Long-time readers of this newsletter might remember that once upon a time, I ran a biweekly segment I called “3-minute direct response news.”
It was my first, but certainly not my last, attempt at launching something like The Morning Brew.
Anyways, in the Jan 2020 issue of “3-min DR news,” I wrote a little feature with the headline:
“The new CBD!”
In that segment, I predicted the explosion of businesses pushing psychedelics. I also suggested that DR marketers might want to get in on this.
I don’t know how far the DR world has picked up on psychedelics. But in the universe as a whole, there is now a lot of hype around psychedelics. So much so that…
Dr Rosalind Watts, a researcher who helped start this craze, recently wrote it’s time to put the brakes on psychedelics enthusiasm. As Watts wrote:
“I can’t help but feel as if I unknowingly contributed to a simplistic and potentially dangerous narrative around psychedelics; a narrative I’m trying to correct. […] If I could go back in time, I would not now be so foolish as to suggest that a synthesised capsule, by itself, can unlock depression.”
An article I read yesterday compared the hype around psychedelics to that around virtual reality or 4D printing.
But you could also compare psychedelics (like I already did) to CBD, or to mindfulness, or to stoicism.
All are some external thing — a pill or a process or a set of rules outside of yourself — that promises to finally solve that aching, long-running, intractable problem you have.
DR marketers have a name for this kind of external thing:
Mechanism.
A mechanism is what allows the same old promise — lose weight, get rich quick, be happy — to be made year after year, and to still be believable. Hope is eternal.
Of course, not all mechanisms are created equal. In order to do its job, a mechanism should be new, different, and ideally, very very sexy. Kind of like magic mushrooms.
Which brings me to my offer for today:
“A secret (and slightly sneaky) copywriting trick for producing magic mechanisms”
That’s a long-form, article-style, optin page I wrote up for my Copy Riddles program.
A warning in case you are getting excited:
You cannot join Copy Riddles now. Though you might be able to do it in the future.
For now, if you are curious about a technique for producing new, different, and very, very sexy mechanisms, then put your sunglasses on, mix up a jug of Kool Aid, and jump aboard the bus right here: