“All train compartments smell vaguely of shit. It gets so you don’t mind it.”
— Ricky Roma, Glengarry Glen Ross
Right now, everybody’s so in love with copy.
In certain circles, this love even goes further, to a certain pride about ugly websites and ugly emails and ugly sales letters. “Who cares? If you’re interesting, if you write well, people will read your message even if it’s written on used toilet paper!”
There are even people who claim they’ve tested this. They claim that ugly, because it stands out, outperforms beautiful.
I can believe this. But here’s the thing:
If everybody’s making an ugly website in the hope of shocking people into handing over their attention… then ugly stops being different.
It gets so you don’t mind it, like Ricky Roma says in the quote above. And at that point, ugly loses its selling power.
I bring this up because I’m listening to an interview right now that Rich Schefren did with a marketer named Sean Vosler.
Rich spends the first five minutes of the interview enthusing about Sean and his work. Rich thinks this is the future of marketing.
He even gets so excited that he pulls up his text messages on screen, to prove how he just had an exchange with Jay Abraham, and how he invited Jay to join this interview. Rich thinks Sean’s stuff is so revolutionary that even Jay needs to see it.
So what exactly is Sean doing?
Well, he is selling a book about copywriting. That’s not unusual. What is unusual is that the book and its sales page are very professionally and beautifully designed (by Sean himself, who has a a background in design).
The point, as Rich puts it, is that “different is better than better.”
And in a world where many marketers are taking pride in making garish-looking sales pages… or sending boring and plain-looking emails (like the ones I send out in my email newsletter)… in that world, a beautiful design like Sean’s looks different. It gets attention. And that’s half the sale.
By the way, this is part of a bigger trend.
Last autumn, I wrote about a similar move to higher production values in VSLs. And now text sales letters seem to be headed in the same direction.
So if you are a marketer or business owner, this beautiful design stuff is something to keep in mind.
And if you are a copywriter, this is something you can bring up to your clients, and make yourself seem well-informed and cutting-edge.
But wait, you might say.
What exactly makes for beautiful design in a marketing context?
I can’t say. I’m not a designer. But if you want to see Sean’s sales page, the one Rich Schefren was so enthusiastic about, here’s the link so you can judge for yourself: