Copy Chief Kevin Rogers is in the club for a special inbetween-isode. This is a rare, second episode this week and it’s a good one. Kevin shares his journey from high school drop out with ambitions of stocking shelves at the grocery store to highly paid copywriter, then chief of his own community for copywriters and other business owners. Here’s a sample of what we covered:
• How Kevin landed his first job (and had to create writing samples first)
• His “go with your gut” principle for writing good copy
• How relationships propelled his career forward and the “mentee mindset”
• His four-part joke formula for creating stellar sales hooks
• The three rules Kevin follows when he gives a speech (and the results)
• What it takes to be an expert in something (and why most writers should have a “bat signal” talent)
• John Carlton’s Pro Code, and
• What really makes Kevin angry
Plus we got the details on Kevin’s upcoming event in St. Petersburg called Copy Chief Live. It sounds like an amazing event that anyone who writes copy that gets conversions might want to check out. One more thing: it looks like Kevin may have set a new record for links on his show notes page. And it’s easily the funniest list we’ve ever published (at least until we get to Carrot Top. That guy’s not funny). Check them all out. And don’t forget to click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.
Most of the people and stuff we mentioned on the show:
Sponsor: AirStory
George Carlin
Rodney Dangerfield
Jerry Seinfeld
Sam Kinison
Bill Hicks
Jim Breuer
Billy Gardell
Star Search
Ed McMahon
Carrot Top
John Carlton
Gary Halbert
Gary Bencivenga
CA Magazine
Nothing in Common
Vin Montelo
Copy Chief
Clayton Makepeace
Daniel Levis
Carline Anglade Cole
Rachel Rofé
Ryan Lee
Dean Jackson
Nicole Piper
Todd Brown
Ryan Levesque
James Schramko
Ben Johnson
Ross O’Lochlainn
Jody Raynsford
Wardee Harmon
Parris Lampropolous
Joe Schriefer
Marcella Allison
Henry Bingaman
Copy Chief Live
PI4MM.com
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
Intro: Content (for now)
Outro: Gravity
Full Transcript:
The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club.
Kira: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes, and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast.
Rob: You’re invited to join the club for this special in-between-i-sode as we chat with copywriter and copy chief, Kevin Rogers, about his journey from standup comedian to highly sought after copywriter. The joke formula that became his secret for writing great hooks, mentoring other copywriters, and a special event he is putting together this Fall.
Kira: Hey Kevin. Hey Rob. How’s it going?
Rob: Hey guys.
Kevin: Hey.
Rob: Kevin, it’s great to have you here.
Kevin: Man, it’s great to be here with you guys. Appreciate you having me. This will be a lot of fun.
Rob: Yeah, we’ve actually had you on our list for a while, Kevin. Wanted to talk to you. You’ve got a lot of stuff going on, but let’s jump in maybe and start with your story, where you came from and how you got into copywriting?
Kevin: It felt like a miracle when I found copywriting. It was like lightning striking twice in the best way in your life because I spent 10 years as a standup comedian and that was such a miracle thing to experience. A high school dropout, just had no direction. I was restless and I really hated, at one point, showing up to school every day. It just felt stupid. I don’t know what ... This isn’t for me. I wasn’t going to pursue college, and I just thought it was so much cooler to work at my job stocking shelves at grocery stores like, “If I could do this all day, I’d have it made.”
Rob: Aim high.
Kevin: Yeah, that’s right. Quickly came to the reality that it’d be good to have something going on in life. “I don’t know what I’ll do.” Was funny enough, I was really good, I understood comedy and I loved getting laughs. My mother inspired that when I was a kid. She was my biggest ... As mom’s are supposed to do, they love when you’re funny. I always had some kind of bit working, and she would, when friends would come over to the house, she would have me do my latest bit, be like an impression or I’d be wearing my little cowboy outfit and I’d do a Western accent.
