It’s 8:45am as I start writing this email. Right now, off my balcony, I can see a tremendous show.
I live next door to a fire station, and the firemen are doing a public demonstration on the street in front of the station.
They are dressed up in their sexiest firefighting suits and they are running around two smashed up cars, one of which is burned to a crisp. The cars were placed there earlier in the morning, inside of a fenced-in area, so the firemen could show how they cut a car open and rescue somebody inside.
Like I say, it’s a tremendous show. Spectacular. My 6-year-old self would have given up a year of eating KitKats in order to see it.
And yet, as I watch this show off my balcony, there’s a total audience of about a dozen adults gathered on the street.
I mean, it’s 8:45am. People are either at home or on their way to work or stuck in the prison of school. Besides, it’s not a busy street. And as far as I know, this demonstration was not advertised anywhere — again, I live right next door.
You’ve probably heard the words of the godfather of modern advertising, Claude Hopkins. Hopkins said, “No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration.”
True, but:
The most famous example of a dramatic demonstration was Elisha Otis. Otis changed the landscape of American cities when he demonstrated his crash-proof elevator — to the masses milling about the New York Crystal Palace Exposition, which attracted 1.1 million visitors.
When Claude Hopkins himself created the world’s largest cake to promote Cotosuet, a kind of early margarine, he made a deal with a giant new department store which had just opened in Chicago.
The cake would go smack dab in the middle of the grocery department on the fifth floor. Hopkins then ran big ads in all the Chicago newspapers to advertise the fact.
Over the course of a week, 105,000 people climbed the four flights of stairs to see that cake.
And when master showman Harry Houdini did his straitjacket escapes, while hanging upside 150 feet in the air, with only his feet tied to a pulley on the roof of some building, he made sure to hang off the building of the town’s main newspaper, guaranteeing a front page story the day before his show. Houdini did all these public escapes at exactly 12 noon, when lunchtime crowds could assemble.
Point being, as Gary Halbert might put it:
Advertise your advertising.
But maybe you say, “Yeah yeah but how? How exactly do I advertise my advertising?”
I gave you three examples right above. If that ain’t enough, here’s a fourth:
The waiting list for my future group coaching program on email copywriting. The waiting list serves as a waiting list, for sure. But it also serves as advertising for the actual advertising I will do when I do make that group coaching available. Very meta.
If you are interested in writing emails that people actually like reading and that they actually buy from, then you might be a good fit for my future group coaching. Or you might not. In case you’d like to find out more about it, the first step is to get on my daily email list. Click here to do that.