Ben is Senior Vice President at American Target Advertising, the agency built by direct marketing pioneer Richard Viguerie.
Ben focuses on copywriting and creating winning direct marketing campaigns for the agency’s clients.
Ben’s letters and ads have generated more than $1 Billion for his clients over the course of his 35 years in the direct marketing field.
Ben has written a number of books, including:
- How to Write Blockbuster Sales Letters (2006)
- Fund Your Cause: Secrets of Successful Direct Mail Fundraising (2005)
- Automatic Marketing (2007)
- Faith & Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty (1988)
- Poisoned Ivy: How America’s Elite Colleges Are Teaching America’s Future Leaders to Hate their Country. (1984)
Ben wrote speeches for many leading political leaders in the 1980s and ’90s, including President Ronald Reagan (1984 campaign) and President George H.W. Bush (1988 campaign). Ben went on to start a speechwriting business that transitioned into an advertising agency that built the Christian Coalition to 1,000,000 members during the 1990s, along with a number of other influential conservative organizations. The Christian Coalition was described by Time magazine as the most influential conservative lobby of the 1990s.
Ben sold his ad agency in 1998 and became President of Richard Viguerie’s American Target Advertising in 1999. Ben decided to demote himself and become Senior Vice President at ATA in 2007 so he could focus on copywriting and marketing strategy and not on managing the agency’s 70 employees.
Ben’s marketing mentor over the decades has been Richard Viguerie, who essentially invented (or at least systematized) direct mail fundraising for political causes and candidates in the 1960s. Without the enormous mailing lists of donors built by Richard and his agency, there probably never would have been a Ronald Reagan Presidency.
Other notable conservative organizations Ben’s marketing campaigns helped launch and build include Judicial Watch and Faith & Freedom Coalition (now 2.4 million members and supporters).
In the early 2000s, Ben built an internet business in an unrelated field that was generating more than $1,000,000 per year in sales before Google changed its algorithms.
Ben graduated in 1982 from Dartmouth College where he helped found America’s most famous conservative student newspaper The Dartmouth Review (1980), which continues publishing to this day. Ben’s first book Poisoned Ivy, which he wrote during his senior year at Dartmouth, chronicles the founding of The Dartmouth Review and was the first book to describe the odd anti-American “woke” ideology (which Ben called “The Ethos”) that was taking hold in the faculty lounges of America’s elite colleges. Poisoned Ivy was a national bestseller.
As The Review’s founding President and Publisher, Ben helped recruit fellow students Dinesh D’Souza (author-filmmaker), Laura Ingraham (FOX News) and others to work on the paper who went on to become highly influential writers and thinkers.