They were all stoned because it was the 70s and so they were a great audience, and I was killing. It really embedded in me at a young age that, “Wow, this feels good. I like this whole laughing stuff.” It was perfect timing because in the 80s, all the HBO comedy specials started coming out. They always had Carlin and some people like that doing their yearly specials, but I don’t know if you remember Rob. Kira, you may be a little younger for this, but I’m 47. I don’t know your age, Rob, but in the 80s these great specials were coming out, these Dangerfield, Rodney Dangerfield specials, and it was the first time anybody had seen Jerry Seinfeld and Sam Kinison, and Bill Hicks, all these amazing comics.
We just soaked those things up and recorded them with our VCRs, and wore those tapes out. I could do everybody’s act from those specials, so we’d go to parties and everybody would have me request all these different bits. What was interesting was, obviously I loved getting the laughs but I found two things. One was I started to really dissect why people were laughing and more importantly why they weren’t laughing sometimes. I’d realized, “Oh, you know what? I tried to follow that Seinfeld thing with that Kinison thing and that’s not going to work.” I was always dissecting, reverse engineering the science behind getting laughs.
The other thing I learned was, it was much more exciting when something spontaneous would happen in the moment, rather than just sort of repeating other people’s material so that got me excited about potentially writing my own stuff and really just being in the moment with comedy. That’s how that started and basically on a dare, did an open mic and was hooked. That was it. It was three minutes that changed my life. It was supposed to be five, and I told the owner, “Five minutes? I need like 20.” My first time up there, they’re like, “You’re an idiot.”
I get up there and I’m like, “Goodnight.” It was like three minutes, but I came off stage a changed man and that was it. Fortunate to get the house emcee gig in that club. Didn’t realize at the time how valuable stage time was and so I was doing eight shows a night after four months of starting and did that for like a year, which was incredible. Made lifelong friendships there with guys like Jim Brewer who you might know from Saturday Night Live.
Rob: Yeah.
Kira: Oh wow.
Kevin: Yeah. That was his own club. Billy Gardell used to come there and he’s still one of my best friends. It was just an amazing run and I did about 10 years professionally, about 7 years straight on the road, and started wanting to do other stuff. Went in the gym, I had to make the really tough choice to stop because frankly I didn’t know anything about business or marketing and I was of the mindset that success just happened to people. I didn’t realize that you could engineer such a thing. I didn’t see it happening for me in stand up because I just never clicked with the important people.
I felt like they were part of this other culture that I wasn’t welcome in. Some of it was self-destructive, like I threw a star search addition in front of Ed McMahon because I hated what he said in the beginning, which is, “Tonight we might find the next Carrot Top.” I was like, “Yeah. Like hell we will. Not during my five minutes we won’t.” Broke every rule and went up and swore, and did my set but I wanted to kill the room. All these comics were going up and not being themselves and it was really annoying me. I was like, “Screw that. I do this for the moment and I want to kill the room. These people came here and look at them. They’re showered. I want to kill this room,” and so that was always my role, just kill the room, so that was it.
I got out when I wasn’t getting any signals that somebody was going to come with their magic wand and give me this amazing career. Glad I did because it forced me to go legit, doing air quotes, and did a lot of oddball jobs. I was a bellman, I was a bartender and that led me to copywriting in a strange way. Ultimately that’s when I discovered it, but I’m sure you guys and everybody listening, you just feel like, “What is this?” I used to tingle. I still get chills thinking about when I first discovered copywriting and started to understand it, and started reading Carlton and Halbert and Bencivenga and just going, “This is magic. I can’t believe this has existed all along and I never knew about it,” and just became obsessed.
Rob: I totally relate to that. I remember seeing ads in a CA magazine, targeted advertising agencies, but they were by Wall Street Journal and they profiled all of these great writers and designers. I remember reading these ads and thinking, “Wait a minute. You can do this?” Like the light bulb moment. I’m like, “This is... Yeah, I want to do this. This is for me.”
Kevin: I remember the first time I ever thought it would be an amazing thing to do creative work like that. I was already doing standup but standup is a very individual art. Standups are terrible improvers, in actual improve, like part of a team because we’re just looking ... We all want the punch lines and so there’s no...
Rob: Not a team player.
Kevin: Yeah. No reciprocity, no yes/and. It’s just, “Look at me!” It’s just like everybody is trying to get there faster,
