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offer richard vickery. the marketing secrets. >> my mother went to her grave a few years ago not really understanding what i did. i was fortunate back in the 1960s to pioneer political direct mail. people had been raising money for ahr long time and raising it through the mail for charities, churches et cetera. nobody combined the two and i did that in the early 60s so about 20 years i had no competitors. i went out there and helped build a conservative movement and make the case that without direct mail there would be no conservative movement worthy of the name. when i did my pioneering work. >> have you always been a

conservative even when you were growing up? >> i grew up in pasadena texas and had kids in the neighborhood playing cops and robbers 11, 12, 13-years-old. i would tell people don't worry i'm not shooting robbers and shootinger commies. i have no recollection of conversations but i came in knowing they are bad people and i'm dedicated to fighting them, opposing them. i'm second-generation conservative, bill buckley, barry goldwater et cetera. 100%, phyllis schlafly, jerry falwell, myself. before we were conservatives, first we wereth anti-communists. emthat was the glue that held te conservative movement together in those days. >> what was that moment for you when it came to direct mail and

you are visiting the review office. >> i was fortunate that i had two weeks summer camp national guard military base outside of chicago and we were there for the two weeks everybody goes into chicago. there was a small add for americans for constitutional action that no longer exists, but i had a buddy that worked for the national review and i could hear g the cannons into te guns going off in new york and washington the war was starting andd i was desperate to get in and fight the political left here in america so i called my friend and said i've got to get one of those jobs and he said it's not for jobs, it's one, i

said get me that job. i got the job. for about a year and a half i moved to new york and i came in contact fairly regularly with bill buckley and frank meyer and intellectual giants. i tried to be like them and i read everything. i wasn't making a lot of progress so at one point i made a conscious decision to focus on direct mail. we didn't have enough people. we had nobody that could market to them to the country so i literally wentid to my wife. i said i think i've got something that's going to change america. could i be relieved of all household duties. for seven or eight years i made a deep dive into marketing and if this was the microphone of

the country back innt those days "new york times," nbc, abc, we couldn't get our message out. starting with direct mail we could go around and that changed everything. i could make the case ronald reagan wouldn't have gotten the nomination without direct mail and john, and george hw bush getting hundreds of thousands of contributions. >> what makes an effective direct mail letter? talk about one that you've written. >> direct mail is it used to be until recently secondd largest form, television number one. now it's number three because the internet. i recognized that early on. when i write a letter that goes to a million people they don't write it to a million people, i

write it to one person. >> and who is that person? >> most of my political life i think it was my parents. my mother and my dad. you don't want to write to somebody that always gives or never gives. doyou have a conversation with them. bill buckley famously said he was aee conservative but not of the greed. saturday night hanging out with john galbraith et cetera. my faith is catholic and they are not quite sure when you stand up. i can sit in the front row. i am one with the audience and that makes a huge difference.

>> many of your letters into those of us that have been involved in the media or politics over the years have received these and they are often one line paragraphs and then three or four pages and they repeat. what is the effect of that? >> one of the many reasons i like direct mail is i don't have to guess this work for that work because we take many letters and we spread it. 500,000 get the long paragraphs and it's been tested billions and billions so we know a good long eight-page letter up to the point. scan it and look at this and that. you would never give a salesman

selling the refrigerator but. only speaking these words you speak until you make the sale. so, short letters, short words. if you read the new testament, they are almost one and two syllable words. he used very short words and short paragraphs. follow me, et cetera. so you want long letters but short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. and let me say i will be 90 in a few months. i literally spend two hours a day studying marketing, advertising, business and i've done that for over 60 years. i've already spent probably. young people are interested in the marketing advertising career and i told them study, study, read, read, competition is not

that serious quite frankly. most haven't done a lot of studying so if you study the classics out there, the giants that have come before us you can get to the top of marketing. >> has e-mail and social media benefited your business? >> not really any major way. when i got involved, fund raising in the mail wasn't a mature business. it had been out there for a a little bit. every fortune 500 company as a direct marketing division department so we know what works in the direct marketing. we will figure it out. it might be tomorrow or five

