During the last election, I spent a lot of time reading Scott Adams’s blog.
Adams was one of the few people to bet on Trump very early. And as Trump kept winning, first the primaries, then the election itself, Adams often talked about “cognitive dissonance” — that disorienting feeling when external evidence contradicts our mental models of how the world works.
Well, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance floating around the Internet today, following the release of the Mueller findings over the weekend.
People simply cannot figure out what went wrong, and how it is that Trump isn’t already under indictment or even in jail.
Well, I’ll tell you how.
It’s because Trump outsmarted Mueller. He was ahead of Mueller every step of the way. He had the Democrats by the nose and Mueller looking in all the wrong places.
And you know how Trump outsmarted them all?
It’s straight out of Limitless. He used a new smart drug called Reviva (which he also used during the election). According to Trump, “Your brain deteriorates as you get older, this pill keeps my brain young & sharper than ever.”
Ok, it’s time to take a moment to breathe.
None of the story above is true — well, except for the cognitive dissonance surrounding the Mueller findings.
The rest of it — the bit about Trump gobbling down a designer smart pill — is something I’ve just read in a very successful, currently running advertorial.
And here’s why I bring it up.
An ad like this could never run on TV.
These days, it also cannot run on Facebook or Google.
And yet I’ve seen this same ad a half dozen times over the past few weeks.
No FTC injunction. No White House cease-and-desist order. Nobody to stop whoever is running these ads from making mountains of golden, shiny shekels. How is this possible?
It’s simple:
Email drops.
In other words, paying for placement in an email newsletter (in this case, Newsmax).
Email drops still seem to be a kind of Wild West of advertising. They make it possible to reach large numbers of people, often using the kind of copy you want (instead of what Facebook wants). And that’s why they can be a great option for advertisers who are looking for new (or alternate) sources of traffic.
Of course, you don’t have to use email drops to sell shit products.
And you don’t have to tell lies to sell whatever it is you are selling.
You can also use email drops to successfully sell decent products with more-or-less ethical marketing. And if this is something you’re interested in, you might find valuable ideas in my upcoming book: