Having interacted with both Cosgrove AND Roussell, I can tell you quite confidently that they are both incredibly smart, and do high quality work.
Keep in mind, you (the typical readers of this forum) are not the target customer. If you listened to that
interview I did with Ryan Lee, you know that you have to research your market, and make your appeal very specific.
Who is the target of that site? I can almost guarantee you that you are not it (most of you anyway).
Do we as fitness professionals relinquish all respect when we do something to make money? Are we supposed to stay broke to maintain that respect?
I don't like long letter ads. Hell, even Ryan himself said he can't stand them, and they don't really work on him, but they work. They work really well! He has marketed the exact same products in two different ways, one with mainstream marketing that was very tasteful and acceptable by this kind of crowd, and the other with the long cheesy sales letter.
Guess which one outsold the other by 10 times?
So if the product is high quality and we trust that the authors are solid, respectable professionals, then why worry about how they market it? I'm not the target since I don't have a bunch of fat to lose, so it didn't really hit any buttons for me. It was very carefully crafted to reach the people who will probably buy this product in droves.
This topic interests me because I am struggling to find a way to have my cake and eat it too with my future products. Yes, I want to sell a ton of products, but I also want to keep the respect of this crowd. How do I do both? Cosgrove and Roussell don't care because they have a product to sell and they aren't really influenced by forumites' opinions. Since my forum is my only real presence on the net it wouldn't make sense for me to do something that would be a real departure from what this group likes.
I know that we sometimes think that we are
the quintessential fitness product consumer, but I think that we don't realize that we are a small dinky teeny tiny piece of the market.
Anyway, sorry for rambling. Just waxing away.