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As colder weather approaches, homeowners feel a different kind of heat - high energy bills and costly repairs, often due to damage from moisture in the home.

Often the culprits are inefficient windows and doors that compromise the home's "envelope" - the fixtures and surfaces that together help regulate indoor temperatures and provide protection from the elements.

Any leak in the home's envelope hits the pocketbook hard and fast. Energy lost through windows alone can account for 10 percent to 25 percent of a household's heating bill, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

"Now is the time to spend a little extra effort inspecting your home to make sure fixtures are in the best possible condition for combating cold, wet weather," said Joyce Richter, windows expert for Jeld-Wen, a window and door manufacturer. "Look for warping or cracks that indicate repairs or replacements are needed."

Jeld-Wen offers these additional tips:

* Use your senses to detect leaks. Hold a lighted candle near closed windows and doors. You'll see immediately if cold air is infiltrating indoors or warm air is seeping out. Feel for cold spots and look for condensation on cold surfaces. Inspect seals and weatherstrips.

* Take advantage of passive solar heating. Use insulated window coverings and close them at night. Open south-facing window coverings during the day.

* Understand how energy efficiency is measured. The most important energy efficiency rating is U-factor. This is the amount of heat flowing through a window. The lower the number, the more energy-efficient the window is.

* Consider Energy Star-qualified products. Appliances and other household products that have undergone rigorous testing will save money on energy bills during all seasons. The Environmental Protection Agency states that a typical household can save up to 30 percent on energy bills, about $400 per year, by selecting Energy Star-qualified products.

* Research the new generation of high-tech building materials. Composite materials, such as energy-efficient fiberglass doors, have become more widely available to homeowners. These materials protect against the forces of nature that cause the most worry: temperature changes, severe storms, moisture and insects.

“A great title is a work of genius,” said E. Haldeman-Julius in the 1920s.

Haldeman-Julius sold 200 million (really) of his “Little Blue Books.” His headlines were his product, because he sold his books by the title. About halfway through his brilliant marketing career he wrote a book called “The First Hundred Million,” in which he shared some of his secrets…

EHJ had a system.  If a title didn't sell over 10,000 copies in a year, it was sent to a place in his office called "The Hospital" to be given a new title. And if the new title bombed, then it went into "The Morgue." As an example, "Art of Controversy" didn't meet his 10,000 copy quota. The title was changed to: "How to Argue Logically" and sales soared to 30,000 copies. He changed nothing about the book—just the title.

Haldeman-Julius discovered that certain words could increase the sales of almost any book. In 1925 "Patent Medicine" sold a measly 3,000 copies.  Haldeman-Julius changed the title to: "The Truth About Patent Medicine" and sales rose to a respectable 10,000 copies. 

EHJ found that the words "The Truth About" had some sort of magic. But far and away the best was “How To.” “How to Psycho-analyze Yourself” out-sold "Psycho-analysis Explained" and "How I Psycho-analyzed Myself" almost four times over. He found that the words: Life; Love; Sexy; Romance; Self-improvement; and Entertainment also worked well in titles. Small changes in his titles resulted in massive differences in sales.

Has the crafting of learning-laden and benefit-promising headlines gone out of style? Gary Halbert was a copywriting legend of recent times in the way that EHJ was in the ‘20s. Here’s what he said: “Go read a copy of ‘The First Hundred Million.’ It is where I learned my magic words… the ones that make copy SIZZLE and my headlines impossible to ignore.”

In the “Information Age,” facts drive the internet. Think that’s new? Good old EHJ found that “The Facts You Should Know About…” was a massive hit again and again. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Yet so many advertisers run any headline at all, or no headline at all, because their creators think it's trendy or clever. Seldom will such an ad succeed.

Arguably, the most famous headline of all time was written by John Caples:  "They Laughed When I Sat Down at The Piano—but When I Started to Play...."  This ad was written for the U.S. School of Music and people are still copying it today. Caples was a past master of the headline that promised both learning and benefit—and of copy (and products) that delivered them.

Maxwell Sackheim was a great ad writer from E. Haldeman-Julius’s era. His most famous headline was “Do You Make These Mistakes in English?” You may well have seen that classic headline before, but you almost surely don’t know that the first draft was “Are You Afraid of Making Mistakes in English?” See how one word changed the product from boring to exciting—“these.” That one demonstrative pronoun promised specific information and real benefits.

Your first clue to the truth about advertising was written more than 100 years ago.

Let me tell you the story of a young, confident copywriter by the name of John E. Kennedy. Early one May evening in 1904, Kennedy, a former Canadian Mountie, sat in a New York barroom.

He sent a note upstairs to the office of A.L. Thomas, the head of the Lord and Thomas advertising agency. "I'm in the saloon downstairs,” the note began, “and I can tell you
what advertising is. I know you don't know. It will mean much to me to have you know what it is and it will mean much to you.  If you wish to know what advertising is, send the word ‘yes’ down by the bell boy. (Signed) John E. Kennedy.”

Thomas dismissed the note as arrogance. But his junior partner, Albert Lasker, did not. The note struck a chord with Lasker and he summoned Kennedy to his office that same night. That meeting of Lasker and Kennedy changed the face of advertising—forever.
 
Kennedy told Lasker, "Advertising is Salesmanship in Print." No one has been able to better that definition of advertising, not to this very day, more than 100 years later.
 
Kennedy was subsequently hired by Lord and Thomas and became the highest paid copywriter of his day—$52,000 a year, a phenomenal sum in the first decade of the last century.
 
Nearly all the top marketers of today derive their killer ideas from the marketing legends of the past. Why? Because all the top marketers understand what makes people buy. They understand that human nature just hasn't changed over time. Human beings will continue to be sold by the same emotions that have been used since the days of Caesar.

The same things that made people buy 10,000 years ago will continue to work 10,000 years from now.  These principles just do not change. No lesser modern marketer than Ted Nicholas says, "Ads which ran 30-50 years ago, even a hundred years ago, are often better than those you see today. You'll get great ideas to use in your marketing, too—human emotions never change." (From "The Golden Mailbox")

Many of those bygone legends, along with writing great advertising, also wrote great advertising books. For instance, Lasker got Kennedy to write all of his principles into a series of lessons called "The Book of Advertising Tests." Lord and Thomas utilized these and the agency became the training center for all New York copywriters. In 1912 the text was published as Reason Why Advertising. How many billion-dollar advertisers a century later still just say “Buy our brand” and give no real reason why?

Kennedy left Lord and Thomas a few years later, leaving Albert Lasker with big shoes to fill. Lasker showed that he had not just been lucky in hiring Kennedy; in fact he showed himself to be a genius, by hiring the equally legendary and possibly even more brilliant Claude C. Hopkins. Hopkins’ 1927 masterpiece Scientific Advertising revolutionized the industry all over again.

What we want changes overnight; what makes us want it hasn’t changed in thousands of years, nor will it change in thousands more. The serious student of marketing can learn much from early analysts of motivation. Here is a bit of George French’s "The Art and Science of Advertising” from the turn of the 20th century…

“We know how to appeal to Smith because we know Smith.  We know what will please Brown because we know Brown.  We know how to get our way with Jones because we know Jones. What the advertiser must know is how to get at Smith, Brown and Jones without knowing any of them. While every man has his personal peculiarities… every man and every mind is controlled, in a large sense and to a great extent, by mind workings which were established before we lived, and are operated in a manner separate from his personality.

Our minds are… more mechanical than we are willing to admit.  That which we loosely call mind is largely the automatic expression of tendencies controlled by physical conditions wholly apart from conscious intellectual or moral motives or qualities. What those physical conditions are, and how the knowledge of what they are may be used by advertisers, forms the body of that new knowledge some like to call psychology, so far as it concerns advertising."

Professor Walter Dill Scott is more specific in his 1908 classic "The Psychology of Advertising”…

The Direct Command
“Now a large majority of people do things because they are told to do them.  It would seem… that more people are forced to action by a direct command than by any other method of appeal. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that the great mass of the people do not think things out for themselves. The thinking is done by the small minority and the bulk of the people accept the thoughts of the minority…

“If you will study advertising… you will notice that the direct command is used more than any other method… ‘Smoke Blank's Cigars.’ ‘Use Blank Soap.’ ‘Let Blank the Tailor Make Your Next Suit.’  ‘Study Law at Home.’  ‘Be a Trained Nurse’…

Interest Your Prospects
“The association of ideas is a matter of great importance… You should find out something in which your prospective customer is interested  that can be associated in some way with what you are offering. Professor William James put this principle very clearly.  He said:  ‘Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.  The two associated objects grow, as it were, together…’

To again quote Professor Halleck:  ‘An eminent philosopher has said that man is completely at the mercy of the association of his ideas.  Every new object is seen in the light of its associated ideas....’

So “borrowed interest,” Scott shows us, is nothing new. Neither, we shall see, is the “limited time offer.”

Work for Quick Action
“The tendency for most people is to delay action. They seem to prefer doing nothing today that can be put off until tomorrow.  It is on account of this condition that so much thought is given to plans and methods calculated to bring about prompt decisions… The special sale which has a "hurry up" low price for a limited time; the special bargain sale in which the numbers of articles offered is limited; the special discount if the offer is accepted within a certain time… Various methods can be devised by anyone who will give the matter a little thought. 

“In conclusion,  we will say that as psychology is only human nature… if we learn what the average man is likely to think and do under certain conditions, we can be guided by that knowledge, as human nature is pretty much alike the world over.”

The old-timers knew a lot about what makes people buy. Tapping into their wisdom is a great way to make your marketing highly motivating and right up to the minute!

Making a character out of the advertiser brings the message alive. Maxwell Sackheim is most famous for inventing the Book-of-the-Month Club. But before that, he invented some dramatic, and dramatically successful, advertising. 

One of his patented techniques was to make a character out of the advertiser, writing ads as if the clients themselves were actually talking. One Sackheim client was Frank E. Davis, "The Gloucester Fisherman".  This is how Sackheim wrote for him:
 
"There is no use trying. I've tried and tried to tell people about my fish, but I wasn't rigged out to be an ad writer and I can't do it. I can close-haul a sail with the best of them. I know how to pick out the best fish of the catch… But I'll never learn the knack of writing an ad that will tell people why my kind of fish—fresh caught, with the deep sea tang still in it—is lots better than the ordinary store kind.
 
"At least you can taste the difference.  So you won't mind, will you, if I ship some of my fish direct to your home?  It won't cost you anything unless you feel like keeping it. All I ask is that you try some of my fish at my expense and judge for yourself whether it isn't exactly what you have always wanted."
 
This copy sold tens of thousands of tubs of fish right across the country. The authentic character of the Gloucester Fisherman brought life, and customers, to the product.

You’re thinking, “Great then, but now? Come on.” Maybe you’ve heard of a couple multi-millionaires named Harry and David? Ever wonder how they got started? Years after Sackheim, a copywriter called G. Lynn Sumner wrote an ad for a pair of pear growers.  The ad set off with the headline: "Imagine Harry and Me Advertising Our Pears in Fortune!"
 
Here's a snippet of Sumner’s copy: "Out here on the ranch we don't pretend to know much about advertising, and maybe we're foolish spending the price of a tractor for this space; but my brother and I got an idea the other night, and we believe you folks who read Fortune are the kind of folks who'd like to know about it. So here's our story..."
 
Years later again, in the ‘70s, Frank Schulz took a Joe Sugarman seminar. Joe suggested the character formula. Frank wrote a headline:  "A Fluke of Nature.” He told of the accidental invention of the “ruby red” grapefruit, and about how picky they are in picking the fruit. The rest is marketing history.
 
One variation on the character gambit is the open letter. Norman Cousins resigned from The Saturday Review to launch his own World Review Magazine. Showing one heck of a lot of character, he put up $15,711 for three insertions in The New York Times. They were headed, "An Open Letter to the Readers of The New York Times." He told them what was wrong with the journalism of the day and what they’d get from the World Review. That first round of advertising netted Cousins $54,923.00 in subscriptions.

Every viable enterprise has a character behind it somewhere. When you find it, then you know what’s unique about the company—and that’s at least halfway to great advertising!