Bill Veeck

How much is infotainment worth?

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How much is infotainment worth? I mean, how much do stories and pop culture analogies and outrage in your marketing sell, above and beyond what you could sell by appealing to personal interest alone?

I don’t know. As far as I know, nobody has ever tried to quantify it.

But I do know of an analogous situation, one that has been quantified. Check it:

Back in 1946, baseball club owner Bill Veeck was the first to introduce fireworks at a baseball game. The baseball establishment was outraged. “It cheapens this great and noble sport,” they said.

Veeck was undeterred. Eventually, other team owners came around, and today, fireworks are a standard addition to many major league games.

Of course, the change in attitude came down to money.

As Veeck argued and found to be true, fireworks at a baseball game pay for themselves many times over, primarily in the form of keeping fans at the stadium longer and selling more hotdogs and beer. When combined with a home-team win, the results are multiplicative. Here are the stats:

1. Lose game, no fireworks: X

2. Lose game, fireworks: 1.4X

3. Win game, no fireworks: 2X

4. Win game, fireworks: 3X

In my mind, this is analogous to selling with or without infotainment.

In this analogy, fireworks are the fun, infotainment, insight.

As for “winning the game,” that maps to your customers actually profiting from the product or the service that you sell.

And “extra money made via concessions” maps to how much more money your one-time customers are willing to spend with you in the future.

Do the baseball numbers above map perfectly to selling?

Again, I don’t know. I would be surprised if they mapped perfectly, But I do suspect they are indicative.

The fact is, infotainment has value in terms of customer loyalty and future willingness to buy. But it has far less value than a product that delivers real results. You can be unlikable or dull, and people will still buy from you, over and over, if they get value from what you sell.

Of course, if you both have a great offer that actually produces results… and you add in your stories and analogies and outrage… then you can look forward to really amazing profits, ones that insulate you from the ups and down of the market and the claws of the competition.

Now I got a favor to ask you, or rather, a deal to make with you:

I’m always on the lookout for great products to promote. The problem is, lots of stuff looks great on the outside. But does it actually deliver results? That’s where I’m hoping you can help me.

What’s a product or a service that you paid $200 or more for over the past year, which really delivered?

It could be an info product, a service, or something you paid to have done for you. And by “really delivered,” I’m not talking about being fun and diverting, but of giving you real value in your real life.

If you’re game, hit reply and let me know of stuff you’ve paid for that was a good investment.

In turn, I’ll reply to you and tell you three offers I’ve bought over the past year or so, all of which cost around $1k, all of which delivered real value to me, and all of which happened to be sold via infotainment.

Do we have a deal? If so, hit reply, and fire away.

Interesting psychological effect of making it easy on yourself

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Get ready for a bit of inspirational massage:

I’m reading the autobiography of a guy named Bill Veeck, who was the last person to ever own an major league baseball team — in his case, Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Indians — without having an independent fortune.

At the time when Veeck got to Cleveland, the Cleveland Stadium had the biggest playing field in the majors.

(For all my non-baseball-loving readers: a baseball field consists of two parts, an infield and an outfield. The dimensions of the infield are strictly prescribed by the rulebook. The dimensions and shape of the outfield are not.)

Veeck found that his Cleveland players were discouraged by the size of their home stadium. They would hit a baseball 450 feet — a good ways by any standard — only to have it caught because the field was so large.

So Veeck installed a new fence which shrank the field.

Hitters started hitting better, because they thought they now had a chance to hit a home run.

So far, so normal.

But here’s the curious bit, which is both true and fit for one of those corporate office inspirational posters. From Veeck’s book:

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There is an interesting psychological effect in bringing the fences within reach. After we put up the wire fence there were almost six times as many balls hit over the wire fence and into the old stands.

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In case this isn’t 100% clear due to all the sports analogizing, the point is that:

1. Veeck’s players had convinced themselves they cannot hit a certain distance, say, 500 feet

2. Veeck changed the field so they only had to hit a shorter distance, say, 420 feet, to hit a home run

3. Within that smaller new field, six times as many players ended up hitting home runs of, say, 500 feet or more, which they thought they couldn’t do when the field was bigger

I’m not 100% sure what hte psychological term or explanation for this is.

Removing stress and pressure? Or finding a way around the players’ learned helplessness?

Whatever it is, I thought it’s a curious thing, possibly inspiring, and so I wanted to share it with you. Maybe it’s something you can find a way to apply in your own life and business, if there’s a fence, metaphorical or real, that has been unreachable for you, in spite of your best trying.

In other news:

In less than an hour from now, mentalist-turned-marketer Kennedy will go live on Zoom to share email copywriting and marketing secrets that took him from selling $27k of his flagship info product… to selling $544k of the same, to the same audience.

This is a live training that Kennedy is doing exclusively for readers of this newsletter.

If you have an email list, there might be valuable techniques you can pick up on this training which you can implement in your own list tomorrow.

Or who knows, maybe simply hearing Kennedy’s story in detail, and seeing that it is possible to go from selling $27k of an info product (quite common and manageable) to selling $544k of the same info product to the same audience (rare and frankly puzzling) is a doable thing.

Maybe not just for Kennedy, but maybe for others too. Maybe even you? I wouldn’t want to put that kind of pressure on you.

But if you want to hear Kennedy’s training, and get inspired, then a bit of time still remains for you to sign up:

https://bejakovic.com/kennedy

How to write in a client’s brand voice

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Copywriter Theo Seeds writes in with a cheeky two questions (as opposed to the usual one-per-family). Let me take Theo’s questions in reverse order:

> 2. Are there any non-marketing books you’ve picked up weird marketing lessons from?

Yes, dozens?

Books, including non-marketing books, are one of the main sources of ideas I draw on for this newsletter.

I estimate I’ve drawn marketing ideas from dozens of non-marketing books in hundreds of these emails over the 7+ years of this newsletter. The most recent one I can remember came last month, from the autobiography of MLB club owner Bill Veeck.

> 1. Do you have any tips on writing copy in a client’s brand voice? Is this something you ever took on, and if so, how did you approach it?

I’ve actually written an email about this topic before, and it was all about how I hated the experience of having to write in a client’s brand voice.

Sure, it’s fine if you’re writing a sales letter, where “good enough” is good enough.

But if you want to write dailyish emails, where it really has to sound like that person, and has to have their stories, and verbal ticks, and unique phrasing, I really don’t have any smart advice to give, because it’s not something I ever mastered myself.

Fortunately, I know somebody who specializes in exactly this.

The guy’s name is Justin Blackman, and he is known as the “Brand Voice Guy.”

Not only does Justin have a very clear and recognizable brand voice for his own daily emails (which I read), but he has a course on exactly what Theo is asking about above, how copywriters can write in a client’s brand voice, in a perfectly chamelon-like fashion.

The course is called Write Like Anyone. The core promise is that it will turn you into someone who is able to echo any client’s voice so well they will hire you again and again.

I haven’t been through Justin’s course. I don’t write for clients any more, and I’m pretty good at echoing my own voice.

But Justin’s course has gotten endorsements from people like Chris Orzechowski and Rob Marsh of the Copywriter Club, plus it features folks like Daniel Throssell and Abbey Woodcock as guest instructors.

Oh, and students seem to love it too. They credit it, like Justin promises, with making them look good in front of clients and winning them more projects.

In case you wanna find out more about Write Like Anyone:

https://bejakovic.com/writelikeanyone

Bejako After Dark, my new OnlyFans project

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I’ve spent a lot of time in Ubers the past few days, jetsetting back and forth across my home town of Zagreb, Croatia.

A part of that experience has been listening to the local pop radio stations, which seem to be the music of choice for Uber drivers here.

(Bear with me for a minute. I promise to give you a good payoff to this story.)

During an Uber today, an awful pop song came on the radio. A woman was singing a childish tune over a reggae rhythm played by synthesizers. The chorus kept repeating (translated from Croatian):

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When you’re alone, you need to go to the sea

When you’re alone, you need a friend

When you’re alone, you need a bottle of wine, you need a nice girl

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“What is this horror,” I asked myself after the chorus repeated for the 45th time. Then on the 46th repeat, the final line changed:

“When you’re alone, you need a bottle of wine, you need Severina”

“Oh ok that makes sense,” I said.

In case you don’t know — and if you do, I have questions for you — Severina is the most nationally and internationally famous singer from Croatia.

Starting in the early 90s, for a decade and more, Severina recorded dutiful and horrible songs like the one I heard today. Her career wasn’t going anywhere.

And then, in June 2004, a sex tape involving Severina leaked out. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, the tape was quickly viewed more times than the moon landing.

As you can probably guess, Severina’s sex tape transformed Severina’s music career.

It opened up huge new audiences both locally and internationally. It helped her change her image to a kind of sex vixen.

It got a lot of musicians, including some respectable ones, interested in working with her. And it has kept her music, awful though it is, playing on the radio, even today, 20 years later.

But I promised you a good payoff to today’s story, and a sex tape ain’t it.

Along with listening to Severina, I am also reading a book titled Veeck As In Wreck. It’s the autobiography of Bill Veeck, who was one of the most innovative and influential owners of a major league baseball team in the history of the sport.

At different times, Veeck owned the Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Indians.

But he started out by working for the Chicago Cubs, back when the Cubs were a horrifically losing team. Of course, no fans wanted to go see the Cubs since they were so bad, and the Cubs’ stadium, Wrigley Field, sat empty.

Veeck managed to turn all this around. Well, not the Cubs’ losing record, but the attendance problems.

Veeck managed to sell out game after game by introducing creative giveaways (live lobsters, a horse), spectacles (fireworks, before any other baseball teams had ’em), and schemes (a dwarf playing as designated hitter). As Veeck put it in in his autobiography:

“A team that isn’t winning a pennant has to sell something in addition to its won-and-lost record.”

And now I’d like to point out something crazy that might have slipped your attention:

Both the Chicago Cubs and early-stage Severina were in the entertainment business — sports and music. I mean, what sells easier and better than sports and music?

Except, of course, for the Cubs and Severina, being “entertaining” wasn’t enough. They both kind of sucked at that, and so they had to tack on a second degree of entertainment — a circus environment, a sex tape — in order for fans to care or at least stomach their first degree of entertainment.

And that’s the point I wanted to get across to you.

If you’re selling something important and dutiful, you can sell more of it by trying to be entertaining. You probably already know that – it’s the “infotainment” idea that people like Sean D’Souza have been championing for two decades.

The thing is, you might not be much of an entertainer. Or you might be decent, but you might simply be in a marketplace where everybody else is also entertaining, and maybe as well as you.

In that case, you can still lap the pack if you offer a second-degree of entertainment — entertainment of a different kind, preferably in an entirely different format.

And with that, I’d like to announce I’m launching a new project, an OnlyFans channel, Bejako After Dark — no, you wish.

But I am thinking about this topic of second-degree entertainment seriously. In time, some good idea will land on me. Maybe it will be OnlyFans.

In any case, until that happens, let me just turn you on to something I’ve already created — an entertainment of a different kind, in an entirely different format, in which I bare myself quite naked:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments