TCC Podcast #324: Breakthrough Advertising Mastery with Brian Kurtz

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Join The Copywriter Accelerator
The Copywriter Think Tank
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
Brian’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Free month of Brain.FM
Kim’s website
Episode 22
Episode 219

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  If you’ve been a copywriter for more than a few days, you’ve almost certainly been advised to read Eugene Schwartz’s book, Breakthrough Advertising. It’s listed on almost every list of the best copywriting books that I’ve ever seen, and it’s true, this book is a must-read, but it’s probably not the first book that you should read about copywriting, or marketing. It’s a bit of a hard book to read, and the concepts are a little bit challenging.

Our guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club podcast is Brian Kurtz, who along with Eugene Schwartz’s wife, makes that book, Breakthrough Advertising, available to the world. He has recently created a companion volume called Breakthrough Advertising Mastery, that makes Schwartz’s book even more accessible for anyone who has struggled with the concepts that he lays out in the book. So, we talked to Brian about that book, what he’s been up to since we last spoke about a year and a half ago, and it’s always great to connect with him. We think you’re going to like this interview. But, before we get to our interview with Brian, I want to introduce my co-host this week. She’s our friend and A-list copywriter, Kim Krause Schwalm. Welcome back to the show, Kim.

Kim Krause Schwalm:  Oh, it’s great to be here.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, I’m excited for this. You’ve been on the show a couple of times. We’ll share those episodes at the end, so we make sure everybody can come back and listen to it. You’ve also spoken at TCC IRL a couple of times.

Kim Krause Schwalm:  Three or four times. Yeah.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. You’ve been an awesome friend to The Copywriter Club, and just getting your ideas and feedback on the show. I’m really looking forward to it.

Kim Krause Schwalm:  I am too. Thanks. It’s weird to be in this role on the podcast, but I am excited. As soon as you said, “Brian Kurtz.” He is somebody that I have so much respect for. I’ve known him for many years, and so yeah, I’m happy to be here, and hopefully I can add some value as well.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. Knowing how close you and Brian are, it was just a no-brainer to have you come and share some ideas. So, thank you for that. So, before we jump into the interview, let me just take a moment to remind you that this episode of The Copywriter Club podcast is sponsored by the Copywriter Accelerator. It’s not a course, it’s a five month long mentoring program, where we follow the Acceleration Formula, to create the foundation for a profitable business that doesn’t struggle, doesn’t struggle with things like pricing, or packages, or finding clients.

You learn critical mindset strategies, you set goals, get accountability, and dive into the business skills, like positioning, pricing, creating client experiences, and getting yourself hired by the clients you want to work with. Most importantly, we’ll introduce you to a curated network of copywriters who will help you get unstuck, and build a business that lasts. The next round of the Accelerator starts soon, so get on the waitlist now at thecopywriteraccelerator.com.

Kim Krause Schwalm:  So, I think we need to get on with this interview. That was a great intro to that program, and I know a lot of people that have gone through it, and I think it’s an excellent way to kickstart your copywriting career. But yeah, let’s get on, and hear from Brian.

Brian Kurtz:  Just to catch people up, I’m still alive, which is a good thing. Had a near-fatal stroke the day after my book, Overdeliver launched, which taught me a lesson which we could talk about later, that you can launch a book anytime. You can only live once. So, weighing those two things, it made sense to continue to live, and not pay much attention to the book launch. And the book did well, it didn’t… I mean it was never going to be a New York Times bestseller anyway. So, and you can always… Book launches are forever, in a way, especially if it’s evergreen material, which my book is. So, that was April of 2019?

Rob Marsh:  Yeah.

Brian Kurtz:  Yeah.

Rob Marsh:  It was the year before COVID, yeah.

Brian Kurtz:  Right, right. So it was April of 2019, and then the rest of that year, I was really recovering. I mean, I didn’t miss a beat on my business. I still had Titans Mastermind. I didn’t know… I’ve always wanted to launch a virtual mastermind. So, in December of… And then I started getting better. I went on my own little tour, my speaking tour in October. I did a GKIC event, it was my first event. And then I spoke at Jeff Walker’s Launch Con.

So I got myself out, after spending four or five months, not in hibernation, but kind of just kissing the ground I was walking on, and saying, “I’m alive, and it’s great.” And I didn’t have a come to Jesus moment, either. It was like, it’s just that I always live my life day to day. But when you’re faced with the fact that the neurosurgeon, when I went to see him two weeks after my stroke and he said, “I’m surprised you’re still here,” that kind of hit me with a jolt.

Rob Marsh:  Not the kind of thing you want your doctor to say to you.

Brian Kurtz:  Yeah. He said it, and he certainly thought I’d be paralyzed, or my speech would’ve been… And of course my kids were hoping that my speech was gone, but that didn’t happen. So, in late 2000… So, I did those speaking engagements, I’m coming out of it, and in December of 2019, I launched Titans Xcelerator. And the interesting thing is that, I always said after the fact, that I predicted the pandemic, because I launched it as a virtual mastermind, all on Zoom, in December of 2019. And I launched it, got 150 members, and in March, we were shut down.

And so one of the things that I learned through all of that was that it’s really good to have a virtual mastermind during a pandemic because my live mastermind became virtual for a while too. But also, it was interesting, because it also taught me to overdeliver. Now, my book is called Overdeliver, but it taught me to overdeliver in a new way, and how that would affect renewals long term. Because I’m a big on renewals, I’m big on the second order, versus the first order. I’m not the guy that teaches copy, cold copy, to cold traffic. It’s much too frigid for me.

I want to go to warm copy, and I want to go to warm copy, to warm traffic, to hot traffic, and renew people for their lifetime. That’s where my business has always been at Boardroom, and it’s always where my business is now. So, one of the features of Titans Xcelerator, when I launched it in December of 2019, was a once-a-month live call with me, where I would do hot seats. I didn’t even think I was going to bring in speakers or anything, but I guess I probably would’ve gotten to it eventually. But I was going to do hot seats. discussions, just an open-ended, ask-me-anything Q&A, and I thought that would be enough.

And so, in March of 2020, all of a sudden I said, “Well, I’m home. I’m going to go to weekly calls.” And so, I went from monthly calls to weekly calls. I had nothing else to do anyway. And they were fantastic. It was like, I already realized that Titans Xcelerator was kind of what I was born to do. I mean, I was born to connect people, and contribute to people, but contributing not so much on Zoom, because I did end up getting a lot of Zoom fatigue, as we all did. But it was very much in my DNA to do it virtually, as well as live.

And so the weekly calls, then I started getting guest speakers. All the guest speakers that were… Getting them on virtual is… I got them live. I got Jay Abraham live, not bragging, but I did. I got Perry Marshall live. I’m not bragging, but I did. I got Dan Kennedy live, but I got him on video. He only comes on by phone, actually, doesn’t come on video. So, what was interesting is that the weekly calls… And I promised right from the beginning that weekly calls would not be forever. That the pandemic would probably end, maybe in six or seven years, and then we would no longer do… I didn’t say that, I said it would end before that, but we’re not going to do weekly calls forever.

But when I went to like… But then, we’re not going to go back to monthly, either. So, I built in an over delivery that was huge, and then I still had an over delivery, even when we came back to normal. And by the summer of 2020, or late in the summer, in the fall, I said, “We’re going to do at least two calls a month now.” And sometimes I do four calls a month. And that’s the nature of the mastermind now.

And what happened was, lo and behold, I got really good renewal rates. Imagine that. And so, it was by accident. I mean, would I have gotten the same renewal rates if I had stayed with a monthly call? I don’t know. I didn’t test against it. But, I do believe that… And it’s the kind of thing over-deliver on, that people… It’s tangible. And even though I send out a USB every month with all the calls of the month, and a swipe of the month, and stuff from the Titans Vault from my masterminds, it’s not the same, because that piles up on their cabinet.

But when you’re live, and you’re being with people, and you know that, because you guys do TCC IRL, right? And when you’re in real life, it just makes such a difference. But, when you’re in real life, on Zoom during a pandemic, it really added a lot. So, I was getting, on first year renewals, I didn’t think I’d get 50%, and I was getting close to 75%. And so, I realized I had something here, and then I did a launch, and I got the membership up to about 250 through 2020, ’21. And then I said, “I want to do more with Breakthrough Advertising.”

