I start with that premise.

Hopefully, the client has research. If there is product research or it’s an existing product or they have any sales data which most people have by the time they’re willing to invest in television.

I want to see who's bought, why they’ve bought, I want to talk to some people that have bought, so there's a pre-research phase before I write anything.

The phase after that is writing a creative brief. In most advertising agencies, a creative brief is a one to two-page document. For me, it’s about fourteen to twenty-page document that dives into every aspect of their marketability, their expected audience.

It's more like a business plan than it reads like a creative brief, but it does contain the sales argument and perspective outlines for shows.

That gets completed and then that’s passed back and forth between the client and me probably two or three times until everybody on the team is in alignment is the direction we’re going to go.

Within that, we typically talk about, “Which one of these four types of long form infomercials are we going to do if we’re talking it in a long form?” that's the first and second step.

The third step is starting to script and scripting contains some formula pieces and I’ll say them in a linear order of viewer sees the show.

The first piece is what we called a teaser, the open to the show, which is between 90 seconds and three minutes long and describes the problem that the product will solve free ultimately. It describes the innovation of the product.

It gives some background of the product and probably has one, two or three bytes of testimonials from either experts or consumers that have tried the product and teases you to watch the show. It’s the carrot that we dangle at the beginning that lets the viewer know the shows about them.

It’s almost a commercial for the show?

It is.

I’m putting it in a nutshell. If you’re stumbling across this right now, this is what it is, why you should care and why you should watch every single minute of this.

That’s a great point that you make of that the stumble across it because direct response time is something people stumble across. People don’t look through their TV guide and seek out infomercials.

That’s the first step, then Act I begins after you’ve done that tease. That’s typically seven, eight, nine minutes long and that is your host and discussing the product, some testimonials feathered in.

Then comes CTA one of the first call to action. The call to action is typically three to five minutes which is the hard selling commercial for the product, and then you repeat the process faster.

Act II is a kind of rehash of Act I, but a little bit shorter and it offers new information. The reason you rehash is because people again stumbled upon this shows and sometimes they find them on the fifteen-minute mark, they don’t find them at the top.

Then you find new and interesting ways to redo the pitch, add some more layers of information that the person didn’t have in the first act, and then you replay the CTA.

Sometimes the CTAs are a little bit different. I tend to mix up my CTAs and make them different intentionally so that if you’ve watched the show from the beginning, you don’t get bored and there’s new information in that CTA.

The Act III of the show is usually typically very short, two, three, four minutes that reviews, this is what you’ve learned and this usually ends with a small tag. I like to take it all back to playwriting or back to the five-paragraph essay that you use to write in high school English class.

It’s you tell them what you’re going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them you told them, then you tell them why you told them, then you tell them more, then you tell them why you told them that. Then you remind him of everything you told him and you close it as proof. It is a trial by jury on TV.

That's poignant. That’s something that I think is the take away for whether you’re a copy for video sales letters online for this, even articles and content marketing, it's a good formula.

People need to constantly be reminded and not just given new information that doesn't lead to that, that's why it’s direct response. We’re looking for a response not just putting out information.

Here is one of the obvious differences with online video sales letters that people don't stumble across. Nobody stumbles across a video sales letter that's already in progress, for instance, you know as it plays or it starts when you're there.

Versus the infomercial world, you have to have that kind of repetitive thing because you don’t know when people are coming in.

In my experience for myself and working with other experts and studying a lot about copywriting, it’s one of the things I geek out on. In the beginning, it's either like you said that commercial for why you should be watching this giving them real quickly, spend some time here.

Then dialing in on the problem building, the problem you’re having, building credibility, twisting the knife on why this problem is so much bigger than they realize and convincing them.

Granted this is a lot for the information and IP based products as opposed to the physical ones, but in taking them on this long journey, often these videos are anywhere between twenty and 40 minutes, sometimes even longer for a VSL online.

In the infomercial space where you do, how much time do you spend shining the light on that problem and twisting that knife and showing them that?

You do it fanatically over and over through, and it also depends on who you’re selling to and what the product is. We probably spend more time on benefits and features than the VSLs do, but we also have the benefit of all this extra data that the consumer can get from watching it.

I’m fascinated by VSLs and one of the things that fascinated me is that the CTA always comes at the end. I have three in a show and folks that do video sales letters have one and it’s right at the tail.

It’s an interesting psychology, but they also have the freedom to write it to be exactly how ever long they need it, and I don’t have that flexibility. I have to be 28 minutes and 30 seconds and I have to fill that time keep people watching.

The trick for me is to get them to the problem as quickly as possible, I spend 10% of the time at the beginning on the problem and then dive into the solution.

Go after, it depends whether you’re selling to a man or a woman, features and benefits, because those weigh differently in a show if you’re selling to a man or to a woman.

I want to flag that as it’s something we’re majorly going to talk about because of the Mastermind that we had. You spoke about the difference between men and women and what not, so make sure we don't miss that.

I want to ask you what's the biggest challenge in the creative side for you when sitting down to come up with the show, I mean you’ve kind of done the research.

I know that in copywriting for I guess the web and whether it’s VSL or page, it's coming up with the lead, and that opening lead and hook of getting somebody on.

 

I mean it’s relatively easy to write features and benefits if you know your product really well, although there is an entire art form to doing that well and what not.

I know that the lead and the hook and web copy is the hardest for me and I always to be astounded when I was sitting there with a blank PowerPoint presentation or blank piece of paper to create this video and realizing we’re getting frustrated going.

TV shows will do it 30 to 60 minutes even maybe a couple minutes and fully describe the entire features and benefits and have called action on these products.

How can they can explain this so simply in two minutes and it has taken me twenty minutes just to kind of get to the heart of it? I was so frustrated. What's the biggest challenge creatively for you to come up with?

Sometimes the demo, what’s that magic moment that becomes iconic for the product. We have the benefit of not having our viewers watch the show necessarily in a linear order, you have the problem, you have to get them with a hook, because if you don't get passed that they never get to minute one.

Our viewer clicks in it minute one, the click in it minute three, they click it at minute seven, that element is not as critical for us. It's making succinct hooks and a series of succinct hooks to grab a larger audience at any point that may tune in.

You're looking for a big cook at the beginning, I'm looking for a lot of little solid hooks all the way through, so that if something comes across us, we are able to get them with that hook or that problem and solution even throughout the show, but keep them watching, so that we get all of them.

Demos are helpful in that. One of the things that we haven’t touched on that I like to spend a second on is the word sincerity. People hear the word infomercial and they immediately hear yelling and selling and they hear it insincerity.

For me that's the number one thing that I drive towards in everything that we do is I want the consumer to feel like I’m telling them the truth and the show is about them, and that goes to how our mind works, my mind works in the sales process, I'm never trying to sell anybody anything.

I’m trying to get them to want to buy, which is a different mindset. People say our TV is a window into the world, and I’m saying that’s absolute crap, it’s not. TV is not a window into the world. TV is a mirror in your living room.

People watch television about themselves, so when I write television, I’m trying to write television about the viewer first and the products second because if I make a show about them, they’ll watch it and then I have the opportunity to talk to them about the product.

How would you make it more about them? I understand the sincerity part. Can you elaborate on that?

