'Sex Alert'
a marketing story>
by Philip Goutell
© 2023 Philip Goutell
Apricots. Apricots from Hunza, a land where men commonly live to over 100. That was the beginning of it all. Max had an accountant who had some connection with apricots from Hunza. I was to write the ad. This was a mail order business.
The apricots were tasty. I must have done some research but I can't recall ever writing the ad though I may have. I do know that the deal stopped dead when the fellow with the apricot connection drowned in his swimming pool. He had been having some financial problems. I don't recall whether I ever met him. Nor do I recall sending a bill, maybe because there was now nobody to send it to. As far as I was concerned his death put an end of the apricot story.
Then I was offered an ad "in payment" for my work on apricots that had never been completed. The ad was for a pill called "Sex Alert."
A fellow down South had this pill, "Sex Alert." A large mail order company in California was prepared to promote it. They had even prepared an ad. Then they called a halt to the program. It seems that they were owned by a larger, publicly traded company that also owned a chain of well known department stores. Anyone who had lived on the West Coast would recognize the name. Some wise owl intuited that their shareholders might be unhappy with the association. Possibly their lawyers had a word to say.
But promising promotions, like promising songs, don't just die upon their first rejection. They get traded around. In this case, from what I heard, the people in California owed money to Max and the Sex Alert promotion was given to him in payment. Now it was given to me for my work with apricots.
We could have run the ad as it was but I had issues with both the ad and the pill itself. Buying the pill from the fellow down south would cost us maybe two or three times what the pill would cost if we just made a pill ourselves. To me, what was in the pill wasn't important. I just wanted a healthy multivitamin without any exotic ingredients that might cause problems with regulators or make people sick. I think at some point Bill went out and got pills from a company that had once encapsulated perfume samples for him.
As to the ad itself, I felt that some of the claims would be difficult, if not impossible, to substantiate, so I eliminated them. I felt I could write a better ad without any reference to them.
It was decided to do a split run test, the old ad against my new ad. The Post had split run capabilities. That meant that on the press, every other sheet would carry the alternative ad, every newspaper out for delivery would either have the "A" version of the ad or the "B" version. Incoming orders with their coded coupons would show the result from each ad. I don't know the exact results from that first test but, based on a rush of activity as the orders started to come in, I knew my ad was significantly out pulling the original ad for Sex Alert.
There were other responses to my ad besides orders. The New York State Attorney General's office had started an investigation and one of the models I had used filed a defamation lawsuit asking for $1.3 million. For the moment the campaign was halted while we worked out these speed bumps.
When Two-Gun Gleeson from the attorney general's office paid us a visit, I hid in the broom closet. He left a message. I contacted the lawyer I had been introduced to and, when Gleeson came or called again, he was given Mark's name. "Oh, you're one of Mark's clients." That explained it all. Now they had someone to negotiate with.
We agreed to pay some money and I had my first and only visit to the pre-9/11 World Trade Center. We agreed that in the future we wouldn't use the word "laboratory" in our company's name and probably a few other points. I went off to write a new ad that would be in compliance.
Each time I showed a revised ad to Mark, his comment was "bars!" I was getting nowhere. Then I was told why Mark was the wrong lawyer for this project. It seems that one of his partners had been a little too involved in a client's business, one that ran amuck with the law. Along with the client's people, the lawyer had been indicted. The others were all convicted but the lawyer pulled a hung jury and the prosecutor left it at that. The firm was now very gun shy.
I still needed a lawyer and didn't know one but I had a client who had once been arrested in front of TV cameras and handcuffed while walking on crutches. He told me he expected to go away for a long time but he didn't. His lawyer, who he referred to as a "magician," got him out of it. (Later I was told that it was someone else at the firm whose argument that had gotten him freed, but that was later.) Now, in need of a "magician," I asked Doc for a referral. He introduced me to Peter Grieves.