Psychology Behind Advertising

The beginnings of empire: How Agora made its first sales

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You look out your window, past your gardener, who is busily pruning the lemon, cherry, and fig trees… amidst the splendor of gardenias, hibiscus, and hollyhocks.

The sky is clear blue. The sea is a deeper blue, sparkling with sunlight.

A gentle breeze comes drifting in from the ocean, clean and refreshing, as your maid brings breakfast in bed.

For a moment, you think you have died and gone to heaven.

But this paradise is real. And affordable. In fact, it costs only half as much to live this dream lifestyle… as it would to stay in your own home!

What you’ve just read is the opening of the International Living sales letter.

Bill Bonner — the founder of Agora, a $1B+ publishing company — used this sales letter to launch his first newsletter over thirty years ago. The letter supposedly brought in $3 for every $1 of advertising spend. Today, it still continues to bring in new paying readers.

I bring it up to illustrate a powerful marketing truth, which I first heard from another famous copywriter, Dan Kennedy:

Sell escape, not improvement

Bonner wasn’t selling people on eking out more from their meager social security. He was selling them escape, to heaven, with nothing more than what they already had. Well, with nothing more but a subscription to International Living.

You too can do the same. ​​Selling people a lighter shade of drab is hard work. Selling them a bright and exciting new color, well, that’s the kind of approach that can help you start a billion-dollar empire.

Speaking of escape:

Imagine checking your email every day, and among the dozens of boring, pushy, or irrelevant messages from God-knows-who, you see it.

It’s a daily email, one that I sent you. It talks about marketing and persuasion, but mostly, it’s a way to escape for a few moments.

For a moment, you think you have died and gone to heaven. But this paradise is real, and surprisingly affordable. In fact, it’s free. You can sign up to make this dream a reality by clicking here.

Shortcuts in bear-and-wolf country

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For the past several days, I’ve been hiding in the wilderness in Croatia.

I came to bear-and-wolf country for a break from the city and to avoid having to celebrate my birthday.

It’s been mostly good, except not one wolf, not one bear. Beyond that, this place (Risnjak, if you ever need somewhere to hide) is very nice.

Now, even in the wilderness, you can learn something useful about human brains and persuasion.

For example, today, I wanted to see two things: a lake and a park.

I asked my host how to get to the lake.

(Bear with me for a moment now, because we get into some simple geometry.)

It turned out the location of Bejako, lake, and park were like this:

Bejako —– Mountain
|                        |
|                        |
Park ——– Lake

So my host told me that to get to the lake, I’d need to head out, pass the mountain peak, and then turn right.

So I did. I found the lake. It was nice.

And then, completely on default, without consulting the map, I headed back from the lake, across the mountain peak, to my original starting point, so I could get to the park.

I hope I haven’t lost you with all this topology.

If you look at my diagram above it should be clear how stupid I was, and how I spent an unnecessary 40 minutes in the car.

Because the location where I was halfway through the day, the lake, was about 10 minutes away from where I wanted to go, the park. I only figured that out at the very end.

And now the persuasion point of all this:

People are not logical. They will not choose what is best for them in some grand and impartial scheme of things.

Human brains love shortcuts, even when those shortcuts mean a three-times longer distance in real life.

Thing is, these mental shortcuts are well-known and predictable.

It is your job as a copywriter to catalogue these shortcuts, and to use them to guide your prospect where you want him to go.

What’s that? You want an example of what I mean by “mental shortcut”?

Well, here’s a powerful one which I unfortunately take all the time:

Mental Shortcut #1: People will almost always take the disinterested advice of others rather than trying to figure out something on their own.

For more shortcuts, as they come out, you might like my daily email newsletter.

More “maybe” for more influence

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Right now, I’m waiting at the airport. In front of me is a little girl riding a Shaun the Sheep suitcase.

I’ve never seen one of these before. It’s got a cool design (S. the Sheep on top, Union Jack below, suitcase inside). It also has wheels and works as a push bike. That’s how the little girl is using it now.

I was so impressed by the suitcase and by how much fun the girl was having, that when she rode by the first time, I stared at her and smiled. (That’s not a weakness I normally indulge in.) The girl spotted me smiling at her and looked away, embarrassed.

She kept rolling around, going in circles.

But I had stuff to do. I started checking my phone. I then got out my laptop to write this email.