We always speak in the first person in TV and then I see a lot of good internet writers do the same thing too, is you never come to television and you go, “One million people are watching.” You never propose writing from that perspective.

It’s you, it’s the first person. It’s you and I say, “You watch yourself, you sell yourself and you buy yourself.” That’s what we need to know, and you’ve heard me say this before Brad. These people go to the mall and they read the map at the mall and says you were here, and they go, “I’m here.”

They think it’s about them when map is saying it’s about here. It’s not about you, it’s about here, but we’re all prewired, we come to this word prewired that we make it all about us.

I try to speak in a language format first of all that’s personal and sincere, and if there is something problematic about the product or questions I have, I raised those and shows and I shine a light on that.

“We can do this, but nobody can do that for you. Here’s your competitors and they can’t do that either.” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking your product and showing occasionally what is limitations are.

It makes it much more believable and they’re probably thinking that anyway.

Most of the infomercials they see people cutting mufflers off of cars with steak knives and stuff that you never do and they go, “That’s the infomercial world.” That’s a certain aspect of it, but if you’re going to seriously spend $100 to $500 on a product you want to know that it’s real and that it works.

What do they call them, typically in sales copy, a damage in a mission where it’s like, “That makes it believable?” There is a friend of mine and a guy that I’ve studied a lot of what he’s done. He is down there in Austin where you live.

He is a good friend of Dave and several of our mutual friends in Rollins, but Perry had a pointy thing, I don’t know how much he came up with this or just the way he phrased it, but it made a lot of sense when he said he is reviewing his or somebody else's copy.

He's looking for how many things am I asking the prospect to believe about what I say? Because obviously if you need to believe it then it’s not substantiated by fact like, “I have to believe that it works, I have to believe that it works as quickly as you say it does.

“I have to believe that you’re not telling me the truth, I have to believe that you’ll adhere to your refund, I have to believe that not only that it works for other people but it will work for people in my situation.”

He says, “I go through the entire thing, how many things am I asking the person to just take on blind faith, and the more you can remove that or substantiate those claims to get them to just not have to believe it but just accept it, the better your offer is going to do.”

A lot of times we utilize the testimonial to do that, it’s the video testimonial. People watch so much reality TV that if you come to business thinking the consumer is stupid, you should go back home.

Consumers are smart and they watch a lot of television, they’re good TV producers, and they know when someone on TV is lying to him and whether it’s a testimonial or a host, you can tell.

You have to be able to craft that out of your work and make sure that the testimonials you select did use the product and they do feel heartfelt about it.

People get nervous when they’re on TV. When a regular Joe comes on a testimonial, you turn the camera and you start talking to them and you start to see the red welts start to come into their neck and they’re shaking.

I have had moments where I’ve winked at my cameraman and said, “Let’s try everything off for a second. Let’s you and I talk about what your experience was.”

You see there’s a pressure just come off of them and you sit there and have a ten or twenty-minute conversation with him about what they're going to say.

Let me guess, the cameras are still rolling?

Absolutely. You want that kind of truthfulness, that rawness and you need a few moments of those and for most of the top sales objections of anything they can usually overcome. If they can’t overcome with the demonstration, they can overcome with a solid testimonial that addresses it.

When you ask people for testimonials, are there any formulas that you use or general guidelines that you're asking them, kind of questions that lead them to where they phrase it in a way that you’re looking for?

I asked them to use the question and answer, that's a normal technique, “Please use the name of the product,” but it's difficult to get a person to say something that they don’t want to say, so I don't go down that road.

When I was new to the business, when I was new at interviewing, I used to come in with a big long list of questions because I knew I had all the sales points, and after years you realize that doesn't get your best testimonial because people come in wanting to talk about what they want to talk about.

It becomes much more journalistic. I typically have a question that kind of kicks off the interview. I listen to them, and if you listen to people you know what the next question is to ask and eventually get their story. The best testimonial you can have is their own story.

There is a book that I read, D’Souza was his last name, he has a great book called The Secret Life Of Testimonials, and it's how he formulates or he tells people to formulate their questions when they're seeking testimonials.

How it is the story structure behind it that makes it so much more effective and he likes to ask questions like you know, “What would've prevented you or what almost prevented you from purchasing the product or service or whatnot?” because he likes to get that.

“Well, I was skeptical about what Ron said because of X, Y, and Z, but then I tried it. Here's what I found and then here are three more things that I found and here’s why I would recommend it to others.”

I got a lot out of that book, so for any readers out there who want to understand, you're not scripting these testimonials obviously, but it’s a way to more effectively pull them out of people’s tremendous resource.

There's nothing more boring than just coming across the testimonial that says, “Rob Lynch is great and I love everything he did,” because it's just like, “Who cares? I assume that it is BS, anyway.” Stories sell. Have you noticed any trends over the past fifteen years or what trends, I know you have?

I'm glad you bring that about testimonials Brad because there is one more technique that’s really valuable that we use in creating testimonials, and that’s when we write a creative brief and we have the story about the product.

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Let's imagine that story about the product is Goldilocks and the Three Bears, that's my story for the product. What I'll do is give the product to twenty people, come back, and I know that I need each part of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and I’ll have a list that I took off.

As I interview all twenty people, I’ll make sure that somebody told me one element of that story. When I go back and string the testimonials together, they will tell the story. I’ll have ten people tell Goldilocks and the Three Bears and everybody will only tell one sentence.

By the time you stitch all those sentences together, the viewer has to assume that everybody told the same story.

You have ten people that know the same story and they all told you the same story and you magnanimously drew that out of the ten people that they all had the same experience.

That's great, or like we like to say in this show that is bacon-wrapped. I love that, that’s powerful. What trends have you seen in the formats of the creative in the past fifteen years that you’ve been working on this?

Have you seen the industry go from where it’s just shouting at you like Billy Mays was famous for doing or to more of the sincerity-based approach or is everything still being utilized in one form or another still effectively?

Everything is being utilized in one form effectively. The things that tend to survive the Billy Mays approach are the magical short form products. Everybody had seen the guy that puts a screen door in the bottom of the boat and put the sealer in and stands on the boat, that’s a Billy Mays approach.

That still works, but it has to be a unique product, and I’m not saying that product doesn’t work, I never bought it. That works for those products, the sincerity approach works.

I eluded to this earlier that most people don't realize is how many branded products are now infomercials. How many large companies are using the vehicle of the infomercial in 30 seconds or one minute to sell a product whether it's human healthcare or it’s Viagra?

They’re driving you to a website to get interaction with you and the branding of infomercials and the awareness that is coming to these larger advertisers realizing, “We can get a metric? Can we do something accountable?” Believe it or not it’s a new idea to a lot of these companies.

When I deal with chief marketing officers of large corporations and we get into the media phase of a campaign, this is something you hear a lot, they ask about how many GRPs, how many eyeballs are seen in my spot?

Just like in your world, “Who cares? I care how much money it makes. What did we spend for the exposure and how many sales did we get in return? I don’t care if 20 people or 20,000 saw it, if we only paid for 20 and we got sales like 40,000 saw it, I’m happy.”

Do you find that that’s one of the hard things for bigger companies who are used to the branding-based advertising to wrap their heads around is the power of direct response?

Absolutely, even when they see it, it's hard for them to believe it. I’ll give you a great example. We have clients in the consumer goods business and I’ll bundle a couple of them together, so nobody feels singled out.

We have somebody who is in a vacuum and carpet cleaner space. We have somebody who is in the skincare space. We have somebody who is in the laser body hair removal space that we work with.

Those people all had devices or products to sell in the marketplace, you do a long form infomercial to launch their new SKU.

The infomercial takes off, money is being made. They go, “This is great. Let’s go put this in retail.” They go put the product in retail. They call you eight months later and go, “We have a little bit of a cash problem here. We have huge inventory needs for our retail and you know our infomercials are dying.”

“It’s not pulling the numbers that it used to when we first met you guys” and you go, “Can I connect the dots there for you?”

It's a hard thing because they have been consumer goods for so long they don't realize that that infomercial can now run as deficit even if it’s driving all that retail. You’re always having to go back and re-stitch the quilt for him.

To remind them that one builds on the other, in direct response is to be able to you know if you can break even on your upfront media costs, if you’ve got your back end and you’ve got your multiple channels making up for it, that's the goal.

If you have a continuity product, all the better that you can be able to do that.

I've heard you talked about the power of languaging, I’ve witnessed it when you were working with Drew and say, “No, Drew. Say it like this. Say these words,” or whatnot.

Address some of the power of languaging. Also, let’s segue into how that differs between marketing the men and women as hopefully, my readers know. If they don't, this is a startling fact that 80% of consumer buying decisions are made by women.

Yes, 80%. Most all buying decisions are driven by women, some of the biggest ones, your house, your car, if you don’t have a permissive purchase in the house so there’s going to be discontent.

Women are gatherers. They’re watching this media and they’re buying, and they’re some of our best customers on television and online. Do you want to go into their differences between men and women?

It was fascinating when you were talking about that at the board room and I want to elaborate.

Women think and operate and purchase differently than men, and that may sound sexist, but I didn’t say which is better or worse, I just said differently. If you don’t believe this, there is a difference between men and women, okay, you can buy a book that,

Here's the basic premise is that women buy of alignment, they buy with empathy. Our goal is to freely ask the female consumer questions that open her mind and give personate personal information that you emotively relate to and reflexively receive as truth.

Can you give an example on that?

When you talk about her, are you happy with the way your skin looks? Have you noticed some lines, maybe some discolorations that have come up recently? Do you feel like you’re aging faster than you want to?

Her head’s nodding. Who wouldn’t? “That’s about me and yeah, I looked in the mirror every day and I see that stuff,” you suddenly got her head nodding.

Now you’re saying that you will do it slightly differently if you were talking to a male audience about a product or would it be the same?

Absolutely. You get the empathy in the alignment where you could have stood next to her and you look at the mountains with her. That’s how you speak. When you’re selling to a man, it’s oppositional, and think about when you go on the car lock.

When a man steps on a car lock, the salesperson walks up to me and he says, “Are you here to buy a car?” and you go, “No.” “Really? Why the hell are you on the car lock then?” We are confrontational, and with a man, it’s a prove it scheme.

With women you sell benefits and you tell her about some features. When it’s a man, its features. That man goes to the car lock and it’s, “You know what we got 420 horsepower, this got a V6, it’s got a paddle shifter, it’s got fuel injectors, it’s got 668 pounds of torque,”

You start having this confrontational sale and guess what, men respond to that. It’s easy to sell men things like tools, they just, “Give me facts and let me know whether I want to buy or not.” There has to be not a whole lot of emotions about it.

I know you’re not saying you don’t sell the benefits to the man, like don’t just sell features, but how else can you be like confrontational? I understand what you’re saying about the features, I mean just when you were telling me that kind of stuff, my brain started going like the testosterone turned on.

If you want to look at them, somebody has done a brilliant job and probably everybody is aware of this particular one, it’s Dollar Shave Club. That guy’s first commercial online blew up because it was a man selling to man.

That guy’s first commercial online blew up because it’s a man selling to men. That’s what the Old Spice commercials are. They’re funny, they’re in your face but do they ever speak about Old Spice not making you stink or Dollar Shave Club giving you better shave?

No.

They don’t. They talk about you, the viewer, in a macho way. It’s fun and you get it. At the end of it, Dollar Shave Club. It’s their value proposition. It’s their offer.

My wheels are spinning because I get it now. I see how if you’re too flowery with your language, you’re too benefit-driven with men it can fall flat.

Women, they want a promise of hope. They want hype or see value. They do want an offer. They want a deal like everybody else does, no doubt about that.

This will be the proof in the pudding that you’ll instantly go, “That’s true. This is why they’re the gatherers and we’re not as much.” There are so many women that are watching TV with an iPad in their lap, their phone in their lap.

They’re ready to respond. They are sitting there. They are waiting for you to tell them and they are going to take that second screen. They are going to go in there. They are going to look at the Amazon reviews and tell whether you’re telling the truth or not.

They’ll do their research. That’s probably one of the things that’s changed when you started is the consumer’s ability to research before picking up the phone and calling, is that you can’t afford to have completely hyped up claims anymore.

No matter if you’re doing TV, internet or whatever because the power is in the hands of the consumer these days.

There’s no way to build a brand. It will be short-lived if you don’t have a good product. That’s why I say when I go back to, what do I pick when I pick a product, I pick good products. It’s the easiest thing. It’s so difficult to sell crappy products, but it’s so easy to sell good products.

When the product sells itself, that’s fantastic. Let’s go back to selling to women. Sell from alignment and empathy. Be on her side. Acknowledge that you understand what she’s going through, probably use the language she uses.

I interviewed another marketing expert, Robert Coorey. We were talking about one of his clients in the health and nutritional wellness space in Australia. She had tremendous results getting people on a webinar. She teaches weight loss and nutrition.

She dialed in on the big pain point was the concept of bloating. Do you feel bloated when you leave the house? You fit into your pants, but you come home.

Do you ever feel like you’re exploding out of your pants and going for that, “We get you.” Those surface-level cognizant pain points in their language.

There’s something brilliant in that because it doesn’t use the word fat ever. They are not calling anybody fat. If you hear the word bloated, it also lets you know you can become unbloated rapidly. There’s an implication that the result that you can get is rapid.

I felt bloated in the past. You want to take a pin and pop. The day before Thanksgiving, we’ll all feel bloated. We’ll all want to stick a needle in our belly and let the air out. I like that and I thought it was a poignant concept.

There’re two other things about men and women that I want to bring up where they buy and think differently. Men are much more Pythagorean. They need it in an order which is why the way video sales letters typically work are good for male responding to answers.

It’s a very A plus B equals C argument. Women don’t think that way. They don’t view TV that way. They have a delete button in their head and they’re listening. They’ll watch a whole show and they only listen to the stuff that’s pertinent to them and they delete the other stuff.

Which is what allows infomercials to work for women so well, even if you have a testimonial that’s not about her, she’ll delete it. She’ll stitch together the six that are about her. She doesn’t need them in any order because they’re smarter than us.

Whether you like it or not, they’re smarter than us. They will stitch it together in an order that goes, that’s me. It pulls on my pins. I’m in. Men do have to line it up in a little bit more breadcrumb way. Your argument should be a little bit more A, B, C with men.

That’s so important to know. In my past, the products that I’ve personally sold, I’ve always been male dominated. Although I’ve had clients that I’ve worked with and help script it a little bit more on their presentations for women.

Drew is one of them. I can see what you’re saying but I was never cognizant of that in the past.

It allows us in TV because there are so many things like you said if you sell your CTAs at the end. In an infomercial your CTAs are at the eight to twelve-minute mark. There’s stuff you haven’t told her yet that you want to tell her. It’s okay.

You got to let go of that pressure because if you’ve given her new information along the way, she’ll be very interested. She’ll hang with you for the second act for more information.

Which brings me to one other thing that comes up frequently in constructing this kind of marketing in these shows is people want to hide details. They want to say, they don’t need to know that. They’re probably bored by that.

I go to a lot of focus groups. The number one thing that makes a show go from being a B show to an A show is more detail. Less repetition and more new information.

That’s what goes from a B to an A or an A to a B?

That goes from B to an A. You can take a show that has little information in it. Go in and find out what are the key components that are missing and add more detail and more information. The sales will go up. People want the details.

They have said the more you tell, the more you sell. That can be true. From my experience and that of some of my mentors, it’s telling as much as you need to get everything out there without being boring, without driving people crazy. There’s a long form sales letters.

The 45-minute video sales letter’s a great proof. People will see these things and think, “Who would read 25 pages of a sales letter?” People who are interested in what you’ve got.

As long as it’s about them.

As long as you’re not boring them, and the information’s good and presented in a way. The more you tell, oftentimes the more you sell.

What are some of the infomercials out there either now or in the past that you haven’t worked on but are some of your favorites?

We get into a hard part here because a favorite can be, this is my favorite commercial because I thought it was the most creative, but the favorite commercial should be the most effective. The one to make the most money.

Are there any infomercials out there that you think are doing it well and doing the right thing that we may not be aware of offhand?

That’s a tough question when you think about that. Honestly, I have to tell you, I make so many of these. It’s hard for me to watch them.

What’s been the best one you’ve ever done? Which infomercial either ran the longest or made the most impact for the product?

I know which one ran the longest, without a doubt, Light Relief did with Robert Wagner which ran for years and years. I love the Total Trolley because it was such an inventive show and it had so many cool demos in it. You can look it up online and find it.

I always love the one that I’m with because I like doing this. It’s very educational for me. I get a lot of knowledge from doing every new show. Whatever I’m working on at the time is always my favorite. It’s like a filmmaker.

Have there been any types of shows you’d like to make that you haven’t had a chance to?

I haven’t made a cooking show in a long time and I love cooking shows. One of my favorite shows that I ever wrote, I didn’t direct the show. Tar Productions did it. I wrote the show for them because I was working on White Relief at the time.

It was for a smart ware which was the Silicon Bake Ware. It was fun to take a product that three or four companies had blown millions of dollars on TV trying to sell Silicon Bake Ware. Nobody has done it in America. No one had cracked the code. We cracked that code.

What made that work?

First of all, we didn’t call it Silicon Bake Ware because it was years ago. The word silicon was associated at that time with breast implants. Why would you eat something cooked in silicon? People thought of leeching.

I came up with a new for silicon and I called it Temperflex. It carried the temperature through. We validated the product because subway bakes all of their bread in silicon pans. Subway’s doing that. It’s probably safe.

We came up with all these cool demos and recipes that you could only do in a silicon pan. You couldn’t do them in a metal pan. Some things were very simple. We made muffins in a pan. The pan’s soft you could flip the cup inside out and shoot the muffins out of the pan into the air.

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It was a fun little moment in the show. I want pans like that. Every woman did. People signed up for it. They cracked the code and got other companies like Kitchen Aid into the silicone bakeware business in the US.

I love stories like that, reframe it and repositioning products offers. There’s probably a lot of opportunities out there for a lot of types of household goods or products that can be repositioned, remarketed in other ways, breathe a whole new life in the products.

That’s an interesting concept. I see stuff on TV every once in a while going, “Are you serious? That’s brilliant.” They took this. I can’t remember what it was. Probably the most famous one of all is the Snuggie. Somebody took a robe and turned it backwards.

Right and there’s a term now that we got a product once upon a time that was a very similar type of cell. It was an air purifier. What it was, was a humidifier. It was a clear humidifier. You added fragrance to the humidifier. It was a HoMedics product.

My former partner Rick Cesari did the show. He’s a brilliant guy. I saw it on TV and I was like, “That is so smart.” He turned what was a humidifier and turned it into an air purifier because the water gets dirty. It’s sucking in air as well. It is an air filter. It’s a wet air filter in the house.

It makes the house smell good. It gets the dirt out of the air. You have this effect where you see the dirt that came out of the air in this dirty water. It was brilliant. Humidifiers have been around for 100 years.

That was an air purifier, you say?

It was. It wasn’t disingenuous. It does clean your air, but nobody ever thought of positioning it, a humidifier as an air cleaner.

There’re so many questions but let me see. I want to get to some of the other good ones. We’ve talked a little bit about the difference between selling to women, selling to men. Let’s talk about when a campaign works.

Let’s go back, Ron is a member of it. You’ll hear me refer to it with some of my guests including Ron. You mentioned you’ve done some testing on phrasing. This was a powerful language with your products with the shipping offer. Go ahead and tell them.

This is an interesting thing. We’ve done split testing on this. We happened upon it with intention. Here’s the deal, you send a consumer an offer. It says, hey, it’s free shipping. I don’t care what the product is, just the term free shipping.

First of all, people believe that shipping is cheap. Secondly, they believe you’re screwing them on the price and that you’re making a profit on it. There’s a lot of bad feelings about shipping in general.

When you see an item, here’s one for $10 and you get a second one pay the shipping and processing. That is a point of aggravation for the customer. It’s typically the end of a CTA.

What a horrible thing to do to the customer is you got them with their wallet out. Now you aggravate them. What we learned to do was instead of saying free shipping, say we’ll pay the shipping.

That immediately repositions it in their mind. It’s something of value. It’s a recognized expense suddenly and you’re doing them a favor.

You can increase the price of your product to cover your shipping. Shippings are usually, relatively cheap depending on what it is. You can either take the hit on the profit margin or increase the price a little bit, is that what you’re saying?

You’re better off to increase the price a little bit and we pay the shipping. You’re doing something nice for a friend at that point.

There’s a big trend. I take that back, this is not a trend, it is proved. It’s been going on for years especially with internet marketing. Some people call it a tripwire, a free plus shipping offer to get somebody to pull out their credit card online to make that first purchase with you.

I know with Kent, my client, we do that. It’s very successful. We’ve got this great two DVD set of all these trainings. It’s worth $97 but we’re going to give it to you for free if you cover the $4.99 shipping and handling charge.

I’m trying to think of the best way to reframe that, I guess we could say it’s worth $97 but we’re discounting it to $5 or $10. We’ll even pay for shipping. We’ll pay your shipping, is that how you would do that?

If we took off the shipping and said we’ll pay for that, now we’re losing money on everyone that takes this. I’m trying to think of different ways to do that.