Those people who aren’t on this call, who haven’t been on the previous calls, might not know, but they probably all know anybody who’s following you guys, know that Breakthrough Advertising is one of the most important books for any copywriter. Actually, it’s for anybody who wants to learn about human behavior. But it’s copywriting, it’s marketing, written by Gene Schwartz in 1966. Not one word has been changed in the manuscript that I sell, and it’s 100% relevant to today’s marketplace.

And so, I have the exclusive rights to it. You can ask me how I got it, but that’s not the important thing. But the important thing is that Gene was a mentor of mine. I knew him well. He wrote copy for me, at Boardroom, for Boardroom, that is. And I made a deal for exclusive rights with his wife Barbara, who is a wonderful woman. She can’t believe the appetite for Gene’s work right now. We’ve sold over 10,000 copies of Breakthrough Advertising over the last four or five years, at $125 a book, and I think we’ve sold, probably it’s up to like 65 to 70 countries, which is just amazing. I got my first order from Eleuthera or something, it was a country I had never heard of. It’s not Eleuthera, it’s something else. It’s a country in between Spain and France, a little country.

Rob Marsh:  Andalusia.

Brian Kurtz:  No, it wasn’t Andalusia. Anyway, so I’ve sold books in Mozambique, and everywhere in the world, and it’s just a blessing that I have this book. But then, of course, with every book, you wonder how many people are actually reading it. You can buy books, and if you look at my shelf here, I’ve got dozens, and dozens of piles of books. I buy them, I look at them, I pick them up once in a while and read a chapter or two, but I don’t read them cover to cover. So, how can I get people to read Breakthrough Advertising in more detail?

And Breakthrough Advertising is a very dense read. So I decided, and Chris Mason, who’s my marketing partner at Titans, he decided that we should do Breakthrough Advertising boot camps. And he devised the agenda. He went through the first three chapters, mostly, set up worksheets, homework. We came up with seven or eight calls we could do. We set it up over two weeks. And of course the goal would be to… We charged $97 for it. The goal was to get people into Titans Xcelerator, which at the time was $2,000 for the year.

And it seemed like a good stepping stone, because the bootcamp was on Zoom, and then we sell them into Titans Xcelerator, which is a year on Zoom. Much wider, broader than just Breakthrough Advertising. And that’s how we did, we’ve done three boot camps, and each time we get 60 or 70 people in a boot camp, we have 10,000 buyers we can go to, to get new people on the bootcamp. And then we get anywhere from, I don’t know, 10 to 20 people join Xcelerator.

So, it’s a nice feeder for Xcelerator, but I realized how enjoyable it was to teach Breakthrough Advertising. And I don’t think anybody could be an expert on that book. I’d say the closest person alive that would be an expert is Parris Lampropoulos. And we actually have a video of him that we use in the bootcamp, because it’s wonderful when he talks about all the states of awareness of your product, from most aware to… From least aware, to most aware.

And I’m never going to be Parris in the book, but I’m getting there. He’s got a PhD, I got a master’s. Chris is getting his PhD. And so, that’s been a big initiative for us, and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s something new. It’s something that I feel like… And when I’m with you guys, or I’m with Kevin Rogers, or I’m with anybody who’s teaching copywriting, I always feel a bit inferior, because I don’t see myself as a teacher of copy. But I do see myself as someone who can help copywriters incorporate marketing into their copy. It’s what I spoke about at the first TCC IRL, which I had a great time at.

So, it’s something that’s in my blood, to teach copywriters. But, people write to me as if I’m a copywriter sometimes. And while I write copy, and I like to write, I’m not a soup to nuts copywriter. I don’t do it. That’s the magicians of the world, that’s for you guys. But I do feel very privileged to be in rooms with the copywriters, and I can bring something to the table, and now I can bring an additional skill to the table, of teaching Breakthrough Advertising, and in incorporating it into their education, and not just selling the book for them to waste $125, to have it sit on their shelves.

So, that’s been a great initiative. And what I’m going to do next, which I think will be a lot of fun, is I’m going to do an Overdeliver bootcamp, because it’s in the same notion of, if you sell a book, you want people to read it. And Jason Fladlien taught me this, he’s a great webinar guy, and he just taught me that… He had this thing called the E-class, and he basically would sell a book, and then he would offer an E-class to go through it chapter by chapter online, on Zoom.

