Drama

Chance encounters with Blackie

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And somewhere in the darkness
The gambler he broke even
But in his final words
I found an ace that I could keep
— Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

This morning, I started writing my bread-and-butter piece of copy. It’s an advertorial of a person on a quest.

In this case, the quest is a mom looking for a way to cope with her 8-year-old’s ADHD without drugs. I’ve also used the same quest structure to sell tens of thousands of shoe insoles, silicone kitchen sponges, even fake diamonds.

The quest has 3 acts.

Act 1 is the hero coming face-to-face with the horror of the problem… and then getting sucked deeper and deeper into promised solutions that don’t work or even make things worse. Despair sets in.

Act 2 starts with a chance encounter. And that’s what I want to tell you about today.

In my advertorials, this chance encounter is usually a friend or acquaintance the hero hasn’t met in a long while. The friend casually mentions the key missing ingredient for the hero’s quest.

At first, the hero is skeptical. But the friend isn’t pushy, plus there’s a good reason why the solution could work. So the hero goes home to do more research and— EUREKA!!

If this sounds familiar, it’s because something like it is present in more than 99% of all make money, rags-to-riches, “I was living in a trailer but look at me now” sales letters. The hero in those stories wouldn’t be the success he is today were it not for the trick he learned from a Yoda-like guru who lives on top of a mountain or in a gated retirement community in Florida.

In fact, according to Dan Kennedy, this same trope goes back to at least the middle of the last century. It’s called a “Blackie story.”

Old Blackie was this horse track regular until the day he died. He had a secret for bettin’ on the ponies… and then on his death bed, he revealed the secret to the writer of the sales letter.

What do you think? Corny? Overplayed? Transparent?

Think what you like. The fact is these Blackie stories work.

Because chance encounters in stories are like spike proteins on the surface of corona virus. They jam themselves into your soft defenses so the payload can worm its way in.

And if Blackie dies to boot, like The Gambler in the Kenny Rogers song, it’s even more powerful. Because the secret is now lost… unless you buy the product on sale.

This all reminds me of a run-in I once had with an old door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. He showed me a neat little trick to get your foot in the door, every time, without fail. It works brilliantly online too.

Unfortunately the poor bastard died just a few weeks later. Rest in peace, Jerome.

If you’re curious to learn Jerome’s “foot in the door” copywriting trick… it’s one of the things I share inside my email newsletter. It’s free to subscribe. You might find it entertaining, and you can always unsubscribe if you don’t like it. Here’s where to sign up.

“Coke and hookers”: Meghan Markle NYT story proves evergreen copywriting truth

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Back in 2016, I got a job writing a bunch of political fundraising advertorials. I was helping raise funds for Hillary Clinton, for Ted Cruz, and for Donald Trump.

(I found out later that the guy who had hired me was a big-time scammer. Almost none of the money he raised was ever used for any political purpose. But it was used for the purpose of coke and hookers in Las Vegas. Which you might think is a more noble goal than furthering the political careers of any of the above faces.)

Anyways, as part of this job, I had to constantly read a bunch of news articles for research. Politico… Fox… WSJ… and of course The New York Times.

It was then that I developed my contempt for The New York Times.

I guess I still had higher expectations of the NYT. Fox News was clearly an inflammatory tabloid, but the NYT still sold itself as classy and respectable and trustworthy.

But that’s not what I saw. Not when I read each story carefully, compared it with the headline, and then compared the whole with the same story covered in other media.

Whatever. I only bring up this episode from my life because I just came across a fascinating article and a resource on the exact same topic. The article and the resource can be useful to you whether or not you support the New York Times point of view.

So:

A guy named Tom Cleveland wanted to see exactly how the NYT A/B tests its headlines. He wrote up a script to pull in the data from the NYT site, and he started looking for insights. You can head over to Tom’s Substack if you’re interested in the full story. But here’s one quick tidbit, which should be old hat if you’re interested in copywriting:

NYT headlines tend to get more dramatic through A/B testing.

Tom gives a few examples. For example, a recent story about Meghan Markle started its career with the headline:

“Saying her life was less than a fairy tale, Meghan Markle described the cruel loss of her freedom and identity”

Come on Meghan. Every angsty teenager complains of loss of freedom and identity. Sure enough, the editors at the NYT tested ways to raise the stakes. The eventual winner:

“‘I just didn’t want to be alive anymore’: Meghan Markle says life as a royal made her suicidal”

A second example, this about Trump:

“Trump, addressing conservatives, plans to claim leadership of GOP”

Trump, ok. Always a solid way to get engagement. But “addressing conservatives, plans to claim leadership”? It sounds like the overture of a long and boring opera. Compare it to the winning “Tarantino-ized” headline:

“Trump’s Republican hit list at CPAC is a warning shot to his party”

Like I said, this will be old hat to you if you’ve been writing sales copy for a while. But it’s still interesting to see when backed up with the massive data behind the New York Times… and when dealing with the supposedly sophisticated and intellectual readers of the Times.

There’s much more to Tom’s data, including stuff that’s both obvious and not so obvious for copywriters. He goes into more detail about it on his blog. But he has also made all his data available online, in real time, in a very easy-to-use format. If you’d like to see it:

https://nyt.tjcx.me/

The value of being wrong

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I had a guy write in today and tell me to get my reporting straight.

This was in connection to a daily email I’d sent to the dog ecommerce list I manage. The email was about Lady Gaga’s stolen bulldogs.

