[Direct Response Series] The Timeless Principles of Profitable Marketing With Brian Kurtz

Brian Kurtz is a Direct Marketing Veteran and former Executive Vice President of Boardroom Inc., where he spent 34 years helping grow the company to $150 million in annual revenue through direct response marketing. During his tenure, he oversaw the mailing of more than 1.3 billion pieces of direct mail and played a key role in launching multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns. Brian is widely recognized for his expertise in direct response marketing, customer acquisition, and list strategy. Today, he shares his knowledge with entrepreneurs and marketers, teaching timeless principles for building profitable, long-lasting businesses.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [5:10] Brian Kurtz explains the Barnes & Noble hand truck method for discovering winning product ideas
• [10:42] How acquiring the rights to underperforming content can unlock hidden opportunities
• [13:29] Brian’s approach to negotiating fair and profitable book royalty deals
• [17:21] Why marketing other creators’ content can be a powerful business strategy
• [22:35] How infomercial upsells dramatically increase average order value
• [27:44] The advantage of selling physical products when everyone else is going digital
• [34:49] How rebranding and compelling headlines transformed struggling books into bestsellers
• [39:32] Brian’s proven strategy for list segmentation and higher marketing response rates
• [46:16] Why the way you sell has a lasting impact on customer lifetime value

In this episode…

What turns an overlooked product into a multimillion-dollar success? Is it the product itself, or the strategy behind how it’s marketed? And do timeless direct response principles still outperform today’s trend-driven tactics?

For Brian Kurtz, a direct marketing veteran, enduring success comes from pairing proven direct response principles with great offers and relentless testing. He highlights that businesses don’t always need to create something new — often the biggest opportunities come from repackaging, repositioning, or acquiring underutilized content. By refining headlines, segmenting audiences, and tailoring offers to the right customers, marketers can dramatically improve results without changing the core product. Brian also explains why fair partnerships, creative product sourcing, and testing across multiple channels are essential for long-term growth. His approach shows that understanding customer behavior and continuously optimizing campaigns can turn overlooked ideas into lasting, profitable businesses.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Brian Kurtz to discuss timeless direct response marketing strategies for building multimillion-dollar businesses. They explore sourcing winning products, increasing revenue through better offers and list segmentation, and using direct mail to scale growth. Brian also shares insights on repositioning underperforming products and building lasting customer relationships.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Brian Kurtz LinkedIn | Website | Email
• BottomLine Inc.
• Bottom Line Personal
• Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You To Know About by Kevin Trudeau
• Great Book of Inside Knowledge by Marion Buhagir
• Best Kept Secrets in America by et al William E. Donoghue, Inc. Boardroom
• The Book of Privileged Information by Boardroom Books
• The Book of Secrets by Marion Buhagir
• The Gary Halbert Letter
• How to Do Everything Right – Volume 1 by Bottom Line
• Little Black Book of Secrets by Martin Edleston
• The World’s Greatest Treasury of Health Secrets by Bottom Line Books
• Bottom Line’s Ultimate Healing: World’s Greatest Treasury of Health Secrets Volume II by Bottom Line
• ”Sounds Delicious with Carnie Wilson”
• Masterminds: Multiplying Business Growth

Special mention(s):

• Gary Vaynerchuk on LinkedIn
• Electronic Retailing Association
• HarperCollins Publishing
• John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Guthy-Renker
• Charlie Rose YouTube
• Dan Kennedy on LinkedIn
• Gary Bencivenga on LinkedIn
• Barry Farber
• Tod Cooperman on LinkedIn
• Dean Graziosi on LinkedIn
• Perry Marshall on LinkedIn
• Tony Robbins on LinkedIn

Related episodes:

• Brian Kurtz Discusses the Power of Newsletters with Mike Capuzzi 
• “What’s In It For Them?” on Timeless Marketing Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “I love direct marketing because it’s measurable, accountable, and results-driven.”
• “The best opportunities are often in content that’s under-marketed or undervalued.”
• “How you sell shapes how customers respond — and how they behave long-term.”
• “Great marketing means believing in your product enough to keep testing until it works.”
• “Your customers are real people, and different people need different messages.”

