Steal These Ideas!: Marketing Secrets That Will Make You a Star, 2nd Edition

The Early Days of Playboy Magazine

In the early 1950s, when I was five or six, my dad was what we call today a “Mad Man” in reference to the popular TV series Mad Men. He was pretty vague about what he did at work all day and, as it turned out, with good reason. He was writing some of the very first promotional direct-mail letters for Hugh Hefner's then new and struggling publication, Playboy magazine.

These letters would be sent to compiled lists of men who subscribed to other men's magazines—which, of course, made sense. What was different was how my dad wrote these letters. He came up with the idea of writing them from the perspective of a Playboy Bunny. Each mailing included a picture of her in full Bunny regalia. The picture appeared on ...