Meanwhile, the girl kept passing in front of me, making ever more elaborate attempts to retrieve my attention. I cruelly kept writing. She kept riding around, until she finally stopped in front of me flailing her arms.

I’ve read this is a fundamental truth about human behavior.

In general, if you want to instill a new behavior, negative reinforcement can work, though not terribly well.

Positive reinforcement works much better.

But what works best of all is intermittent reinforcement. As Robert Sapolsky once put it, you never get more behavior out of an organism than when you introduce a “maybe” into the outcome.

That’s something to keep in mind when you’re trying to influence, in real life or online.

But maybe writing about influencing a 5-year-old human organism sounds a little callous, even for me. So I’ll wrap up this email here, and get back to admiring this girl’s suitcase-riding skills.

One more thing:

I write a daily email newsletter about influence and marketing. It’s a cold-hearted affair but some people find it interesting. If you want to get my emails (much like what you’ve just read) in your inbox each day, you can sign up right here.

How to agitate any market’s problem

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I kept glancing left and right. Each time I spotted another bicyclist, my fears were confirmed.

I went for a bike ride today.

It was hot. It was smoggy. I had to compete for roadspace with tons of cars and trucks.

But that’s not what really cooked my liver.

I kept glancing around. I soon realized that, out of all the other bikers I passed, I was the only one wearing a helmet.

Food delivery guys… little kids on oversized mountain bikes… pretty girls in big pantaloons on “classic” bikes…

Nobody had a helmet. I was the only one dorky enough to be concerned with my safety in this way.

This growing realization put me in a state of mild panic. Which is pretty strange. If anything, I should have felt safer and superior wearing my protective pudding padding.

But here’s the thing:

Loneliness, which is a horrible physiological reaction involving tightened blood vessels and gurgling in the gut, has two forms.

One form is the familiar one, when you’re literally alone, in your house, like during lockdown.

The other form is when you’re surrounded by lots of people — but in some significant way, they are all strangers. You’re in a crowd, but you don’t belong.

As you can probably guess, this human instinct can be used to “guide” your prospects in the direction you want.

“I really sucked at the piano and it seemed hopeless…”

That’s the level at which most headlines stop. It works.

But could we do better? John Caples could:

“They laughed when I sat down at the piano…”

In short, the vast majority of people, myself included, want to be consistent with the herd. If you’re lagging in some noticeable way behind the others, you’re liable to start feeling lonely, and to wind up in a state of mild panic.

So when you write your sales copy, remember this:

An easy way to agitate any market’s problem is simply to introduce an audience.

You know how sometimes you feel lonely? Getting an email from me at that point won’t fix that. But it might help, just a tiny bit. So if you want to get a bit of protection against loneliness, and maybe get some lessons about persuasion and marketing in the process, sign up for my daily email newsletter here.

Social proof concentration and when not to use it

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It all happened within three or four days. Ben Settle, Brian Kurtz, Abbey Woodcock, Kevin Rogers, and David Deutsch all emailed about the same topic:

Reclusive A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos was finally offering a training. He would reveal his best-kept, most profitable secrets to raise funds for his cousin’s cancer treatment.

The first email I got on the topic, I thought, this is interesting — but I’ve already got plenty of copywriting trainings as is. Second email, I thought, another email about that same thing. Third email, maybe I should get this. Fourth email, I better get this now while I still can.

This experience was an illustration of a persuasion principle I read about in a book called The Catalyst. The principle is called concentration.

In a nutshell, all instances of social proof are not the same. If you can get a bunch of people to independently recommend your thing, and they do it in real quick succession, it’s much more powerful than having it all spread out. If it’s spread out, then your prospect can forget about each individual piece of social proof, or rationalize it away. If it’s concentrated, he cannot.

This idea might might or might not be useful if you’re writing a piece of direct response copy. (You’ll have to think about it and make up your own mind.)

But if you’re interested in persuasion more broadly, then the principle of concentration definitely has immediate application. If you’re marshaling an army of lieutenants who will all fight for your cause, it makes sense to focus their attack on one specific point, at one specific time.

But here’s a question to leave you thinking:

Concentration clearly worked on me and got me to pay Parris some $300 for his very valuable training.

But are there situations where concentrating your message might be a less efficient use of your resources?

​​I personally think so. If you agree with me, and you can name some specific situations, I’d love to hear from you. Write in and let me know.

Salvation for low self-esteem prospects

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Martin Luther was obsessed with images of the devil’s butt.

Luther was tormented, day after day, by the awareness of his sins and impurities.

He went to confession so often and confessed in such detail that his confessors grew angry.

Had Martin Luther been born today, there’s a good chance he would be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and medicated accordingly.

But because Luther was born in the right environment for his particular kind of crazy, he went on to become one of the most influential persons of the last thousand years.

Point being, a seeming weakness or fault can actually be a tremendous strength — in the right circumstances.

Yesterday, I promised to tell you one way you can convince your prospects that success for them is probable, and not just possible.

This is something I picked up in a talk by Rich Schefren. Rich said that one of the biggest things you have to do as a marketer is increase your prospect’s self-esteem.

And the way to do that is to take something your prospect doesn’t like about himself… and to twist it, so it becomes a potential strength.

“You say you’re obsessed with images of the devil’s butt? That’s actually a good thing. It means you’re on the lookout for moral weakness, which can help you and others from sliding into sin.”

Of course, you’re probably not selling to Martin Luther types.

But with a bit of thinking, you can show your prospect how his procrastination… or shiny-object addiction… or never following through… are just bad manifestations of a good kind of crazy inside him. In slightly different circumstances, the underlying positive characteristics would make him a success.

And how could he change his circumstances in the right way? The path to salvation is quick and easy. It lies in taking you up on your offer.

Here’s an offer that is sure to help you rid yourself of intrusive images of demonic behinds: I write a daily email newsletter. It talks about the fine points of persuasion and copywriting. And if you’d like to keep yourself far from the temptation to slack off in your learning about persuasion and copywriting, then click here to subscribe.

“Reality is a shared hallucination”

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“A student working under the direction of anthropologist Edward T. Hall hid in an abandoned car and filmed children romping in a school playground at lunch hour. Screaming, laughing, running and jumping, each seemed superficially to be doing his or her own thing. But careful analysis revealed that the group was moving to a unified rhythm.”

I ventured out of my apartment today for a rare night-time sortie into the city. And I found a proper summer evening outside:

Teenagers stood around on curbs in groups, giggling to themselves.

Couples strolled down the street and talked in a self-absorbed world.

An occasional single person, just getting out of work at 7:30pm, walked alone, staring at the ground and looking beaten.

All this reminded me of an article that I read years ago, just when I was starting to learn about copywriting. I want to share it with you tonight.

Let me warn you first that this article has no copywriting tactics in it, and nothing about marketing.

But it does talk about human psychology on a really fundamental level, which I haven’t seen discussed much elsewhere.

The article affected me very much. It’s stuck with me for years. It’s colored how I approach marketing, and how I see the world.

It was written by one Howard Bloom. Originally a music publicist for big names like Prince and Billy Joel, Bloom also wrote about group behavior in his spare time.

The quote up top is from one such article of Bloom’s, titled “Reality is a shared hallucination.” That’s the article I read many years ago, and the one I think you might find interesting.

​​In case you’re curious, here’s the link:

https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Reality-is-a-shared-hallucination-3412882.html

My brief and curious career as a stock analyst

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Back in 2014, I quit the one and only proper job I’ve ever had, as a buzzing little drone in a software company. I then started something I was completely unqualified for:

I became a stock analyst.

To be fair, all I was really doing was writing front-end content for The Motley Fool. But the very fact anybody would pay me to write about stocks was outrageous.

Not only did I know nothing about finance, or stocks, or business… but I also didn’t care.

There was nothing less interesting to me than how the price of Apple stock is moving, and whether NVIDIA would be a good buy at $19.

But here’s the kink in this story:

I spent each day reading about a new company, and writing up a 500-word blog post. “Yes, it’s a good buy.” “No, it won’t succeed in a new market.”

I had no idea what I was talking about. But a funny thing started to happen.

I was becoming interested in these companies. And by extension, in their stock prices. And yes, I even became interested in finance, and what all the different accounting numbers meant.

This, of course, has a very powerful implication for copywriting. The technical term for it is a “curiosity gap.”

Of course, people don’t get curious about a question they know the answer to. But they also don’t get curious about a question where their knowledge is non-existent.

The sweet spot is somewhere between these two extremes. Actually, it’s much closer to the “I know this answer” extreme.

In other words, if you want people to be curious about what you have to say, they must already know a lot about your topic.

But what if they don’t? Well, then it’s your job to tell them all about NVIDIA, in such a way that even a 2014 version of me would listen.

Finally, here’s a hot stock tip for you:

Click here and subscribe to my daily email newsletter. There’s actually nothing about finance in my emails. But if you’re interested in marketing and copywriting, I can fill in the occasional curiosity gap on those topics.

The $3.9-billion argument for soft, believable persuasion

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Michael Burry, the first guy to figure out how to make money from the subprime mortgage crisis, lost out in a way.

Burry saw the crisis coming. He realized he could make money from it by buying something called a credit default swap. This would pay out big time once crappy mortgage bonds failed.

Burry ran a hedge fund. He invested much of the money in his control in these credit default swaps. But this was a massive opportunity. Burry wanted to invest more. So he tried to raise money for a new fund, which would buy more credit default swaps.

Trouble was, Burry was an awkward guy, and not great at persuading. He shocked people with his predictions of catastrophe. Nobody gave him more money to invest.

Fast forward nine months. Burry’s ideas had spread around the industry. So another investor, John Paulson, attempted the exact same thing Burry had tried to do. From The Big Short:

“Paulson succeeded, by presenting it to investors not as a catastrophe almost certain to happen but as a cheap hedge against the remote possibility of catastrophe.”

This brings up a fundamental rule of persuasion. It’s perhaps the most important rule of them all:

Only tell people something that they are ready to accept.

In some situations, this can mean you don’t start with your biggest promise, your strongest proof, or your most shocking prediction. In the words of Gene Schwartz, the best thinker on this topic:

“The effectiveness of your headline is as much determined by the willingness of your audience to believe what it says, as it is by the promises it makes.”

So did Michael Burry lose out? Depends on your perspective. When it was time to cash in, Burry walked away with an estimated $100 million. John Paulson? $4 billion.

Want more billion-dollar persuasion ideas? Click here and sign up for my email newsletter.

“Controversial search engine” may be a good business model

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Two years ago, I signed up to get emails from Newsmax. Since then, I’ve seen over 50 sponsored Newsmax emails for the same unusual offer:

“Controversial search engine goes viral — have you searched your name?”

So today, when another one of those emails arrived, I finally clicked on the ad and went through the funnel.

I didn’t search my name, but I typed in a friend’s name. I also gave the town he lives in and his estimated age.

And then I waited. And waited.

The search engine worked furiously in the background, combing through public records, government databases, and various social networks to dig up everything it could on my — so I thought — squeaky clean friend.

I say “so I thought” because while I waited, I kept getting notifications like, “You might be surprised by [FRIEND]’s criminal record!” and “You might be shocked by [FRIEND]’s dating site profiles!”

A few times, I was prompted for more info or to confirm info I had put in already. At one point, the search engine asked me whether I planned to make use of my UNLIMITED access to reports, which I would get after getting [FRIEND]’S report. I thought this was a strange question, but I answered “YES.”

Meanwhile, loading bars kept loading, time kept passing, and I kept getting more notices that I will be “very surprised” or “shocked” by what’s inside [FRIEND]’s report.

After about 10 minutes of leading me by the nose like this, the search engine finally finished. One final checkbox appeared:

“Please confirm once again that you are ready to learn the truth about [FRIEND].”

I sighed and clicked yes.

An order page opened up, giving me the option to access the report on my suspect friend (and as many other reports as I want) for $27.78/month.

I found this whole experience interesting, for a couple reasons. First off, even though this offer is unusual — it’s not a supplement or a newsletter — it’s built upon direct response fundamentals like curiosity, consistency, and continuity.

Second, I started wondering where else you could use the same business model. That model in a nutshell:

Create an online tool that takes in some personal information… churns and whizzes while it applies proprietary algorithms to secret sources of data… and finally spits out a shocking and surprising report — which is only available through a paid monthly subscription.

Off the top of my head, I thought of a tool for generating the horoscope of a person… the historical coat of arms of a family… the feng shui of a property… or an auspicious name for a baby born on a given date.

If you have other ideas, let me know. Or if you like any of the ideas above, they’re yours to use. And if you want a copywriting partner in your new endeavor, get in touch. If you can handle the proprietary algorithms, I can write up the teasing notifications that pop up while your algorithms run — and we can become the next Google together.