We punch way above our weight.
Who benefits most from that? You.
We just love watching you succeed. It's where our strength comes from.
We learned our trade in a series of apprenticeships in one of the world's most fragmented marketplaces: South Africa – a land of 27 different tribes, both black and white, each with its own culture, customs and dialect or language. A marketer's nightmare but an adman's paradise.
Then we sharpened our expertise for years in New York City and its environs, crafting campaigns for some of the world's largest companies.
Now in Arizona, we tailor those same skills for local and regional enterprises large and small.
We're not cheap. But we're fairly priced, and very effective. And as we said earlier, we partner strategically with some of the most incandescent agencies and talents you'll find anywhere in the United States. And beyond ... Australia, the UK ... wherever the talent exists to power your success.
About our boss: John Graham Seeliger
Born in Cape Town and raised in Johannesburg, headquarters of global companies and the financial center of Africa. A hot spot for advertising agencies.
His major was journalism, at a time when that actually meant something. So he learned to ask probing questions, and how to write effectively. Then he apprenticed himself – to gain hands-on understanding – in newspapers and print, film, radio and TV production, before turning full time to the advertising world.
John wrote copy at McCann-Erickson/Interpublic, Leo Burnett/LPE, and local agencies, moonlighting at others, before founding Copy*right in 1967 ... now providing copy, scripts and editing to ad agencies like Gray, JWT, and those same locals*, as well as direct to business.
Late in 1970 he left Apartheid South Africa, where he was under surveillance, for the USA, where he wasn't. "I was lucky to land up at a blazing-hot direct response agency," he says, because there he developed and wrote the marketing plan that launched Godiva Chocolatier first into New York, then widely across the United States.
Immediately after, he spent several years at Garden Way, makers of the intrepid Troy-Bilt Roto Tiller – a $1,000-plus gardening machine sold exclusively by mail. (That's around $7,000 in 2020 dollars. And yes, exclusively by mail. Before the internet.)
Copy*right hummed along under all these endeavors, including the years when John also took a leading interest in NOVA Power Marketing LLC. Now done with NOVA, he should be ready for retirement ... but he's not.
"I tried retiring once," he says about the crash of 2008. "It was horrible. They took my sandbox and toys away. And there's only so many hours of Bar Rescue you can watch."
Instead, Copy*right has again moved front and center, providing creative concepts and strategic copy to the advertising industry and independent businesses.
- John Graham Seeliger is Past President of the Arizona Direct Marketing Association, and was voted Arizona Direct Marketer of the Year.
*(For you old-timers out there: Jonsson Advertising; Thomas Downing & Partners; Cloran, Heeger & Partners; Van Zijl & Robinson; Effective Letters; Manifold DM ...)