If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know I love talking about the wisdom of the greatest advertisers and copywriters who ever lived.
Why?
Because they mastered the PRINCIPLES of producing winning ads that will never go out of style. We’ll be able to use them forever, anywhere, promoting anything to anyone. Because they relied on simple immortal elements of reality:
- Human psychology
- Sales strategies
- Simple math
Mastering these three principles is the core of what makes ads work.
Everything else is details. “What medium should I use?” “How long should the copy be?” “What should the subject line be?” “Should I use emojis or not??” “What’s the hottest AI tool I can use to make my job easier?”
Those are all tiny little details that have nothing to do with the principles of advertising and everything to do with the execution.
Which leads me to what I believe is one of the main problems in advertising today: advertisers are OBSESSED with mastering execution, tools and “tricks” instead of mastering the simple proven principles that make ads work. (As I’ll explain in a moment, this is why we’re experiencing an absolute tsunami, daily, of utterly horrific advertising.)
We need to return to the roots of what made advertising great in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
The principles of direct mail from masters like Claude Hopkins, John E Kennedy, Victor Schwab, Eugene Schwartz and Ogilvy are just as relevant today as they were during their lifetimes. Their principles transcend the medium you use to market or the time you live in; whether it’s direct mail, newspaper ads, email marketing, landing pages, video sales letters, it doesn’t matter.
They took the art and science of conversions from face to face sales and selling from stage and applied them to mass media, beginning with direct mail.
This is what ultimately became called Direct Response advertising.
Now, smart advertisers adapt those same principles to digital mediums.
But another problem plaguing modern advertisers is that in the technological age, the quantity of advertisements and speed of production have dramatically increased while degrading the quality of advertisements.
“Speed kills nuance” in the wise words of Dan Kennedy.
Every day we’re pummeled by up to 10,000 unsolicited ads. And buy and large if you ask someone what they think about ads, they’ll say something to the equivalent of “I hate them with power of a thousand suns and with every fiber of my being and from the very depth of my soul.”
And with how ads are made and deployed it’s hard to disagree.
- Ads are things that pop up and interrupt your entertainment…
- They force themselves upon you when you have zero desire for what they’re offering…
- They’re annoying, stupid or gross…
- They’re everywhere… thousands and thousands of ads trying to feed off of your attention like soul-parasites fighting for the same real estate in your mind.
This isn’t because ads themselves are bad but because advertisers have gotten bad.
99% of people creating ads, sending promotional emails, or making marketing materials are terrible at their job.
They don’t know the principles of great advertising.
They just try to splatter as much slop on the wall as possible in hopes something will stick…
They try to get the “most eyeballs for the least amount of money…”
They try to crank out and deploy mass numbers of ads without regard for the end user…
This is what I call “degraded advertising” and it creates a 3-fold evil:
- It pisses people off which hurts your brand image… (and not the good kind of “alienating people to attract your tribe.” I’m talking about senselessly pissing people off with the garbage quality of your ads.)
- It attracts “degraded attention.” Like attracts like. If you make crap ads, you’ll get crap leads which won’t be worth much, won’t stay long and will cause you more problems than higher quality folks.
- You waste countless dollars in ad spend. As the OG advertisers say, “waste circulation is your #1 expense in advertising.” If you’re not doing carefully crafted, carefully targeted and carefully tracked advertising, you’re dumping money off a cliff.
It’s time to get back to basics.
The technology and digital age have muddied the waters about what makes great advertising. It’s made people lazy, sloppy and maximized the proliferation of idiocy at speeds never before seen.
Every time a new breakthrough happens it becomes a demigod for a while, destined to change the course of advertising forever. AI is the most recent example. Everybody freaked out and thought it would change everything. It hasn’t. It’s a tool. Like the internet is a tool. Like a calculator is a tool. Like a typewriter is a tool.
Tools will change, but principles of advertising will NEVER happen for the simple reason that human psychology, persuasion and basic math will never change… no matter what time or place we’re in.
So I hope you’ll follow along with me each week as I dive into the proven and profitable principles of Immortal Advertising.
