Claude Olney achieved the American Dream--the acquisition of vast wealth without a whole lot of labor--by turning his underachieving son into a gold mine. Almost everybody has seen Olney's "infomercial," a thirty-minute television commercial with 1970s sitcom star John Ritter. And almost everybody knows somebody who owns Olney's best-selling video, Where There's a Will There's an A, a collection of simple grade-improvement tips for students. Short of the biggest blockbusters, Olney's taped lecture outsells Hollywood's video releases. Olney wasn't prospecting for his lucky strike back in '82. It came to him in the form of a high school report card.
It all started when young Robert Olney finished at the very top of the bottom half of his graduating class at Gerard High School and missed qualifying for admission into Arizona State University. Claude, a good father and a business professor at ASU, pulled some strings and got the boy admitted anyway. Fearful that Robert would then flunk out of the university--and cause untold amusement among the fellows in the faculty lounge--Claude began researching his very own freshman-at-risk program. He collected every how-to-succeed-in-college book he could find.
"Instead of just giving the books to Robert the way most parents would have done, I started reading them," Olney says. Claude Olney is a do-it-yourself kind of guy. He restores classic cars as a hobby. He has designed and built several houses from the ground up. The books, he discovered, were filled with tons of general information, most of it poorly presented. A few vague tips were recycled again and again. Get plenty of sleep, the books advised. Learn to allocate your time. Make the library your friend. Olney knew this was not the program to inspire his son. "You can imagine giving that kind of information to a poor student," he says. "It just goes right over their heads. In fact, it was going over my head."
So Claude assembled all the existing college-survival wisdom into one easy-to-understand, twenty-point package. He made the program a twenty-pointer because he attended school himself for seven years and had been teaching at ASU for thirteen. Seven and thirteen. Twenty. "If I can't come up with one good point for each of those years," he said to himself, "I should just quit. I don't deserve to be at this university." The program succeeded on a couple of levels. First, Robert Olney made the dean's list his very first semester in college and stayed there until graduating with honors. Second, the twenty steps made Robert Olney's dad quite a bit of money. So far, the Olney Lode has produced many millions of dollars. The vein is rich. The operation will continue for some time to come. Claude Olney isn't very comfortable talking about money. After all, he still shops for clothes at Sears and still seeks out bargain movies. But even a poor student can do this math. "Sales go up every year," says an executive of the company that markets Olney's seminar. "At any given point, you've got 40 million students in America, kindergarten to college. We've sold a million. That means there's 39 million to go.
"We think it'll go on for years."
CLAUDE OLNEY IS an unlikely--but not totally unwilling--celebrity.
A churchgoer, Olney is a gentle, charming man who smiles easily at the many ironies in his life. His voice still carries a Wisconsin-native tang and his ears stick out after a haircut. He could be Gomer Pyle's shy cousin from Milwaukee. Early in his mass-marketing career Olney would sometimes turn on his TV in the middle of the night to see if he was on. After almost four years, the thrill is not gone. A couple of months ago, while doing some weekend shopping at the Biltmore Fashion Park, Olney walked into a department-store electronics section just as one of his infomercials (there have been four so far) began to air on one of the major networks. As John Ritter's face played across 100 different sets, Olney loitered. "I didn't say anything to the clerk," Olney says. "I knew I come in at about fourteen minutes after the start. So I waited around. Finally, just before I'm on I made some comment to the clerk. `Gee, wouldn't it be something to see yourself on all these sets at once. I bet that would feel really weird.'"
Occasionally it feels great. Olney tells the story--which concludes with the clerk's whiplash double-take at the sight of 101 Olneys--with obvious delight. The not-so-nutty professor is recognized constantly in restaurants and airports. "If someone gives me kind of a funny look, I go out of my way to say hello for fear that they think I'm a snob," he says.
Last month William Morrow and Company published Claude Olney's life story, a collection of mildly inspirational anecdotes about how to get ahead in the world. The book's message is that hard work does pay, that sometimes nice guys do finish first. Its title is, The Bucks Start Here: How to Turn Your Hidden Assets Into Money. The cover promises, "The best $16.95 you'll ever spend or your money back."
