601 Free Gifts
by Philip Goutell

© 2023 Philip Goutell

I've been reluctant to tell this story, from my point of view. A number of people were involved: marketers, law enforcement, and maybe even gangsters; I don't know all the facts, just what I did and what I might have overheard. This is the story of a promotion that was successful, outrageous, controversial, and, perhaps, a little into the gray area of legality although it didn't have to be. It's a story about magazine subscriptions although some might call it something else.

The whole thing started with two marketers wanting to sell subscriptions to a catalog dressed up as a magazine. It had grown out of Hi-Buyer's Gazette, a rag passed off as consumer tips and information but was, in fact, a catalog for sell cheap merchandise cheap.

I think the promoters may have gotten stalled on distribution. Catalogs were not flying out the door. Of course the usual way to distribute a catalog is to rent mailing lists and mail out a few million copies. But these guys, who I'll call Moe and Curly, wanted people to pay to get their catalog. If you saw the catalog you would see this as a joke.

Moe had known me from when I worked for him at another company. Curly was known to me only by reputation. I had seen him at the other company and Judi, a consultant, had told stories about him. He was someone I had wanted to meet thanks to his reputation as a clever and aggressive marketer but before this project we had never met. I think I was recommended to him by a fellow at a major mail order house whom I had never met me.

Writing a subscription promotion is a fairly standard assignment in both the publishing and the direct marketing world but I had never been involved in one. I had never created one. I had never written one. And, at the time, I had no reputation for creating brilliant, money making ads. I was probably called in because Moe told Curly I would work cheap and, they were stumped, and neither of them were expecting much from me. I took the assignment and went off to see what I could do.

Having no experience writing a conventional subscription promotion mailing, my thoughts turned to where I did have experience: fantasy. Working under Doctor X everything was fantasy. Forget what is real; imagine something people want. Build your ad around it. Then worry about how to clean it up and make it legal. I had been told by Michael Goodman, who did the mechanical art for Doctor X that Doctor X never showed his promotions to his lawyer until he had run a test and results showed it would be profitable. Write first, clean up the legals later. But what should this subscription promotion be? Out of somewhere in my Doctor X experience the promotion began to take shape. It was pure fantasy.

I envisioned an institute that manufacturers went to with their products to have them tested by consumers to get feedback. I called it "Manufacturer's Testing Institute." Then I envisioned the interface between the institute and its participants and this became the headline: 601 Free Gifts. Now all that was necessary was to write the logical links and add a photo of something like a board meeting of the institute deciding what "free gifts" they were going to put in the hands of the consumers for the month. I wrote the copy and drafted a layout for a tri-fold flier. That was the whole promotion.

Of course the "gifts" that were highlighted in the brochure were not those that you might expect to receive. But my feeling was that if my clients wanted to use the ad, they could make it clean by giving away a few more expensive items, a color TV or two, a stereo, some higher end cosmetics or jewelry. This editing and cleanup was always up to the client. My words were just suggestions.

I presented my finished copy and rough layout and the clients looked genuinely pleased. There was some comment about perhaps the photography might be too expensive and complicated and would thus be eliminated. When I presented my bill — it didn't amount to much — it was paid without question. The next I heard of the promotion was when the printed piece was shown to me. They had followed my layout exactly and taken the suggested photography which, as I recall, showed Laura conducting the "board meeting." Joe Richfield had done the photography. My copy had not been edited. Not one word had been changed. The deal was you got 601 free gifts for just postage and handling. The postage and handling easily paid for the free gifts and shipping with a generous profit left over. The free gifts had been acquired for very little. I think there was another story but it's one about which I must plead ignorance.

The promotion exploded. I was later told that it brought in $6 million in 9 months or $9 million in six months or something along those lines. The "gifts" were stored in a warehouse in New Jersey that had once been owned by a major industrial company. As I recall there were four separate 2-story buildings each the size of a football field. When Paul gave me the tour he told me "this is what your ad did" or words to that effect. Where do things go from here?

A short time later I was again with Curly. He was comparing his operation to Moe's. Moe had only a bookkeeper, he had a CPA — things like that. Dun & Bradstreet was picking Curly over Moe and Moe was always a bit cheap. He wasn't offering much even now. Curly was offering me a chance to make some money or so it seemed at the time and so it eventually proved. But beyond that there was the experience. How do you learn something without being involved? I wanted to learn more about the mail order business and Curly was a master practitioner. We would meet in the Hamptons to discuss it farther.

I don't remember all the details of our initial meeting. I recall flying out to the Hamptons in a small plane, trying not to get airsick on the other passengers. Motion sickness is a problem for me. Then I recall discussing business aboard a boat with a dead motor Curly had rented for the summer. The boat was tied to a dock.

The deal came down to this. We would start a new company. I would have a share and thus, if it made money, I would make money, hopefully more than I was making with freelance copy writing. The relationship went through various twists and turns but, for each of us, money was made. The grief that went along with it at times was simply the cost of doing business. The obstacles, jolts and jars were, in their own way, quite edifying.

As to others involves with the 601 Free Gifts promotion, friction arose between the promoters and some others who may have believed they they too should have profited from the promotion. A fire destroyed the warehouse. You could see the smoke from midtown Manhattan. It was reported in all of the city's major newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, which typically does not report local fires on its front page.

And the government stepped in. Orders as well as merchandise may have been destroyed in the fire. The Manufacturer's Testing Institute, as an entity continued to exist to fill orders or respond to government inquires and, there must have been, some kind of legal action against the company. I never knew the details. The brother of Curly's girlfriend was now president and responsible for taking the heat. I don't know how he managed.

For Curly and Moe, life went on with them doing the things that they did to make money. Now I was working to get something started and, for me, this was the beginning of what were to be some very profitable and stressful years. I wouldn't want to do it all over again but, aside from being profitable, it was "educational."