The Biggest Dirtbags I’ve Ever Worked With: Beware Financial Newsletters

Throughout my PR career, I’ve worked with a lot of dirtbags. (Weirdly, most of my past clients keep saying the same thing about their past PR rep, but c’mon, they must be talking about someone else.) Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met and worked with amazing, brilliant people with impeccable moral fiber, too. In fact, I’ve worked more with the latter than the former.

But running into dirtbags is kinda what you expected in my industry — the same way criminal defense attorneys are probably gonna end up working with criminals. Those are the people who need our services. 

Sometimes — but not always — the folks who request crisis communications have helped do something unethical, illegal, or problematic, so our audience is at least partially self-selecting. It is what it is.

I’ve repped booze brands and gambling brands — hey, I’m the creator and executive producer of (the God-awful) “National Lampoon’s Strip Poker” titles! I’ve even had dirtbags like the late Al Goldstein as a client! (Please don’t Google him if you’re on a work computer.) I say this not to brag — ‘cause let’s face it, none of it’s worth bragging about — but to establish my vantage point and category credibility: I’m uniquely qualified to identify dirtbags.

And by a VERY wide margin, the biggest dirtbags I’ve EVER worked with were in the financial newsletter industry.

Not what you expected, eh?

Given the demographics of our site, I suspect that many of you subscribe to financial newsletters to help you manage your portfolios. My dad paid a few hundred a month to a financial newsletter and followed its advice. He found a guy he liked and ran with it.

But working with this particular company was eye-opening — and not in a good way.

I won’t mention it by name. All I’ll say is that it's a big company with many different “financial experts” within their ecosystem. 

The guy I repped was one of ‘em.

Behind the scenes, the company is completely candid about its purpose: They are NOT in the financial industry! Instead, they’re in the publishing industry. And given the price of their newsletters, they probably make more money per word than anyone else, even more than the highest-paid guy at the New York Times. 

It’s a fascinating business model.

Of course, if you’re really in the publishing industry, it’s way more important to sell a gazillion newsletters than to make accurate financial predictions. And if you think about it logically, if they were actually the financial wizards they claim to be, they wouldn’t be investing in newsletters; they’d be investing in stocks!

They dumb down their advice. Their writers are instructed to write at a middle-school level because they’ve learned they can sell more newsletters this way. You’re specifically told to write short sentences and short paragraphs. (Their editorial handbook literally says “AVOID FANCY WORDS” — all caps.) 

Their newsletters usually follow a very specific pattern: A compelling story, followed by some kind of actionable recommendation, and it’s all explained in an easy-to-read way.

To be fair to this company, its editorial handbook does tell its writers not to trick readers. Like they proudly say later in their book, they don’t have to trick readers to sell newsletters. 

So instead, they usually invent some kind of fabulist, fringe scenario to tease their audience. For example, the guy I repped was smart and financially savvy, but one of the ad campaigns billed him as one of the world’s stupidest, most unlucky investors until a wise man gave him a special formula. (So on and so forth.) It was absolutely horrible, dreadful branding for PR purposes, but it made splendid sense for the company's business model.

They mostly sell outlier scenarios — things that probably won’t happen, but if they did, WOWWEE!  — that kind of pitch. They justify this by pointing out that if someone predicted in the early 1930s that the world was on the verge of its greatest war ever, all the empires would soon die, and a nuclear weapon would be unleashed in Asia, all those claims would’ve been considered fabulist, too. But as we all know, World War II happened. 

So who’s to say [fill-in-the-blank] won’t happen either?

If you want to subscribe to a financial newsletter because it’s entertaining and you enjoy speculating about the market, knock yourself out. Their newsletters truly are entertaining as hell. Furthermore, I’m NOT saying that every financial newsletter comes from unethical people! There are lots of good ones out there, too.

But if you’re paying for a financial service that sounds suspiciously like what I’m describing, please do your due diligence. It’s your money and you can do whatever you want with it, but I hope you proceed with your eyes wide open.