Action steps:

1. Leverage existing content and partnerships to create new opportunities: Find valuable products or content that are under-marketed and build partnerships instead of starting from scratch.
2. Study successful marketing funnels before building your own: Learn from proven strategies by experiencing competitors’ sales processes and adapting what works.
3. Diversify your marketing channels to maximize growth: Combine direct mail, digital marketing, physical products, and other channels to expand your reach.
4. Segment your audience for more effective messaging: Tailor your offers and copy to different customer groups based on their interests and motivations.
5. Test relentlessly and refine your approach: Keep improving headlines, offers, and positioning until you find what resonates with your audience.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

All right, here we are. Dr. Jeremy Weisz here. Welcome to Digital Domination Super Summit. This is where some of the smartest minds in tech share lessons and actionable tips to improve your business. I’m the Founder of InspiredInsider.com. I talk with successful entrepreneurs and leaders. Everyone who’s live. Put your name in where you’re from. Put all your questions in there throughout. I’m going to be pulling them in and asking them. And also we’ll have questions in the live chat at the very end. I want to introduce our special guest today.

It’s Brian Kurtz. He’s Executive Vice President at Boardroom Inc, which at its height was a $150 million Company. He’s overseen the mailing of approximately 1.3 billion pieces of direct mail over the past 30-plus years. And he’s going to talk about what works, what doesn’t work, some of his Light Bulb moments in his journey. And he knows a thing or two about marketing and copywriting. And you know what makes one of the world’s greatest list managers? Brian, thank you so much for being here.

Brian Kurtz: 01:22

It’s my pleasure, my pleasure that you’d have a direct mail guy at the Digital Domination Summit.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 01:27

Yes. You know, offline to online, online to offline. I want to find first, Brian, for you. What inspired you to get into this business?

Brian Kurtz: 01:37

You know, it’s funny, a lot of people in direct marketing in the 80s, it was a lot of people just sort of fell into the business. And you know, I always tell the joke that I was most likely voted in my high school yearbook, most likely to become a list manager. But that’s not true because that never happened, because I didn’t even know what a list manager was when I was in high school or college. And in fact, there was one line about direct marketing in my marketing textbook in college. So to say that, you know, I had my eyes set on direct marketing from day one would be lying.

I mean, I thought I was going to be either a baseball umpire or a film critic for The New York Times, because I was big in movies and big in baseball, and I decided to go into business, and I knew I had a propensity for selling. So I got involved in this company, Boardroom, with Marty Edelston, who’s probably one of the best salespeople that’s ever lived, who never took advertising in his newsletter. Different story. And what happened was, he told me after a year of working here, where I thought I would go into the editorial side after being an English major, he said, I had a nose for marketing, and I think that’s how I got into the business.

You know, he saw that. And I love direct marketing because it’s measurable, it’s accountable. And the best people who are marketing online today, who are hopefully listening today, are marketing with an ROI in mind, a return on investment in mind, that they are actually all direct marketers. And so I would never trade. I think on my LinkedIn page, it says, I love direct marketing is my first line. And it’s because I love the feedback, I love the measurability. I love knowing what worked and what doesn’t work and shoot me. Now, if I was running a Super Bowl ad this Sunday.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s great. And so what do you find early on that you learned that was influential? Before we get into your talk and Light Bulb moments, what was something you learned early on from Martin, one of your mentors, that you remember?

Brian Kurtz: 03:31

Oh, God. Martin, you know, he just passed away in October, so it’s still a little raw. In fact, there’s a, in the, in the slides that I have, I have a great picture of him that fits into one of my stories. But you know, Martin had an expression, you know, you only go through life once. You might as well be the world’s best. He had a bunch of great expressions, but that was one of them. And, you know, for my first 3 or 4 years I got into this business, and he said, Brian, be the best list manager. You could be the best list manager in the world.

I will say that the the competition wasn’t all that stiff, so I stood out because he taught me. But he taught me all those lessons of connection with people, of really contributing to people, to really connect with them the way that you send notes. I mean, I still send a lot. I still personally, right now, I send a ton of handwritten notes to people. I connect with people at a, at a whole other level besides email. And that’s not just because I came out of direct mail and I’m a dinosaur. It’s because I know what it’s about to connect with people. So I’d say that would be like an overriding umbrella thing for Martin. But boy, I’m doing a whole two day event that’s just going to talk about the lessons of Marty Edelston. So yeah, I was very fortunate to have a mentor like that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:42

Yeah. And I’m looking forward to your words of wisdom on this. And I know anyone can apply what you’re about to tell your great story. So I’ll let you pull up. I’ll let you take it over from here. The presentation. All you have to do is hit the.

Brian Kurtz: 04:58

Hit the button. It’s just. Just moving slow. I’m sorry.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:01

Gotcha. No worries.

Brian Kurtz: 05:02

It should be. It’s it’s coming up, and I apologize.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:05

That’s good. We’re good. We’re good. All right, I’ll let you take over.

Brian Kurtz: 05:10

So it’s Light Bulb moments is what Jeremy, Jeremy and I came up with, which is, you know, sending billions of promotions, sending, selling millions of products. And while some of it is direct mail, some of it is direct response TV, and some of it is digital. I think the lessons here are big in terms of direct response, because, as I said, I think everything that we do today, online or offline, is all about direct marketing. It’s all about measurable response. So I’m hoping that you’ll be able to see, even if it’s about something from the past in direct mail, how much it is applicable to what we do today. So my first Light Bulb moment is what I call new product development by renting a hand truck at Barnes and Noble and the marriage of Content and list. So basically, in the 1980s, Boardroom was known for our newsletters, and then we created a whole book division, which was basically the greatest hits of our newsletters.

We were able to take lots of content from our newsletters and create these huge books. I mean, 4 or 5, 600-page books, sell them in direct mail, not sell them in retail at all or in the trade. So we were able to get, you know, $29 and $39 for these books and be able to sell them in solo direct mail, by solo meaning, you know, single, single product, direct mail, and sell hundreds of thousands of copies. We didn’t care about the New York Times best seller list. We just cared about how much money we could make on these fantastic books with fantastic content. One of my mentors at the time, Gordon Grossman, said to him, I don’t know how we expand this business. I can only use the greatest hits from our newsletters. I’m having a hard time getting enough content to get new books. And Gordon said in his famous quote, which was the Light Bulb moment, I guess.

Why do you think that all of your content has to be your own? And so what I decided to do is that at that time, maybe we didn’t have a 9 million name database that we have today of buyers and subscribers, but we probably had 3 or 4 million names. And basically, I realized that the stuff that we were selling them from our own content, there was a lot of content out there in the way of books that we could go out and find what would be the most applicable to our database. So I literally went with one of my associates to Barnes and Noble, to a local Barnes and Noble, asked him for a hand truck, and they happened to have one in the back. And I went to every section of Barnes and Noble, every section of the bookstore. That was a category that I thought would appeal to some portion of my database, whether it was finance, whether it was all kinds of health topics, whether it was, you know, memory, whether it was.

You know, any kind of a lot of the soft stuff, a lot of soft psychology stuff, because all of that stuff we had covered in our newsletters. And after about, I think about an $800 invoice at the cash register, I took all of those books back to the office; I didn’t get to take them in the hand truck. So I had to put them in by hand in my car. And what I did was I started going through them and started looking at which books I thought would be applicable for direct mail. And by that meaning, what could a copywriter do to take information out of those books that create really exciting direct mail copy? So we narrowed down the books we bought to different groups, and we started sending them out to our best copywriters, and we were connected to the best ones in the world.

And what began was a whole division at the boardroom, which was books that other people had that, before I put them on that hand truck, were just collecting dust on shelves at Barnes and Noble. If they were lucky, they were selling 5000 copies and maybe even ten and calling it a best seller. And we developed a whole line of books that way. We had one health book in particular. I remember we sold 800,000 copies just in direct mail because the copywriter fell in love with it. We were able to take the book. It was a soft cover that I got from Barnes and Noble. We created a hardcover version of it. We started adding premiums, other small books, to go with it from our own content, because now I didn’t have to do our own content for a 600-page book. I got the 600-page book at Barnes and Noble, and I put our own content and our own spin on it with the premiums, and I developed these incredible direct mail packages.

Not personally, of course I’m not. I wasn’t the copywriter, but that was basically new product development by renting a hand truck at Barnes and Noble. And I think that the idea of how that applies today, of course, is that knowing what your audience wants, knowing what might be out there that’s under-marketed or undervalued, and you have the marketing muscle to bring it to the market. I think there are tremendous lessons here. I will tell you that I go into even more detail about this whole process in an interview I did with Perry Marshall, which I think we’re going to direct people, Jeremy, to, to that, to that interview at the end. So I’m going to go off to Light Bulb number two.