And with Overdeliver, I can have all kinds of homework, and assignments. Go make your own intentional dinner, and go do some Christmas cards in July. All the things that I’ve done my whole career, and put them into the bootcamp. And those people, if they don’t join Titans Xcelerator after being with me for two and a half, three weeks talking about Overdeliver, I don’t know how I can sell Titans Xcelerator better than that.

Because if they’re not… They’ll either drop out of Overdeliver, and never want to see me again for the rest of their lives, or they’ll be with me for the rest of their lives. And so, that’s the plan. I’m not doing too much different, in a way, but I’m just continuing to teach, and learn, too. I mean, when I teach, I learn. I just did two hours of hot seats on the Breakthrough Advertising Bootcamp before coming on this call with you guys, and it was great. I mean, I learned as much as I taught. It was just wonderful.

So, that brings you up to speed today. I don’t know what I’ll be doing tomorrow. I’ve got to get a negative COVID test, because I’ve had COVID the last week and a half. But outside of that, I’m happy to be alive. I’m happy to be with the two of you. And you’re always smiling, you’re always doing great stuff, and I’m your biggest fan.

Kim Krause Schwalm:  Well, we are happy you’re alive, and happy you’re with us too. And I can’t wait till the day where you say that you are a copywriter, and you just admit it, finally.

Rob Marsh:  It’s coming.

Kim Krause Schwalm:  When is it going to happen?

Rob Marsh:  It’s slow. Yeah.

Brian Kurtz:  I have gotten away from saying I’m a copywriter wannabe. I definitely got away from that.

Kim Krause Schwalm:  That’s an improvement. That’s great.

Brian Kurtz:  Right. But I just say, where I’m at now is that I write copy. I don’t… The reason why, because I was a copywriter when I started in 1981, and that was a long time ago, neither of you were even born yet.

Rob Marsh:  Of course, that’s not true. But, yeah.

Brian Kurtz:  So in 1981, and during the ’80s, to me, copywriters were just magicians. Gene Schwartz, Jim Rutz, Gary Bencivenga, Mel Martin, Clayton Makepeace, going a little more current, David Deutsch, Parris Lampropoulos, Arthur Johnson, Eric Betuel, just the best of the best. And I could not put myself in their category, as a writer. They wrote soup to nuts, 24 to 34 page magalogues, 64 page bookalogs, 12 page letters, that were so compelling. I couldn’t do it then, I didn’t want to do it, and I can’t do it now. So when I say I’m not a copywriter, I’m not that kind of copywriter.

Now, do I write a weekly email that sells stuff in it, all educational? Yeah. Do I sell a shit load of stuff? No. It’s not a selling vehicle, but I sell stuff in it, and it’s all… And like I sold your event, for example. Now, I don’t take any money for that. I don’t take affiliates. I sell stuff that I think is valuable to my audience. If you’re lucky, you got two people to show up for my list. It’s not a selling vehicle, and so they’re not used to buying. So, is it because of my writing style, or is it because they’re not used to buying? If you think I’m a copywriter, then it’s because I haven’t gotten them used to buying it. If you don’t think I’m a copywriter, then it’s because I suck at writing.

But, I have gotten rid of the whole idea that I can write, I know that I’m really a content writer, that loves to teach at the same time, and I can subtly sell stuff. I mean, when we launched this Breakthrough Advertising Mastery book, which I think you guys wanted to talk about, I sold a lot through that.

Now, I did multiple emails that I didn’t really write. I had Chris write them, because I don’t really like writing the sales emails, so he wrote them himself, and then if you sign my name to it, I edited it, so it was in my voice, because I’m just not comfortable sending anything that’s not in my voice. That’s another thing that prevents me from being as good a copywriter as I can be to sell stuff. But, I have to admit, we sold 500 copies of the book, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, of a brand new book. Selling it to people who bought Breakthrough Advertising, and some people who didn’t. So, that’s my spiel on me as a copywriter.

Kim Krause Schwalm:  Well, before we hit record, you mentioned that, I think you said that you read Breakthrough Advertising, you typically read it every year, but this past year you read it four times. Is that right? You said four times?

Brian Kurtz:  Yeah, well I read it at least three times, because we had three bootcamps. So, we went through it during the bootcamp, and not just… We went through the first three chapters in depth. So the first three chapters I probably read six or seven times, and then the rest of the book maybe two or three times. And I get something new every time I read it. I’ve gotten something new out of every bootcamp. We’re in the second week of the fourth bootcamp that we’ve done, and I’ve learned something new in each bootcamp.

In this bootcamp, I learned that the chapter later in the book, on redefining yourself, and redefinition, how I was able to bring that back into levels of awareness. Actually no, yeah, levels of awareness of your audience, because we had a bunch of hot seats with people with commoditized products. I mean, one was a supplement for dogs that had nothing new in it. And another one was car washes. And how we redefined those products to make them specialty from commodity, was actually later in Breakthrough Advertising.

I didn’t realize, because Gene’s mind was like a maze, and when you talked to him, you didn’t see him that way. He was really personable. He always talked in really good language. He always has the… Good language. What does that mean? So he talked in words that people can understand, and why shouldn’t a copywriter talk like that? Right? Because he writes like that. And so, he had such a complex brain. And so, seeing the intricacies of the later chapters, and the earlier chapters has been a revelation for me because I spent a lot more time on the first three chapters.

And Parris Lampropoulos, when he teaches his Copy Cubs, he teaches them Breakthrough Advertising, and he basically says, “You read the first three chapters multiple times before you go on to the rest of the book.” And when you buy it from me, I basically put that as a note on the front of the book. It’s glued on the front of the book when they get it. It says, “Pro tip for reading Breakthrough Advertising, first three chapters multiple times. Don’t forget the rest of the book.” And now I just found something in the rest of the book that was so much more meaningful to me, as opposed to something that was a throwaway. So, there’s nothing that’s a throwaway in the book.

Kim Krause Schwalm:  Can we dig deeper into that though? The redefinition, before we move away from that? I think that will grab a lot of copywriters’ interest, as far as, what does that mean, and how do we do it?

Brian Kurtz:  So, I’ll give you the example I gave on the hot seat. So, it was this guy, he had a supplement, and it had three ingredients in it. One of them is an ingredient that’s in a lot of dog stuff. It begins with an F, fermentin, or something. I had a dog, I don’t have one anymore. The other one was lavender, and the third was chamomile, maybe. I know it’s tea, but it’s also an ingredient, right? So it’s like those three ingredients.

And so my first question for him, I said, “Is the interaction of those three ingredients like a new US…” Speaking in Todd Brown’s language, “Is that a new, unique mechanism? Is it a new thing?” He said, “No, there’s a lot of it out there.” This guy wants to do e-commerce on Amazon. I said, “Well, how are you going to differentiate yourself? How are you going to redefine a product, or something to your audience, that knows? I mean, they’re most aware of this product if you’re going out to dog owners.”

So, we started getting into… I kept on quizzing him on what the product is. And so, there was nothing new in this product. However, then a light bulb went off, and I thought about when we sold books at Boardroom, I used to get trade books off the shelf at Barnes and Noble. I used to take the… I’ve written about this in my blog, I might’ve even done something about it on one of my… I’ve written about it on other podcasts. It might’ve been on one of yours.

But basically, the premise was that, and I won’t go into the whole story, it’s in my blog archive, but I will go to… We went at Boardroom to Barnes and Noble, and the blog post is about walking around Barnes and Noble with a hand truck. And I walked around Barnes and Noble with a hand truck, and went to all the categories that our nine million name database would buy books in health, tax and accounting, finance, home improvement, because our newsletters covered a lot of areas, in health, and consumer issues, and all that.

So, we used to go through the books, and I’m not going to go through the whole process, but there was one book that we took off. It was a health book, it was a natural healing book. And what we did was, so the book that’s sitting on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, it’s got an inch of dust on it, and it’s already in the discount bin, basically, selling for $7. It probably sold 3000 copies in its lifetime. And we would then take the book, test it with our copywriter, see if they could write fascinations for it, or write good direct mail copy for it, and make a direct mail version, a direct marketing version of that book.

What did we do? The book off the shelf was a soft cover. We made it a hardcover. The book off the shelf was 600 pages. We made the hardcover 500, because we took some stuff out to reduce the weight a little bit, because we had to ship it now, in direct mail. But also, there was stuff in the book that we didn’t even want, our editors didn’t think was so good. So we made it our book.

Then, we added premiums, and bonuses, like all kinds of special reports that would go with the book on natural healing, from our own archives at Boardroom. Now we had a Boardroom product, started with an outside product that was so foreign, but still in the same category of books that our people buy. And if you looked at the Encyclopedia of Natural Healing, Boardroom’s hardcover book with premiums, versus the soft cover book that was sitting on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, apples to oranges. We redefined that book for direct mail, even though the bulk of it, same book. So, that’s a really extreme exam-

Brian Kurtz:  Oh, the bulk of it, same book. So that’s a really extreme example. So I put that on… Chris and I both quizzed this guy with the three-ingredient dog supplement, and we started saying to him, “What could you add to your supplement that would make it so that the other supplements that look just like yours, you couldn’t compare them to? And if you could possibly add a continuity to it, then you’ve got people that could come back, not just for the supplement, but for whatever you add.” And we were brainstorming, I said, “You have to do the research. I’m not doing… ” The hot seat is not… I don’t do it for them, but I give them the tools to go do it.

And one of the things that came up was like a ball that you give to your dog when they’re frightened. They can chew it or maybe… And also the vest that they put on during thunder and lightning storms, something like that. Because I guess the supplement is to calm them down and make them not bark when they go to the door. So you get something that’s related, but maybe something that needs new batteries or a new charger or something like that so there’s some renewability. But if the supplement has renewability, so you don’t need the bonus to have renewability, even better. So you have built in continuity, but now it’s a kit.

And you rename it. You don’t call it the ingredient, you don’t call it what everybody else is calling their supplement. So that’s a major redefine. He has some work to do on his hands, but I think he can get to a place where he’ll have an apples-to-orange comparison, his product versus the others. And hopefully, he will stand out and have an unfair advantage against his competition. That’s the best-case scenario.

Rob Marsh:  We love talking about copywriting principles, marketing principles, and how he differentiates. Awesome. So let’s talk about the book, because we’ve talked a little bit about the events that you do, the virtual events and going through that, but you’ve actually taken the principles that Gene laid out and you’ve put them into a book, you and Chris, in a format that makes it doable.

And I think the problem with Breakthrough Advertising, aside from the fact that it used to cost $900 or more to get it, the problem is that, like you were saying, Gene was so smart and the book is so dense. I think even Parris talks about only reading the first three chapters until you are an expert copywriter and then go deeper. But-

Brian Kurtz:  He doesn’t recommend Breakthrough Advertising to novice copywriting.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you guys have taken the principles though, and you’re making them doable. At least that’s my impression of this book. My copy hasn’t arrived yet. Still waiting for it, but-

Brian Kurtz:  It’s coming off the presses soon.

Rob Marsh:  So yeah, tell us about the book.

Brian Kurtz:  Yeah, so the issue was that the bootcamp was our first attempt, actually it started in Titan’s Accelerator. One of our members, Theresa Pantanella, who’s a wonderful… She does Facebook advertising. She’s a wonderful lady. And she was like, got a copy of Breakthrough Advertising and she was struggling with it. She’s not a copywriter, but she’s a marketer and she wanted to get the principles. And she said, “Brian,” and she did it in front of all the accelerators, said, “Brian, you know all these copywriters, you know all these people who know the book really well. Why don’t we do a Breakthrough Advertising study group inside Titans Xcelerator?”

And so we did that. We started having like… So the Titans Xcelerator calls are on Thursdays between 11:00 and 01:00. And then at 01:30, we started doing these Breakthrough Advertising study groups once a month or twice a month in addition. And we had Paris come on one, we had David Deutsch come on one, we had Kim Krause Schwalm do a couple of them. Then some other writers like Brian Chudzinski, who’s one of Parris’s former cubs, he did a session. And so it was just a wonderful little study group.

So after a while, like everything else, it fizzled out and everybody lost… Didn’t lose their attention span. We said, “Okay, we had enough of this.” But Chris and I said, “Let’s continue this as the bootcamp.” And then we launched our first bootcamp. We’re on our fourth now. So then in the bootcamp we started doing worksheets and resources that we created so that they could go through the… So we gave them exercises, homework, all of that. And we put them in the Facebook group during the bootcamp so they could go get them and print them and have them forever with the book.

So then we said, “Well, wait a minute. Maybe we could put those in a book that could be a standalone.” And at the same time we’re thinking about that, and I believe in fate. You put good karma in the world, stuff comes back to you. I got an email from this guy, Luis Flavio Nunes. A young copywriter, 25 years old from Brazil, sends me an email. He goes, “Brian, I’ve been accumulating all of the ads, the real live ads, like real ads from the fifties and sixties that Gene cites in Breakthrough Advertising.” There are some ads in Breakthrough Advertising in the version that we sell, but he mentions ads all over the place and he gives you the headline, but you don’t see the whole ad.

This guy on his own just accumulated… He has a database of 15,000 ads. He’s like an archivist. He’s like a Denny Hatch of Brazil or something and he had all 300 that Gene mentioned. And basically, he wasn’t going to hold me ransom for them. He goes, “Brian, would you like them? I’m going to put them in a little book. Or if you want them, maybe you want to use them.” And I said, “Luis, how about I trade you? I’ll give you a lifetime membership to Titans Xcelerator. In exchange for that, I’m going to give you an annotation for this, but I’m going to take the ads, I’m going to scan them and I’m going to put them as the second half of this Breakthrough Advertising Mastery book that we’re putting together.”

I didn’t have the title yet. We did a title contest on my blog, and that’s why I know I can write copy because I got hundreds and hundreds of responses. If they have to buy something, it’s different than just sending in a title, but whatever. But I can get people to respond. So we ended up titling it Breakthrough Advertising Mastery and we decided we were just going to go all out. And so it ended up being a… It’s a 500-page hardcover book. The first half of the book are the worksheets from the bootcamp plus some additional worksheets, some explanations from stuff in the book. Chris put all of that together on his own. Chris has become a real student of the book himself.

And then the second half of the book is in color. I decided I’m going to do it in color too. We did every ad that Gene mentions in Breakthrough Advertising in color with a cross-reference at the bottom of every ad to where he mentions it in Breakthrough Advertising. So you can basically… It’s a little inconvenient, but you can go a little bit back and forth. I’m not digitizing the book, I’m not doing it. The book will work as a collector’s item as well as a workbook of sorts. And we also have a digital site with all of the worksheets so you don’t have to write in the book if you don’t want to. That’s what I did with Brilliance Breakthrough, Gene’s other masterpiece, which I gave away, I think, at your first live event.

And that book comes… I put it with a workbook because the exercises are in the book, Brilliance Breakthrough. And I was taught in third grade never to write in a book. So you can write in it, but we give them the workbook with the book. So in the case of Breakthrough Advertising Mastery, you could write in the first half of the book, but we have this site, which you get the URL when you buy the book and you have access to all of the stuff. So the book is… It’s not going to make a lot of money because it’s so freaking expensive to print. My fault, my bad, my good, my bad, right?

I wanted to do it in color. I wanted to do the ads in color. I wanted it to be every ad. I wanted it to be hardcover as opposed to softcover. Not that it was that much more expensive to do hardcover. I’m excited about it. The goal would be to sell it as a bump or an upsell when people buy Breakthrough Advertising. So Breakthrough Advertising is $125. I don’t want to make it more than Breakthrough Advertising, which I could. I mean, the book could be a couple of thou… It could be a Ben Settle kind of encyclopedia. He sells books for thousands of dollars and they’re amazing. You have a couple of his books, right?

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, I’ve got a couple. His email, Enomicon…

Brian Kurtz:  Oh yeah. It’s amazing.

Rob Marsh:  It’s ginormous.

Brian Kurtz:  It’s ginormous. And he charges, I don’t know, 2000 bucks for it or something.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, they’re expensive.

Brian Kurtz:  They’re expensive. It’s like 800 pages too. And so he did softcover though. It’s an 800-page softcover book. It’s interesting. So anyway, I actually went to Ben. I sai