Actually, the bucks started for Claude Olney long before he struck gold with his son's mediocre transcript. The 45 or so cars he has restored were all sold at a nifty profit. Same for the several homes he built for his family over the years. The Olneys' current home in Scottsdale, a two-story Mexican hacienda built into an old orange grove, predates the study tapes, as do the house's splashy amenities--a three-stall carport, a pool and a tennis court. Olney has degrees in economics, philosophy and law. He practiced law here for several years, and began his ASU career in 1969, where he taught courses in business law, real estate, as well as an innovative section on entrepreneurship which he designed himself. In all areas, the Olney style is not flashy, but practical, common-sense, do-it-yourself. He is in no way a hustler. But he has a great eye for angles. ONCE SON ROBERT proved that the twenty steps could help a poor student, Olney began sharing the program with kids in his classes at ASU. Soon he was getting invitations to speak to campus groups and fraternity chapter meetings. Here, he thought, was a new angle. Olney made tapes of his talk and sold them at his lectures. Eventually he rented a room in the ASU student union and tried charging for his advice. At the very first lecture, students eager to pay a dollar per tip overflowed the room. While reading a wire-service story in the morning paper one day, Olney saw another angle. He wrote Chicago Tribune reporter Clarence Petersen a letter, suggesting that the newspaperman write about the grade-improvement program. Petersen called and did a telephone interview. A few weeks later, checks began to arrive at Olney's post office box. Syndicated in 25 newspapers in January 1987, Petersen's short feature article generated 3,000 requests for tapes, which sold at the time for $29.95. The Olneys assembled each one of the 3,000 packages on their dining-room table. "Then in 1988 I attended a wedding reception and sat next to a former student and his wife," writes Olney in the gee-whiz prose used throughout The Bucks Start Here. "I told them about my seminar and they told a friend who made TV commercials. The friend's daughter tried my tapes, and her grades went from a 2.1 to a 3.4 average."
When the friend who made TV commercials learned that Olney sold 3,000 tape albums without advertising, a partnership was formed. Hello angle three.
STEVE SCOTT, the man whose daughter moved up from Cs to Bs with the help of Olney's tapes, is an executive with American Telecast, a company that produces infomercials. In addition to Claude Olney, other horses in the American Telecast stable include diet-dealer Richard Simmons and makeup model Victoria Jackson. Scott is also an ASU graduate.
From the very first meeting between Scott and Olney, the marketing ace knew the study seminar was a solid product. What the project needed next was a celebrity salesman, a standard feature of the infomercial genre. Several names were kicked around until Olney's wife, Nancy, suggested TV star John Ritter.
Scott scoffed. Ritter never did commercial endorsements. Claude Olney suggested sending Ritter the tapes. "He's got kids, doesn't he?" asked Olney, the innocent angler. "You handle the seminar part, we'll handle the marketing," Olney remembers Scott saying as he headed for the door. The visitor was almost to the end of the driveway when Olney ran up to the car, handed a seminar package through the window and suggested he send it to Ritter anyway. As Olney tells the story, Ritter listened to the tape and agreed immediately to do the endorsement. The first infomercial was a comparatively crude effort. Ritter played a talk-show host. (The fake talk show is a standard infomercial ploy.) Olney played a guest. During the first two years of marketing-via-infomercial, Olney says Where There's a Will There's an A averaged sales of 8,000 copies a week. Olney has a hard time explaining his appeal. "I make mistakes and everything else," he says of his performance. "It's just plain ol' me. It's this hometown stuff that I think does it. I'm real."
IN THE MOSTLY SLEAZY infomercial world, "real" is a rarity. The on-air talent, for the most part, is patently unreal, either unknown actors and pitch artists or third-tier entertainers like John Davidson, Ali MacGraw or James "Dano" MacArthur. Typically, the celebrity salespersons earn a royalty on each sale they make. That is the case with John Ritter and Where There's a Will.
Products successfully marketed via infomercial offer cures for baldness, impotence and obesity. Odd kitchen gadgets, auto polish and get-rich-quick schemes also are popular. The Federal Trade Commission regularly swats at infomercial producers who make false or exaggerated claims about the products they sell. Like much modern pestilence, infomercials are the result of Reagan-era deregulation. Broadcast licensees were told in 1984 that they no longer needed to limit the amount of commercial time they could sell. Instead of parceling it out in piddly thirty- or sixty-second bites, TV networks and stations could sell as much time as they wanted--in chunks of any size--throughout the broadcast day. It's estimated that 80 percent of all TV outlets now run program-length commercials. The shows typically run when air time is cheapest (late night or early morning), but many of the spots--including Where There's a Will There's an A--have run on the major networks.
At first, Olney was wary of this hard-sell world. When he traveled to Southern California to tape his first infomercial, Olney didn't know much about Steve Scott or Scott's company. "I was skeptical of this group," Olney says. "I was very skeptical about Hollywood and all the razzle-dazzle."
But on his very first shoot, Olney found big star John Ritter to be "really upbeat, really impressive." At the end of the day, the production team took Olney out for a big dinner. When Scott asked one of his colleagues to lead the group in a prayer of thanksgiving for the "wonderful day" they had just had, the bad vibes about Hollywood and razzle-dazzle went away. "There was another thing I noticed about this group," says Olney. "There was not one single four-letter word all day long. Nobody cursed, nothing.
"I felt this was a group I wanted to be with."
Where There's a Will There's an A (the title Olney's daughter created for the grade-improvement program) today is sold in two formats. The audiocassette package sells for about $60. The videocassette version, which has outsold the audio by four to one, can be bought for slightly less than $90. Three different editions are available--one for college students, one for high schoolers and one for the parents of grade school children. In recent weeks, Olney has been hawking his tape personally on home-shopping networks.
What purchasers of American Telecast product get for their $90 is a tape of Claude Olney delivering a lecture to a roomful of students. The theme of the lecture is that studying "smart" is preferable to studying "hard." Most of the twenty study tips are stunningly simple, even obvious. For example, Olney suggests that students sit in the front row of the classroom. He also suggests that they write down their goals, attend class regularly and become friendly with their teachers. Papers and other assignments should be neatly prepared. In one section, Olney offers tips for guessing on tests. He encourages students to outline compositions before writing and to study in short bursts instead of long sessions. Using drugs or excessive drinking are bad ideas, he says. He demonstrates several memorization techniques. He recommends flash cards for students studying a foreign language. Olney discusses right-brain functions (supposedly creative stuff like music and art) versus left-brain functions (math and logic) and encourages students to exercise their least-used half. And that's about all there is to it.
Olney has a thick file of thank-you letters from now-successful students. Positive reviews come from all over. Some people send report cards. Libraries that stock the tapes typically have a long waiting list. The Tempe Public Library has to replace its audio copies of Where There's a Will every six months, either because of wear or because one is borrowed and never returned. ASU's main switchboard fields about twenty telephone calls a week from people who want to know more about Olney and his program. Don Robinson, coach of ASU's gymnastics team, keeps a copy of the seminar in his office. His gymnasts are encouraged to watch the tape and follow its precepts. Robinson was so impressed with the program he agreed to deliver a testimonial in one of American Telecast's infomercials. He received no payment for his appearance, but Olney will speak to Robinson's team for free. The lecture fee usually runs at least $3,000. "ASU has been really good to me," says Olney, whose employment status at the school is professor emeritus. "It's just a neat place."
IN ADDITION to a business college and athletic department, Arizona State also has a College of Education. One of the professors there says that Olney's conclusions about right-brain/left-brain research are "oversimple" and that his theories about the brain are "mumbo jumbo." These are her comparatively minor criticisms. "An enormous amount of what Professor Olney does on the tape is try to present the message that education is a scam, and that is deeply distressing to me," says Marigold Linton, who holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology and is the ASU College of Education's director of education services. Linton's academic specialty is learning and its foundation elements--memory, problem-solving and thinking. Essentially, she studies studying.
"He talks about all the superficial things you can do to influence the instructor," she says of Where There's a Will. "He spends an enormous amount of time talking about appearance over substance. . . . He spends very little time talking to students about preparing themselves for life."
On the plus side, she says, "Anything that can get our somewhat uninterested students of today involved in learning is great. He spends a lot of time trying to motivate students . . . . He really does emphasize being pro-active.
"It's probably true that if a student gets one good idea from it, it may be worth $90," Linton concludes, adding that studies show that slow learners do better when given precise instructions. "When people are struggling, being explicit about the rules is very helpful.
"Probably the best piece of advice that he implicitly gives is, have a professor for a father."
ROBERT OLNEY, the very first test case for Claude Olney's million-selling grade-improvement plan, is now 27 and taking graduate-level courses in art history at ASU. Robert's younger brother, James, also a lackluster student in high school, used the tips and also made his way onto ASU's honor roll. He now speaks fluent Spanish and Russian and teaches English-as-a-second-language classes. Robert's younger sister, Susan, was still a high school student when her dad dreamed up his tip sheet. She put the plan to work early, breezed into college and advanced directly to honor-student status. In December she graduated from ASU with an anthropology degree and is considering graduate school at the University of Arizona. All three of the Olney children live at home. Sadly, the patriarch of the overachieving Olneys is not enjoying his recent success as deeply as he might have. Nancy, his wife of some thirty years, died late last year of a blood disorder. The loss was devastating. Dad does most of the cooking now, and keeps the household up and running. Olney, age 59, will accept paying speaking engagements from around the country as long as he can get to the lecture without changing planes more than once.
When he's home, the telephone rings constantly. "It's a disaster to flunk out of school," Claude Olney says, citing the high suicide rate among high school and college students. "I don't have to answer the phone. I could pay someone to do it. But what are you going to do with these poor people? What am I supposed to do, just let 'em go between the cracks?
"This is what's fun. Answering the phone. They call all day long. I've got two lines in here to handle it. They call and I answer and they say, `Are you kidding? Are you really the professor?'
"I didn't know this thing was gonna go. You know, if my son would've been one more student higher in the graduating class, I'd have never done this."
His ears stick out after a haircut. He could be Gomer Pyle's shy cousin from Milwaukee. The Olney style is not flashy, but practical, common-sense, do-it-yourself. He is in no way a hustler. But he has a great eye for angles. In the mostly sleazy infomercial world, "real" is a rarity. The on-air talent, for the most part, is patently unreal.
Most of the twenty study tips are stunningly simple, even obvious. "An enormous amount of what he does on the tape is to present the message that education is a scam, and that is deeply distressing to me."
"They call all day long. They call and I answer and they say, `Are you kidding? Are you really the professor?'
