An obscure email marketing misconception still going strong in 2026…

Moving forward with maxim #3 of the 4-day breakdown of 4 particular maxims from David Ogilvy’s phenomenal 1972 ad titled:

“How to create advertising that sells”

(Check out the email from two days ago titled: “How the world’s ugliest car can help you siphon more email profits…” if you need further context.)

Two days ago, I broke down his maxim about having to make your marketing pretty…

…otherwise the consumer would think you’re shoddy and not buy.

I strongly contested that – I thought it was outdated and in need of an update to the 2026 environment.

Yesterday I broke down his maxim about keeping your marketing tight & focused on just one thing.

I actually vehemently agreed with it.

So let’s discover what will it be today shall we?

Here’s the maxim in question:

(TWO actually – they’re both connected to the same core theme.)

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    How many words in a headline? In a headline test conducted with the cooperation of a big department store, it was found that headlines of ten words or longer sold more goods than short headlines.

    On the average, long headlines sell more merchandise than short ones––headlines like our “At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric cock.”

+

    Yes, people read long copy. Readership falls off rapidly up to fifty words, but drops very little between fifty and five hundred words. (This page contains 1909 words, and you are reading it.)

    Ogilvy & Mather has used long copy––with notable success––for Mercedes-Benz, Cessna Citation, Merrill Lynch and Shell gasoline.

   “The more you tell, the more you sell.”

===

I think every SINGLE marketer – who thinks he’s worth his salt – should read, heck…

TATTOO these paragraphs into their brain.

I’ve written many times before about this misconception that people have goldfish-level attention spans…

…and that it’s worse than ever before…

…and that it will only keep getting worse due to us brain-rotting ourselves with TikTok, YT shorts, Instagram reels and whatever new algorithm favouring humanity’s worst impulses a Big Tech firm comes out with in the future.

That’s all bollocks.

If it wasn’t?

• Why do people STILL binge-watch entire seasons of a TV show in one weekend?
• Why did Oppenheimer – a 3-hour movie with no action, no explosions, no witty one-liners, just mostly dialogue – do a billion at the box office & sweep at the Oscars?
• Why do people STILL read 500+ page books?

(50 Shades of Grey is 514 pages and sold 70 million copies – that’s the first book ALONE, not counting the other books in the trilogy.)

I could go on, but I believe you get the point.

Someone started spreading this myth around that our attention spans are not longer than 7-8 seconds, and it caught on like wildfire.

The problem with believing that is the truth is…

(Well, besides the fact that it isn’t…)

You start tailoring your marketing for that.

You limit your ads/content/emails to just:

“Hey, we’re here, we do this, you can buy this from us now.”

The problem with that is that you leave no room to establish your credibility & trust in you…

And more importantly…

NO room for any relationship-building!

You don’t keep coming back to buy from a business you have no relationship/bond with – they don’t have your retention.

(Unless you’re into selling essentials like Walmart, Costco, Tesco etc. – then I guess you can get away with it but even THEY work turbo hard at trying to build a relationship with their customers. Costco’s entire business model is actually getting you into their membership. But more on that in perhaps another email…)

The relationship is why people will drive across town for their usual coffee – even if the same chain is closer.

Or why people won’t try and jump through six hoops to eat at a chain restaurant on a Friday night…

But they WILL for that local place – where the owner knows their name, their favourite dish, and makes them feel like family.

This is not an accident. And it isn’t better food either…

It’s what I call (in my Book):

“Relationship-Glue”.

And in 2026?

There’s no better way to build and/or strengthen that relationship-glue than through some email marketing.

It’s a channel YOU own in which YOU control the environment, message, schedule, audience, rules, tone and style…

And no Zuckerberg can come along and ban you, or take it away from you, or change the algorithm — like an Andromeda — or the rules on what you can/can’t say…

Which is a shame.

Because after nearly a decade of being in this space, nearly every supplement brand I see either doesn’t use email marketing…

(Or they use it so infrequently – i.e. emailing 3-4x/month – that they might as well not be using it…)

Or they tailor their marketing emails to appeal to the “goldfish-level human attention span”.

It’s such a low-hanging fruit.

But I digress:

Oh look, this email is already at…

820+words!?!

Wait…

Was I being sneaky and deliberately made this email a bit longer than usual* just to demonstrate – once again – how people DO NOT actually have non-existent attention spans because you’re still reading it up to this point?

(*My emails are usually around 300-500 words.)

Ooops… my bad…

But anyway,