The Perfect Launch System: How to Get Free Advertising That Actually Pays for Itself
- Harvest Growth
- 5 hours ago
- 9 min read
What if you could run advertising campaigns that pay for themselves and generate profit from day one? In this special episode, host Jon LaClare starts an exciting new series where he reads directly from his groundbreaking book, “The Perfect Launch System”, sharing the exact strategies used to launch over 300 products and generate more than $2 billion in sales. Today's chapter reveals the "free advertising" secret that most entrepreneurs never discover: how to build marketing campaigns that make money every time they run.
This episode features the incredible David vs. Goliath story of OxiClean versus corporate giant Clorox. When Clorox launched OxyMagic in 2003 to crush the upstart OxiClean, they had nearly 100 years of experience and billions in resources. OxiClean not only survived but thrived using direct response marketing principles that turned every advertising dollar into immediate profit. While Clorox burned through millions on traditional brand advertising with no way to track results, OxiClean's approach with Billy Mays generated measurable returns that funded continuous growth.
Whether you're launching on Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, or even traditional TV, this episode shows you how to move beyond the "spend, wait, and hope" approach that drains most marketing budgets. You'll discover the exact metrics successful companies use, why tracking individual ad performance changes everything, and how this methodology has evolved from infomercials to today's digital platforms.
In today’s episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we’ll cover:
The revolutionary difference between traditional brand advertising and direct response marketing
Why most new product launches fail with their massive marketing budgets
How to project and determine profitability
Why research and testing are integral to advertising success
You can listen to the full interview on your desktop or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Or, click to watch the full video interview here!
This is just the beginning of “The Perfect Launch System” series. We're sharing select chapters here on the podcast, but for the complete roadmap to launching and scaling products successfully, grab the full book in hardcover or Kindle on Amazon or get your free digital copy at www.perfectlaunch.com.
To be a guest on our next podcast, contact us today!
Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands that now total over $2 billion in revenue? Set up a free consultation with us today!
Prefer reading instead of listening? Read the full transcript here!
Jon LaClare [00:00:00]:
Welcome back to the Harvest Growth Podcast. Today's episode is something a little different. It's part of a special series where I'm sharing the audiobook version of my new book, the Perfect Launch System One chapter at a time. Each chapter is packed with proven strategies from launching over 300 products and generating more than $2 billion in sales. In today's episode, Chapter 1, you'll learn how to market your product with free advertising. That means building campaigns that actually pay for themselves, whether on TV, Facebook, Instagram or Amazon. I'll explain how brands like OxiClean use this strategy to scale fast and how you can too. Let's dive into Chapter one of the Perfect Launch System.
Announcer [00:00:41]:
Are you looking for new ways to make your sales grow? You've tried other podcasts, but they don't seem to know harvest the growth potential of your product or service as we share stories and strategies that'll make your competitors nervous. Now here's the host of the Harvest Growth Podcast, Jon LaClare
Jon LaClare [00:01:03]:
Free Money! If you turned your TV on after 10pm back in the 80s, you undoubtedly heard Matthew Lesko screaming that you could get free money from the government. He was hard to miss, as he always wore brightly colored suits with question marks all over them, and he screamed out possibly the best call to action ever written. Free money. Matthew sold books that taught you how to get money from the government in the form of grants. Some claimed that he was misleading in his advertising.
In 2004, the New York State Consumer Protection Board put together a report that claimed many of the grants mentioned in his books were actually public assistance grants that most people would not qualify for. The report also asserted that Lesko misrepresented some of his examples of people who had supposedly taken advantage of the government programs. Apparently, even money from the government isn't as free as it may seem.
Being fully aware of the many wild claims by people like Matthew Lesco and thousands of purveyors of the get rich quick schemes, it's with caution that I make the claim that you can get free advertising. If you had told me in 2002 when I was managing the Planters brand, that there was a way you could get millions of dollars in national television advertising for free, I literally would have thought you were crazy.
But it is true. You can advertise online, on TV and in other marketing channels for free. Free. Let me explain further. With traditional advertising, or what is sometimes referred to as brand advertising or brand marketing, you pay TV stations and online marketing channels like Facebook and Instagram to air your content and eventually, often after spending millions of dollars to large New York ad agencies to help you buy this media time, you hope to generate revenues in retail stores or possibly from your website.
I like to refer to this methodology as spend, wait and hope, because you often never really know what's working and what isn't working. With traditional advertising, it's estimated that consumers need to see your ad 7 to 10 times before they become purchasers. And that's if your advertising is actually working. You can see how this type of advertising expense can add up. In fact, the average marketing expense for a new product launch at large CPG or consumer packaged goods companies starts at over $2 million. That's just to get the product off the ground. There is a better way.
Most inventors and entrepreneurs don't have millions of dollars at their fingertips to help them propel their product launch forward. And when we work with companies that do have large coffers of cash available, we always teach them that they shouldn't spend that much on a campaign, at least not until the product and the campaign are proven. Marketing should pay for itself. That's how you get free advertising.
