George Lois

Going ape for agree and amplify

by

I’m working on my new 10 Commandments book and that means I’m reaching deep into my journal and processing all the research I’ve collected.

That’s how I came across a great marketing story I should have already used for an email.

This story involves famous ad man George Lois, somebody I’ve already written about in this newsletter.

Lois was a master of dramatization.

Back in 1960 or so, Lois was tasked with creating a commercial for the new Xerox 914 photocopier. The USP was Xerox’s new technology, which used plain paper for printing and made the photocopier easy to use, unlike the steam locomotives that were used until then.

Lois decided to dramatize Xerox’s ease of use by showing a little girl — his own daughter Debbie — using the Xerox 914 to make a photocopy of her doll.

Sure enough, the commercial showed Debbie skipping over to the Xerox machine and pushing two buttons. Out came a photocopy.

Overnight, Xerox became a sensation. But competitors were furious. No photocopier could be that easy to use! They filed complaints with the FCC for deceptive advertising.

When Lois was told of this, he nodded his head and said, “Yes, yes, you’re absolutely right… it was wrong of us to use a little girl to show how easy this machine is to use… we should have used a stupid ape!”

So Lois reshot the commercial, this time with a chimp in place of Debbie, and with officials from the FCC to watch as the chimp made its photocopy, all in one take.

Following this, Xerox became the biggest photocopier company, a huge tech behemoth for decades. They funded research that changed the modern tech landscape (they invented windows, the mouse, laser printers). And then they let Apple and Microsoft eat its lunch.

But! The point of this email is not Xerox’s business incompetence, but George Lois’s advertising competence.

More specifically, the point of this email is the power of agreeing and amplifying — chimp instead of girl — whenever anybody attacks or challenges or even mocks you.

And now I’d like to tell you about my Simple Money Emails training.

This training makes it so easy to write sales emails that even a little girl could do it.

I really hope somebody will challenge me on that, because I have video recordings of an ape that does it as well.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

“Research is the enemy of creativity”

by

Yesterday, I mentioned an embarrassingly titled book I bought, “Damn Good Advice (for people with talent!)”

The book is written by a brand marketing guy, George Lois. On the face of it, it’s all about pushing the envelope, thinking outside the box, following your bliss, and other cliches that advertisers who work for prizes, rather than for sales, resort to.

Take for example Lois’s advice no. 50, which says:

“Research is the enemy of creativity, unless it’s your own ‘creative’ research (heh-heh)”

Nonsense, right?

Like direct response giant Gene Schwartz said, copy is assembled, not written. And it is assembled out of diligent, detailed research, deeper and more penetrating than the other guy is willing to do. No research, no sex, at least when it comes to copy that gets real results.

But really what Lois is talking about is the kind of research that’s common in brand advertising:

Focus groups.

Ask people who have no skin in the game, who aren’t being faced with decision whether or not to buy your product, what they think of your ad. “Is it good? Is it bad? Do you like it?”

It’s completely reasonable that research like this won’t give you useful feedback.

Not unless, as Lois says, you get creative.

He tells the story of Aunt Jemima pancake mix.

The makers of Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Quaker Oats, never wanted to create a matching Aunt Jemima syrup, in spite of Lois’s insisting that it would make tremendous $$$ business sense.

So Lois got creative.

He sent out a survey to a bunch of pancake mix consumers, asking a series of questions.

One of the questions was which syrup these people used. There were 10 brands to choose from, among them Aunt Jemima syrup.

And get this:

89 out of 100 pancake eaters selected Aunt Jemima syrup as their preferred choice, even though it was entirely imaginary at that point, just something in Lois’s head.

Result:

The head honchos at Quaker Oats were finally convinced, and put out the syrup. Within a year, just as the survey predicted, Aunt Jemima went on to become the number one brand in the billion-dollar-plus syrup business.

Is this scientific advertising?

Hardly.

Is it a useful idea which could potentially be worth a lot of money to you?

Well, consider this:

Direct marketer Justin Goff recently sent out an email exactly about this topic.

Justin said that he and his pardner Stefan Georgi often poll their audience about what offers to create next.

But they don’t go the focus group route.

“What should our next offer be? Do you like the sound of ‘Copy Accelerator By The Beach’? Would you buy ‘8.F.F.G.M.S.’ if that stood for ‘8-Figure Facebook Group Marketing Secrets’?”

No, none of that.

Instead, Justin and Stefan make a list of a few specific offer ideas. They ask people which one they want best.

This bit of research, Justin says, matches up very well to actual results of how well an offer sells when they do create it.

In this way, a simple creative poll can be worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to Justin and Stefan.

So there you go. An idea that you can use, starting today.

Or an idea that I can use, starting right now.

Because there are a few live presentations or trainings that I’ve been thinking of creating. They might be paid, or they might be free. They might be a single lesson, or multiple, depending on the topic.

Based on this limited info, and the short descriptions below, which one would you like the best?

If you would like to vote, sign up to my email list. And when you get my welcome email, tell me your preference among the four choices below. If you vote honestly, you will have the best chance of seeing a training about this topic from me in the near future:

1. A presentation about horror advertorials, the front-end funnel that I’ve used to help clients sell millions of dollars of dog seat belts, door stops, and detergent-replacement balls

2. A presentation about the most valuable email I regularly send to my daily email subscribers — the one type of email I would resort to if I had to stick to only one type for all of time

3. A presentation about creating a feeling of insight in your prospects, as a way of overcoming resistance and driving people to spontaneously want your offer, without you doing any overt selling

4. A presentation about natural authority — the rare, most penetrating, and longest-lasting form of authority, which is not built on either expertise or overt status or association

A damn good bit of advice from an embarrassing book I bought yesterday

by

Yesterday, I found myself in the Moco Museum gift shop, thumbing through a book, and looking over my shoulder.

The Moco Museum features street art, pop art, and what I can only call high kitsch.

And after getting through the colorful exhibit, there I was in the gift shop, holding a little white book with a big black title.

The book collects 120 short ideas by George Lois. Lois is a brand advertising guy that the book describes as “America’s master communicator, advertising guru, the original Mad Man, and acclaimed cultural provocateur.”

A little boastful, but nothing too indecent in that.

The problem was that big black title on the cover. It read:

“DAMN GOOD ADVICE (for people with talent!)”

I felt embarrassed being seen buying something like this. But I liked the few of Lois’s bits of advice that I had thumbed to.

And since I have exactly one physical book in my new apartment, I steeled myself and decided to buy “DAMN GOOD ADVICE (for people with talent!)” in spite of the title.

So like a teenager buying condoms for the first time, I looked around, picked an opportune moment, and rushed for the cash register.

“I’d like to buy this,” I mumbled, pushing the book across the counter, not raising my eyes.

The woman just smiled at me knowingly and rang up the book without comment.

And good thing. Because I’m reading the book more this morning, and I’m enjoying it.

Lois gives a brief but interesting perspective on creativity and brand advertising. Much of it is laughable and sacrilegious from the perspective of direct response advertising. But there is still some surprising common ground.

For example, Lois’s advice no. 50 says:

“Research is the enemy of creativity — unless it’s your own ‘creative’ research (heh-heh)”

I raised my eyebrows when I read this headline. But Lois pays it off in a way that is consistent with something a very successful direct response marketer said recently. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow if you like.

For today, I just want to share a much simpler idea, Lois’s advice no. 75:

“What a difference a name makes!”

Lois is talking about the power of good brand names. But his advice no. 75 made me think of chapter 6 of Great Leads, by Mark Ford and John Forde.

One bit of advice from that marketing classic is that, if you have a complex problem to talk about, it can be smart to package it up inside of a name, ideally one that makes instant sense to the reader.

Of course, not only complex, hard-to-describe problems deserve a good name.

Vague symptoms… shadowy enemies… novel mechanisms… and plain old giant promises often become more manageable and real if you just give them the handle of a good name.

Which brings me to the name and the promise of the presentation I will put on next Wednesday.

It’s called the Most Valuable Email.

And it’s about a type of daily email that has been most valuable to me in the history of this newsletter… and that might be equally valuable to you, if you are a copywriter or marketer, and you have your own mailing list, or you want to start one.

The Most Valuable Email presentation will happen on Wed June 22 at 7pm CET. If you’d like to get signed up for it, the first step is to get on my email newsletter before Wednesday. The second step will become obvious once you get my first daily email. No talent required.