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Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:03

Now, I have a quick question on Light Bulb #1 that’s remarkable that you sold 800,000 of the books. Now, how does it.

Brian Kurtz: 10:10

Now, that was 800,000 of one book.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:12

Of one book.

Brian Kurtz: 10:12

Write one book. I sold millions and millions of books that we did this way, but the biggest one was one that we sold one title that had sold, I think maybe 2000 copies at Barnes and Noble. And in the trade, we sold 800 000 copies at a higher price than what was being sold in the bookstore, with additional content that we put together for the direct mail package.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:34

Yeah. The question I had for that is, can you walk me through briefly: do you start off contacting the author, or what do you do to start?

Brian Kurtz: 10:42

Oh, so basically I started with going to the categories in the store and finding the books. Once I saw the books that I wanted and I and I started the first thing I did, I knew instinctively that the John Wiley’s and the HarperCollins of the world, you know, all these big, big publishers that if I went to them for a deal that says, I want to buy the direct mail rights to your book, and I’ll pay you a 5% royalty that most of them are going to say yes, because it’s found money for them. It’s a channel that they’re not using. And as I said, you know, I could I could explain to them how I just had to dust the book off because it was sitting on the shelf. So the sale, the, the, the, the way to present it to the publisher.

That was kind of the, that was the mechanics of it. But that was pretty easy. The big part was, was the content good enough for our copywriters to cull enough good information to write killer direct mail copy? And so I never, I never had a situation where I found a book that I wanted to do in direct mail and couldn’t get the rights to.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:45

So you just approach them and you. You kind of just tell them, as far as you’ll make a deal. Absolutely.

Brian Kurtz: 11:51

Yeah. No, they sell subsidiary rights all the time. In fact, they have all these publishers that have a department. I mean, you could buy the subsidiary rights to a chapter. You could buy all kinds of stuff. So, you know, the idea. And in a lot of cases, I bought direct marketing rights, not just direct mail rights, which gave me the opportunity, if I wanted to, to sell in direct response TV and on the internet later on. So at the beginning, when I did this, the internet wasn’t doing there wasn’t much of an internet, so I only needed direct mail at the time, and I. But I did. I did ask for direct mail rights. As time went on, I always asked for direct marketing rights. A lot of times they wouldn’t give me that because they might want to hold on to the online rights.

But again, a lot of times these books were already, as I said, sitting on the shelf, not doing much. So it was a it was kind of a non-producing asset for the publishers. And I was basically opening up a whole new market for them. So they would give me the option to do direct marketing rights. And I think in one case, we did test a book that I bought the rights to this way that we tested on TV. It didn’t work, but we because of the books we rolled out on TV. As a matter of fact, that’s not true. One of the books we rolled out to in an infomercial was a book that I originally got the rights to this way, and we just paid them the same rights for the TV sales as we did for the direct mail sales.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:11

I mean, originally, I mean, that’s a genius idea. I mean, people can go on and think about that online. I have to come up with all your own ideas. But other, you know, quality information is out there. But how did you know this is the first time you had done this? At that time, how did you even know what to offer the the publisher?

Brian Kurtz: 13:29

Oh, that’s a good question. We had done books in the 80s. Martin had made deals with certain authors who had written, like, you know, very esoteric textbooks and stuff. And Martin had told me that he had made a deal once with one of the authors, and he gave him 10% royalty. And Martin said, you know, I blew it. I found out afterwards that the basic direct mail royalty and direct marketing royalty is about 5%. So I knew the ballpark already. So that was a piece of information I had. It wasn’t the Light Bulb moment because I had to put all of this together. But I knew also that there were other publishers out there that had thought about the concept of buying subsidiary rights. I mean, that had been around for a while. And then when I found out, I did a little research, I found out that 5% was a going rate. So I knew where my starting point was.

Now, I did talk to someone else in the book business that said that they did some deals at two and a half to 4%. So depending on how desperate you think the publisher might be, you probably could go less than five. I will tell you this though, and here’s another one of my rules of thumb in business: I am never. You know, Martin taught me this. You know, not being a pig never gets you anywhere. And so I knew that if I could make the thing work at 5% and 5% was a fair royalty, I knew I was going to do the fair royalty. And Marty Edelston told me on his deathbed- I was I was trying to; he was kind of out of it, but he definitely could hear me. And I was telling him about a deal I was working on. And the one thing he said to me, this was two days before he died. And he said to me, Brian, always be fair. Yeah, I’m the fair. I’m known as the fairest guy in direct marketing.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:08

Yeah, I could tell that by your personality.

Brian Kurtz: 15:10

I sleep very well at night. I will tell you that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:13

The other question I had was, Brian, kind of in regard to that. Now, obviously, the books for sale are you selling it for the same or more when you go?

Brian Kurtz: 15:23

Oh, you can always get more. In most cases, the book was already sitting on a remainder shelf in Barnes and Noble or wherever, and it was in a soft cover version. The first thing I did was figure out how I’m going to how I’m going to bulk the book up. In one case, the one that I sold 800 000 copies, I actually did. Once I made the deal with the publisher, I went to the author, who was a doctor, and I started talking to him about, can we put a new chapter in here? Can we bulk it up a little bit so it doesn’t look like the book exactly as it was in Barnes and Noble? And I call it the apples-to-oranges comparison. Remember I said before that we also would put a couple of premiums. We do a couple of small books to go with the big book.

So the combination of taking the book and putting it into hardcover, if it was softcover, it may be adding a chapter or two, but certainly adding some premiums, some softcover books that go with the big book. Now I’ve got an offer for $39, and the book in Barnes and Noble was probably being discounted for 1795, and there was no way, and our books never went on Amazon unless you found them on remainder. And our books never were found in bookstores again, because the product that we created for direct mail and direct marketing became its own product. It became, again, I call it apples-to-oranges marketing. So the apple was the book sitting on the shelf collecting dust. And the orange was the direct mail product, which was a hardcover version with premiums. ET cetera. ET cetera.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:49

Yeah, no, that’s really powerful. So you repurposed it and then added to it, bulked it up. So added even more value to it.

Brian Kurtz: 16:55

Correct. And, and, but we had to get a higher price because the margins in direct mail were tight. So I couldn’t sell for 17.95 in, in direct mail. So it was actually out of necessity that I had to sell it at $39.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:08

Yeah. Now I know today even people are, you know, obviously doing books, and they’ll, you know, they’ll bulk up the value, create video modules or, you know, audio modules, and doing that way online.

Brian Kurtz: 17:21

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And as I said, I mean, it’s harder to get full three. I’ll call 360 direct marketing rights for this type of thing today. I think the concept is sound in terms of going out to find other products to sell to your database. That’s not your own. That’s sort of the big lesson here. And that was the Light Bulb, but the actual use of the content and the kind of deals you can make. I mean, the internet is, you know, I do think this internet thing will catch on. So I think that getting, you know, full 360 rights that includes online is going to be a lot more difficult today than it was in 19, you know, even in the 90s. So. Right. Or late, late 90s.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:02

Yeah. But there’s still a lot of opportunity out there for somebody who’s not selling their. I mean, you can go to Amazon and probably search and see, okay, who hasn’t been selling this, or it’s amazing content, and they just need someone to kind of get it out there.

Brian Kurtz: 18:16

Well, yeah, I mean, I think, I think inventor societies, these, you know, these inventors, you know, when I used to go to the era show, which is the infomercial trade show, Electronic Retailing Association, and there was always an aisle at that show in the exhibit Hall of Inventors and the inventors. It was almost like you walked down. I was the guy with, you know, in this case, I was the guy with the with the bankroll to look for product. And going down that aisle, you feel like you’re going to get attacked because they’re incredible inventors with incredible ideas, with no marketing muscle.

And B, when I say marketing muscle, they have no idea how to bring their product to market. And B, they don’t have the money to invest in either direct mail or direct response. In this case, it was direct response television. You know, they didn’t have $200,000 to do an infomercial. So yeah, there’s, there’s, there’s content. Content is obviously all around us. I mean, Gary Vaynerchuk throws out numbers about the amount of content that gets produced per day is, you know, what was produced like in, in, you know, centuries worth in the past. And he’s got a great number for it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:24

But yeah.

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