I guess you could say, “We’re going to have a reason for knocking the price down to next to nothing but then say we’ll pay your shipping, too.”

My gut reaction to that is. I’d rather see you drop the price to $19.95, instead of going all the way to zero or go to $49.95 or $39.95 and not discount the product so much.

They’re paying for the shipping.

Let’s say we pay the shipping. We got a $100 product. We’re going to give it to you for $19.45. We’re going to pay the shipping.

I want to try that. Especially for all of the digital marketers out there who are selling in the $5, free shipping offer, assuming nobody takes your upsells, you’ve got a $5 customer value. It could be $20, pay for the shipping. You’re quadrupling your customer value.

As long as you don’t cut, your conversion numbers could fall in half. It quadrupled your customer value. I’m going to try that. That’s a split testable strategy.

That’s the thing, you should test everything and you should also be careful about what the entire school of fish is doing. If you’re doing the same thing that everybody else is doing, how’s the consumer going to react? Not that you’re choosing between a bunch of other people.

If you do something unusual, that typically gets people’s attention, things that they haven’t heard before. We’ll drop it from $100 to $19.95. We’ll pay the shipping. If you don’t get X out of your experience with this, we’ll refund your $19.95. You’re going to get five times the value.

I can’t remember who it was and exactly how they did it, but they talked about how they decided to raise the price on Black Friday. They let their people know.

It was a relatively big brand. It wasn’t some little marketer. I read about this, but they raised their price on Black Friday. You know who it was, I’m almost 99% sure it was the game Cards Against Humanity. Have you ever played that game? I think it was them, I could be wrong.

I thought it was genius. They wanted to zig when everybody was zagging. They go hey, instead of paying $10 this Friday, you can pay us 20. It was a gimmick, but it was remarkably successful. People were like, “You got balls.”

It got their name out there. Everybody knows this is a game season. People buy games during the holidays. That’s when they’re sold. That’s brilliant.

Have you played that game?

I did. It’s for you hack viewers so that you know. You can download it for free from Cards against Humanity. Take it to Kinkos. Print it out, and so yes.

Isn’t that brilliant? They drove so many sales by doing that exact, same thing saying, “If you’re willing to go through the inconvenience of downloading it and printing it, go ahead.” Otherwise, buy it and we’ll send it to you.

I didn’t do that because I’m cheap, I did it because they were out of stock and I wanted it.

I remember seeing that thinking, “It’s genius.” When I went to their website and I bought it, I was like, “I’m going to pay for it because I thought that was so brilliant. I’m going to pay for it anyway to give you the cash.”

I love it when people do those innovative things. As you said, it gets attention. Nobody else is doing that. I mentioned him a second ago, Robert Coorey, who I interviewed is doing that with a book that he’s got called Feed A Starving Crowd.

If you got to FeedAStarvingCrowd.com you can see it. He’s got a great book of tons of marketing ideas. At the bottom the call to action is, “Opt-in. I’ll give you the PDF for free.”

You can the physical one for free plus shipping, but $9 in shipping. There’s another $99 product out there for a little bit of price decoy. It’s genius. You want to get it for free. You can also buy it.

He says you’d be surprised at how many people buy it even though they can download it for free. We’ve diverged from that initial strategy, but I love that. Like you said, you’ve tested it. We’ll pay for your shipping.

 

You’re doing this for me, versus you paid shipping. I can see how that wouldn’t work. A split test is coming. I cannot wait to share the results with you on that.

You mentioned that in the past something like 70% or 80% of sales would come from the TV spot. Another 20% or 30% would come from web sales. That’s changed dramatically, isn’t that what you said?

Yeah, in fact when the web first came around that number was as low as 15% at the beginning. Now we get 70% to 80% of sales to come from the web. It’s for all the one. The world has shifted and people trust purchasing on the web.

There was a day when people didn’t want to put their credit cards online. People have gotten accustomed to that. They feel safe with that. They feel like they have somebody they can return the product to.

Some companies have done a good job of giving the consumer confidence in that. One of the things that I see as a big driver in that shift is one, they’re dogging to research online and see reviews. Two, the ability to not talk to a person in a call center.

A lot of people are afraid of calling there because they don’t want to get upsold or they don’t want to spend twenty minutes on the phone. They know how to point, click and buy something. That’s what they do.

You have to make sure when you’re dealing with a consumer good company that they’re giving you the adequate credit for that with you DRTV spend that you aggregate all of your sales, even retail.

Make sure that you know that what you’re spending on TV is coming back to you from a lot of shores, not just the one TV shore.

Let’s say you’ve got a product out and you’ve got a web presence. Some people may stumble across it because they’re Googling it. Do you have typically two different websites set up? One for the call to action from the show, and one for stumble across traffic to track that?

You can track stumble across traffic to a landing page as well. You associate it with your TV metrics with your air spots. You do it with a zip code tracking.

You can cross reference.

There’s a lot of software that tells you where that came from.

That makes it much more important. Like we said, people are going to do research. They’re going to watch the thing on TV. I did this. I’m going to immediately go take a look at it. I’m going to look at it online, maybe see if it’s on Amazon as well.

When you’re selling consumer goods, you put those typically for fulfillment on your website, but do you also put them on Amazon as well? Do you do both channels?

It depends on the product and the distribution that they have set up. One of the challenges with Amazon, let’s you have your own Amazon store and you can control the pricing. You don’t want to cannibalize your price because the algorithm with Amazon will always undersell you.

With Amazon Prime, suddenly you’ve got free shipping. You’re driving people intentionally to Amazon. I can make an argument of a reason why to do that as well, is to take fulfillment out of your process and give it to somebody who’s a trusted fulfillment agent.

It has to be a cognitive decision. You have to understand the financial metrics of it and make the decision that’s right for you. I have clients that do both.

I have some clients where the product might be pre-scripted. It might be medical. You can’t fulfill it through Amazon. You can only fulfill it directly yourself.

Now in a company, let’s say I’ve got a product. It’s a physical product. I’m selling it. I’m thinking of a good hypothetical example here. I’ve got a decent amount of web sales. Let’s say I’ve sole over $100,000 on the web. I’ve proven that it’s a product, it works. I’ve got fulfillment.

Let’s make it up. Let’s say Brad’s orthotic shoe. Brad’s unique orthotic shoe. You filled 100,000 of them on the web.

Now there’s an opportunity here to go into DRTV and branch out, what is the low end of the budget that I can potentially, to have a quality show, not something that I filmed with my iPhone.

Maybe I can’t afford to do the highest end stuff, but low to medium end effective to get a test to get it out there, what budget should I typically have? $100,000 in the bank?

Fifty. It doesn’t have to be for a long form. That could be a short form. I immediately want to ask the penetration question of it’s the assumption that the quality makes a difference. Sometimes the poorest quality, the better the difference.

We can do a spot for Brad’s orthotic shoes where we go to the mall. I’ll make sure there are people trying their shoes and your shoes and come up with a good demonstration of how much better balance they have.

You got those, what was it, the P90X commercials which were all the little home testimonials shows? Probably very low production cost but very highly effective.

The very first P90X commercial if you go back and look at it, it’s the four founders of the company. That’s what’s in the commercial. It’s a 30-minute show about the four founders of the company doing the program because they didn’t have any testimonials. It was fantastic.

That’s probably a good way to go, if you’ve got something that has had effects on people going sincere, authentic and low quality that can be put together quickly.

The way I break that down Brad is $20,000 of it for your production and you’re editing for the spot. $10,000 to $15,000 for the media to test it. The rest on fulfillment call center and merchant processing, the setup of those pieces that you’ll have to do to take the orders via television.

To rough it out that’s about as low as it can go. I’ve made infomercials that are $1 million. I’ve made them that are $300,000. I’ve made long form shows that are $175,000.

I had somebody bring to me what I thought was a very long PowerPoint presentation. That’s what I felt like, was a bunch of testimonials and photographs. It was difficult to watch.

For $70,000, we took their existing assets, went out and shot for maybe a day or two and did some quality editing. I’m not going to tell you what the product is. It’s in the tool category. It is killing it. I don’t think that all in all, these guys spent more than maybe $100,000 on this show and it is killing it.

What do you consider killing it? What can people typically expect?

We operate in MER, Media Efficiency Ratio. If you spend $1,000 in media, how many products do you sell in relationship to that? We build a fraction out of that. A 1.0 is I spend $1,000 and I sold 1,000.

That’s not ROI. That’s $1,000 at 1,000 units.

That’s 1.0. If you’re doing a 2.0, you’re doing great. I have clients in shows that we’ve built like this that are out there that are doing 3.0s and 4.0s that were not expensive shows. Mind you, they don’t have huge media budgets because they’re very specified products.

They might be in hunting, fishing or tools, but because there’s a specified media channel where I can get to that consumer, we can run media on that. Maybe we can run $10,000, $20,000, $50,000 a week. Every time they spend $50,000, they sell $200,000 for the product. That’s killing it.

The profit margins, you alluded to this earlier, but to have a product, we’ll call it $20 product that you’re selling online. Not online but on your TV, what kind of profit margin should you probably have before you even look into doing a spot like this?

Are you saying that the sale price is $20 or the cost is $20?

Let’s say the sales price, we can use any number but in general. I know it probably is arranged if you have a $100 or $200 product versus something sub 100, it probably changes. What markup should somebody have? The lower the margin, the harder it’s going to be.

It depends on what the product is. I hate to have that be the answer to everything.

Let’s use a tool.

You want a five times markup on that. You want that tool to have cost you $3 to make and you’re going to sell it for $20, $19.95. That can be done. Some people have done it for years in the tool business.

A brand will be short-lived if you don’t have a good product. Click To Tweet

You’ve probably seen lots of tool ads around Christmas of magic screwdrivers, pliers and cutters, things like that, sharpeners.

The $3, that’s the cost to produce it and to fulfill it or to produce, it is the fulfillment?

To produce it. Let’s say I have a factory in China. It gets landed in Los Angeles for $3. I can go out on TV and sell that for $19.95. If I have upsold products with it that are good, I might be able to get a little bit, have an expectation of having a little bit more cost of goods at the front end.

I’m trying to generate a phone call for $19.95, but that doesn’t mean that that person is leaving for $19.95.

You segue perfectly into one of the big questions that I had backend marketing. As consumers, we only get to say, unless we’re buying everything out there under the sun, I’ve thought about doing. I want to see what their sales funnel looks like.

I want to buy so they sell me more shit. That’s the part that most consumers or marketers who are seeing the surface level don’t get to see. I want to find out some of the secrets behind backend marketing.

Especially coming from the world of information marketing, there are a million things that you can tag on. I’ve always wondered, somebody’s selling a tool, somebody’s selling a kitchen gadget, tell me about some of the more effective backend campaigns?

The thing that makes the backend funnel work the best is flexibility after that phone call is initiated. The consumer has an idea of what your core offer is. You want to go up and you want to collect more money from them, and you want to give them more product.

It’s either, “We’re going to supersize your offer, or we’re going to supersize your product.” Rug Doctor has been a client. They sell the regular Rug Doctor that you can win to the grocery store, that’s a product you can purchase.

They also have a wide track machine that’s bigger, faster, more horsepower. They have a variety of soaps and goos that go in those machines. Conversely say the consumer goes and they go, “I saw the Rug Doctor commercial. I saw it has an introductory offer of $49.”

“I’m finding out that the retail price is a little bit higher than I can afford,” they have another product they can move you down to. They have Rug Doctor spot cleaner that’s $179 product that they can move you down in that direction, so smaller offers.

Because you paid for the phone call as the marketer. You want to sell them something. Having the flexibility to go up and down is critical to long term success.

The next layer is the line extension of product. The next layer is continuity. I don’t typically see anybody succeed with more than three upsells.

I see the same thing online as well. It’s hard to get people to buy more than three things.

One of the other things is that if the upsells were linked to the user group, that’s key. It doesn’t necessarily have to relate to the product. I’ll give you for instance, BackJoy, a product that I launched. We sold over one million units.

It’s an orthotic that you sit on that corrects your posture. You can get up from your chair and feel great at the end of the day.

I bought a couple of them when Kenya and I moved from Dallas to San Diego. We bought a couple of those and it was great.

It’s a very simple, amazing product. When you buy one, there’s the opportunity to buy another one but there’s also the opportunity to buy the BackJoy Pillow. There’s BackJoy Shoes. They’re orthotic shoes.

They recognize that their category is pain relief. They sell things up and down in the channel that are appropriate to pain relief. They’re all good product. They have zero disappointment from customers.

That’s something to think about if you slap something on to your offer because you want to make more revenue, and it’s a crappy thing, guess what it does to your plan?

It brings it down. You want the backend products to, enhance what you’re doing and blow them away. Oftentimes it would be even more exciting than the first offer.

Do you see very often, and this depends on the market or the product that you’re selling, but let’s say the front-end product is not an information IP style like home study course books, CD, DVD set.

Do you see much information products being used in backend marketing for physical products ever? Do you not see people offering things like that?

It’s offered all the time. We do it all the time. This is what snapped into my mind when you said that is supplements. In the supplement world, one of the best things you can sell is a book from the person who created the supplement. It reinforces the sale.

It showed up, a supplement, I buy the supplement. Then you give them IP that makes them smarter about the supplement. You not only sold them something of value to them, which is knowledge but you’ve also helped continuity in the line.

Do you see a lot of supplement companies or a lot of companies like that doing that? Is that something that only a handful of people to your knowledge or on top of?

I would say that 40% of the people that are in the supplement business with me do that.

The smart ones.

They got to have the book or the product, too. All of them gets that business with the book. Sometimes some people are busy writing books while we’re busy making their show.

This question came to my mind. It relates to that. What do you think are some of the biggest opportunities right now based on the state of the market?

Where you see it’s going, the industry, etc., do you see any big opportunities for entrepreneurs or marketers to cash in? One of the first things that came to my mind was there’s probably people out there with a lot of great IP. Drew was a perfect example of it.

Drew Canole is big in the juicing world for information products. The original partnership was going to be I’ll be the spokesperson for your juicer, and then utilize his IP to help enhance that. I know a lot of my colleagues, friends, and readers are experts with IP.

I always wonder if there’s an opportunity to partner with certain companies to provide IP when they don’t have it if they’re selling products.

