Editor:
Today I am excited to welcome Carl Galletti, a distinguished figure in the world of marketing and copywriting. Known for his insightful strategies and profound understanding of direct response marketing,
Carl has helped numerous businesses achieve success, and with his ability to transform complex marketing challenges into opportunities for growth, Carl has become a rather important figure in the industry. So Carl, it’s a pleasure to meet you.
Carl Galletti:
Glad to meet you too. Pleasure to be here.
Editor:
What I’d like to start with is just a little overview. Your career spans several decades now in marketing, so what first drew you to this field?
Carl Galletti:
Well, a long time ago, I read Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy, and I got interested in the field of advertising, but never did anything with it. Many years later, I went to a seminar because I was in real estate.
I was a real estate broker at the time, and they send you to seminars every so often. And so, I was sitting in the middle of a seminar, it was like $395, which in those days was a lot more money than it is today. I got looked around.
There were like a couple hundred people, and I started adding this all up, and I’m saying, “Okay. This is a room that you rent from a hotel.
There’s a speaker here.
I’m sure you could hire a speaker for some amount of money and it can’t be all that much compared to how much money is here.
What is the secret of getting all these people here?”
I finally deduced that it was the copywriting, that was the advertising that got them there. So, I got interested in that, and I said, “I want to know how to get people to a seminar.”
So, I had subscribed to Entrepreneur Magazine.
In the back, they had these reports, and I was looking at them, and I had never ordered any before. So I saw one
about how to get people to a seminar, how to promote a seminar, and then I did a couple others, and I called them
up to order.
In those days, the internet wasn’t as prevalent as today. I called up to order, and they up-sold me on a package for that, including that report and the other ones I wanted, plus a whole bunch more stuff. So I did the upsell, and then what I didn’t know is that Jay Abraham had advised them to do this, and in exchange, he was able to use the list to promote his own newsletter, which he came out with, so he sent me a promotion for his newsletter.
Carl Galletti:
I read the sales letter for it, and I said, “I had never ordered a newsletter for $500 for a year in my life.” At the time, that was a lot more money than it is today. I ordered that thing, because by the end of the sales letter, I was just sold on it. I said, “If this guy charges $2,000 an hour for phone consultation, and he can write a sales letter this good, I not only want to know everything he knows, I want to know who he learned it from.”
So, I got his newsletter, and in there, I got introduced to people like Claude Hopkins and Scientific Advertising, and because of that, I said, “I have to know who this guy is. I’m going to call Jay up and ask him,” but before I was able to actually call, I got a letter from Gary Halbert, and I didn’t know it was Gary Halbert who wrote this, the Boron, basically The Boron Letters, because Jay didn’t give his name, right?
But when I opened up the letter, the sales letter for it, he talked about the Tova Borgnine promotion that he did, and I connected immediately that it was the same guy. So, I ordered his newsletter, and I was a lifetime. I was one of the first subscribers to his newsletter, because I called up and his girlfriend at the time, Paulette, answered.
Later on, I had found out from her that I was like one of the first people to order Gary Halbert’s newsletter, and I still have all his newsletters to this day. They were fantastic. From him, I learned about the Robert Collier letter book and all of the masters of copywriting, marketing, and advertising, and just learned from Gary and Jay Abraham, and eventually they hired me to write for them, so I was a freelance copyright.
I became a freelance copywriter at the time, and have been ever since and went on from there.
Editor:
It’s an amazing story, Carl. I mean, you mentioned some real heavyweights there, Jay Abraham, Gary Halbert, and so on and now of course we add Carl Galletti to that list.
You’ve been referred to, for many years now, as a copywriting legend. Can you maybe share what that
means to you now to be regarded in such high regard alongside your peers?
Well, I wish my family felt the same way about it. To them, I’m just an average Joe. But anyway, it’s great to have some degree of fame, but I think it was a producer in movies who said, “You’re only as good as your last picture, right? So, the next picture, you still have to prove yourself.”
So, you always have to keep proving yourself. The only way to do that, really, is to keep up and to review the basics, and learn the new stuff, but Dan Kennedy did this thing, where he said, “Principles never change,” and Jay
Abraham used to say something similar.
He said that human nature is immutable, meaning it doesn’t change.
What got people to buy stuff 1000 years ago is the same thing that gets them to buy stuff today, but that doesn’t change. Strategies change, like your strategy one time might be, TV’s the latest thing, and then before that it was radio, and then magazines and newspapers, et cetera, so those strategies change, and how you use those mediums, as a strategy, change.
Tactics change often, so you hear people talk about how things move so quickly on the internet. Well, there are only the tactics that are changing quickly on the internet, but the strategies, the fact that there is an internet and how you use that strategy to promote stuff, that changes, but it changes less often, and actually kind of rarely.
But the principles, what it takes to sell people and to
promote stuff doesn’t change, so studying Claude Hopkins is critical to understanding how to write copy, because he was there. What happens is when you go to the source, what I call the source is these are the people who came up with it in the first place, and they usually have the best insights, because they’re not repeating off of what people came before them.
They’re creating it anew. It was never there before, and they have some insights that are just unique and interesting, and you can learn a lot from them.
Editor:
On a personal level, how has it changed for you from when you first started?
Well, remember when I said, “I not only want to know what Jay Abraham knows, I want to know who we learned it from,” and that’s why whenever he mentioned something, like Claude Hopkins or a book, in those days he had mentioned scientific advertising and my life in advertising. In those days, they weren’t at the bookstores. You couldn’t buy them online, so I had to call Crane Publishing in Chicago, get on the phone with somebody, and get them to sell me the book, and of course, I had to write out a check, put it in the mail, wait for it to get there, and then they sent it to me. It was like, “Oh. it’s a several week procedure” so that’s what it took to get it in those days.
And so, I started accumulating all of these things, and as a sideline to my copywriting business, I sold these books.
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