‘A headline I love’ – System Seminar Blog Post
Read Ken McCarthy’s latest ‘System Seminar’ Blog post titled “A headline I love”. [Blog Post Reprint]
Ken McCarthy’s latest ‘System Seminar’ Blog post is reprinted here.
A headline I love
The mail order business, the grandfather of the Internet, started in America. It began as a way of serving farmers who lived too far away from town to shop in stores.
That’s why Chicago – where we’ll be holding System 2007- was the birthplace of the mail order business. It sits right in the middle of America’s farm belt.
Sears, Montgomery Ward, Spiegel, you name it and is started in Chicago or nearby. In fact, even today Chicago has the biggest direct marketing club in the world. Bigger than Los Angeles, bigger than London, even bigger than New York City.
With all this in mind, here’s a headline that I saw recently that I just love…
“Spring is just around the corner. Are you ready?”
It’s a headline for a seed catalog.
Understand that right now where I live when I retrieved this catalog from the malbox out in front of our house, the temerature was in the single digits. Fahrenheit. Cold. Very cold.
Be that as it may, seed merchants and their customers – the gardeners and farmers or the world – are holding a picture of spring in their hearts.
Spring is just around the corner? It takes a vivid imagination – and faith – to see it, but that’s what gardeners and farmers do. When the ground outside is frozen solid, inside they’re planning for a future they can only see in their mind’s eye.
I bet you think I’m going to transition this somehow into a pitch for System 2007.
I’m not. Other than to say that no matter what it looks like outside right now, spring is just around the corner.
Spring is when we at the System plant new ideas for the coming year. And just like seeds, the material we present at the System comes from living things, in our case not plants, but real life businesses.
That’s why the success rates of our grads is so high. Real people with real businesses in real marketing sharing exactly what they do to make their money trees grow. That’s been our formula from the beginning.
No theory. No pie in the sky. Just good old fashioned common sense – which as Mark Twain once pointed out is not that common after all.
“Spring is just around the corner. Are you ready?”
System 2007 – Chicago – April 27 -29 – Register now and enjoy the big ‘Early Bird’ discount http://www.TheSystemSeminar.com
Ken McCarthy organized and sponsored the first conference ever held on the subject of the commercial potential of the World Wide Web. His company Amacord Inc., formerly E-Media, was one of the first Internet-based businesses in the world.
In addition to working with small and mid-sized business clients since 1993, McCarthy was a consultant to NEC’s Biglobe, the largest online service in Japan, from 1996 to 2001. His book The Internet Business Manual was the first book on web entrepreneurship published in that country. He is also credited by Hotwired magazine with being one of the people responsible for the development and popularization of the banner ad, one of the key underpinnings of commercial Internet publishing.
A graduate of Princeton University, McCarthy came to the Internet industry with a varied background which included technical consulting for two of New York’s top investment banks, lecturing on educational psychology at MIT, Columbia, and NYU, and founding and operating a number of small businesses, including one that helped produce an Academy Award winning documentary. Ken McCarthy is associated with the following blogs: Ken McCarthy’s Blog, System Video Blog and Internet Video Marketing Letter
*IMNewswatch would like to thank Ken McCarthy for granting permission to reprint the latest blog posts.
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