Persuasion

4,2,1,0… what comes next?

by

Let’s see if you can solve this mathematical riddle:

My grandmother came from four brothers and sisters…

My grandmother then had two kids, my aunt and my mom…

My mom only had one kid, me…

And I, barring some late-life religious conversion or late-night sexual slip-up, will end up with zero kids.

So the riddle is…

4, 2, 1, 0… what’s the next number in this sequence?

I mean, is there even a number?

Or is the human race doomed? Because I don’t think my family is all that unique.

I look around at people of my generation and I see them either childless or with fewer kids than their parents had at the same age… and definitely fewer than their grandparents or great grandparents had.

Do you have your answer to the riddle?

Here’s mine, or rather, here’s my prediction about what comes after 0:

People will start having more kids again. 1, 2, and maybe 4. Yes, even in rich, modern, urban societies, the ones that offer all the pleasurable temptations and alternatives to a young man or woman to settling down and raising children.

The statistics don’t bear me out yet. But I’m seeing anecdotal evidence for it. People I know, younger than me, getting married earlier… having kids earlier… having more kids. Stuff that was unimaginable to me at their age.

The theory supports me also.

The human brain loves to think linearly. To find a pattern and to keep that pattern going to eternity, like watching a snowball roll down an endless hill.

We love to think in this way about other humans too.

Except humans are not like snowballs down a hill.

We also have the ability to consciously choose our action and shape our identity. To stop rolling, to even turn around, and start hiking up the hill again.

And in fact, that’s often what happens, more often than you might think. History is full of examples of groups of humans — Puritans, Bolsheviks, hippies — choosing their identity in direct opposition to what came before them, or to what’s around them now. Sometimes with great influence.

I’m not sure what my point is.

Maybe it’s that there’s a powerful persuasion lesson in the above, for anybody who would sit down and unpack it a bit.

Or maybe my point is simply to try to convince you to give my Daily Email Habit service a try.

Because if you have kids, or are planning on it, I figure it’s way nicer today than it was 40, 20, or even 10 years ago.

Back then, the only option for most people was to go to work in somebody else’s office, from 9-5, and sit in a car for an hour or two to get there. With the time left over, maybe they’d see their kids only for a few minutes before bed.

Today, there are real alternatives. It’s never been easier to work for yourself, at home, with yourself as a boss.

Now here’s my pitch:

If you’re gonna work for yourself, at home, and have more free time than you would if you had a regular job, then it makes sense to write daily emails.

Daily emails promote what you do and ensure a certain security and continuity. Daily emails nurture an audience of previous customers and ready prospects who know you and trust you and are willing to give you money in the future also.

And daily emails allow you to do that without you having to spend 16 hours a day hunting for new business all the time.

If that makes sense, I’d like to suggest you take a look at the following service. It will help you start and stick with sending daily emails. And it’s completely different to all previous methods I know of that promised the same:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Why I don’t drink alcohol

by

I’m zoominating on the high-speed train from Barcelona to Valencia as I write this.

In between looking out the window at the countryside (sun, olive orchards, power line towers, factories, occasional ruins of medieval forts), I also making sure to regularly check what’s happening on the Internet, so you know, so I don’t miss out on something important.

A few minutes ago, this led me to a surging Reddit thread:

“Why do you not drink alcohol?”

Millions want to know, and millions more want to answer.

This thread caught my eye because I myself don’t drink alcohol, and haven’t for the past two years. Why?

Some top Reddit comments apply to me, some not:

– “I drank my lifetime supply” (I definitely did drink, regularly, for years, but having had my fill isn’t what made me stop.)

– “Getting older” (A part of it. With age, drinking just made me feel in general less healthy, though it was probably always true.)

– “Blackouts” (This was actually significant. I noticed that even moderate drinking started to make me not remember what I did the night before, and this scared me.)

– “Tastes bad” (Just add some water to it.)

– “Alcoholism runs in my family” (No. My dad is a lifelong teetotaler and my mom tends to start crying if she has a glass of wine.)

– “I don’t like who I am when I drink” (I like myself much better when I drink.)

So much for crowdsourced wisdom. It’s okay… but there’s one reason I didn’t see anybody on Reddit mention.

The fact is, over the past two years, not drinking alcohol become a part of my identity.

For me, not drinking was at first a health-related experiment… then a kind of on-off habit.

But whatever reasons I initially had have become completely secondary to the fact that now “I just don’t drink.” It’s not something I have to think about, pressure myself to do, feel I need to justify myself over.

