Stages Of Sophistication

“This changes everything” (no it doesn’t)

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This morning I was reading an article about Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the massive bestseller Eat Pray Love, and the “dizzying numbers of women” who have followed in her wake to narrate their lives and loves online. This passage made me tingle:

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On social media, many of the most chaotic and emotionally lawless people you’ve ever known are posting on a regular basis about having at long last achieved inner peace. Many among us, after observing this cringe-inducing side effect of regular self-narration at mass scale, have given up altogether on sincere ideas of personal epiphany.

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I’m not on social media, but I am on email, a lot. And the passage above sounds exactly what I feel when I read the often-emailed phrase, “This changes everything.”

For fun or frustration, I just typed that phrase into my Gmail and came up with 52 exact matches in the subject line or preview text.

From coaches… crypto peddlers… course creators… Internet marketing gurus… two A-list copywriters… a B-list copywriter… and about a half-dozen investing mavens who act as the face of various Agora newsletters.

Whenever I hear somebody who has been in business for more than 2 weeks breathlessly announce that “This changes everything,” I conclude that this person or brand is either 1) chaotic or 2) the sales equivalent of “emotionally lawless” ie. unscrupulous.

And I lose a bit of respect for them, if I have any left. I also become a little more jaded towards the idea that anything being advertised at me can be worthwhile.

I’m telling you this as a kind of public service announcement, so you can beware of people using this phrase, or maybe, so I can warn you against using the same in your own marketing.

My second public service announcement is to remind you of my recently reopened Skool group, Daily Email House.

“This changes everything?” I hear you asking.

No.

But Daily Email House might change a few things in your life or head to help you, as the current mission for the group says, “use your email list to pay for a house.”

If you’d like to join me inside:

https://bejakovic.com/house

The great disengagement is here

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A few days ago I saw a trending and curious article, “Are we the Baddies?”

The article was written by a guy named George Hotz, aka Geohot, who is a kind of influencer among nerds. (He was the first to hack the iPhone and later worked at Google, Facebook, and Twitter.)

Says Geohot:

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I signed up for Hinge. Holy shit with the boosts.

How does someone who works on this wake up every morning and feel okay about themselves?

Similarly with the tip screens, Uber algorithm, all the zero sum bullshit using all the tricks of psychology to extract a little bit more from every interaction in society. Nudge. Nudge. NUDGE.

Want to partake in normal society like buying a coffee, going on a date, getting a ride, paying a friend. Oh, there’s a middle man now. An evil ominous middleman using state of the art AI algorithms to extract just a little bit more from you.

===

Geohot goes on to helpfully prophesy that we are doomed.

You might agree with him, you might not.

My point today is simply that Geohot, a tech nerd, wrote this article, that it went viral, and that it had thousands of upvotes across sharing sites and hundreds of comments. Here’s a representative one:

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We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.

This isn’t theoretical, it’s happening right now. The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people, the shift from public feeds to private DMs, and the “Do Not Disturb” generation are all symptoms of the same thing. People are feeling the manipulation and are choosing to opt out, one notification at a time.

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Copywriting legend Gene Schwartz famously talked about “stages of sophistication.” In the shell of a nut:

Over time, each market gets exposed to more and more advertising. As a result, people in that market become more jaded and suspicious.

But it’s okay, says Gene. Because eventually, the market dies and a new market is born out of it. Tony Robbins’s Personal Power collapses in on itself, and out of that comes Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.

The one thing that Gene never talked about is that society as a whole has gone through multiple such death and rebirth cycles.

Once or twice is ok. Three times and people start to notice something oddly familiar. The fifth or tenth time, we all become a little more jaded or sophisticated in general.

And after 150 years of direct marketing, of using “all the tricks of psychology to extract a little bit more,” and dozens of such cycles, society becomes really sophisticated.

And now, with the acceleration that Geohot is talking above, of apps that everybody is using all the time, which are applying direct response insights and techniques at mass, instantaneously, backed by big data and genuine AI… well, welcome to the great disengagement.

