Book Review: Breakthrough Advertising

It's 1966...

President Lyndon Johnson throws more men into the meat grinder that is Vietnam. The Space Age dawns as NASA's Gemini 8 docks in space, the first time ever - and Lunar Orbiter 1 is launched. The Caesars Palace opens in Vegas. The Beatles end their U.S tour in San Francisco, their last performance as a live touring band. LSD is made illegal.

The era of Mad Men.

But there's another man in the ad world who works behind the curtains. If I showed his photo, you wouldn't know who he was. But he singlehandedly shaped marketing over the past 60 years.

Billions of dollars of sales could be attributed to his ideas, I reckon.

His name? Eugene Schwartz.

Maybe you've heard of his book Breakthrough Advertising. It's so rare and sought after that a physical copy will set you back $500.

And for good reason. He scientifically breaks down what makes effective copy work. Plain and simple.

So I've set up a little background for this book, but I'm itching to mine its pages for their gold. The great thing? There's enough in there for everybody.

I want to warn you. This isn't a 500-word book review for you basic uncles out there. Breakthrough Advertising is 60,000+ words and this review is 5,000 words.

It addresses the ideas from the 1st half of the book, which is about headlines. Schwartz says that "Headlines do 90% of the work" in an ad. That's how important they are.

So, let's dive in.

Mass Desire: The force that makes advertising work

Right out of the gate, Schwartz tells us all that we need to know: the power, the force, the urge to own that makes advertising work, comes from the market itself, and not from the copy.

This idea is the guidepost for everything that comes after in this book review. Keep this idea front and center in your mind as you consider your own advertising and copywriting efforts for your brand or products. No, do one better: write it on a sticky note and slap it on your laptop. It's that important!

Ads, no matter how slick, can't create desire for products. What effective ads do is take the emotions of the market and focuses them onto a product.

This is the goal of copy: to channel the market's desire.

The mass desire for your product or service must already exist. You can't create it. You can't fight against it. You must direct it, focus it onto your product.

So, what is this mass desire, anyways? Schwartz defines it simply, "It is the public spread of a private want."

When a private desire is shared by a significant number of people, then there's the potential for profit - and a market is born. There's no need to create this desire - in fact, that's an impossible task. It already exists.

An amplification effect happens when ads exploit these pre-existing desires. If you try to create the desire, it's not advertising - it's education. Instead of an ROI of 50x or 100x per $1 spent that effective ads can produce, educating the market produces a 1:1 on spend.

What creates mass desire?

There are many things, but they fall into two general categories - which any advertiser should know.

• Permanent forces

  • Mass instinct: Women wanting to be attractive, men to be virile, everybody wanting health. The instinct never fades. We don't need to pick the trend here, but rather, to distinguish your product from others that came before.

  • Mass tech problem: Think of bad cell reception or the slow effect of a medicine. Your market will buy and try anything to solve these problems. Our job is to offer the claim of relief but in a new way.

• The forces of change

  • The beginning, fulfillment, and the reversal of a trend: This category holds things like style. Maybe this year, a certain type of grill is in fashion to show up for summer BBQs. Or a brand of sneakers. Horsepower in cars was the rage in the 1950s, now it might be safety or MPG. You need sensitivity and intuition to catch the wave of these trends and fads, and how to relate them to your product.

  • Mass education: School, movies, culture, movie stars (or TikTok influencers, now). This is group pressure. Backyard gossip. It's the sum total of culture. Your job? To detect these desires, chart them, and to channel them onto your products.

But how do we channel these forces?

You have three tools at your disposal:

1. your own knowledge of these mass desires;

2. your product;

3. the advertising message.

Those are your 3 tools.

And, you also work in 3 stages.

• Choose the most powerful desire that can possibly be applied to your product. Every mass desire has 3 vital dimensions.

  • urgency and degree of demand (chronic pain vs. small headache);

  • staying power (hunger vs craving for specialty food);

  • scope (the number of people who share this desire).

  • Every product can appeal to many of these mass desires. But in your copy headline, only one can predominate. There is 1 key that unlocks the mass desire. What mass desire you choose when writing your ad is the most important step. Your choice should give you the most power in all 3 dimensions listed above.

• Acknowledge the desire - reinforce it - offer the means to satisfy it - in a single statement in the headline of your ad: The headline is the bridge between your prospect and your product.

  • If the prospect is aware of your product and realizes it can satisfy their desire, your headline starts with your product.

  • If they aren't aware of your product, but only of the desire itself, your headline starts with the desire.

  • And if they are not aware of what they really want, but are concerned with a general problem, your headline starts with that problem and crystalizes it into a specific need.

• Show your prospect how your product satisfies their desire:

  • It's as simple as that :)

    • Don't worry - we'll get to the how shortly!

Physical product vs Functional product

Every product we're trying to sell is really two products.

One is the physical product. The thing itself.

The other is the functional product: the product in action, the benefits that your product gives your customer. This is why your customer buys.

The thing itself doesn't sell your product - people don't buy a Bugatti for the raw steel, leather, and rubber that goes into making it. In fact, what makes up your product is only an excuse for charging them your price. Your customer really pays you for what your product will do for them - and nothing else.

This is another massive lesson to keep in mind. So many times companies sell features over benefits. But no part of your physical product, or the thing itself (if it's a service), can ever become a headline. Nobody buys a Bugatti for the weight of its raw materials.

Nobody buys copywriting services for the number of words you give them.

But there is a caveat here.

All of the facts of the physical product, the thing itself, can be used to reinforce the promise of your headline:

• by justifying your price - the more of something they get, the more the dollars you can ask for it.

• by documenting the quality of your product - tell your prospect about the quality of your product's features, and they're more likely to believe the benefits you've claimed.

• by assuring longevity - a feature that gives the prospect the sense that your product will last longer.

• by sharpening your prospect's mental picture of the benefits - your product must work because of x, y, z features.

• most importantly by giving your product's claim of performance a fresh new basis for believability - when your brand or product enters a crowded market, this is the key element: a novelty. Your product must have a new mechanism that gives the benefit, a new quality that assures performance, or a new freedom from old limitations that improves the performance.

This last point of differentiation and novelty will be covered very thoroughly as this review unfolds.

So, now we understand how to leverage the features of the physical product, or the thing itself. But as said above, people buy for the functional aspect of your product - or what it can do for them, what benefits it has.

This is the performance of your product, satisfying the mass desire of your market, which provides the selling power of your ad, writes Schwartz.

Your first task, then, is to fully grasp your product. List the number of different performances it contains. Group them against mass desires that each of them satisfies. Then feature the one performance that will harness the most power to sell your product.

Schwartz gives the example of an automobile. The car can offer these performances:

• Transportation - it can get you and your family from point A to point B.

• Dependability - it won't break down, saving you time and money.

• Economy - Great gas mileage.

• Power - High horsepower, can climb mountains.

• Recognition - status, envy of peers, "you've arrived!", the oohs and ahhs of neighbors.

• Value - It'll last 200,00 miles.

• Novelty - new features that no other car has.

And there are many more. Try this with your product or service and see what performances, or benefits, you can come up with and how they correspond to desires in the market.

But our ad's headline can only feature one of these performance. It can only effectively tap into one mass desire at a time.

Every Great Ad Starts with a Great Headline

Your headline is limited by physical space. You have 2 seconds and 1 chance to grab your reader's attention.

Everybody's bombarded by ads. And what's worse, nobody is seeking out your advertisement.

So, as Schwartz writes, "If your first thought holds him, he will read the second. If the second holds him, he will read the third. And if the third thought holds him, he will probably read through your ad."

Your job when writing a headline is to find the one product performance that dominates, squeeze it for all its worth, and convince your prospect that that performance can only come from your product.

So you must be wondering, how to find that one performance, that one benefit that correlates to mass desire, that will dominate them all?

Luckily, Schwartz will tell us how.

Your Prospect's State of Awareness and Stage of Sophistification

Our first task is to define our market. Our second task? Select the product benefit, or performance, that will likely capture that market.

These two aspects form the core concept or theme of your ad.

We start with the market, we end with the product. The bridge between these two - their meeting place - is your ad.

Schwartz writes that, *"Your ad always begins with your market, and leads that market into your product."

The beginning of your ad - or the headline - is the first step in this process. And, thus, the headline should consider the market first - it may never even mention your product or the benefits or performance.

The headline only has one job: to stop your prospect and compel them to read the 2nd sentence of your ad. The 2nd sentence has the same job, to force your prospect to read the 3rd sentence... and so on.

The headline's job is not to sell - that's asking way too much from the headline.

The headline is based exclusively on the answer to these three questions:

1. What is the mass desire that creates this market?

2. How much do these people know today about the way your product satisfies this desire? (State of Awareness)

3. how many other products have been presented to them before yours? (State of Sophistication)

The answer to questions 2 and 3 gives you an idea of how your market will relate to your product. The answer to these 2 questions will give us the content of our headline.

Prospect's State of Awareness and Your Headline

The only reader we care about here is the prospect for your product.

But not every prospect is at the same State of Awareness about your product, its features, and ultimately - what it can do for them, or the benefits and performance that it can offer them.

Answer these questions about your prospect:

• How aware is your prospect of their desire?

• How close is it to the surface of their consciousness?

• Are they aware only that a problem or need exists, or are they aware that it can be satisfied?

• And if they are aware that their problem can be satisfied, do they know that the answer can be found in your type of product, or specifically your product by name?

Give a value to each of these questions, from 1 - 10, 10 being the highest. The answer, or sum total, to these questions helps you determine the State of Awareness of your market. It is at this point of awareness that your headline begins.

The more aware your market? The less you need to say.

This information is useful in crafting ads and headlines specifically that address your prospect at their various States of Awareness.

Here are the States of Awareness in a descending scale, and how to approach them:

• Most aware: The customer knows your product. They know what it does. They know they want it. They just haven't bought yet. In this case, your headline - and the ad itself - only needs to say the name of your product and a bargain price. The rest of the ad can just summarize its most desirable selling points, and how and where to buy it. The majority of you reading this do not fall in this category, unless you run a discount store or compete exclusively on price.

• Prospect knows of the product, but doesn't want it yet: Your prospect isn't fully aware of how your product can benefit them, or may not be convinced how well it can do the job. Most big brand advertising falls in this camp - but most of you reading this don't manage global or national brands, so this State of Awareness likely does not apply to your company. The product here, like an established brand name, is known by the market. The link to a mass desire is already established. It's already been proven in the market. The headline here needs to:

  • Reinforce the prospect's desire

  • Sharpen the image of the way it satisfies the desire, or sensory sharpening

  • Extend the image of where and when the product satisfies the desire

  • Introduce new proof or details of how well the product satisfies the desire

  • Announce a new mechanism that enables the product to satisfy the desire

  • A few examples of these sorts of products and headlines:

    • "Steinway - The Instrument of the Immortals" (Desire reinforcement)

    • "Tastes like you just picked it - Dole" (Sensory sharpening)

    • "Anywhere you go. Hertz is always nearby"(Extend the image of when and where)

• Introduce a new product to a prospect: At this State of Awareness, the prospect knows - or will recognize immediately - that they want what your product does. But they don't yet know that there is a product, or specifically your product, that will do it for them. This is the start of difficulty in the States of Awareness that prospects have - and it is likely where your brand and advertising is. Here, there are two problems your ad must tackle. The first is to pinpoint the ill-defined desire that the prospect has. The second? Crystalize that desire, and its solution, so sharply and dramatically that your prospect will know it at a glance. The headline here needs to:

  • Name the desire and/or solution in your headline.

  • Prove that the benefit can be accomplished.

  • Show how your product does it.

  • You need astute analysis of the market, intuition of its trends, and verbal creativity for the headline and ad to work.

  • A couple examples of headlines (not necessarily the best examples, or most effective, but they illustrate the points):

    • "When doctors feel rotten - this is what they do."

    • "Who else wants a whiter wash - with no hard work?" ()

    • "How to win friends and influence people."

  • Notice that the amorphous desire has crystalized in the headline? The next steps would be to sharpen and expand on this desire in the following copy.

  • Simple statements of the desire can work best ("How to win friends and influence people"). No verbal trickery needed!

  • Sometimes, an element of mystery, or wonderment, or reinforcement is needed.

  • Keep in mind that the "Who else wants a whiter wash" ad won't work on a market that's been barraged by these ads for years.

• Introduce products that solve needs: At this State of Awareness, your product has a need - but no desire. But your prospect will recognize the need immediately. They just don't realize the connection between the fulfillment of that need and your product. This is a problem-solving ad. At this level, the headline needs to:

  • Start by naming the need and/or its solution in your headline.

  • Then dramatize the need so your prospect realizes how badly they need the solution.

  • Then in comes your product to save their day.

  • This type of ad can run from the most basic statement of need alone, to complicated verbal twists.

  • Here are some examples:

    • "Back pain?" (Only the problem is mentioned - nothing more!)

    • "Stops maddening itch." (Only the problem and solution mentioned)

    • "Do YOU make these mistakes in English?" (General problem, open ended solution can follow in the ad)

    • "How a bald-headed barber helped save my hair" (Effective because hair loss solutions have been promised many times, this verbal twist makes it fresh and fun and novel)

• Open up a completely unaware or a market that has moved on: This is the the most difficult State of Awareness - but also, one of the most interesting to study and practice. It will take creativity here. Many of your brands and products will be in this category. Your prospect is either not aware of their desire or need - or they won't honestly admit it without being lead by your ad - or the market has moved past your product, it's old-hat or old-fashioned or worn-out - or the need is so general that it's hard to sum it up in a headline. The job of your headline is to bridge the gap. Crafting the headline for this State of Awareness is a process of elimination:

  • Price means nothing to a prospect who doesn't want or doesn't know about your product. Eliminate all mention of price or discounts.

  • The name of your product means nothing. Keep it out of your headline.

  • A direct statement of what your product does, what desire it satisfies, and what problem it solves - simply won't work. Either your product hasn't reached the awareness of your market, or they have moved past caring anymore about your product.

  • So you can't work with price, benefits / performance, or solutions. What do you have left for the headline, then? Your market!

    • Concentrate on the state of mind of your market.

    • This is an identification headline.

    • You are selling and promising and satisfying nothing.

    • Instead, you are echoing an emotion, an attitude, a satisfaction that picks people out of the crowd and binds them to a single statement.

    • You are telling them what they are. You are defining them for themselves. You are giving them the info they need and want about a problem so vague that you are the first to put it into words.

    • The function of the headline is to get the prospect to read the next paragraph and so on.

  • Tactics that can be employed in these headlines include (with links to the ads):

    • Giving words to a hidden dream (The university of the night, headline for a home correspondence course Great Print Advertising: I. C. S. - "The University O f The Night" (great-adv.blogspot.com))

    • Exploiting a hidden fear (Why men crack, headline for a coffee substitute Why Men Crack Ad by Young & Rubicam » Swipe File Archive » Marketing & Copywriting Examples (swiped.co))

    • Project a hidden desire that can't be put bluntly into words (The Marlboro man tattoo ad 1958 MARLBORO Man PRINT AD USAF Tattoo GOOD Vintage Condition | eBay)

    • Using a common resentment or unvoiced protest to capture a far greater market than the direct statement of the solution that resentment would produce (Why haven't TV owners been told these facts?, for a DIY book on TV repairs SwipeSpiration | Why Haven’t TV Owners Been Told These Facts)

    • Projecting an ultimate triumph that the prospect will identify with (They laughed when I sat down at the piano. But when I started to play!-- for a music lessons course They Laughed When I Sat Down at The Piano by John Caples » Swipe File Archive » Marketing & Copywriting Examples (swiped.co))

    • Projecting the result of a problem in such a way that it will be identified with by people who would reject a direct statement of the problem itself (Often a bridesmaid but never a bride increase sales of a mouthwash! Flashback Friday - "Often a Bridesmaid but Never a Bride" - Baer Performance Marketing (baerpm.com))

  • Remember, this is the hardest State of Awareness to write a headline for. The headline can't just be a startler, or an attention-grabber, or humorous, or cute. It can't be an empty headline. Keep this cardinal rule in mind: Your prospect must identify with your headline before they can buy from it. It must be their headline, their problem, their state of mind. It must pick out the product's logical prospects - and reject as many people as it attracts.

With all of this said, keep in mind: desires, markets, fashions, and what advertisements work will all change. That is certain.

The examples provided above may have worked in the 1920s or 1960s, but would be laughable now. And vice-versa.

But although styles and markets change, strategy does not.

Although the styles of the ad examples above are now old-hat, you can see how they worked and why they had power. They tap into desires that still exist - although now these desires are directed towards different products and problems.

The ads channeled the desires of their market at their time so effectively that if they were rewritten in today's lingo, and applied to different projects, they could still sell millions.

Your prospect's State of Sophistication

In a way, this is the easiest question to answer.

A few hours or research will tell you how exposed your prospect is to your product and its solution.

Just like the States of Awareness, there are varying levels of States of Sophistication. Schwartz lays them out, with strategies that tag along with each, as follows:

• First to market: Your prospects have no sophistication about your product at all. They've never received info about the type of product you offer. Once they're interested, they'll be enthusiastic, and believe much more of what you have to say and will buy more readily. The story of your product is brand new to them. Sadly, most of you are not in this camp, unless you work with a truly revolutionary tech or brand. Or if you are dealing with an already established product, but your advertising is able to visualize a completely new market or advertising channel for the product. Your strategy here should be:

  • Be simple, direct. Not fancy.

  • Name the need or the claim in your headline.

  • Dramatize the claim in your copy.

  • Prove that your product works. Nothing more, nothing less.

• If you're second, do this: Copy the successful claim, if it's still working, but enlarge it. Drive it to the absolute limit. Outbid your competition. These headlines will:

  • Evolve over time as the claims are enlarged.

  • Keep expanding the claims as long as they are producing results. At some point, this will fatigue.

• Third stage of sophistication: All your prospects have heard the claims, even the extreme ones. Maybe they've bought one or two of your competitor's products. They're bombarded by ads of similar products. Many of you reading this are selling to a market at this stage of sophistication. So, how to breakthrough? They've seen and heard it all. Luckily, we have one thing working in our favor: the restorative power of the market. Women will always want to be beautiful - in new and novel ways; men will always want to be powerful. The desire never fades. New prospects enter the market. Old customers become dissatisfied with their old purchases and want to look again. What is needed here:

  • A new mechanism, a new way to make the old promises work.

  • A different process, a fresh chance, a brand new possibility of success where only disappointment has resulted before.

  • The focus isn't on what the product does, but rather, how it works.

  • Not accomplishment, but performance.

  • The claim remains - reinforced by the mechanism that accomplishes it.

• The fourth stage of sophistication: Even these new promises will only give temporary results. The new trends fade. What works next is to elaborate and expand on the mechanism, not the promises. If there's a new mechanism of achieving results being advertised in the market, and it's producing sales, then simply:

  • Enlarge upon the successful mechanism.

  • Make it easier, quicker, more sure.

  • Allow it to solve more of the problem.

  • Overcome old limitations.

  • Promise extra benefits.

  • It's the same strategy as the Second Stage of Sophistication, but applied to the mechanism instead of the promise.

• The final stage, or how to revive a "dead" product: In this Final Stage of Sophistication, your market no longer believes in your ads. They don't want to even hear about your product. This corresponds to the Fifth Stage of Awareness discussed above. The strategy then is to shift away from the promise and the mechanism that accomplishes it, to identification with the prospect themselves. Bring your prospect into your ad. The "Why men crack" ad referenced above is a good example here. You can also find techniques on how to do this in the 38 headline strategies listed below.

The tobacco industry is an example of selling a product that has gone through all five Stages of Sophistication. For better or worse, through thick and thin, social taboos and government regulation, tobacco companies found new ways to advertise and sell.

38 Ways to Strengthen Your Headline

Schwartz gave us great, practical ways to improve our headlines.

He writes that one of the most powerful techniques that we can learn when crafting a headline is verbalization. This is the art of increasing the impact of a headline by the way it is stated.

By now, we should have a general idea of our market and the content of our headline. We should know what we want to say. Now, we have to figure out how to say it.

The easiest way? Just state the claim. "Lose Weight" or "Stop Headaches". If you're first to market, this works, of course.

But when things are competitive, or if you product's performance and benefits are too complicated to sum up like that, then you must reinforce your claim by binding other images to it. This is verbalization.

It can do several things:

• Strengthen the claim by enlarging upon it, measuring it, making it more vivid.

• It can make the claim fresh and new again by twisting it, changing it, showing a new angle, changing the narrative style, challenging the prospect with an example.

• It can help the claim pull the prospect into the body of the ad by promising him info about it, by questioning him, by partially revealing mechanism (this is useful for Fifth Stage of Sophistication and Awareness cases).

Here are 38 guideposts that you can employ when writing headline copy (note, these are just simple examples for illustrative purposes - adopt and improve for your product and circumstances):

1. Measure the size of the claim: "I am 61 pounds lighter..."

2. Measure the speed of the claim: "In 2 seconds, Bayer aspirin begins to dissolve in your glass!"

3. Compare the claim: "Costs up to $300 less than other models"

4. Metaphorize the claim: "Melts away ugly fat!"

5. Evoke the senses: "Tastes like you just picked it"

6. Demonstrate the claim with a prime example: "At 60 mph, the loudest noise in this Rolls Royce is the electric clock."

7. Dramatize the claim: "They laughed when I sat down at the piano - but when I started to play..."

8. State the claim as a paradox: "How a bald-headed barber saved my hair", "Beat the races by picking losers"

9. Remove limitations from the claim: "Shrinks hemorrhoids without surgery"

10. Associate the claim with values or people that the prospect wishes to be identified: "Mickey Mantle says: camels never bother my throat"

11. Show how much work the claim does: "Relieves congestion in all 7 nasal passages instantly"

12. State the claim as a question: "Could you use $1000 a week extra income?"

13. Offer info about how to accomplish the claim: "How to win friends and influence people"

14. Tie authority to the claim: "Here's what doctors do when they feel rotten"

15. Before and after the claim.

16. Stress the newness of the claim: "Announcing! Guided missile spark plugs"

17. Stress the exclusivity of the claim: "Ours alone, Persian lamb originals"

18. turn the claim into a challenge for the reader: "Which twin has the Toni, and which has the $15 permanent?"

19. State the claim as a case-history quotation: "Would you believe it - I have a cold!"

20. Condense the claim - interchange your product and the product it replaces: "Pour yourself a new engine."

21. Symbolize the claim - replace the direct statement or measurement with a parallel reality: "Starting next Tuesday, the Allantic Ocean becomes only 1/5th as long"

22. Connect the mechanism to the claim in the headline: "Floats fat right out of your body"

23. Startle the reader by contradicting the way he thinks the mechanism should work: "Hit hell out of the ball with your right hand"

24. Connect the need and the claim in the headline: "There is only one solution to an advertising problem: Find the man!"

25. Offer info in the ad itself: "Why men crack..."

26. Turn the claim or the need into a case history: "Again she orders - 'a chicken salad, please'"

27. Give a name to the problem or need: "When you're weary with daytime fatigue, take alka-seltzer."

28. Warn the reader about pitfalls if they don't use the product: "Don't invent one cent of your hard-earned money until you check this guide"

29. Emphasize the claim by its phraseology by breaking it into two sentences: "A man you can lean on. That's Kloper-man."

30. Show how easy the claim is to accomplish by imposing a universally overcome limitation: "If you can count to 11, you can increase your speed and skill at numbers"

31. State the difference in the headline: "The difference in premium gasolines is right in the additives"

32. Surprise your reader into realize that former limitations have now been overcome: "See what happens when you crush a Hartman DC-8? Nothing."

33. Address the people who can't buy your product: "If you've already taken your vacation, don't read this. It'll break your heart."

34. Address your prospect directly: "To the man who will settle for nothing less than the presidency of his firm."

35. Dramatize how hard it was to produce the claim: "When Jens finished designing this candleholder, we had to invent a new kind of candle."

36. Accuse the claim of being too good: "Is it immoral to make money this easily?"

37. Challenge the prospects present limiting beliefs: "You are twice as smart as you think."

38. Turn the claim into a question and answer.

There are infinite number of variations like this. Schwartz asks us to create your own - and do it tomorrow!

But don't rush the process of creating a headline. The research it takes to understand your market, its mass desires, and the most effective ways to pinpoint the Stage of Awareness and Sophistication of your market may take days, weeks, or months to achieve.

Don't rush the process.

The market will be there. Your job is to effectively channel the market's desires onto your product - not to create the market.

The first five or ten words of your copy, the headline, make up about 90% of the value of your ad.

It's why I spent 5500+ words combing through Schwartz's ideas on crafting the most effective headline and summed them up for you. They are compasses to find your own direction and path, not formulas to copy word for word.

The rest of the review discusses the techniques of writing the body copy of your ad. I will break them down into several simple sections of techniques, just like Schwartz did.

Conclusion

Would I recommend Breakthrough Advertising?

No, I wouldn't recommend it.

I would beg you to go out and get a copy, by any means necessary, right now.

It's a tome that can be mined for its gems for your entire entrepreneurial career. The techniques and ideas in the book are timeless. And the best thing? Each idea in the book may be relevant to you at different stages of your company, your product, or your life.

For more books reviews like this, you can find them here Subscribe | Content Kung Fu (beehiiv.com).

My next review will tackle the 2nd half of Breakthrough Advertising on how to write effective body copy.

Until then,
keep kung-fu fighting