Maybe there’s a lesson there?

The way I see it, if you want to make an appeal to people, then identity is as powerful of an appeal as you can make, and much more powerful than any kind of benefit or promise or warning.

This works with yourself as well.

Make something a part of your identity, and it becomes a non-issue to do it regularly, cheerfully, even in the face of hardships and obstacles.

There are intermediate steps, like I said. First experiment, then habit.

But my train’s a-nearing Valencia. So let me just say:

I don’t know if you identify with the sentiment, “I write. It’s just something I do.”

Writing has benefits, as you may know. It also has costs — time, thought, or blood, like Hemingway apocryphally said.

But writing can become just something you do, regardless. And then good things happen.

If you’d like to start an experiment with writing regularly, and maybe make a habit of it, and even an identity one day, then I can help. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The first time I tried it, I didn’t last very long

by

Dan Kennedy has a joke that goes something like, if we all stopped doing a thing in case the first time didn’t work out well, the human race would soon die out.

Get it? Get it? Wink wink, nudge nudge?

It’s about sex.

I bring this up for two reasons:

Reason one is that the first time I tried it — meaning writing emails, get your mind out of literotica section please — it didn’t work out well. Or actually I just didn’t last very long.

I believe this current newsletter, which has been running for 6+ years day in and day out, is something like my third or fourth attempt to stick to emailing consistently.

Reason two is because I want to share with you a case study I got from a reader named Jakub Červenka.

Jakub runs an online business called Muž 2.0. From what Google tells me, that translates from Czech into into Man 2.0. Because Jakub’s business is teaching men self-development stuff, specifically how to fix various bedroom problems.

Now, I happen to know from having exchanged lots of emails with Jakub over the years that his main thing is running ads on Facebook to a webinar that sells his core program.

But lately, Jakub gave another shot to daily emailing, even though it didn’t work out well the first time around. Jakub reports:

===

I had been sending emails daily and then stopped for a good part of this year mainly due to feeling burnt out and feeling like I was riding on a dead horse, writing emails about the same topic.

With your service, this block is gone. I like to see the puzzle and then read in your email how you personally used it. It’s great over-the-shoulder learning experience.

I also noticed how not wanting to break the streak is motivating me – even more so than I don’t know, say making potentially money from making a sale to my list… that’s crazy. I am ashamed to admit it, as it is completely irrational, but it’s the truth. And probably not so surprising to anyone in the copywriting world, we know we are not rational beings, but still, this surprised me.

Also, I used a few of your prompts in my Black Friday promo. I made crazy good offer to my list, (20 of my flagship courses for 40% of the price) due to some messed up technical stuff ended up selling 23, which with some up/cross/down sells brought home close to $20k in 3 days… my best Black Friday yet.

So it was a good offer, but I was not promoting it in any other way than by e-mails and your inspiration was part of it, so you can say that your service contributed to this result. Which is true and it restored my resolve to write daily.

===

The service Jakub is referring to is my Daily Email Habit. It makes it easier to come up with a daily email topic every day, plus it has an in-email streak counter to keep you accountable.

Like Jakub says, why the streak counter works is not particularly rational… but it can be very effective.

And the results?

Jakub already had a successful business, and he had all the pieces in place. Reintroducing daily emails helped him make another $20k last month that he might not have made otherwise.

Your particular situation? Only you can really answer that question.

One thing I’m sure of, if you’re planning to ever or restart daily emails, the sooner you do, the sooner you will see results. Yes, even if you tried it before and it felt like riding on a dead horse.

For more info on Daily Email Habit, and how it can help you start and stay consistent with daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Don’t think of an Iranian drone

by

A couple nights ago, I rewatched the 1997 comedy Wag The Dog… as research for work.

Robert De Niro plays a political communications consultant. He’s brought in for clean-up after news breaks that the President of the United States has had sex with a 15-year-old girl in a closet behind the Oval Office.

The situation is bad. De Niro needs at least a day to think up a way out of this sticky situation. Fortunately, the President is on a visit to China.

“Keep him there,” De Niro tells the President’s handlers. “Say he’s sick. And say his visit has nothing to do with the B3 bomber.”

“Sir, as far as I know, there’s no such thing as a B3 bomber,” says a White House staffer.

“That’s exactly what I said,” says De Niro.

The rest of the movie is about how De Niro’s character, along with a Hollywood producer played by Dustin Hoffman, orchestrate a make-believe war against Albania (“They seem shifty”), which happens entirely on the evening news.

I thought about this while reading a news article yesterday, titled, “New Jersey drone cluster sightings prompt call for ‘state of emergency.'”

In case you haven’t heard, the state of New Jersey is under attack by swarms of unexplained drones. An FBI official explained:

“Are we concerned there are nefarious intentions that could cause either an actual security or public safety incident? There’s nothing that is known that would lead me to say that, but we just don’t know. And that’s the concerning part of it.”

Could it be Iran? China? Perhaps the Albanians?

“There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States,” said the Pentagon press secretary, “and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States.”

So you’re saying it could be the Albanians…

Look, I’m just fooling around. I’m certainly not claiming there are any parallels between the current drone situation and Wag The Dog. As far as I know, there’s no evidence that the drone situation is any kind of ploy to cover up some new atrocity being committed by people in power as we speak.

(See what I did there?)

All I really want to do is to introduce you to the powerful concept of a “frame.”

A frame is all the stuff that goes on in your head before, after, and around a specific message. A frame is how the phrase “SHUT UP!” can be interpreted in your head as an insult… a joke between friends… a cry of surprise or disbelief… a sign of mental breakdown… and probably 10 other things, all depending on the context.

There’s a guy named George Lakoff, who is a real-life version of Robert De Niro’s character in Wag The Dog.

Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at Berkeley, and he has long advised Democratic candidates on messaging and communication.

Lakoff believes that frames are such powerful and valuable communication tools that he wrote a guidebook, all about how to use them in politics, which he titled, “Don’t Think Of An Elephant.”

Because you can activate a frame even if you seemingly deny or negate that frame.

Frames are definitely an interesting topic, and it makes sense to actively play with them in high-stakes situations like political messaging.

But in everyday life, it can be exhausting and paralyzing to try to “control the frame,” as pick up artists like to say.

Fortunately, it’s not necessary to be constantly aware and constantly in control of the frame as you go about your life.

Because you can simply adopt a frame which will always serve you well.

That frame is that everything that happens works in your favor and is there for your benefit.

It works in politics, and in daily emails too, where it’s often expressed by the maxim, “Nothing bad ever happens if you write a daily email.” Everything becomes fodder for the content beast.

If you’d like to see how I and a group of other smart folks are taking our everyday frustrations, thoughts, and even stupid news items, and turning them into daily emails that both entertain and sell, you can find that inside my new service Daily Email Habit.

I’m not saying this service could transform your life, or be the equivalent of hitting the lottery. The people who subscribe to Daily Email Habit have reported good results, but nothing so far that would lead me to say this is the one thing you will ever need in your life for success, happiness, and contentment.

And that’s the concerning part of it.

For more info on Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

When scarcity wears out, what then?

by

I only have a half-dozen print books in my apartment. The print books I do have are there because I feel the book is simply so important that I want it around me, available even if the grid goes down, sitting there on the shelf, catching my attention from time to time, inviting me to pull it down and open it up and look inside once again.

One of these half-dozen books is the Robert Collier Letter Book.

If I were ever stranded on a desert island… if for some unlikely reason I wanted to get off and rejoin civilization… and if my only hope of rescue was to write an effective sales letter that I would mail to millions of homes around the country… then I’d want Collier’s book next to me under that palm tree.

Collier’s book has got everything — rattlesnakes, beheadings, genies in the lamp, war heroes, romance, adventure, silk stockings, wagons of coal, dinosaurs.

But let me get to the point of this email:

Collier at some point was selling an O. Henry book set by mail. He sold literally millions of copies of this book set, in a single year.

How?

Well, prices of paper, binding, and labor were increasing (it was during World War I). Collier’s sales letters all emphasized that future editions of the book would have to cost more, and people saw that it must be true. In fact, Collier found that his most effective headline was:

“Before The Price Goes Up!”

But when the price eventually did go up, sales of the O. Henry dropped to such low levels that it wasn’t profitable to mail out any more sales letter.

Testing out different copy produced no improvement.

What then?

Side note:

One trick I practice (I think I got it from John Carlton) is to stop when I come across a puzzle like this. Rather than reading on to find out the answer — and there is an answer — I ask myself, what would I do here?

If I were selling something, using scarcity language to knock in a bunch of golf balls that are close to the hole… what then?

Time to move on? Or time for a new product? Or for more leads? Or what?

Think about that for a moment. Really, try it, now.