Direct response marketing is marketing that elicits a response from consumers where they come back to the product marketer to purchase their product directly from their website or still at a surprising rate, from a call center. Because these consumers are purchasing directly from the marketer, the marketer can track the performance of their ads to know exactly what is working and what isn't.
With a national TV infomercial campaign, different phone numbers are used on each station so that when consumers call to a specific phone number, we are able to track exactly which station drove the purchase. You can quickly determine which stations are working and which stations are not working. By working, I mean the advertising is paying for itself. For example, if you pay $500 for a single airing on a national Cable Network and $1,000 in revenue is generated from that airing, then you are returning $2 in revenue for every $1 you spend on media. We call that a 2.0 media efficiency ratio, or MER. $2 in revenue divided by $1 in media equals a 2.0 MER. In the digital marketing world, that same calculation is referred to as return on ad spend or ROAS.
Jon LaClare [00:05:01]:
We'll go into more detail on the profitability of an individual campaign in a later chapter and. But suffice it to say that typically when you have an MER above 2.0, you are generally making money every time you market your product, which means you are getting free advertising. We benefited Greatly from this equation. During my time marketing Oxiclean. Oxiclean was attacked by Clorox when they launched as a competitive product oxymagic back in 2003.
Clorox's bleach business was suffering due to the growth of Oxiclean. The Clorox chlorine bleach business was down 8.7% from the previous year as OxiClean surged to hit $50 million in sales. Clorox in turn launched the powder form of Oxymagic to directly compete with Oxiclean. In the first two years, Clorox made a huge dent in Oxiclean sales, to the point that the company wasn't sure if it would survive. However, Clorox was focused on brand advertising, meaning that they were spending millions of dollars and hoping to get a return at a future time.
Sales grew, but as soon as they started to decrease their large launch marketing budget, Clorox sales took a huge hit. It proved not to be financially sustainable and soon thereafter, Clorox shuttered the project and stopped selling Clorox Oxymagic in its powdered form. Oxiclean was able to survive this storm because we were able to continue to spend millions of dollars in advertising since every time we advertised we made money.
Oxiclean continued to focus our efforts on two minute direct response commercials featuring the late great Billy Mays. Billy was definitely a big reason for the success. With his loud but lovable personality, he captured the attention of the airwaves. But if you had inserted Billy into a 15 to 30 second brand ad, you never would have known if he was working or not. In fact, time after time, when we researched in focus groups whether or not we should keep Billy or try new talent, we several people told us that they didn't like the way he yelled.
But we tested other talent and no one ever came close to selling as much as Billy did. We aired spots with Billy and profits came in immediately. Oxiclean was not founded by a large venture capital group. There were no large outside investors. And yet Oxiclean was able to beat out Clorox, that had been around for almost 100 years at the time and literally had billions of dollars at their disposal. Because Oxiclean had used the power of direct response marketing to propel their business forward, driving revenues and brand awareness from advertising that paid for itself or free advertising.
Today, there are more ways than just infomercials to get free advertising, which is welcome news. Because as good as direct response television marketing can be for launching a product, there are a limited number of products that can make it work. For example, a product needs to be unique, have a wide potential audience and be visually demonstrable in order to work on tv. Online advertising through Facebook, Instagram, Amazon and other platforms is often purchased in a direct to consumer fashion as well, and these online channels can use the same system in order to utilize the free advertising approach.
At Harvest Growth, even though we started as an agency specializing in direct response television, now over 80% of our business is online through Facebook, Instagram and Amazon, and even our TV campaigns typically start online for campaign testing before going live on TV. The same principles apply online that I explained for TV for every $1 you spend on media Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Amazon sponsored ads, Google Ads, et cetera, you need to generate a certain MER or ROAS, generally over 2.0 in order to generate a profit.
For the rest of this book, I'm going to focus primarily on Facebook ads and Instagram ads as they work better than other platforms for launching products for various reasons, but the same principles work for any advertising platform. Currently we like Facebook and Instagram for online product launches because they provide better tracking which leads to better results.
Facebook tracking pixels can be added to your e commerce website to help you track exactly what ad drove each sale and also to help you understand the demographics of your purchasers. Amazon is an amazing platform for selling products and we have many clients that are generating serious levels of revenue on Amazon. But it's a difficult platform to launch a brand new unique product that no one is searching for yet. You generally need to drive traffic from somewhere outside of Amazon when you have an unknown product and you lose tracking once consumers go to Amazon, so it's difficult to see exactly which ad is working. The specific platform is certain to change, so be sure to focus on the principles of direct response marketing rather than the specific channels.
Jon LaClare [00:09:46]:
Thanks for listening to this special chapter of the Perfect Launch System shared here on the Harvest Growth podcast. We're only releasing a selection of chapters, less than half of the full book as part of this series. If you'd like to dive deeper and get the complete system for launching and scaling your products successfully, you can find the full book on Amazon in both hard copy and Kindle formats or get a free digital version, just visit perfectlaunch.com or whether you're just starting out or looking to take your business to the next level, the Perfect Launch System gives you the proven roadmap to get there.
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