Copywriting Friday: For sports fans who know everything

Published: September 2025

In a sense, it’s easier to provide products and services to beginners—they don’t know anything and—if they’re being honest—they’ll admit it.

The ad we’re looking at today is a great example of going after the experienced segment of a market. It was written by Mel Martin. He was one of the secret weapons of Boardroom, Inc., which in its day was a direct-response powerhouse, valued at over $100 million.

Here is the ad:

Mel was known as the “Master of fascinations”, which are bullet points on steroids. Typical bullet points usually involve either specifications or benefits. In contrast, fascinations focus on curiosity. Here are some of Mel’s most-famous ones:

• What never to eat on an airplane.
• Bills it’s okay to pay late.
• All aspirins are the same, right? Wrong!
• For golfers who are almost (but not quite) satisfied with their game—and can’t figure out what they’re doing wrong.

That last fascination is vintage Mel, laser-focused on a narrow slice of the market, just like the ad we’re about to review.

Let’s look at three principles Mel uses to get his audience lathered up and in a buying mood.

Principle 1: Go narrow to go deep

Imagine how much weaker the subhead at the top would be if it said: “Attention Sports Fans of All Ages:” Of course the New York Times wants to sell as many books as possible, but they hired Mel, who knew that shark bait is different from minnow bait, and you can’t effectively appeal to both at the same time.

Notice how Mel hits the ground running for the sharks. No ramp-up, no “Hi Sports Fans”, but instead:

It’s one of the few times he uses all caps, and he uses them sparingly. (An entire paragraph in all caps comes across as unreadable shouting.) There’s no doubt who is the target of this ad.

Mel has saved everyone time: You’re only going to read on if you self-identify as a hardcore sports fan, or you want to be one. Everyone else can turn the page. There’s nothing stopping the New York Times from running a different ad later, focused on selling the same book to other target markets like beginners, spouses of sports nuts, and so on.

In your marketing materials, do you try to appeal to everyone? When your target market reads your first few sentences, will they think you’re addressing a crowd? Or will they think: Wow! That’s me!

Besides using targeted words, you can increase your appeal to a target market by using jargon and images. Look at how Patagonia does it:

The original caption for the image on the Patagonia blog reads:

Yosemite climbing pioneer Yvon Chouinard organizing pitons at the Cyclops Eye bivy on the first ascent of the North America Wall on El Capitan. End of pitch 19, fall 1964. Photo: Tom Frost.

What’s a “bivy”? What’s “El Capitan” and “pitch 19”? Climbers know.

(To see how Patagonia uses pattern interrupts in their marketing, read Copywriting Friday: Beware of any endeavor that requires new clothes.)

Principle 2: Appeal to ego—carefully

We’ve already seen how Mel calls out the super sports fans who “know everything”. If they know everything, how can we sell them a book that teaches them something?

This is where Mel needs to deliver a plausible reason why they need the book:

• “So many new and different sports are shown every week on TV that not even the most ardent fan can expect to be an expert on them all.”
• “There’s probably nobody in the room who knows any more than you do.”
• It’s OK to be confused because there are “…rules that cause confusion even among big-league players and television announcers.”

That last one delivers a clever subtext: If you get this book, you’ll know more than some players and TV announcers do.

Notice how Mel almost never directly asks if you know something. Instead he phrases the fascinations in a way that does not put you on the spot, but still arouses your curiosity:

This is merely the opening to the ad; it’s littered with many more snippets that are easy to read and hard to guess.

Soon readers will realize there’s another hidden benefit of getting this book—how they’ll amaze their friends with their sports knowledge. It’s easy to put yourself in the position of repeating what you just read in the ad:

“Did you know that all the thoroughbreds in the world are descended from three horses who lived 200 years ago?”

Let’s say you aren’t pitching a sports book, but instead sell cloud services. You could apply this same principle of describing details that few people know:

“Most people think nothing of saving a file to the cloud—it just syncs and that’s that. We cater to IT leaders who know the real complexity lies in version control, cross-region redundancy, compliance with dozens of regulations, and zero-downtime access worldwide. Our cloud service manages every detail, while still feeling as simple as dragging a file into a folder.”

Principle 3: Choreograph your readers’ attention to direct and keep interest

Mel was constrained by a single page in black and white. Even so, he used several methods to maintain readers’ attention:

• The huge headline separates interested readers from everyone else.
• Immediately after the headline is that set of bulleted fascinations we mentioned earlier.
• He sets off each separate sport with all caps, like BASEBALL, FOOTBALL, etc.
• We occasionally see bold and italic type, but not so much as to make it hard to read.

In other words, though it’s a lot of text, the ad is easy to scan and there are no big, daunting blocks of words.

We’ve described these techniques (and others) before in Copywriting Friday: Breaking rules for fun and profit.

And because we believe in continuous improvement…

As effective as this ad is, we can see some things we would have tested to make it potentially stronger, not based on research but on copy principles. (Research-based testing would yield even more ideas.)

1. The guarantee in the coupon should reinforce the sale and not take away from it. It currently reads: “If I find the book unsuitable for any reason, I may return this order…” We would test saying: “I must find this book to be worth many times the price, or I may return this order….”
2. We only find out that there’s a free-shipping offer in the fine print of the coupon. It’s worth testing to see if making that language more prominent would boost sales.
3. We’re given no idea how long it will take to get the book. Mel’s done such a good job of revving people up that it’s a good idea to at least set proper expectations. It may also make sense to test a rush-shipping option that costs a few dollars more.

How do you leave your readers feeling?

After you read Mel Martin’s ad and sit back, you’re left with one final impression—that the ad has only scratched the surface of what’s contained in the book.

Now think about the case you make for your product or service: Do you have multiple testimonials or other proof elements, and make it clear that there are lots more where those came from? Do you answer the “frequently asked questions” and make it easy for people to get more answers even if they have obscure questions?

Mel Martin’s ad is a timeless lesson that over-delivering on proof can be an effective way to crack some of the toughest nuts.

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

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