While The-Book-of-the-Month-Club was widely acknowledged to be one of the most successful practitioners of direct response marketing, its The Quality Paperback Book Club division was not doing well. In fact, you might say it was going south on a flatbed truck. BOMC was considering closing it. As a last try before shutting QPB they said they would try anything, even something that broke the "rules" of book club advertising.

This campaign broke practically every rule of book club advertising. No postage stamp-sized photos of books. No blaring "two books for only two bucks" headlines. No coupon in the bottom right corner. A surprising new logo and tagline. And caricatures of authors! It also broke through the clutter and made a real connection with readers. With the very first ad, lead costs plummeted by more than 400%, and the campaign ran successfully, virtually unchanged from the initial strategy and the original visual architecture of this first ad, for an unheard of thirteen years.