Do you remember the TV show Lost?
It was a big cultural phenomenon some 15-20 years ago. A planeful of people crash on a mysterious island. They have to fend for themselves while uncovering the island’s many bizarre secrets.
I watched Lost a few years after it came out. I did it because my girlfriend at the time insisted. She insisted because everybody else insisted.
So we got into bed one night and we watched the pilot episode.
Beautiful setting. Good-looking actors. Some ridiculous cliffhangers.
“Do we really need to keep watching this?” I asked my girlfriend.
“Yes! Everybody says it’s sooo good.”
So we watched another episode. More of the same.
And a third episode.
Beautiful setting. Good-looking actors. Some ridiculous cliffhangers.
But bit by bit, I was getting sucked in.
I was starting to like or dislike the various characters. I formed theories about the island’s bizarre secrets and the show’s unresolved cliffhangers. I looked forward to settling into bed each night for yet another episode.
And that’s how I ended up wasting about a hundred hours of my life, watching the remaining 120+ episodes of Lost. Even though my initial experience summed up what each of those episodes were all about:
Beautiful setting. Good-looking actors. Some ridiculous cliffhangers.
I recently talked about Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind. Here’s one curious thing from that book that got to me:
“It is generally the most disinterested spectator who is the hardest to fool. Those who watch less end up seeing more.”
Brown was talking about doing magic. Apparently, a drunk at the bar who is not paying attention to the magician on stage will spot the sleight much more easily than an attentive audience member who is focused on the magician and who is determined to catch the trick.
That’s because, as Brown says, magic is about “entering into a relationship with a person whereby you can lead him, economically and deftly, to experience an event as magical.”
As in magic, so in marketing.
Except you might already be a little sick of being told that marketing is all about the relationship.
And the fact is, what I’m telling you about is both more and less than a relationship. You can see some of the stuff I mean in my Lost history above. Social proof and pressure… a sufficiently tight curiosity gap… an attractive or inviting selling context.
Or, in a few simple but powerful words:
“One prime objective of all advertising is to heighten expectations.”
And with that, I’d like to promote a book to you. And it’s NOT Derren Brown’s Tricks of the Mind.
Instead, it’s one of the top five marketing books I would recommend to anyone…
It’s part of A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos’s mandatory reading for copywriters who want to make it into the top 10% in just a year…
And it’s where I got the quote above about that prime objective. I spotted that quote on, I believe, my third re-reading of this book.
Of course, there’s a lot more in this book besides this one quote.
Like horses. And beer. And ketchup. If you’d like to read more: