>> reporter: a healthy democracy doesn't just look like this. it looks like this, where americans can see democracy at work with citizens being truly informed, a republic thrives. get informed straight from the source on c-span, unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. from the nation's capital to wherever you are. the opinion that matters most is your own. this is what democracy looks like. c-span powered by cable. >> host: joining us now on booktv is author richard viguerie. his book is "go big: the marketing secrets of richard a. viguerie". what do you do for living? >> guest: my mother went to her grave a few years ago not understanding what i did.

i was fortunate in the 1960s to pioneer direct mail, people were raising money for a long time for charities, churches etc. . and you have no competitors and i helped build the conservative movement and i can make a case that without direct mail there would be no conservative movement worthy of the name. when i did my pioneering work in the 60s, they weren't doing it. >> host: have you always been a conservative even when you were growing up? >> guest: i grew up in texas, kids in neighborhoods playing cops and robbers, 11, twelve, thirteen years old. i'm not shooting robbers, i'm shooting communists which i have no recollection of any political conversation in my

family, my extended family. i knew communists are bad people and dedicated to fighting them. opposing them. i'm second-generation conservative, first-generation bill buckley, barry goldwater etc. . 100% of second-generation conservatives, jerry falwell, myself, etc. before we were conservatives. that was the glue that held the conservative movement together in the 60s, 70s, 80s. >> host: what was the burning bush moment for you when it came to direct mail, you are visiting the "national review" office in new york city. >> guest: i was outside monetary base in chicago and the first only saturday we were

there everybody goes into chicago, i saw a small ad about an inch or two for field directors, americans for constitutional action, it no longer exists but i had a friend, a buddy to work for "national review," a journalist, a writer, i could hear the cannons and the guns going off in new york and washington, the war was starting it i was desperate to get into the battle and fight the political left in america so i called my friend who said i've got to get one of those four jobs, it's not four, it is one. it was an ad to run young americans for freedom and i said get me that job. i got the job. about a year and a half, moved to new york and came in contact regularly with bill buckley and frank meyer and brent bozell, intellectual giants, james burns abraham, tried to be like

them and read everything, wasn't making a lot of progress what one point i made a conscious decision to focus on direct mail, we didn't have enough people like buckley who could write an debate but we had some, we had nobody's it could market them to the country. i had a wife and two babies and i said i think i've got something here that will change america, maybe change the world but i don't know it, got to study it. no diapers and no trash, no yardwork, she bought into it. for 7 or 8 years i made a deep dive in marketing and direct marketing, direct mail. the microphones of the country in those days, conservatives message against blockage, new york times, nbc, abc etc. couldn't get a message out but starting with direct mail we could go around this block into people's homes and that changed everything. i can make a case ronald reagan would not have gotten the nomination without direct mail,

john connolly and george h w bush were giving the contribution, hundreds of thousands of contributions from this campaign. >> host: what makes an effective direct mail letter? >> guest: direct mail used to be until recently the second-largest form of advertising in the country, television number one. now is number 3 because of the internet. internet is number one, television number 2, direct mail number 3. i recognized that early on and recognized 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. >> host: who is that person? >> guest: for most of my political life it was my parents, my mother and dad, have them match, they didn't give every time but they would occasionally give. you want to write to someone

who always gives it's not a challenge whenever gives, you want somebody that occasionally gives that you have a conversation with them. bill buckley famously said he was a conservative but not of the breed, saturday hanging out with john gall birth and truman capote etc. . i'm of the breed. my faith is catholic. not quite sure when you stand up, when you kneel down, i sit in the front row. any conservative meeting, i'm one with the audience and that makes a huge difference. i'm a true believer. >> those who have been involved in the media and politics over the years have received the use and they are off on one line paragraphs and then 3 or 4 pages and they repeat. what's the effect of that.

>> guest: i don't have to guess does this work or that work, we take a million letters, split it in half, 500,000 short paragraphs, 500,000 get long paragraphs and it has been tested billions and billions of letters so we know that a good, long 8-page letter will outdo a 7-page letter. the more pages, people say i don't read that but they scan it, flip through, look at this, look at that, the longer, you would never give a salesman selling a refrigerator, you can only speak 200 words or 400 words, you speak until you've made the sale. so short letters, short words. if you read the new testament jesus's words are almost all one or 2 syllable words.

uses very short words and short paragraphs, follow me etc. . so you want long letters but short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. and let me just say i will be 90 and up a few months. i spent 2 hours a day studying marketing, advertising, business and done that for over 60 years. to this day i spent 2 to 3, probably 4 to 5 minutes today studying marketing and young people interested in marketing and advertising, study study study, read read read. competition is not that serious which most people in marketing and advertising haven't done a lot of studying. if you study the classics, the giants who have come before us, you can get to the top of marketing and then be at the top 5%.

>> host: has e-mail and social media benefit your business? >> guest: not really in a major way. when i got involved in 1961, early 60s, fundraising through the mail was not a mature business. it has been out there for little bit. it's very mature now. every fortune 500 company has a direct marketing division, department. we know what works in direct marketing, we don't with the internet, we will figure it out. might be tomorrow, five years from now but we haven't figured out how to market on the internet. there's a lot of young people trying it. they know next to nothing about markets. née they know the internet but not how to market its. we are in the export-oriented agent terms of learning how to

market using the internet. >> host: back to "go big: the marketing secrets of richard a. viguerie," you talk about four horsemen of marketing, position, differentiation, benefits, and brand. describe those four. >> guest: nothing original about that at all but put it together in a package which is really important, urged our viewers that it doesn't matter in life whether you are running for office or want a promotion or job or raise or spouse, i told people when i dated my wife, there was a lot of competition for this pretty young hand so i had to separate myself from all that competition. position number one is simply a hole in the marketplace. what hole in the market place can you occupy and that is a private decision. differentiation is what you do publicly to let everybody know

what your marketplace is. i like to use msnbc or fox television. they both have a position in the marketplace, they both differentiate, used to be tucker carlson and now bret baer, jesse waters, laura ingraham on fox and rachel maddow on msnbc, you don't find those type of people anywhere else on television, third is benefit. you got to market to your audience, get all four right, get all four right, get one wrong you are going uphill, not likely to succeed so fox to their audience succeeds for a benefit. they are for news, information you don't get anywhere else particularly until recently have a little competition now but previously there was no competition for decades, same with msnbc. fourth is brand and brand is the ball game. one is a combination of

position, differentiation and benefit, it is what makes you singular. what makes you, in the words of the famous communicator a corporate cow. i live in the country, 40 brown cows here, 50 black and white ones over there, one of them was a purple cow that stands out. figuring out how to squeeze a fifth one/5 one in because it is called a tagline and you want a tagline. the tagline should be relatively short and summarize what it is you do but differentiate you from everybody else. anybody can use your tagline, thorough it away, nothing to do with how much smarter you are or faster or how high you jump or it better or anything else. it is something that differentiates you from all other products. if you are running for office your 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 is that tagline separated trump in 2016 from everybody else, that tagline. we had a well-known governor of virginia, george allen, who said you do the crime you do the time. a tune you can whistle. reagan in 1980, you better off now than you were four years ago? you want the tune people can whisper in the tagline. >> host: have you found it effective to use strong language against your opponents, negative adds work well on tv even though everybody says they hate? >> guest: not necessarily strong words. i read something about truman people used to say, give them

hell, harry, i don't give them hell, i just tell them the truth and they think it's hell. i think it is important to differentiate yourself from your competition whether in the primary or general election or even if you are a nonprofit, separate your self from your competition and you want to explain in a few words what you are doing. it used to be people exposed to a thousand or 2000 messages a day, now it is 5, 10,000 with the internet, we are inundated so you've got to succinctly, in a few words identify your brand, brand is when you own a category. i'm a brand. iona category. i was the first ever to do political direct mail, the second person to fly solo across the atlantic? who was the second pope? you remember the first, you want to be the first in a category.

>> host: you talked about how the others have superseded the conservative movement when it comes to direct mail even though you started it. >> when i did my pioneering work in the 1960s, i got a lot of criticism quite frankly, regularly attacked on nbc, abc, new york times, time magazine, all through the 70s. all the criticism stopped within a few hours election night november 1980. so that is what richard viguerie has been up to. i told my conservative friends at the heritage foundation, many that use to come to my home for breakfast every wednesday, don't worry, it has taken me 20 years to learn how to do this, it's going to take them 30 or more years because i'm smarter than they are. not so.

within five years, others on the left caught up with the conservatives and far surpassed us in my opinion but i wouldn't dream of flying an airplane with a pilot who had the skills the average conservative marketer, most people learned by their gut feeling, none of us go to a doctor who will learned by the seat of his pants. the liberals basically have about 20,000 single issue organizations, conservatives about 1500. they raise 700% more money from 700% more donors. >> host: you talk about food force organizations which are what? >> guest: i'm a big exponent organizations, not third-party but third force. the liberals have 20,000 single issue organizations out there. think if obama, former president obama called a

meeting of all liberal environmental groups, 350 groups represented there. if the conservatives did the same there would be 5, six, seven groups represented. each of those groups has their own agenda, their own source of money, their own membership, their own leadership and pulling everybody their way, and they pool people their way on many issues so the politicians don't set the agenda so much as third force organizations. conservatives with only 1500, we really are far behind and one of the things -- one of the reasons i wrote the book was to encourage mostly younger people. when you get to be my age or in your 60s and 70s, your dna is pretty's.

the definition of an entrepreneur is a risk taker, you want to be bold and take risks. that's going to come from younger people, 20s, 30s, 40s so i wonder about conservatives who read the book and get engaged. get themselves to lead. nobody was banging on barack obama app store to run for the senate or president. he picked himself. in 2007-8. he decided to describe himself as a community organizer. a year later he's president of the united states, donald trump is a businessman, no prior government experience, 15 months later he's president of the united states. i urge young people pick your self, don't wait for some buddy to come knocking on your door. i came to washington and had all these ideas and energy and nobody invited me. i said all this knowledge going to waste, one day out of frustration i called a meeting, a dozen people came.

i called a meeting a week later, more came and i learned early on something nancy pelosi learned also as she's climbing the democrat leadership ladder, you would be surprised how many good people come to your meetings if you serve good food. i served good food and they started inviting me to their meetings. pick your self, have courage, be bold. >> could liberals pick up "go big: the marketing secrets of richard a. viguerie" and learn things? >> guest: unfortunately yes. nothing i can do about that but yes. it's good advice even if you are not in politics, the four horseman of marketing. if you want to get a job or get a promotion, start a business, get a spouse, want to differentiate yourself from competition, there's a lot of competition out there, billions of people of this book will help you differentiate yourself

from everybody else out there. >> let's begin with charles edison. it was he? >> one of life's great human beings. i was fortunate to know him in the early 60s, the youngest son of thomas edison the inventor and he'd been secretary of the navy, governor of new jersey and the last 10 or 15 years of his life was very active in the conservative movement, quite wealthy and very generous with his contributions so very supportive. iran young americans for freedom in the early 60s and one day we had a small office on the fourth floor, no elevator, madison avenue in new york city, so i'm working at my desk at 2:00 in the afternoon, i look up and there's charles

edison, 75 years old, walked from the waldorf-astoria towers 15 blocks, to boost morale and encourage us and all that, delightful, wonderful man. i called him on the phone asking for contribution, he gave me a contribution on the phone and i called other people like him. a world war i hero, and the oil company, they gave me money generously but i decided i didn't like asking people to write letters. >> host: calling people on the phone, called calling. >> i don't like people asking for money. so i started writing letters and that seemed to work and so i got secretary and was liable to write more letters and then something hardly any viewers understand or remember, or know about, something called a mimeograph machine.

it would print a few hundred letters in our and that seemed to work, then i got something called computers nobody had heard of in those days and we started spitting out letters and after a year and 1/2, the "national review" of young americans for freedom i began to focus entirely on direct mail and after a year and 1/2 i thought i knew everything and they said, i quit a good job and hung out in the machine room and started the world's first direct mail political advertising agency and i knew nothing, less than one% of what i know now but one thing, i know i didn't have, names and addresses and i was able to get 12,500, barry goldwater donors and that changed everything and so by the end of that first

year i had 100,000 republican goldwater donors and now we are well past 10 million donors and activists in the conservative movement and i recognized early on i wasn't in fundraising or marketing, i was in the name acquisition and they figured that out too. >> host: have you gotten rich? >> guest: i have not. to this day my team will testify under oath is that i put everything possible back into the company. every fiber of my being, i'm an entrepreneur. i said earlier the definition of an entrepreneur is a risk taker. to this day, i put everything i've got available back in the company and the reason i do that is 1965, started my

company in january and went to various conservative organizations, there's a few of them out there and got is goldwater donors, they all agree and we spent one dollar, now you spend one dollar and 50% of the money comes back because you invest in the longtime value of that donor. in those days, 2 or 3 or $5 come back, this is great, now 50,000 letters and when those results come in we will mail 500,000 which everyone said no, let's mail another 5000. i said no, barbarians are down the street, i see them, we got to blow and go and they said no, 5000. i said at that moment i want to save western civilization, i know what to do, tell you what i do. i will finance the money and to this day the vast majority of our clients financed, anything i can get from the company i

put back to finance more girls in the conservative movement. >> was right, 5000500,000? >> guest: millions. we will be meeting in the next 18 months around 300 million postal letters. >> someone else who has been active in the conservative movement that you write about, martin blackwell, who is he? >> guest: he is a dear friend. known in the conservative movement has 002 which means active at the national level longer than every living conservative except for doctor lee edwards, barry goldwater and bill buckley and brent bozell senior, falwell, robertson, all dead. i'm active at the national level longer than everybody except doctor lee edwards, lee is different, i've known since 1960 one, he came to the phone one time and said let's have lunch with this young

conservative, he doesn't know you, you don't know him. we had a nice lunch at the mayflower hotel. it went so well, i invited morton back for another lunch and the end of the lunch, morton set i spoke the magic words to amend the magic words i spoke were i want you to come work with me and help me build the conservative movement. i gave him a pay increase. anyway after some years, he left and ended up working for ronald reagan in the white house and after that he left and started something called the leadership institute and almost no organization i can think of is more important to the conservative movement than the leadership institute, they trained over 1/4 of a million younger people, many governors, senators, legislators over the years. as we speak, my president of my

company, i am chairman, in jerusalem, four five other marketers and he's teaching a couple hundred people in europe, conservatives, how to be effective conservatives. he has maybe 500 more classes all over the country his leadership institute teaches each year and had more impact than anybody else i can think of who is living. >> host: the book is called "go big: the marketing secrets of richard a. viguerie". as someone said before rush limbaugh there was richard viguerie. ..and my pleasure, peter. good to be with