Like the commenter above says, this isn’t theoretical, it’s happening right now.

I’m telling you this simply as a kind of warning, or a curious observation of something you might not have spotted yourself yet.

If you want more than a warning, then my best prediction is that when all is said and done, people will still want to connect with other people, be entertained, and maybe learn something new.

In the future, I imagine everybody will be an actor, or a semi-pro soccer player, or maybe a newsletter author, even if the platforms change or no longer exist, and people ignore notifications and stop trusting algorithms.

And if you don’t agree with me, you know what to do — don’t write me and tell me so.

Instead, start your own email newsletter and express your views there, to people who want to hear from you over others, even without notifications and algorithms.

And if you want my help with that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Солярис

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Last night, I went to the movies. By myself. At 10pm, which is pretty much my bedtime.

First came one trailer — some Iraq war thriller with Matt Damon as a solider yelling at other soldiers and lots of explosions and jets swooping in and rapid-fire editing between more yelling and explosions and gunfire.

Then came another trailer — a horror movie about vampires in the deep south, with bloody mouths and fangs and a vampire banging his head on the door of a wood cabin, asking to be let in, while the non-vampires inside cower and transfer their fear to the audience.

And then, after about six total minutes of this adrenaline-pumping overstimulation, the screen got dark. A Bach piece on organ started playing and a barebones title card showed the name of the movie:

Солярис

… or Solaris, if you can’t read that. A three-hour-long science fiction movie from 1972. In Russian, which I don’t speak. With Spanish subtitles, which I can barely read before they disappear. The movie opens up with a five-minute sequence of a man walking next to a lake, without any dialogue.

I’ve seen Solaris twice before, years ago. A few days ago, I finished reading the science fiction novel on which it’s based. When I saw it was playing at the local old-timey movie theater, I decided I would violate my usual bedtime and go see it again, and on the big screen.

I’m not trying to sell you on Solaris. All I really want to highlight is the contrast that was so obvious between those new Hollywood trailers and the start of the 1972 Russian movie. It reminded me of something I read in William Goldman’s Adventures In The Screen Trade:

“In narrative writing of any sort, you must eventually seduce your audience. But seduce doesn’t mean rape.”

Goldman was writing in a different era. He was contrasting movie writing to TV writing.

At the beginning of a movie, Goldman said, you have some time. You can seduce. Things are different in TV land — you gotta be aggressive, right in the first few seconds. Otherwise the viewer will simply change the channel.

Things have changed since Goldman wrote the above. Today, all Hollywood movies have become like TV. That doesn’t eliminate the fact that different formats allow you to do different things, and that not every movie needs to start with a heart-pounding sequence of bloody vampires banging their heads on the door.

The bigger point is, just because you know a trick, this doesn’t require you to use it at every damn opportunity. Holding back can in fact can make the show better.

A year ago, I read a book titled Magic And Showmanship, about… magic and showmanship. The author of that book, a magician named Henning Nelms, kept coming back to a principle he called conservation.

Conservation is keeping from overselling what you’ve got, and from making yourself out to be more skilled or powerful than absolutely necessary for the effect in question.

It’s a lesson that can apply to a lot of showmanship, including showmanship in print.

Anyways, I suspect nobody will take me up on a recommendation to read Nelms’s Magic And Showmanship, but recommend it I will. In order to sell it to you, I can only say that last year, I was even thinking of taking the ideas from this book and turning them into a full-blown course or training about running email promos, because I found the ideas so transferable.

In case you’re a curious type, or in case you simply want new ideas for running email promos:

https://bejakovic.com/nelms

Is the daily email marketplace glutted?

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I’m on the Amtrak from New York to Baltimore, sitting the wrong way, away from the direction of travel, bouncing up and down as trees and warehouses zoom by me. It’s not a great time to write a daily email.

​​Fortunately, a long-time reader fed me a good email prompt a few days ago. He wrote:

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For a while now, I’ve been feeling like I’m inundated with emails from copywriters, marketers and direct marketing companies.

Until a few months ago, I took pleasure in reading everything.

Now I don’t anymore.

[…]

Lately, I enjoy reading newsletters about what is happening in the world, novels, history books, detective stories, and business history textbooks.

I hope this metamorphosis of mine is normal.

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My reader’s message sums up the concept of the sophistication of the marketplace, as described by legendary marketer Gene Schwartz, in the experiences of one person.

A man will enter a specific marketplace. He will be new, interested, and engaged by just about everything there.

In time, he will become more selective, more skeptical, or even leave that specific marketplace altogether.

Is this a problem?

​​Is it a vote against ever starting a business in general?

​​Or is it a vote against starting a daily email newsletter right now?

Of course not.

The fact is, there are uncountably many humans alive on the planet right now. You only need a tiny number of them to be interested in what you are writing or selling right now to do very well for yourself and your business.

It’s much like a direct mail sales letter, which will typically only get a 2% response rate, even when mailed to a highly qualified list of prospects.

98 out of 100 targeted, pre-selected prospects won’t get the sales letter… or won’t bother to read it all the way to the order form… or won’t be persuaded to buy.

Only 2 out of 100 will actually respond and send in any money.

And yet many big fortunes over the past century have been built on those 2%.

The same applies to you today, with even more extreme numbers.

That said, it is undeniable that different formats – email newsletters as opposed to video courses as opposed to books — will attract different kinds of people, and in different mindsets and stages of sophistication.

In my experience, he more serious and successful people are, the more likely it is that they read books.

So if you do write a regular newsletter, it makes sense to adapt your best content, and turn it into a book. You will often reach great prospects who might be among the 98 out of 100 who would never read your newsletter, at least not today, before they really know you and trust you to have something worthwhile to say.

That was one of the motivations for my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters book.

​​That book was quick to write. And yet it’s one of the best thing I’ve ever done for my standing in the industry and for attracting quality readers to my newsletter — readers who might never have read otherwise.

For more info on this quick and yet worthwhile book:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Email coaching for sale

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When doctors go on strike, patient deaths either stay the same or go down. Such was the conclusion of a 2008 literature review by four professors of public health at Emory University.

The scientists looked at the results of five doctors’ strikes from 1976 to 2003.

​​They found that in the absence of doctors, deaths never went up, but often went down.

You can interpret that how you will. I know how I will interpret it, and it’s to tell you that when copywriters go on strike, sales either stay the same or go up.

Well, of course not every time. But in many situations, getting tricky with your messaging, optimizing for the sophistication of your market, or being clever and indirect actually harms rather than helps your sales.

One of the most successful of all copywriters, Gary Bencivenga, summed it up as the “duck for sale principle.” Gary wrote:

“If you are trying to sell a duck, don’t beat about the bush with a headline such as, ‘Announcing a special opportunity to buy a white-feathered flying object.’ You’ll get much better results with, ‘DUCK FOR SALE.'”

If you would like my guidance and help writing emails, which don’t need to be complicated or take a lot of time to get you results, I will soon have email copywriting coaching for sale. The only way to join it is to be on my email list first. You can sign up for that here.

How to spot a lie

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Four days ago, I sent out an email inviting readers to reply with one truth and one lie about themselves. It turned out to be both fun and informative.

I got hobuncha responses.

Inevitably, a few people didn’t follow the instructions I gave. Not much I can do there.

Others followed the instructions perfectly but then went one further, and told me which of their statements was the lie and which was the truth. That’s my fault. I forgot you can never be too specific in your CTA.

But the vast majority of people played the game as intended. As a result, I found out some interesting and true stuff about my readers. A curated selection of the most intriguing:

“In a small town in Thailand, a monkey on top of a tree threw a stump which hit my forehead and crushed part of my teeth.”

“Last April I appeared on the UK TV quiz show Countdown, 24 years after first applying as a 12-year-old and being told to wait for my vocabulary to develop.”

“I was almost bitten alive by a poorly-anesthetized tiger in an animal photoshoot session in Thailand when I was just a high-school student.”

