How a copywriting book changed the way I do messaging.

A few lessons from the greatest marketing book ever written.

Welcome to Voicemail — a newsletter about copywriting for B2B product marketers who want to bring their messaging to life.

In 2025 I’m reading some of the greatest advertising books ever written, analyzing the shit out of them, and reporting all the insights back to you. If that sounds like your jam, keep reading (it’s free!) or sign up to get these letters delivered right to your inbox.

• Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz, originally published in 1966

• Long considered THE most influential copywriting book ever published, Breakthrough Advertising is a collection of lessons from one of the greatest copywriters of the 20th century. It’s been called, “the most important book ever written for anyone who markets any product or service in any medium,” by Brian Kurtz (a living copywriting legend).

• Reading dates: January-February 2025.

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How I've been using Breakthrough Advertising to write better messaging.

Hey team,

Kind of crazy, but we’re almost at the end of the time I have slotted for Breakthrough Advertising.

There’s a load more to say about this book. I’ll probably revisit it at least once a year. But, as they say, the show must go on. We’re getting ready to move onto the next book.

That said, Breakthrough Advertising has fundamentally changed how I write messaging and copy. It’s easily one of the most impactful books I’ve read in my career.

It seems only fair to wrap up this book with some of my biggest takeaways — and examples of how I’m using them on every campaign that crosses my desk.

Lesson #1: Messaging is about what your market wants, not about your product.

Schwartz’ key tenet to marketing is that our job isn’t to create desire — it’s to find the desire that already exists in a market and funnel it towards your product.

I know this seems straightforward… but it’s really hard to do. Most companies get it wrong. I’ve gotten it wrong. I’ve seen other messaging consultants screw this up.

The reason isn’t because marketers are bad at our jobs. We’re not. The reason is because everybody thinks marketers are bad at their jobs — then nudges in and inserts opinions about what needs to be messaged and how to do it.

This ^ is how you get copy by committee. Headlines that sound like, “AI-enabled systems optimization solutions that scale sustainably in enterprise and mid-market and small businesses in England, France, the US, and Asia and Africa.” It’s how you end up with a tangle of product features and no structure for presenting them to the world. All while the CEO is asking you why you haven’t started running Youtube ads on his favorite channels.

In other words, we screw it up because we think from the inside out, rather than the outside in. We try produce messaging and put it out into the world, when we really need to be exploring the outside world and leading it back to our product.

This ^ isn’t an entirely new concept to me. I’ve critiqued the concept of funnels in the past because I think it encourages inside-out thinking instead of outside-in thinking.

But what WAS new to me is the idea that our job as marketers is to be trend spotters. We’re not supposed to produce messaging. We’re supposed to figure out what forces are shaping our market, then slot our product into that pre-existing narrative.

I’ve started doing this with the campaigns that land on my desk, and it’s made them way more persuasive. Instead of creating messaging docs that talk about how amazing our product is, I’ve created frameworks that detail exactly what our audience should think about the industry.

Lesson #2: The best messaging strategies are creative concepts, not a series of pillars.

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you’ll know that I have beef with traditional messaging strategies in B2B.

As the hired gun that usually comes in to execute on these strategies, I find them mostly lackluster and unhelpful. If you need a 35-page guide to explain your product’s core idea to me, you don’t have a strategy — you have a corral for your ideas.

Over the years I’ve figured out my own solutions… but Breakthrough Advertising taught me about Concepts for advertisements. It’s a framework I’ve since adopted into every campaign I work on, and let me tell you, it’s been a game changer.

Basically, a Concept is the creative foundation for an ad. It’s the one thing you want to communicate in your creative. You find it by doing three things:

1. Figuring out the market’s mass desire.

2. Determine all the different potential value propositions your product features create.

3. Choosing the one value prop that helps your market get whatever it is they desire — and turning it into an ad.

I know. It’s not exactly rocket science. But again, I think as marketers we systematically fail at doing this. We stay in the island of strategy and leave the execution to someone else — which is why your messaging vision never hits quite right.

In the last two months, I’ve written probably 15 campaigns for my clients. Instead of doing the traditional Positioning/Messaging/Copy workflow that B2B gurus advise us to do, I’ve used the Messaging Concept framework.

We’re executing on the concepts faster. Our campaigns are more interesting. And more importantly, the copywriters can work their magic because I’ve given them a sandbox to play in.

Lesson #3: Great messaging is about telling a story to the market. That’s it.

Look at me, coming here and telling you that marketing and messaging is about storytelling! I’m a genius! Wow! What an insight!

Look, I hate this as much as you do. I actually feel like I’m about to break out in hives every time I see the word “storytelling” on LinkedIn.

Buuuuut… I’m begrudgingly coming to accept that it’s jargon for a reason. And, I’m starting to lean into it for myself and my own business.

Schwartz’ book really taught me that most marketing today is vastly overcomplicated and over-engineered. We break up the process into brand, storytelling, positioning, messaging, design, copy silos. The result is often we end up with dull branding that nobody is particularly excited about, both internally and externally.

I think the problem is that as marketers we get bored, so we end up reinventing the wheel every few years. But the honest truth is just that our job is just about telling a convincing story at scale.

Most companies aren’t that great at the storytelling process. It takes someone with a lot of willpower to fight internal forces to make something spectacular.

But if you can master it? If you can tell a really good story?

You’ll be unstoppable.

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Next up: The Adweek Copywriting Handbook.

Next week we’re going to crack the spine on a new book, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joe Sugarman.

Sugarman was an interesting character. He sold the first mail-order pocket calculators in the US. He pioneered the idea of accepting credit card payments via 1-800 numbers. He brought the idea of bluelight blocking glasses to market in 1986. The guy was massively influential — and he only died three years ago. You can learn more about him here.

The Adweek Copywriting Handbook is wildly accessible copywriting education. I’ve read about half of it so far, and I’m excited to talk about it more.

If you feel like following along, feel free to buy the book (use this link to support a local bookshop if you’re in the US or UK — I’m not an affiliate).

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Appreciate you. Have a great weekend.