Last week I posted a newsletter on this website which I titled simply "Water". That newsletter consisted almost entirely of an ad I wrote several years ago.

The newsletter described how a genius named Carl Palmer had made himself wealthy several times and how he was prone to chronic boredom unless he was working on an exciting project. The ad also told about his creation of a marvelous new product which could save millions of lives and was needed by virtually every human being on this planet.

In that newsletter, I told my readers the ad had ran twice as a full-page in Investors' Business Daily.

Then I asked my readers to email me their comments about the ad and how well they thought the ad did.

I have never before had such a high percentage of my readers make such  idiotic guesses about how well they thought an ad performed. The people who made truly insane guesses were those who worked in financial services... and sadly... those people who identified themselves as copywriters and/or direct response marketers.

The more analytical the response, the further it was from the truth of how the ad performed and why.

However, all is not lost. A handful of my most astute readers (just a tiny handful) got it exactly right.

Listen up: The ad is very confusing and deceiving to people with a first-rate marketing mind. You pretty much have to have a world-class marketing mind to understand the genius of that ad.

First, I will tell you how well the ad worked. It attracted an enormous number of qualified investors who, by my estimate, were willing to pony up in the neighborhood of $400,000,000 to participate in this project.

That ad is so Machiavellian, I believe not even 1 out of 1,000 readers will be able to understand its almost unbelievable power. This would truly be a candidate for the most powerful space ad ever written.

And sadly, I suspect none of you... even after you read that ad ten times... will ever have a clue of WHY it's so powerful.

Not only that, there is a "back story" concerning the ad. It involves very curious twists and turns... and... some of the most bizarre, slickest,  intelligent and corrupt people in the annals of American business.

I bet you would like me to lead you by the hand exactly through every step of the ad and explain what I was doing as I wrote every sentence. I bet you would also love to read the "rest of the story" about that ad.

I've been thinking about revealing all this for almost eight years. I still am not 100% certain I want to tell you all the secrets about the ad and the back story that goes with it.

But I've made myself a deal.

Now all of you know the answer as to how well the ad performed. None of you now have any excuse for emailing me and pontificating idiotic reasons why the ad did not work.

Here's what I want you to do: I want you to email me immediately with your best guess as to WHY the ad did work... and... performed so outstandingly it was almost unbelievable.

If enough of my readers (and by "enough" I mean almost ALL of them) email me their guesses about why this ad worked so well... I will write another newsletter this week and give you ALL of the answers in minute detail. But let me tell you something you better believe. This is me, Gary Halbert writing, and I'm not fooling around. If I don't get an ENORMOUS amount of emails from my readers guessing why the ad worked so well... and... if I don't get those email responses almost immediately, I'm not going to tell you the answers! I will take the secrets to my grave and all of you can go piss up a rope making absurd guesses about the ad for the rest of your pathetic lives.

Look, I don't mind you are all shitweasels. In fact, as the Alpha Shitweasel, I'm rather proud of that. However, I have no patience whatsoever with LAZY-MINDED shitweasels. So, if you are too mentally lethargic to make an immediate guess as to why the ad worked... don't send me an email. If there are enough of you who don't email me... none of you will ever know.

You know why from time to time I write a "kick-the-anthill" newsletter like this?

I do it for the same reason a dog licks his balls. It's because I can.

	Sincerely,
	Gary C. Halbert "Supreme Master of Politically Correct Communications"