Someone once told me that staying away from media either keeps you badly informed or better informed.

Sometimes it’s hard to know which.

I had been off Instagram for a good – and I mean good – 6 months and have found myself creeping back onto it again more and more, supported by a list of pathetic self-serving justifications.

In the first 6 months of 2026 my impulse buying of anything had been reduced to zero.

Less white noise.

No algorithm to navigate.

And yet it was through a doomscrolling session this morning on Instagram that I came across Gary Halbert.

Gary was the founding father of the direct response letter and widely regarded as one of the greatest sales letter writers of the 20^th Century.

His good work would eventually take him to prison – mail fraud – where he would pen The Boron Letters to his son, Bond.

The letters were a mix of philosophy, fatherly advice and “how to sell’ strategies that Halbert would eventually become famous for.

Clearly famous enough before I came across him on Instagram for the first time.

Halbert was essentially one man and a typewriter whose influence on sales and marketing may well be immeasurable.

He built his reputation on mail order campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s – a world so far removed from the ephemeral nature of social media today.

If you didn’t live in a world without mobile phones and only 4 tv stations you will never be able to fully appreciate that world.

He argued that the biggest single factor in sales success is a hungry, motivated audience – not a better product, more compelling advert or location.

If you are selling beef burgers, find a starving crowd.

Find people who already want what you’re selling.

He worked that out with a pen and a rented mailing list — who’d bought recently, who bought often, who’d spent real money doing it.

Sound familiar?

That’s every ad platform you’ve ever used.

Lookalike audiences.

Retargeting.

Intent data.

Today tech geeks are becoming bazillionaires automating what Halbert did by hand with a highlighter and a list broker.

The tools might have changed but Halbert’s principles haven’t.

What’s actually different

Everything and nothing – all at the same time.

Speed. Halbert wrote long because his reader had nothing else competing for attention inside that envelope. Your reader has forty tabs open and a notification going off mid-sentence. You’ve got seconds to earn the next line, never mind the sale.

Measurement. He tested by posting different letters to different lists and waiting three weeks for the replies to trickle back. You can test ten headlines before you have your first cup of coffee.

AI. The elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. About nine in ten marketers are now using AI somewhere in their content process, and AI-assisted email campaigns are showing serious response-rate gains.

Writing content has never been easier nor faster.

What remains is strategic – knowing which crowd is actually starving, and which angle everyone’s already worn out.

What hasn’t moved an inch

Ask any decent copywriter what AI is bad at, and they’ll give you roughly the same answer Halbert gave in a prison letter forty years ago: it can’t pick the market for you.

It’ll rewrite your paragraphs and headlines all day long but it won’t tell you the market’s sick of hearing that pitch.

It won’t spot the gap nobody else is talking about.

That’s a judgement call, and judgement is still a human’s job.

For now anyway.

Halbert advise was to “Write like you talk.”

It’s still the difference between copy that reads like copy, and copy that reads like one person talking to another.

Nothing about a language model changes that — if anything it makes plain, human-centric writing stand out more, not less.

Give a reason for the offer.

Back the claim up instead of just making it.

One clear next step – call to action – instead of five competing ones.

None of that is new.

It’s just Halbert’s old rules, in Instagram colours.

The three-week wait

Halbert’s world was a letter posted on Monday and a reply, if he was lucky, by the third week.

Today the reply lands before you’ve finished writing the sentence.

Same conversation.

Same crowd.

Same offer.

Just a much shorter wait to find out if you got it right.

That’s great news for anyone in sales or marketing right now — not a reason to hand the whole job to a machine and hope for the best.

Lessons from the teacher
My 3 big take-aways from the legacy of Gary Halbert:

1. Find the crowd before you write a word. No amount of clever copy fixes the wrong audience.
2. Let AI do the donkey work, not the deciding. Research, drafts, variants, spellcheciking (see what I did there)  — deadly. Which market, which angle, which offer — that’s still on you.
3. Read it out loud. If it doesn’t sound like you talking, it won’t sound like anyone talking.

Thanks Instagram.

And thanks for reading.