Perhaps you know the story. There was a heist. Some guys pulled up on the street, shot Lady Gaga’s dogwalker, and then sped away with the two dogs.

In my email, I wrote the kidnappers arrived in a van, because, well, that’s how kidnappers do, at least in the movies I’ve seen.

But it was not a van. It was a car. And one upset reader rightly wrote in to correct me.

I’ve talked about this before, but often the best way to get a response out of somebody is to say something wrong.

Blood rushes to your prospect’s head, and he has to write in to tell you how wrong you are. Because you’re careless… you’re offensive… maybe even because you’re stupid.

Why would you ever want your prospect thinking that?

Simple. Because hate, irritation, and scorn, are much closer to love, identification, and sales than you might think. They are certainly much closer to each other than they are to indifference.

Sometimes you get lucky, like I did, and stir up a reaction by accident. But you can do it on purpose too. As long as you don’t mind being told you’re wrong, by people who feel strongly enough about the matter to take time out of their day to write and correct you.

Well. I doubt I stirred up any controversy with this email. And so you probably didn’t get any closer to loving me or identifying me. Still, perhaps you’d like to join my email newsletter. If so, here’s where to go.

The best copywriting tactic ever

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Why does a giraffe have the longest neck?

The canned answer is because it’s useful. It allows the giraffe to browse books on the top bookshelf.

The real answer is that giraffes love extremes. That’s according to V. S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist and psychologist at UCSD.

Ramachandran says giraffes, and all other animals, have to know who’s a sexual target and who’s not. Otherwise, they might waste their prime dating years humping couches or human legs or other animals species. (Clearly, something went wrong with dogs.)

So how does a giraffe find love?

The simplest and easiest way it can. It looks for shortcuts.

“Long neck? Gotta be another giraffe! Time to get the cologne.”

But here’s where it gets tricky and interesting:

If a long neck is a mental shortcut for a giraffe to pick out another giraffe… then a longer neck is an even shorter cut.

The conclusion is giraffes’ necks get longer and longer. The longer your neck, the more likely you are to get some giraffe action and pass on your long neck genes. In the end, the longest neck wins.

As I said, giraffes love extremes. Almost as much as humans love extremes.

Because the human brain is like a giraffe’s. We also like shortcuts. And we want to follow these shortcuts to the end. Which leads me to the best copywriting tactic ever:

Go to extremes, whenever you can get away with it.

The most successful direct response copy is filled with the most dramatic stories… the scariest warnings… and with superlatives like fastest, easiest, and best.

The world is complicated. Too many choices. Too much information. That’s why we seek out extremes, to make our lives easier. And that’s something you can use to make your copy not better, but best.

Speaking of which, here’s the safest offer you will ever hear:

Try out my email newsletter. If it doesn’t make the highlight of your day tomorrow, simply unsubscribe.

Drama in your copy? Not like this

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Imagine a fanciful scene, say:

A rough-looking man is walking down the street. He passes a rough-looking woman, who doesn’t mind that people can see her talking to herself (no headphones).

The woman bumps into the man but keeps walking without even a nod of apology.

“Watch where ya going, yea?” the man says.

“Tongue ma fart-box,” she replies with a smile and a little curtsy.

In one leap, the man catches up to the woman and grabs her by the sleeve. “Ya gonna shaw me a bit of respect.” He start to twist the woman’s arm.

But instead of whining or trying to pull away, the woman slams into the man, chest to chest, and gives him a kiss. Straight on the mouth, tongue and all.

The guy is stunned. For a second, he goes with the kiss, out of pure shock.

But then he starts to squirm… and then to scream, mouth closed, with the woman still attached to his face.

Finally, he manages to push her away.

There’s blood on her lips.

The man looks panicked and confused, like he’s just tasted something unfamiliar but awful. He looks down and opens his mouth. A red and bloody pulp of flesh rolls out of his mouth and falls to the ground.

The man staggers back in horror. “Ya bip my pongue off!” he yells.

And in that moment, a seagull swoops down from the solid gray sky, and lands right between the man and the woman. In a flash, the hungry bird picks up the fleshy red pulp off the ground and flies off, while the man looks after it, and after the displaced tip of his tongue, never to be seen again.

So.

​​The question I have to answer now is, why? Why tell you such a pointless and gruesome story?

After all, if I were practicing for a screenwriting workshop, you might rightly tell me to try again. “It’s a little forced,” you might say. “I guess you’re trying to go for some kind of Oldboy violence and bizareness… but it just seems made up and fake. Maybe tone it down. Get some inspiration from real life.”

And there’s my point. Because the above story, bizarre and unlikely though it might seem, is from real life.

It happened on August 1, 2019, in that ancient hub of learning and culture, Edinburgh. I invented the dialogue with the help of Scottish insults dictionary. But the rest of the story is all true, as far as the Daily Mail and the Scotsman would tell me. The aggressive kiss on the street… the tongue that wouldn’t stay put… the opportunistic seagull. All true.

But if this scene happened in a movie, who would believe it?

And like I say, that’s my point. Some things can be true. But there’s a difference between being true and seeming true.

And if you have to choose between those in your sales copy, always go with the seeming true. In your promises… in your case studies… in your warnings.

Yes, you want drama. But you want the kind of drama that movies and TV shows have taught us to expect. Not the crazy shit that happens in real life.

Another gruesome thought:

I write an email newsletters. The emails arrive to your inbox each day, like hungry seagulls. That probably doesn’t sound appealing. But if for some unlikely reason, you like bizarre and occasionally violent content, here’s how to get on the newsletter.