And once you’re done…

Then read on to find out the answer, in Collier’s words:

===

So we decided to try another kind of hurry-up, and the one we hit upon was: “Last Chance To Get Jack London free!” Mind you, we had been giving Jack London (or Oppenheim or the mystery and detective stories, or some other premium) for six years, and people had come to expect it. They had grown tired of hearing of raises in price, probably no longer believed further raises possible, but the threat of losing the premium was something different.

Strange as it may seem, putting in that one line changed the results over night. Back went the sales to the previous year’s figures. Ads pulled again. And circulars — how they pulled! For the second time we sold $1,000,000 worth of O. Henry books in a single year!

===

Point being, when one kind of scarcity wears out, move on to another kind. From price… to free bonus… to a special limited edition… to an event at a given time, happening only once…

There are lots of aspects of an offer that can become scarce, that you can focus on. As one more example, take my Daily Email Habit service. I’ve repeatedly gotten variations of the following question about it:

===

Looks so good, if I subscribe do I get access to the previous daily prompts from when you started this service?

===

The answer is no, and to emphasize it, I even number the daily email “puzzles” that go out, much like daily Wordle puzzles are numbered. (Today’s daily email puzzle, based on which I’m writing this email, is #18.)

It seems reasonable to me to only give access to those “issues” of Daily Email Habit that go out while somebody is subscribed, much like with a magazine subscription.

I think this is a way to respect people who signed up earlier… it’s a motivation to sign up now, rather than later, and avoid missing out on any new puzzles… and in my mind, it assigns greater value to each puzzle that goes out — it makes each puzzle feel more unique. You either get it, or you don’t.

If you’d like to get tomorrow’s daily email puzzle (#19) before it flutters away, or to find out what Daily Email Habit is all about:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Build your list by… writing

by

Last Wednesday, I got a message from Chavy Helfgott, who is a copywriter and brand strategies, and who also happens to subscribe to my Daily Email Habit service. Chavy wrote:

===

At least for the beginning, I’m posting my emails on LinkedIn as well (as I have a large following there) and – I got 8 new subscribers from today’s post! This is after neglecting my LinkedIn account and rarely posting for quite a while.

Thank you for this. It feels amazing to have had a concrete result so fast.

===

Yesterday, I wrote that I’ll one day have an official launch for Daily Email Habit, but that day is not today, or any time soon.

I also invited people to reply if they are interested in Daily Email Habit, so I can send them the full details. A good number of people did reply.

I sent the folks the details… and then I asked myself, what exactly am I doing? What is my purpose in creating this extra obstacle for others and work for myself?

And so I’ve decided to open up Daily Email Habit to my entire list, both to stop myself from fielding these one-on-one messages, and to make Daily Email Habit available to people who might benefit from it.

If you’re interested in Daily Email Habit, and how it might possibly help you, the full info is at the link below.

I can tell you that the core promise of Daily Email Habit is a daily nudge to write your own daily email.

The effect of consistent nudging is consistent daily emails. And the effect of consistent daily emails is that they grow your expertise and authority… create or deepen your relationship with your audience… build up a stockpile of interesting content can reuse as you see fit… and make you better at writing, in all formats.

Plus, you can do like Chavy is doing, and simply post your daily email to LinkedIn or wherever and get people to opt in for your list. And yes, it does work — she sent me a screenshot of 8 shiny new subscribers from last Wednesday to prove it.

For full info on Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Wickedful

by

I like to go see movies without knowing anything about them other than they’re playing at my local movie theater. I don’t want to know the genre, the actors in it, the plot summary, the reviews.

“Let them surprise me,” I say with a magnanimate sweep of my hand, as I hand over my 7 euro at the box office.

And so this Wednesday, I went to see Wicked. I only knew it had something to do with the Wizard of Oz. But I was surprised to find it’s three hours long, and a musical of the kind I don’t like, and a heavy-handed morality play to boot.

I emerged from the theater several years older, no wiser, and looking desesperately for something, anything, a little shred from this ordeal that I could reclaim for my daily email.

And there was something.

In between all the unendful singing, Wicked also has bits of dialogue. And the dialogue regularly makes use of a little word-trick. Each time it happened, it put a smile on my face and lightened the heavy burden of watching this movie.

I won’t spell out exactly what this word-trick is. But perhaps you can guess? I’ve tried to use it myself numerious times in this email.

My point for today is that it makes sense to make up and use your own words, terms, slang, even if it’s nonsense, or silly. It lightens the burden of reading (or watching) otherwise valuable but dry material.

You might shrug at that. Perhaps it’s because you’ve heard this advice before. Perhaps it’s because you think it doesn’t apply to you, and the serious business you are engagified in.