years from f now. but we haven't figured out how to market on the internet. there's a lot of young people who are trying it. they know next to nothing so we are still in the exploratory stage is learning how to market. >> you talk about the four horsemen of marketing differentiation benefits and brand. briefly describe what those are. >> nothing original with that at all. borrowed from the santa stole from that et cetera but i would urge the viewers it doesn't matter whether you are running for office or you want a promotion or a job, ray's, spouse. iot tell people there was a lotf

competition. i had to separate myself from competition. position number one is simply a whole in the marketplace. it is a private decision. differentiation is what you do publicly to let everybody know what level of the marketplace is. they both have a position they hold in the marketplace and they both differentiate what used to be tucker carlson. now it's jesse waters and laura ingram et cetera on fox and rachel maddow on msnbc. you don't find those people anywhere else on television. third is benefit. by the way, you have to tune the market to the audience. get all for right and life is downhill. get one wrong you're not likely

to see. so to their audience they succeed for a benefit they offer news information you don't get anywhere else until recently a little competition and previously there was no competition for decades. the same with msnbc. one is the composition of the differentiation and benefit. it's what makes you singular and the words of a famous communicator. i live out in the country. our goal in life is to bean a purple cow. i haven't figured out howfi to squeeze a fifth one in their but the fifth one is a tagline it should be fairly short and summarized what it is you do that different from everybody else out therere and if anybody

else can use your tagline, throw it away. it has nothing to do with how smarter, how high you jump or anything else. it's something that differentiates you from all then other products. if you are running for office the name doesn't say if you are liberal or conservative. the most effective tagline by the way the last 40 years has been make america great again and liberals acknowledged that so the tagline is separated trump in 2016. we had a well-known governor in virginia george allen who said you do the crime you do the time. reagan in 1980 are you better off now than four years ago so you want a tune people can whistle. >> do you find it effective to use strong language against your

opponents on the negative ads, do they work well on tv? >> it's not necessarily strong words. i read something recently about truman. people used to say give them hell. he would say i don't give them hell i just tell them the truth and they think it's hell so it's important to differentiate yourself whether it is in a anyprimary or the general electn or even if it is a nonprofit you want to separate from all the competition and explain in a few words what it is you're doing. it used to be people were exposed to a thousand or maybe 2,000 messages a day. now it's five or 10,000 so you've got to be able to succinctly in a few words identify your brand and by the

way that's when you own a category. i am a brand ionic category. i was the first ever to do political direct mail. you want to be the first in a category. >> what surprised me as we were talking about how liberals or the others have superseded the conservative movement when it comes to direct mail. >> when i did my pioneering work in the early 1960s, i caught a lot of criticism quite frankly. regularly attacked on abc, nbc, "new york times," "time" magazine all through the 70s. all the criticism stopped within a few hours. so i told my conservative

friends at the heritage foundation and many others that used too get together don't worry, it's taken me 20 years to learn how to do this. it's going to take them at 30 or more because i'm smarter than they are. nott so. within fivee years, roger and others on the left have caught up with and far surpassed us in my opinion. i wouldn't dream of flying an airplane with a pilot that hadma the skills of the average conservative marketer. most people have learned by their gut feeling. none of us would go to to a doctor that learned by the seat of his pants. so the liberals basically have about 20,000. they raise 700% more money.

>> yet you talkio about them as organizations that are what? >> on the organizations not third-party but 30 fourths. the liberals have these 20,000 out there. think about if president obama called a meeting of all environmental groups. if conservatives did the same 35, six, seven so each of the groups author has their own agenda, their own source of money and membership, their own leadership not just with the democrats but the republicans. they pull people on their issues so the politicians don't really set the agenda so much as these

third fourth organizations and we really are far behind and one of the things the reason i wrote the book is to encourage mostly younger people when you get to be my age or in your 60s, 70s even 50s your dna is pretty well set. the definition of an entrepreneur is abo risk taker, somebody that will go out there and take risks so that's going to come from younger people, 20s, 30s, early 40s. some get engaged, pick themselves to lead and i think it's very important. nobody was banging on barack obama's door to run for president. he picked himself 27, 2008 describing himself as a community organizer and a year later president of the united states. donald trump is a businessman.

fifteen months later so i urge people pick yourself, don't wait for somebody come knocking on your door. i had all these ideas on energy and nobody invited me. i said all this knowledge is going to waste so out of frustration i called a meeting and a dozen people came. later moore came and i learned something nancy pelosi also learned when she was climbing the ladder you will be surprised how many good people come to your meetings if you serve good food. all of a sudden they invited me to their meetings. but pick yourself. have courage. >> can liberals pick up and learn things? >> unfortunately, yes. nothing i can do about that. butdv yes. it'sno good advice even if you e

not just in politics. but the four horsemen of marketing. if you want to get a job and a promotion, start a business, get a spouse. if you want to differentiate from all that competition out there. so this book will help you differentiate yourself from everybody else out there. >> i want to talk about some of the people you write about in go big. >> this was one of life's great human beings. i was fortunate to know him in the early 60s. he was the youngest son of thomas edison and he had been secretary of the navy, governor of new jersey and the last ten or 15 years of his life he was very active in the conservative cause and movement, quite wealthy and very generous with his contributions and so i ran

young americans for freedom and one day we had a small office on the fourth floor, no elevator. i'm working at my desk at about 2:00 in the afternoon i look up and there is charles edison all the way from the boulder historian towers to kind of boost to the morale and encourage us and all that. a delightful wonderful man. i called a few other people like him and jay howard they all gave me money generously. >> let's talk about that a little bit. calling people on the phone voice to voice. >> it wasn't me in my 20s.

>> but you will write them a letter. >> i got a secretary and they would write more letters. there's a machine and it would print letters out and it seemed to work but then i got something called computers nobody heard of in those days and we started spittinger out letters and after about a year and a half by the way the national review i began to focus entirely on direct mail and after a year and a half, i thought i knew everything. so i quit a good job and started the company that was the first direct mail political advertisingry agency.

i knew nothing. less than 1% of what i know now. one thing i knew i didn't have that i needed and that is names and i was able to get donors and that changed everything so by the end of that first year i had 100,000 and now wellrv past 1 million. i didn't recognize early on in the business i was in i was fundraising, in the main acquisition. >> have you gotten rich? >> i have not. i live very comfortably and to this day my team will testify that i put everything possible back into the company.

every fiber of my being i am an entrepreneur. as i said earlier the definition is a risk taker so to this day i put everything i've got available back in the company. the only reason i do that is 1965 i started my company in january and went to various conservative organization sims d said i'veli got these and they l agreed and we spent a dollar because you invest the longtime value. two, three, four, five. that's great. when those results come in we will mail 500,000. every one of them said no let's just mail another 500,000. so at that moment i said okay i

want to save western civilization. i know what to do so i tell you what i do i will is the meeting -- finance the meeting. >> who was right? >> neither. we will be meeting in the next 18 months. >> somebody else that has been very active, blackwell, who is he? >> i'm known in the conservative movement as double zero two. doctor lee edwards is double zero one.

barry goldwater and bill buckley and falwell. at the national level longer than everybody except for doctor lee edwards so he's a dear friend i've known since 1961 and he called me on l the phone one day and said i'm having lunch with a young conservative. so we had lunch at the hotel and saw it went so well we invited him back into ten days later just he and i and he said i spoke magic words to him that i want him to come work with me and help me build the conservative movement and he said atng that point i gave hima little pay increase, but anyway after some years he left and ended up working for ronald reagan in the white house and then after that he left and started something called the leadership institute and almost

no organization i can think of that's more important than the leadership institute the trains well over a quarter of a million young people, many governors, senators,ro congressmen, legislators over the years. right now as we speak, i'm chairman of the company and they are in jerusalem with other national conservative marketers teaching people in europe how to be effective so he has maybe 500 or more classes all over the country and he's had more impact than anybody else i can think of. >> the book is called go big the marketing secrets and as someone said before rush limbaugh, there

was richard. we appreciate your time on booktv.