“As a senior in high school, at a small, private day school in Harrisburg, PA, I set 2 school records in basketball. At 5’7”, I scored 44 points in one game and 309 points for the season.

So how did I do? Could I distinguish the true statements like the ones above, and separate them from the lies, like the following:

“I met Kevin Costner at the premiere of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and he was quite rude.”

“My daughter packed her own school lunch today and it was only waffles and syrup.”

“I got hit over the head with a stray chair at a pro wrestling show, and got to go backstage afterwards to meet the roster.”

I will tell you honestly, I dug myself into a hole at the start. I made a lot of wrong guesses. But I slowly realized two things kept happening over and over:

#1. When one statement was hyper-specific and the other was vague, it was more likely that the vague statement was true and the hyper-specific was false

#2. When one statement was outrageous and the other was bland, it was more likely that the outrageous statement was true and the bland statement was false

The common element to both of these realizations is “persuasion knowledge.” It’s kind of like the battle of wits between the Dread Pirate Roberts and Vizzini the Sicilian in the Princess Bride.

Bejacco the Croatian: “Only a great fool would not look to specific details to verify a statement. But I am not a great fool, and you know that I am not a great fool, therefore I can clearly not choose the hyper-specific statement in front of me!”

Spoiler alert:

In The Princess Bride, the Dread Pirate Roberts wins the battle of wits because he has developed immunity to iocaine powder, a deadly, odorless, tasteless poison that he puts into both cups, the one in front of him, and the one in front of Vizzini.

Likewise, over the course of playing this truth/lie game, I developed immunity to the persuasion knowledge of my readers. I then went on a tear, guessing almost all of the last two dozen truths/lies right, using the two realizations above and a few more like them. In spite of the bad start, I eventually ended up in the black, with more right guesses than not.

My ultimate point for you is a fundamental truth, something I heard a very great copywriter say once.

As a marketer, you have no power. Your only power is anticipation — knowing how your prospects are likely to think and behave, and adjusting for that.

And with that, let me end this email with a tease. I won’t tell you which great copywriter said the above. But I will tell you it is one of the A-list copywriters I built my little 10 Commandments book around.

​​If you haven’t gotten that yet, and you would like to see who is inside, and maybe unravel the riddle of who said that anticipation is the only power marketers have, you can find the book below:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandment

Good Will Hunting disease: Why you shouldn’t join Age of Insight

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“So why do you think I should work for the National Security Agency?”

Today is the last day to sign up for my Age of Insight live training. And since this is the last email I will send before the deadline, let me tell you why you shouldn’t sign up.

I call it Good Will Hunting disease.

As you might know, Good Will Hunting is movie about a tough-talking, blue-collar math genius from the slums of Boston, played by a young Matt Damon.

In one scene, Will is interviewing for a job at the NSA.

“You’d be working on the cutting edge,” says the NSA guy in a cocky sales pitch. “You’d be exposed to the kind of technology not seen anywhere else because it’s classified. Superstring theory. Chaos math. Advanced algorithms. So the question is, why shouldn’t you work for the NSA?”

Will nods his head and thinks. “Why shouldn’t I work for the NSA… That’s a tough one. But I’ll take a shot.”

And then he goes on a 2-minute rant, all about how he’d just be breaking codes the NSA, feeling good about doing his job well, but the real upshot of his work would be burned villages, dead American soldiers, lost factory jobs, drug epidemics, inflation, and poisoned baby seals.

Will finishes up his rant and smirks sarcastically. “So why shouldn’t I work for the NSA? I’m holding out for something better.”

Of course:

Your offer is nothing like a job at the NSA. And your pitch is nothing like the NSA recruiter’s pitch.

Still I bet you that your audience, on some level, suffers from Good Will Hunting disease.

Too smart. Too sophisticated. Too skeptical.

And if you need proof of it, just look inside yourself. Don’t you smirk and scoff and shrug off pitch for top-secret opportunities all the time, even if they are at the cutting edge, and even if they promise things you superstring theory and chaos math, or whatever the equivalent is in the marketing space?

And this is why I am not making a pitch for you to join the Age of Insight training. The only offer I will make you, unless you are holding out for something better, is to join my email list. Click here smart guy.

Daniel Throssell prompts me to put Gene Schwartz into a bigger context

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In response to my “Age of Insight” email yesterday, Australia’s best and favorite copywriter, Daniel Throssell, writes to ask:

I love how you think about this.

But aren’t your three levels of marketing kinda just expressions of market sophistication — and the different techniques required to make an ad succeed at each level?

You’ve probably heard about market sophistication. It’s an idea from Gene Schwartz’s book Breakthrough Advertising.

Basically, sophistication is a question of how many ads people in your market have seen previously. The more ads, the more sophisticated — and you gotta act accordingly.

At first, a simple promise will do. Then you need a bigger promise. Then you need a mechanism. Then you need a cooler mechanism.

And eventually, people get soooo bored with all your promises and mechanisms. You’re in the last stage of sophistication.

So Daniel is asking whether my “ages of marketing” — the Age of Promise, the Age of Positioning, the Age of Insight — are just a restatement of Gene’s stages of sophistication?

​​​​And is insight just another concept that’s hidden between the densely written lines of Breakthrough Advertising?

As often, my answer is both yes and no.

Yes — because pretty much all of marketing is contained in Breakthrough Advertising. This includes examples of proto-insight and insight-like techniques.

And no — because while pretty much all of marketing is contained in Breakthrough Advertising, there is one thing missing.

As far as I understand, Gene’s sophistication model is about individual markets. The way Gene has it, when a market reaches the ultimate level of sophistication, it eventually dies, and a new market is born out it:

The market for cigarettes dies, but the market for filter cigarettes is born, like a phoenix rising out of the ashtray.

And then the market for filter cigs goes through the same stages of sophistication, from naive to jaded, as the cigarette market went through.

Eventually, the market for filter cigarettes also dies, and yet another new market — the market for flavor in cigarettes — opens up. “Winston tastes like a cigarette should.”

Sounds reasonable, right? Human desires and gullibility are infinite, right?

Well, about that. That’s the one thing that’s missing from Gene’s magnificent Breakthrough Advertising.

Like I said, Gene’s sophistication model is about individual markets.

But it doesn’t account for what happens to both society and to individuals after many such deaths and rebirths.

So what happens? ​​What happens after decades of advertising, after thousands or millions of our personal money spent on cars, cigarettes, detergents, copywriting courses, and book-of-the-month clubs — all of which failed to really deliver on the deepest promises we were hoping they would fulfill?

I’ll tell you.
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What happens is that more and more people become guarded against any kind of advertising — not just bored with the claims in a given market.

What happens is low self-esteem — people start to suspect that there’s something wrong with them, and that even the most credible and amazing new offer can’t help them.

What happens is compulsive aimlessness — as is endemic in the info publishing world — where people still buy on occasion, but they never consume or implement.

That’s when you enter the Age of Insight. And that’s when insight techniques become useful beyond the techniques that Gene talks about in Breakthrough Advertising.

All that’s not to say that promises or mechanisms or positioning are obsolete. You can still sell and influence using just those.

But as Gene says, it’s a matter of statistics. And today, more and more people are becoming jaded, defeatist, or simply indifferent in response to classic advertising and marketing methods.

The good news is that it is possible to reach them — and to open up vast new markets for your offers.

How do you do it? That’s something I talk about on occasion in my daily email newsletter. In case you’d like to read that, and maybe find out how to reach those unreachable people, click here and sign up to get my dailiy emails.

Have we reached “peak storytelling”?

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This week’s New Yorker features a cartoon of a puzzled couple in front of an apartment door.

​​The man is holding a bottle of wine, so the couple are probably guests coming for a party. But they are hesitating, because the welcome mat in front of the door doesn’t say “Welcome”. Instead, it says,

“Welcome?”

This cartoon connected in my mind to a “law” I found out about a few day’s ago, Betteridge’s law, which states:

“If a headline asks a yes or no question, the answer is always no.”

Ian Betteridge is a technology journalist. And his argument was, if the answer to that yes/no question were yes, the writer would definitely tell you so, right away, as a matter of shocking fact.

Instead, the writer didn’t have enough proof to support his claim. But he decided to make it anyhow, as a question, in order to say something more dramatic than he could otherwise, and to suck you into reading. Like this:

“Will AI and Transhumanism Lead to the Next Evolution of Mankind, or Doom It?”

No. And no.

Betteridge’s law is an instance of the persuasion knowledge model.

​​That’s a fancy, academic term for the fact that people become aware of manipulative advertising and media techniques. And after people become aware, they also start resisting — “Don’t even bother reading this article, because the answer is sure to be no.”

That’s how in time, people become dismissive of intriguing headlines (“clickbait”), of being told something new about themselves (r/StupidInternetQuizzes/), even of effective stories (the entire TV Tropes website).

That’s not to say that curiosity, categorization, or stories no longer work or will not work as ways to persuade or influence.

But it does say that the effort and skill required to make them work today is a bit greater than it was yesterday — and it will be a bit greater still tomorrow.

And so it is with what I’ve been calling the Most Valuable Email trick.

Like stories, categorization, or curiosity, my MVE trick is based on fundamental human psychology.

​​It will continue to work forever — just how a well-told or fascinating story continues to work today, in spite of the fact that you probably have 20 story-based daily emails sitting in your inbox right now.

The thing is, if you act today, you get bonus points for using the MVE trick.

​​The day may come when the persuasion knowledge of the market becomes aware of this trick, and maybe even takes evasive measures. But today, practically nobody is aware of the MVE trick, especially in emails. As copywriter Cindy Suzuki wrote me after going through the Most Valuable Email course:

I’m looking back at your old emails with new eyes. You know that moment people get epiphanies and the entire world looks different? I’m feeling that way about your writing now. You’ve helped me unlock something I didn’t know existed. So incredible.

In case you’d like to take advantage of this opportunity while it’s still early days:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

The round red balloon of sophistication and awareness

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Imagine a round red balloon, filled tight with air and floating in the middle of a room.

Got that image in your mind?

Ok, then let me explain why it’s important.

You’ve probably heard of Gene Schwartz’s ideas of market sophistication and awareness.

These two ideas are critical in writing advertising that sells. That’s because they tell you how to 1) get your prospect’s attention and 2) have him believe you, at least for a bit.

In a nutshell, sophistication is how skeptical your prospect is. Awareness is how much time he has spent researching his problem.

But here’s the trouble. I learned about sophistication and awareness years ago. And today, I still don’t have a 100% intuitive grasp of these ideas. I always have to “count on my fingers” when it comes to adding up where my market is in terms of these two measures.

Maybe I’m just not very smart. Even so, there are other problems with sophistication and awareness.

For one thing, these are two separate dimensions. That’s complicated. One dimension is simpler and more elegant than two.

To muddle things more, sophistication and awareness are not orthogonal. If somebody has zero skepticism to your claims… odds are good he hasn’t spent much time researching the problem.

And also, parts of the awareness and sophistication scales are not relevant to most sales copy. You’re probably not getting hired to write to a stage 1 awareness market (“$4 off Safeway pork chops this Friday!”). And if you are, you’re not getting paid much for it.

Which brings us back to that round red balloon floating in the middle of a room.

That’s my image of the typical direct response market. It combines sophistication and awareness, at least the parts that are relevant to sales copy. And it forms one simple, easy-to-understand-and-visualize dimension.

And for people who are subscribed to my email newsletter, I went into detail about how the red balloon of sophistication and awareness works, and how it simplifies things. But it’s not something I am willing to put on my blog.

Why? Because it might scratch your itch a little too well. Because frankly, my goal with these blog posts is to get people onto my email lists, where I can have more direct and immediate contact with them.

If you don’t ever subscribe to anybody’s newsletters, I can understand. And fare well.

But if you do occasionally subscribe to newsletter’s, then consider subscribing to mine. If you do decide to try it, here’s where to go.