Your mind is a crowded room

Make It About Them

Every day you are bombarded with an overflow of external and internal activators. Memories of familiar smells, tastes, sights, emotions and that irritating new song from the black eyed peas;”Tonight’s gonna be a good night!”

A familiar face, a special place, a distinctive smell – familiar touchstones like these bring order to the chaos and us of who we are and why we do the things we do.

Such sensory images are like old friends; each encounter with one of them brings our self-image more sharply into focus.

Advertising is like an intruder banging on the door of the customers mind. The subconscious mind answers the door and asks, “Who do you know in this house? Name the people you know.”

A good ad associates itself with a familiar touchstone and gains entrance into the mind. The ad that only speaks about itself is quickly shown the door. “Go away,” says the subconscious. “It’s too crowded in here for you.”

New and unknown ads are more easily excepted when they are related to the known and familiar. Do your ads touch the familiar in your customers’ mind? Do people relate to the things you say? Or are you just going on about Whom, What, Where and When, while failing to answer the most important question: Why?

Most ads are written under the assumption that the customer is asking, “Who are you? What are you selling? When are you open? What is your address?” Unfortunately the only thing on your customers’ mind is, “Why Should I care?”

Your customer wants to hear a story with them in it. Don’t tell them a story about you. Tell them how your product can save them time, make them money, and allow them more time with their kids. If not, leave them alone. You’re wasting their time.

Most ads are about companies and their products, and these ads yield disappointing results. The best ads are the ones that speak about the customer and how the product will change their lives.

What kind of ads are you writing?

-Martin

Fighting Fire With Fire…

You might not be surprised when I tell you that telling the truth is hardly persuasive these days.

The sad truth is that businesses have invented a whole new way of communicating which is rather deceitful. It’s called “advertising.”

Deceitful advertising is a common method today as honest business people of yesterday realized that telling the simple truth isn’t enough anymore. The result, all too often, was a dramatic loss of business to competitors who used deceitful advertising to sell inferior products.

The honest business person had no choice but to fight fire with fire.

Anyone who believes in this philosophy has certainly never tried to put out a fire. For you will soon realize that the guaranteed result is a nationwide inferno of deceitful advertising. “If the public won’t buy our product for $30, we’ll mark it as $60 and sell it for half price!”

These kinds of business people knew that they couldn’t fool ALL the people ALL of the time. But they could fool some people some of the time, and so it went on.

These kinds of business people are heading for extinction because it’s getting harder to fool ANY of the people ANY of the time.

The real tragedy is that honest business people abandoned the truth in their advertising. It wasn’t the truth that was ineffective; the mistake was assuming it was enough to simply tell it.

If you want the truth to prevail, you have to cause people to realize it. This requires much more skill than to simply tell it.

Honest persuasion is the water that will put out any fire.

“Truth we are told is truth we may not accept; the truth we have realized is the only truth we own.” – Anonymous

-Martin

Its Good Or It’s Bad

You have two choices when you advertise.

Your ads can be intellectual (information focused) or emotional (experience focused).

Emotional ads take the reader and lead him along the path of experience. He feels and tastes and sees what the ad writer wants him to: “As the light sneaks in on a cool winter’s morning, you feel the soft air tickle your face. You know today is going to be filled with unique experiences that will leave you feeling like there is no place like this on earth.”

However, when you choose the intellectual approach to ad writing, it’s no joking matter.

Most people write intellectual ads the way they tell a joke. They open with an obscure reference to what’s coming, and then they spend the rest of the joke adding little pieces of information working their way up to the punch line.

This is the worst possible way to write an ad. An ad is NOT a joke.

Those who listen to a joke are committed to listening. Those listening to an ad are not.

A bad intellectual ad starts off with a setup, where the writer tries to set the stage for the argument that is to follow. As the ad lingers on, the customer is thinking, “Get to the point, what’s in it for me?” In less than seven seconds you’ve lost the customers attention entirely.

 A bad intellectual ad can take up to twenty seconds to get to the point. What’s worse is it’s a point to a question no-one is asking.

A good intellectual ad begins with the punch line to a felt need, and then quickly backs up any claims with relevant proof.

Intellectual or emotional, a good ad is a satisfying experience.

Are your ads satisfying?

Or are they a joke?

 -Martin