There is a real opportunity for that. There are people that need it and presents a bond to that customer for the company. It also provides, because I know so many of these IT properties can be turned into continuity products and be parceled out to them.

One of the things that I see in your space that I’ve loved that you're focused here is that IP is one of the easiest things to sell if you have the story straight and the courage to do it. They’re relatively inexpensive shows to produce. They’re highly profitable because you’re selling IP.

William Randolph Hearst sold publishing. That’s what you guys are selling. It’s a matter of fear. That’s the number one thing, when I go to a lot of internet marketing events, and people want to talk to me about how could they sell their thing?

You talk to them and they go, “I don’t know if I can spend $20,000 or $30,000 or $50,000.” Then you ask them what they’re making and they’ll tell you that they’re making $50,000 a month. “What are you waiting for?” It’s a block in their mind because they don’t know how to do it.

It’s like being a computer programmer. If you know how to be a computer programmer, you know that. How could you make a TV show? It’s not difficult. You just haven’t done it. Everybody who’s on TV who’s ever sold, IP had to get over that mental hurdle. They’re hugely successful.

Dean and his real estate project on TV has been millions and millions of dollars. Dean wasn’t a TV producer. He’s a smart real estate guy. One of his shows was a GoPro camera in his car.

He drove around for 30 minutes in his car and sold a real estate infomercial product. It’s a great product. He did a great job. Do you want to talk about a show that’s inexpensive to produce? That thing must have cost him $28 to produce.

It can be so easy. It came from Dean’s authenticity.

It’s compelling.

 

I’ll broach this topic. I’ll let the readers guess what the rest of it is, but did you talk to Adam Lyons about his workings with Yahoo on the video production?

No.

This is some pretty cool stuff. Bottom line is if there are any readers out there with a product and you’re spending a highly, a significant amount of money.

Let’s say $500,000 to $1 million or more on ads, like on Google or ideally Yahoo Bing, send an email to AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com. Let me know. We might have some cool opportunities there for you. That being said, sorry to diverge folks.

I was asking for any other if you thought of any other big opportunities for folks out there based upon the state of the industry, the way things are changing. I know that at the boardroom, Kevin Harington was there.

He was speaking about how media cost and other things have brought down the ability to make a profitable infomercial as much these days. You have nine shows airing. Are you seeing a major change in the economics of making this affordable? Do you see it going up, down, sideways?

The margins are thin, but the margins have always been thin. Media is more expensive. There are more channels. Again, if you look at that as a glass half full you’d say there are more channels that I can find a specific type of viewer on.

Finding a product that matches that viewer and then make the show that’s appropriate for that customer. There’s been this expansion and contraction thought of, “There are so many channels it’s going to cost too much.”

I look at the channels saying, “When we lost GoPro, let’s look at thirteen channels and thirteen creatives.” We’re going to make a channel to talk about networks that were around at that moment when GoPro launched.

“Let’s make a car racing commercial with Nick Whitman, the CEO and put it on the speed network. Let’s make a boat racing commercial and put it on Sunday mornings between the fishing shows.”

“Let’s make a motocross and make sure that goes on in the afternoons when motocross is happening on ESPN 2.” Those are some peripheral networks that are a little bit cheaper, but the creators identically match the viewer.

Business is business. It’s always tough. You always have to be smarter. You always have to be more innovative. There’s no easy path, but it’s not that difficult because people are doing it. It’s something that people want. There will be another me too. Go be unique.

When you think about economics or change, there’s a balance. One thing rises, the other thing falls. It may be more expensive to do certain types of media, but now when it comes to TV there are all those other types of channels. You can get specific.

A couple of years ago you were advertising on three, five, ten channels. Now you’ve got a whole bunch. You can get much more specific and dialed into your audience.

Like with Facebook, with the demographic targeting and psychographic targeting. You can get specific to people who want your stuff, badly.

I’ll say find better stuff. If you ask me a couple of years ago what’s a good pair of shoes cost? I’d go $80. Now you ask me what a good pair of shoes cost $450. It’s because the market’s changed, not because I’ve changed. That’s what a good pair of shoes cost. What’s a good car cost? Find better stuff to sell.

It still blows me away talking about that with jeans. Jeans always used to be $50. That’s a nice pair of jeans. You go to the store. This is $180. This is on sale.

My wife works at Nordstrom. I walked through Nordstrom, and she picked up three pairs of pants. I just about had a heart attack. The pants are $180 a pair. Sell better stuff. Don’t be a bottom feeder, be a top feeder.

You work with clients, everybody from Fortune 500 companies to entrepreneurs who got their product. I know you’ve got an agency, Big Baby.

Big Baby is based here in Austin. We’re focused on doing, probably more so than the rest of our industry. That’s how you and I got to know each other is tie my industry more directly to the internet industry. That is where the future is. It’s where the pricing is.

Most of my industry hasn’t even caught up to the present. We’re looking at more integrated strategies and integrated campaigns. It’s expensive to make an infomercial sometimes. You collect a lot of assets that you don’t’ have time to use on TV.

The internet is a great place to use those assets and collect more individuals from individual sales and searches on the internet.

Tell me about those assets. Number one is obviously you’ve got the creative that you can use in all different types of places.

From YouTube, Marketing or whatever. Videos that can be syndicated and disperses out there on the web. Are there any other types of assets you’re referring to?

There’re tons of testimonials. Typically, I shoot 60 to 80 hours of footage to make a 30-minute infomercial. There’s a lot of stuff on the editing to go through as far as technical testimonials or longer testimonial stories. More humanity focused stories on people.

I may talk to somebody for 20 minutes and only use seconds of what they said. They all have a story. Then I have 20 or 30 good stories that are two to five minutes long that make great sales pieces.

What are some of the nuts you’re trying to crack? Especially when you’re starting up a new agency. I’m sure you’re spinning a lot of plates and getting everything rolling.

Maybe specifically at it relates to creating more integration with web and e-commerce integration, what are some of the nuts you’re trying to crack there? I ask for selfish reasons because I may be able to help you. There may be some readers out there who could be a wealth of resources.

I am finding the paths. There’s a lot of folks out there that are getting good at specifics like Google in particular or Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube.

What we’re finding is that not only are there experts in those fields, but then there are subsets by product category.

For me that’s what I would like to collect, is that I have a go-to person for YouTube that knows how to sell nutriceuticals, or that knows how to sell IP, or that knows how to sell garden tools, whatever it is.

There would be a person on Facebook that knows that category and how to find that consumer. I know some people that overlap, but I find that those things are becoming such specialties.

That people are channel specialists. I am aligning myself with those specific channel folks that work on an ROI basis. That are interested in going in and going, “I get your product and I know how to sell it. Here’s what I would like as a cut from the sale when your client sells one.”

Luckily, I may be able to help you out on some of that. I’ve got a lot of good resources and people that maybe we can create some collaboration and help you do that. I’ve seen your work and it’s awesome.

Speaking of your work, let’s talk about some of the clients that Big Baby is looking for. Big, small, in between, tell me about your ideal client profile here?

For me it goes back to what I said earlier, it’s innovation. That is what I’m looking for. Number one is innovation. Somebody who’s got a product that is unique in the marketplace or they think might be. With a little bit of proper positioning, possibly could be.

It’s something that they’ve sold, something that has some consumer data behind it that we know who likes it and why. I don’t typically do a lot of inventor stuff anymore, only because frankly I don’t have to. It’s very laborious to go through that process.

People do hire me as a consultant early on in their businesses if they’re funded and they’re doing a new device or product. I have a client that’s in the beauty space.

They’re well-funded and we’re designing building the product from the ground up. That’s not going to be an infomercial for another eighteen months.

They’ll work with you on helping to frame that out correctly and set it up for success later on.

I know how to name the product. I know how to help design, because that’s a background in design. The device itself, what the components of a complete offer are for that product so that there’s desire to purchase.

Even down to how to build the right box for it. Stuff that you wouldn’t normally think a person who makes infomercials, and the financial mechanics behind it.

When you think about the economics or change, there’s always a balance. One thing rises, the other one falls. Click To Tweet

I look for different things like that, innovation. People that are in development that are funded that have something that’s headed towards innovation.

I get a lot of folks, too, that you have broken infomercials or marketing. Things that worked for a couple of years, no longer do. They don’t know how to move them. They have a brand that’s been successful for years.

They’re looking to get into direct response advertising as the way to do self-funded ventures. Like SE Johnson, did a project with me. You’d think that the people that make Windex have all the money in the world.

They probably do, but there’s within these corporations, there are individuals who have what I’d call pet projects that the company is funding. They say, “You can do this, but you got to find a way to pay for the advertising.”

It may look like Windex on the outside, but on the inside, it’s nuts and bolts basic. How do we launch this and how do we make it work?

It’s like a little entrepreneurial venture inside bigger companies? There’s a lot of financial constraints but they want to make it work.

When it comes to somebody hiring you to say, all right Ron, we’re ready to go. Ideally, I’m recapping for you here and filling any holes, somebody, they’re not necessarily starting up unless they’re starting up with a huge budget. They don’t mind throwing it your way.

Ideally, they have some consumer data. It’s a good product. It’s innovative, there’s a good USP that you can get behind. You’re not selling another butter knife that is like any other butter knife. It can be a physical product.

It can be information product, IP experts, people who have things that they want. There’s no real better way to get some dramatic celebrity branding or social proof than to appear on television if for nothing else. That’s tremendously powerful.

Done in the right format, almost like a Ted Talk or a presentation style show, it doesn’t have to look the least bit cheesy. It doesn’t have to look the least bit pushy, your typical infomercial. It’s like a talk show.

You’ll work on producing the entire thing, helping with the financial, the mechanics, doing all that. You’ll also work as a consultant for people who, if they’re not quite ready, but they need some guidance, there are some opportunities there to work with you.

I’ll tell this next statement to the readers. I know I’ve got some pretty big people who have great products listening to this who may have always thought that infomercials were out of their range.

This should appeal directly to you to reach out to Ron and say, “Here’s what I’ve got. I don’t know if I could take this to DRTV, if it would be profitable, but I’d like to potentially work with you. I heard you on the best podcast ever Bacon Wrapped Business. I want to know.”

There’s the opportunity to use some of your consulting expertise to help people align themselves for success. I’m going to make some introductions to you Ron to some other people who may even have a bigger list of those folks out there. It may help you there.

If people want to get in contact with you and they want to say, “Ron, I heard you on Bacon Wrapped Business, it was amazing. I want to give you money for being cool or for helping me out,” either one, how would they get a hold of you? What’s the best way?

You can contact me directly at Ron@BigBabyAgency.com.

You can’t say that and not get a great visual. Like you said, you’re good at naming products and things.

I want people to remember it. It’s something you don’t have to say twice.

Have you got your logo done yet?

We’re working on that.

I can’t wait to see that one.

It will be fun. Again, the end game doesn’t have to be television for you. If you have a product and you have a consumer at the other end and you’re trying to build a communication strategy to them.

We’ve said enough about marketing to men and women to hopefully jar that there is a difference and you should be speaking to them differently, but still personal. I’d be happy to help people with that.

Anybody who takes you up on that offer, I’m telling you guys right now, you’ll be in good hands if you’ve made it this far through. Me, picking Ron’s brain is because this is stuff, I wanted to know folks, not for you, every question.

I’ve read the book a couple of times. I’ve seen Ron work. There were still a lot of unanswered questions that I had. Ron, you did an amazing job filling in some of those gaps and got me excited for some of the other possibilities out there.

Ron’s book that he co-authored, and I know you’re going to be working on another one, bringing one out. Buy Now: Creative Marketing That Gets Customers Respond To You And Your Products. It’s an amazing book written with your former partner.

Ron is there anything else I can do for you? Anything else you’re looking for out there either from my listeners of from me?

I’m like you, I feel the same way. I like to help. That’s what makes this business fun. If you’ve got something that you think I don’t know that you’d like to share with me, by all means connect with me.

I like new people and I like new ideas. Let’s go forward. This is the best damn sizzling show on the internet.

I got that on record, I’m going to plaster that out all over the interwebs. I’m not talking to guys and girls. I’m not talking to a big group of people. I’m talking to you individually. Insert your name here.

I hope that you’ve enjoyed this episode of Bacon Wrapped Business. It is by far the longest episode I’ve had. It’s on purpose, honestly my favorite. I’ve got years of knowledge out of Ron. You guys have, too.

I’m appreciative for Ron for doing this. I’m appreciative to you for reading. Hopefully you’ve taken a lot of notes.

One of the best things you can do for me because if you appreciate this, the way to get back, I’m not charging you for this although I want you to feel like you stole some great IP from me, it was that good.

The way you can repay me is to share the show, tell your friends, share it on social media, tag me in it. Let me know on Twitter, Facebook. You can find me on both of the sites. I love it when you share and when you give me feedback.

If there are any topics you want me to cover, any questions I didn’t ask, any people that you want me to interview, send an email to AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com. I read every single one like I read all the reviews.

If you even want a second opinion on the marketing strategy that you’re working on now, or you’d like me to connect you with a previous case because you think that they could help you out, let me know. Send that email to AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com.

Keep those reviews and emails coming and keep listening. Ron, thank you very much for being on the show. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed it and look forward to working with you.

Brad, thank you. I’m sorry I chewed up so much of your time. It was fun.

I’m glad we were able to. Guys, thanks for reading until next time. We are over and out. See you later.

Important Links:

• Big Baby Agency
• Ron@BigBabyAgency.com
• Buy Now: Creative Marketing That Gets Customers Respond To You And Your Products

About the Guest: Ron Lynch

His combined background as a retail operations expert and a filmmaker made direct response marketing the obvious landing pad for his passions. He has experienced the joy, pain and reward of generating over three billion dollars in retail revenue for his clients and partners.

The experience he has in building real brands through direct response marketing venues is far-reaching and robust.  Ron specializes in the launch of innovative products including housewares, skincare, natural medicine, pharma, hardware, pain relief, technology, entertainment IP and personal growth IP.

Ron is also the founder of BigBabyAgency.com

• Here’s How »

• Bacon Wrapped Business on Facebook
• Brad Costanzo on Facebook
• Brad Costanzo on LinkedIn
• Brad Costanzo on YouTube
• Brad Costanzo on Twitter