So there’s a bigger and to me much more interesting point I want to share with you. But I will save it for my email tomorrow. It’s not that humor is important, though it is. It’s not that it can be done in every field, even if your field is accounting for mortuary offices.

Rather, the point I want to share with you is a surprising idea I heard recently in the crypto space, which applies much more broadly, to business and perhaps to life.

Maybe you think that’s a grand claim. I can only promise to pay it off tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if you would like to learn a different trick, one that can lighten the burden of reading AND writing daily emails, you might like the enfollowing:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Industry gossip you shouldn’t care about but probably do

by

Yesterday, I exchanged a couple emails with the “The World’s Most Obsessed Ad Archivist,” Lawrence Bernstein.

Along with a few decades and deep connections in the direct response industry, Lawrence has the distinction of being one of only a handful of people to be called out as a “valued resource” by A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga, at the climax of Gary’s legendary Farewell Seminar.

I promoted a little offer of Lawrence’s a couple months back. Lawrence was good enough to tell me yesterday that the 150+ sales of that offer that I helped make were slightly more than he got from his own house file.

That’s gratifying to read. And considering I only have a modest-sized list, it’s proof of the effect of daily emailing done right. But wait. There’s more.

Lawrence then went on to say how this compares to big-marketer results he’s been privvy to recently:

===

By contrast, and I realize this isn’t apples to apples…

There are/”were” some BIG marketers who thrived on the affiliate merry-go-round of ubiquitous as they are shallow $2K courses, usually backed up by webinar selling.

That model hasn’t had much of a pulse — at least as far as I can see — for a year or so. One of my subscribers and friends, who writes for one of the big financial outfits wrote me this last February, regarding those $2K offers:

“Been on a massive downslide ever since the FTC stepped in against Agora Financial – and in general the most recent “home-runs” have been more like inside-the-park home runs. They rarely work externally… and they’re mostly just milking house files with backend launches.

I’ve seen groups repeatedly run promo’s bringing in names at 10% of BE just because they had nothing else…

I’ve seen huge affiliate pushes for webinar launches that resulted in 750,000 names on a hotlist… and the sales were so low the affiliates payouts were ZERO…”

===

Let me repeat that last number because it’s so crazy: 750,000 qualified leads… and effectively ZERO in profits.

I read something similar in an email from Shiv Shetti recently.

Shiv shared stuff he’s heard inside private masterminds, gossip about specific flashy gurus in direct marketing-related niches.

These are guys who are publicly making millions and living a Floyd Mayweather lifestyle… who are in private broke, nearing bankruptcy, or are facing revolt from the customers and clients they have managed to rope in.

Maybe you’re not in the direct response industry. Still, I’m telling you this in case you ever find yourself looking around, and seeing that everyone else is doing so much better than you are… maybe even including people who got going well after you did.

You can’t really know anybody else’s full reality. And if you’re like me, you don’t even want their reality, even if it’s not all rotten.

From what I can tell, the insecurity about how well others are doing is simply a way to focus the general human desire for ANYTHING BUT WHAT I HAVE NOW.

“People are like cats,” says Dan Kennedy, “they always want to be in the other room.”

The trouble is, this kind of “But look where everybody else is!” comparison is such a fundamental part of human nature, or at least my own, that there’s no easy, quick, and permanent fix for it.

But certain things do help. Awareness of it… inquiry about what’s really going on, and if the surrounding thoughts are true or not… focus on your own work, instead of gawking around.

And maybe the following exercise.

It’s quick, it’s easy, and it might just give you a permanent fix, at least a partial one in your business, and maybe even in how you feel about it.

If you have a couple minutes and an open mind:

https://bejakovic.com/things-worthy-of-compliment-in-12-of-my-competitors/

An old Soviet joke from a modern Russian prison

by

Here’s a Soviet joke for you:

A shy, unathletic, bookish boy is walking across a snow-covered courtyard in Moscow, past a group of kids who are playing football.

The ball rolls to the boy’s feet. He decides against habit to join in the game. He kicks the ball awkwardly, and it veers off and crashes through the window of the janitor’s apartment on the ground floor.

The janitor emerges. He’s a huge, bearded man, who has clearly been drinking. He roars and starts to chase the boy.

The boy runs for his life, thinking to himself, “Why do I need football in the cold and the snow? I should be at home, safe and comfortable, reading a book, conversing with my favorite author Ernest Hemingway.”

Meanwhile, Ernest Hemingway is in a Havana bar, drinking rum, with a salsa band playing next to him. It’s hot. Hemingway thinks to himself, “God I’m sick of this heat and rum and salsa. I should be in Paris, the center of the world, drinking Cavalos with my great friend Jean-Paul Sartre, and discussing philosophy.”

Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Sartre is in a Paris cafe, in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He’s taking part in an abstract but heated discussion that means nothing to him. “God how I’m sick of all these cigarettes and cafes and empty discussions,” thinks Sartre. I should be in Moscow, talking to my friend, the great novelist Platonov, about things that are real and mean something.

Meanwhile, back in Moscow, Platonov is running across a snow-covered courtyard. And he growls through his gritted teeth, “God I swear if I ever catch him, I’ll kill the little bastard.”

That’s from the memoirs written by Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. Navalny wrote down the Soviet joke above — “my all-time favorite joke” — while in prison in the Pokrov correctional colony.

You might know Navalny’s story. Back in 2020, he was poisoned by the Russian secret service with a nerve toxin, almost died, but somehow made it to Germany to get medical treatment.

He recovered over the course of months. During this time, he cold-called Russian secret service agents and tricked them into revealing how they had poisoned him (I wrote about the crazy story ​back in December 2020​).

In spite of the assassination attempt, Navalny decided based on his principles to return to Russia.

He was promptly arrested as soon as he landed at the Moscow airport. He was then charged with embezzlement, fraud, and extremism, and was tossed in jail.

That was back in 2022.

Navalny never made it out of jail. He died earlier this year, on February 16, at age 47, under mysterious circumstances in the “Polar Wolf” prison, which sits in Western Siberia above the polar circle. “All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out but did not yield positive results,” the prison statement read.

I’m telling you this because somehow, during all this, Navalny remained cheerful and optimistic, in spite of the fact he was in prison in Siberia, in spite of the fact he had a 19-year sentence, in spite of the fact he knew he was really in for life, one way or another.

All that’s to say, if you think that whatever you’re writing about is too serious for joking, that your audience cannot and will not stand lightheartedness, that certain topics are sacred, well, it might be worth reading some of Alexei Navalny’s posts from prison. They are fascinating, inspiring, and well-written. Plus they might give you a change of mind on some things.

In case you’re curious:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/alexei-navalny-patriot-memoir

Smug, yet falsely modest

by

I plopped onto my couch this morning and ripped open the latest New Yorker. I skipped the first few pages by instinct — after all, they’re just ads. “Except,” I said to myself, “that’s kind of my job?”

So I flipped back to page one.

What I saw was a two-page ad for AI company Anthropic, which makes Claude, a ChatGPT competitor.

The Claude logo took up the entire left page.

On the right page, the headline read, “Late bloomer” (including the quotes).

The body copy then went on to say that Claude might not be the first AI chatbot to market. But this was by design, the ad explained, so Claude could be so good, and so safe, and so useful as it happens to be. “We build AI you can trust,” concluded the copy

In a way, this kinda sounded like the famous Avis ad, “Avis is only No. 2,” which turned being second in a market into an advantage.

Or maybe it kinda sounded like the famous Volkswagen “Lemon” ad, which flipped quality concerns into a demonstration of higher standards.

The Anthropic ad kinda sounded like that… but it failed.

Because those headlines — “Avis is only No.2,” “Lemon” — really were objections that people were throwing at Avis and Volkswagen.

Whoever wrote this ad for Anthropic could have gone that same route by saying something like “Also-ran” in the headline.

Instead, they went the board-pleasing “Late bloomer” route, which is not any kind of insult or objection, but in fact a kind of smug self-compliment.

I can’t say whether this Anthropic ad will prove to be effective in any way, and neither can Anthropic. Because this ad is a typical “tombstone ad,” with no mechanism to track response.

All I can tell you is that this headline + body copy violate a kind of core rule of effective communication.

That rule is contrast.

If you say about a person that he is smug yet effective, then there is some tension and power in that description, because of the contrast. Plus, you get bonus points for transparency.

On the other hand, if you describe someone as “smug, yet falsely modest,” then at best you’ll confuse your audience based on what they were expecting. At worst, you’ll sound repetitive, mealy-mouthed, or self-serving, which is what I felt about this Anthropic ad.

So use contrast for power. Avoid contrast for blandness.

Also, if you haven’t done so yet, consider reading my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters. It doesn’t have anything to do with this email, and so I won’t pretend otherwise. The only thing I will say in favor of this book is that it’s short yet cheap. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments