you think this is just a community center? no, it's more than that. comcast is partnering with a thousand community centers to create wi-fi enabled look to zones so students from low income families can get the tools they need to be ready f anythi. >> comcast along with these television companies supports c-span2 as a public service. joining us now on booktv's offer richard vickery. what do you do for a living?

>> my mother went to her grave a few years ago not understanding what i did. i was fortunate back in the 1960s, early 60s to pioneer the political direct mail for charities, churches et cetera -- of the name. when i lived in the 60s the left wasn't doing it and now they are doingve a better job tn the conservatives. >> have you always been a conservative even when you were growing up in texas? >> i grew up right in texas outside of houston and kids in the neighborhood playing cops and robbers 11, 12,

13-years-old. don'tt tell anybody. i'm not shooting robbers, i'm shooting commies. i have no recollection of any political conversation with my family, extended family but i came in knowing communists are bad people and i was dedicated to, you know, fighting them, opposing them. i'm a second-generation conservative, fourth-generation bill buckley, barry goldwater et cetera. 100% of second-generation conservatives, phyllis schlafly, falwell, myself et cetera. before we were conservatives, first we were anti-communists. that is m the glue that held the movement together in those days back in the 60s and 70s, 80s. >> what was that moment for you when it came to direct mail and mailing lists? you are visiting the national review office. >> i was fortunate i had two

weeks summer camp national guard military base outside of chicago and first we were there for the two weeks everybody goes into chicago, richard stays in the barracks and small add about an inch or two for the for field directors, americans for constitutional action and it did no longer exist, but i had a friend who worked for the national review, a journalist, a writer so i could hear the cannons y and the guns going off in new york and washington. it was starting and i was desperate to get into the battle and find the global left in america. so i called my friend and said to david, i've got to get one of those four jobs. he said it's not for, it's one. there was an added to run young americans for freedom and i said get me that a job. i got the job and for about a year and a half i moved to new york and i came in contact

further regularly with buckley and belmar and intellectual giants, james byrne, and i tried to be like them and read everything i thought they were reading. i wasn't making a lot of progress so i made the decision to focus on direct mail. we had nobody that could market them so i literally went to my wife.bi i had a wife and two babies and i said i think i have something here that's going to change america and maybe the world. i've got to study. i believed for seven or eight years i made a deep dive into the marketing and the microphones of the country back in those days up against the mortgage, "new york times," abc, nbc et cetera we couldn't get a message out. the story with direct mail we could go around and go right

into people's homes and that changed everything. i could make the case ronald reagan wouldn't have gotten the nomination without direct mail because when john conley and hw bush were given the thousand dollar contributions he was given hundreds of thousands funded in the campaign that made all the difference. >> mr. viguerioe, talk about one you've written. >> direct mail used to be until recently the second largest foreman the country. television number one. now it's number three because the internet. i recognized that early on and i recognized that its lot when i write a letter that goes to a million people i don't write it to a million people, i write it to one person, one person in mind i'm writing that letter to -- >> who is that person? >> for most of my political life it was my parents, my mother and

my dad. they didn't give every time but you don't want to write to somebody that always give us. that's not a challenge. but somebody that occasionally gives and you have a conversation with them. a bill buckley famously said he was a conservative but not on saturday night he's hanging out with john galbraith at truman's the podium et cetera. my faith is catholic and as long as they are going to mass they are notdo quite sure when you stand upve and kneel down. i sit in the front row. i know when to applaud, i'm one with the audience and that makes a difference. i am a true believer. >> many of your letters and those of us who've been involved in the media or politics over the years have received these and they are often one line

paragraphs and then the three or four pages and they repeat. what's the effectiveness? >> oneli of the many reasons i like direct mail is i don't have to guess does this work or does that work because we take a million and a split in half, 500,000 get to this opinion, the short paragraphs and 500,000 get the long paragraphs and it's been tested billions and billions of letters so we know that a good long eight page letter is going to alta pull a seven-page letter up to a point. people don't read itt but they scan itt and kinda flip through look at this and that. you would never give a salesman selling a refrigerator sell this refrigerator but you can only speak 200 or 400 words. you speak until you've made the sale. so, short letters, short words.

if you read the new testament, jesus words they are almost all one and a two syllable, very few three or four. he used a short words and short paragraphs. follow me, et cetera. so long letters but short words, short sentences, shortle paragraphs. let me say at my age i will be 90 in a few months. i spent two hours a day studying marketing advertising business and i've done that for over 60 years. to this day i've already spent 45 minutes studying marketing. young peoplein interested in the marketing advertising career i tell them study, study, read, read, read. competition isn't that a serious out there quite frankly. most people in marketing haven't done a lot of studying so if you study the classics, the giants

have come before us, you can get to the top of marketing in five years you could be at the very top 5%. >> mr. viguerie, has e-mail and social media benefited your business? >> not really in a major way. when i got involved in the 1961 early 60s fundraising throughs the mail wasn't a business that had been out there for a little bit. it's a very mature now. every fortune 500 company has a direct marketing division, department. so we know what works in direct marketing. well don't with the internet. we will figure it out. it might be tomorrow, it might be five years. but we haven't figured out how to marketnt on the internet. there's a lot of young people who are trying it.

they know next to nothing about marketing so we are still in the exploratory stage in terms of learning how to market using the internet. >> back to go big you talked about the four horsemen of marketing. position, differentiation, benefit and brand. briefly describe those. >> nothing original with that at all. born from this, stole from this et cetera but i put it together in a package that is important and i urge the viewers it doesn't really matter in life whether you're running for office or you want a promotion or a job or a raise, you want a spouse. i tell people when i dated my wife m there was a lot of competition for this pretty young ladies hand in marriage, so i had to separate myself from the competition out there. position number one is simply a hold in the marketplace.

and that is a private decision. differentiation is what you do publicly to let everybody know what your marketplace is. and i could use either msnbc or fox television. they both have the position they hold in the marketplace, they both differentiate. it used to be tucker carlson and now it's bradberry and jesse waters and laura ingram et cetera on fox and rachel maddow ond msnbc. you don'tre find those people anywhere else on television. third is benefit. by the way, you have to market it to the audience and get them right. get all of it right and life is downhill. g get one wrong you're going uphilld. and not likely to succeed. so fox to their audience succeeds for a benefit. they offer news information you don't get anywhere else out there particularly until recently a little competition but previously there was no

competition for decades. the same with msnbc. fourth is brand. one is a combination of benefit. it's what makes you singular, what makes you in the words of a famous communicator seth golden, a purple cow. i live out in the country, past 50 black-and-white ones over here you can't tell one from another but one stands out so all of our goals of life is to be a purple cow and i haven't figured out how to squeeze of 51 in there but there's a fifth one called the tagline and you want the tagline. when you come up with the tagline it should be relatively short and to summarize what it is you do that's different that differentiates you from everybody else out there and if everybody can use your tagline, throw it away. it has nothing to do with how smart you are or how fast or how high you jump or if you are better at anything else. it's something that differentiates you from all the

other products all the other candidates. if you'reur running for office, the name doesn't tell you if you are liberal or conservative so you want a tagline, the most effective tagline in the last 40 years has been make america great again. liberals will acknowledge that. the tagline is separated trump in 2016 from everybody else out there. you want that tagline. and we had a well-known governor of virginia who said you do the crime, you do the time. it's kind of a tune you can whistle. reagan 1980 are you better off now than 40 years ago. you want to the tune the people can whistle that is in a tagline. mr. viguerie, haveou you found t effective to use strong language against your opponent? a.k.a., negative ads that work well on tv even though everybody says they hated? >> it's not necessarily strong

words. i read something recently about truman the people that would say give them hell. he said i don't give them hell i just tell them the truth and they think it's hell. so it's important to differentiate from your competition with roots in the primary or the general election. even if it's a nonprofit you want to separate yourself from all your competition out there and explain in a few words what i' is you're doing. it used to be people were exposed to a thousand or may be 2,000 messages a day. now 1 it's five or 10,000 with e internet so you've got to be able to succinctly fuel the words, identifyy your brand amanda brand by the way is when you own a category. i am a veranda. i own a category. i was the first to do political direct mail. who was the second person to fly solo across the atlantic, the

second pope, remember the first -- >> you want to be the first in the category. >> what surprised me in reading go big is you are talking about how liberals or the others have superseded the conservative movement when it comes to direct mail, even though you basically started. >> when i did my pioneering work as i said earlier in the 1960s, i caught a lot off criticism, quite wrinkly. regularly attacked on nbc, abc, "new york times," "time" magazine all through the 70s. all thee criticisms stuck within a few hours. election night november 1980. that's what he's been up to. so i told my conservative friends at the heritage foundation, phillips and many others that used to get together at my home for breakfast every wednesday for ten years, don't worry it's taken me 20 years to

learn how to do this. it's going to take them 30 or more because i'm smarter than they are. not so. within five years, roger and others on the left have caught up with the conservatives and now they have far surpassed us in my opinion. i wouldn't dream of flying in an airplane with a pilot who had the skills of the average conservative marketer. they just most people have learned it by their gut feeling. none of us would go to a doctor that learned medicine by his gut feeling by the seat of his pants. the liberals physically have about 20,000 organizations and conservatives about 1500. they raise 700% more money than we do, 700% more dollars. >> you talk about them as these organizations which are what? >> i am a big exponent of the organizations, not third-party but through force.

they have these 20,000 organizations out there. think about if former president obama called a meeting of all of the environmental groups it would be 300 to 350 groups represented. it's if the conservatives did the same there would be five, six, seven groups represented. each of the groups out there has their own agenda, their own source of money, their own membership, their ownul leadersp and thinknk with the environmentalists of accomplished not just the democrats but the republicans. they pull people mostly their way on many of their issues and so the politicians don't really sett the agenda so much as these three fourths organizations and with only 1500, we really are fari behind and one of the reasons i wrote the book was to encourage mostly younger people.

when you get to be my age were in your 60s, 70s, even your 50s, your dna is pretty well isset. .. he picked himself up. in 2007, 2008 describing himself as a community organizer. fear later is president of the united states for donald trump no prior government experience, 15 months later his president of the united states. i urge young people pick yourself the way for young people to come knocking on your door pay when i came to washington had all these ideas and energy but nobody invited

me. all of this knowledge is going to waste. when they out of frustration i called a meeting and got some peoplele and they came. i called a meeting a week later and more came. i learned early on something nancy pelosi she is climbing the democratic leadership letter. you would be surprised how many good people will come to your meetings if you serve good food left back and i serve good food. but all this on the start invited me too their meetings. but pick yourself up. have courage, be a risk taker, be bold. stew and could liberals pick up those things and learn things? >> unfortunately gas. [laughter] nothing i can do about that. but yes. itn is good advice even if youe not interested in politics. the marketing you want to get a job and get a promotion, start a

business forget a spouse. you want to differentiate from the competition is a lot of competition out there. this book will help you differentiate yourself from everybody else out there. >> on to talk about some of the people like to write about. beginning with charles edison who was he? >> charles edison was one of life's great human beings. i was fortunate to know him in the early 60s. who's the youngest son of thomas edison the inventor. he'd been secretary of the navy, governor of new jersey. unless 10 or 15 years of his life he was very active in the conservative cause and movement. he is quite wealthy and very, very generous with his contributions. i'm very supportive. a young rat americans for freedom. toi had a small office on the fourth floor with no elevator. madison avenue advertising gone rogue in new york city.

i'm working on my desk at 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon i look up this charles edison 75 years old he walked all the way from the towers just to boost their morale and encourage us in a delightfule is wonderful p man. i called him on the phone when i first started asking for contribution. a goodd net contribution on phone. i called a few others like him. and j howard pugh of the seven oil company that will give the money generously. i did not like asking people for money so i started writing letters. stewart talk about that cold calling people on the phone, voice to voice. >> that is not me it was not me i' the 20s is not me almost 90's i don't like asking people for money. would you like them a a letter? as a started writing letters that seem to work so i got a secretary of stable to write more letters when they got

something part of the innate reviewers understand or knoww about the mimeograph machine i would roll on a drum and would print a few hundred an hour or something like that that seemed to work and then i got computers nobody had heard of in those daysd we started pit spitting ot letters and after about a year end a half at buckley's the national review of the young americans for freedom i began to focus entirely on direct mail. after a year end a half i thought i knew everything to know so i quit a good job hung out my shingle as are the world first direct mail political advertising agency. i did nothing i thought i knew everything i knew nothing, nothing less than 1% of what i know now. the one thing i knew i didn't have that i needed that was names and addresses. i was able to 12500 barry

goldwater donors and that changed everything. i'm so by the end of that first year started my company in 1965 ahead 100,000 republicans we are now past 10 million donors activists in the conservative movement. i recognize early on i was taught in fundraising too much orme marketing i was in name acquisition and mark zuckerberg figure that out too. >> host: have you gotten rich in your business? >> guest: i have not ever live very comfortably but to this day my team will testify under oath i put everything possible back into the company. every fiber of my being i'm an entrepreneur as i said earlier. the definition of an entrepreneur is anything but a risk taker so to this day i put

everything up got available back in the company. and the reason i do that is in 1965 i started in january and out to variousw conservative organizations, just a few of them out there i so goldwater ir donors they all agreed. we spent a dollar nice amended dollar and 50% of money comes back you invest in the longtime value of that dodo. in those days when i did spend a dollar or two, three, four, $5 was coming back i said this is a great i'm going to melt 60000 letters those results came in the same as 5000 will mail five thousand everyone said no let's mail another 5000 i said no there down the street i can see them and they said note 5000 so i said at that moment i, said okay is saved western civilization pride know what toi do it will type what i will do i will finance the mailing. i will put up all the money. to this day the vast majority of

our clients we finance their camailing. everything i can possibly get from the company i put back to mfinance more growth for the conservative movement. stewarded by the way who is right 5,500,000? >> neither. millions and millions. i will be mailing the next 18 months something around 300 million postal letters. stuart someone else's been very active in the conservative movement that you write about is horton blackwell, who is he? >> i dedicated the book to morton he's a dear friend. i've known the conservative movement is zero zero two i've been active at the national level more than every living conservative except' for doctor lee edwardsr who is zero zero one. barry goldwater and falwell and roberson are all dead. i am active at the national level longer than everybody

except for lee ed group. i've known them since 1961 he calls me on the phone one day and says let's have lunch with this young conservative you need to know we had a nice lunch at the hotel. i liked him so will i invite them back 10 days later for another lunch he and i. and at the end of the lunch morton set i spoke the magic words the magic words i spoke a set i want you to come work with me and help me build the conservative movement. at that point was taking a pay cut i gave him a pay increase. anyway after some years he left and ended up working for ronald reagan and the white house. after that he left and starts on the called the institute. i must ignore organization i can think of is more important than aa leadership institute they trained well over a quarter of a million young people many, many

governors, senators, congressmen, legislators too numerous to mention. right now as we speak the president of my company i am chair of my company is in jerusalem at four, five, six other national conservative marketers and he is teaching a couple hundred people in europe conservatives how to be effective conservatives. he has maybe 500 more classes all over the country leadership institute teaches each year he has had more impact on the conservative movement than any anyone else at least living. >> guest: the book is called go big that market marketing secrets as someone said before rush limbaugh there was richard. we appreciate your time about tv for. >> is a pleasure thank you. >> if you are enjoying book tv

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