Seducing Strangers: How to Get People to Buy What You're Selling (The Little Black Book of Advertising Secrets)
208
Seducing Strangers: How to Get People to Buy What You're Selling (The Little Black Book of Advertising Secrets)
208eBook
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Overview
The job is using words, pictures, stories, and music to seduce strangers. In the industrial, mass-media, consumer economy of the past, the job was called advertising, and “Mad Men” did it. In today’s service-based, social media-focused, information economy, the job is called life, and everyone does it.
Here’s how you can do it. And do it better.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780761184195 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Workman Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 04/07/2015 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
The Job That Was Once Called Advertising
The job was using words, pictures, stories, and music to make someone somewhere do something. In the industrial, mass-media, consumer economy of the past, the job was called advertising, and “Mad men” did it. In our modern, service-based, social-media-centric information economy, the job is called life, and everybody does it.
Once it was the job of these advertising executives on Madison Avenue—“Mad men”—to be the public champions of products and services, making businesses successful and customers happy. Don Draper always seemed to know exactly how to do it. He knew what the business goal of the advertising was. He knew how to create an insightful, persuasive message. And he had teams of experts to help him decide which media would help him do the job best.
In today’s information economy, the power to persuade remains the coin of the realm. But persuasion is no longer the job of just a creative director and a host of media buyers. Today it’s everyone’s job. People working in today’s information economy spend all or most of their time and effort trying to get someone somewhere to do something. From the CEO of a multinational company trying to establish a presence on Facebook to a teenager tweeting about a pair of awesome-looking jeans, everyone needs to be able to effectively persuade someone, whether it’s a boss or a boyfriend, a customer or a committee.
The problem is that most people today don’t feel equipped to craft messages or take action with the same confidence and certainty as Mad Men’s Don Draper. Two things confound them. First, most are a lot less familiar with the principles of persuasion than they are with the means. They’re not quite sure what makes a message persuasive, but they know how to use a smartphone to tweet 140 characters to millions of people in a second. Second, recent and rapid changes in new digital media technology make doing the job hard—even for experts who do understand the principles of persuasion. Why? Because today there are more ways to go about it than ever. Changes in media affect how we figure out the “somewhere” part of the job. And with all the hype, hysteria, big money, high-tech IPOs, consolidation, disruption, and destruction that is the digital media revolution, people who are trying to get someone somewhere to do something can lose sight of the “get someone” and the “do something” part of the job.
Lee Clow is president and chief creative officer of TBWA/ Media Arts Lab. The man behind acclaimed multimedia ad campaigns for Apple, Nissan, Energizer Battery, and Pedigree Petfoods, among others, Clow is arguably the most famous and acclaimed creative director ever. This is what he said recently when asked about the current state of advertising:
“We haven’t come close to figuring out how to use all these new-media opportunities, and most clients are very conflicted about what media they should use, why, and how. They keep thinking there’s some new silver bullet in the new-media world that will allow them to save money or find a new way to twist consumers’ arms.”
This book establishes some new communications principles to help you come up with more effective, persuasive ideas and understand where to place them in a world of changing technology and changing consumer expectations.
I never would have written this book if I had not been hired to be an advertising consultant on Mad Men. My job was to see that the show accurately depicted the process of creating ads and servicing clients. I didn’t know what I knew about advertising or how I did it until I needed to explain it to Mad Men creator Matt Weiner and the show’s writing and production staff.
In the writers’ room, Matt would constantly ask me and Bob Levinson, the show’s other advertising consultant, “What would they do in this situation?” Weiner and the other writers were trying to make drama, not advertising. He wasn’t interested in what was going through Don’s head when Don stared out the window. He was interested only in what could be seen, said, and dramatized and how it made the story better, more intriguing or surprising.
Seven years spent thinking about how to depict the process of persuasion made me think deeply about what I do to create and sell ideas that connect with and motivate other people. It made me think a lot about what is principle and what is fashion. What was it about getting someone somewhere to do something that would have been as true in the midcentury Mad Men world of Madison Avenue as it is today? And what ideas about advertising were just 1960s style?
Today every Starbucks I walk into looks like every creative department I’ve ever been in. People are writing, creating presentations, blogging, and trying to think of ideas to tweet, email, or post in order to persuade someone somewhere to do something. My aim here is to offer some proven techniques that have helped me do the same things—faster, better, and more confidently.
The goal of this book is to explain how messages that make people do things work. And it’s written for anyone expected to make something happen by using words, pictures, stories, or music.
To help me understand a client’s goals, I often ask, “It’s a year from now, and we’ve all come back into this conference room to celebrate the success of this ad campaign we’ve created. Tell me, what are we celebrating? What did we do? What happened? How did we know when it was time to stop working and open a bottle of Champagne?”
A year from now, I want to walk into a Starbucks and see someone sitting at a table with a computer and a couple of books. One is a Moleskine notebook. It’s filled with ideas, sketches, headlines, scraps of paper, bits and pieces. The other is a copy of this book. It’s dog-eared and worn. The spine is cracked. Passages are underlined, and bookmarks are sticking out all over it. And the person sitting at that table with his laptop and books has that “Please don’t talk to me. I need to get this idea down before I lose it” look.
When I see that, I’ll know I’ve done my job, and I’ll open a bottle of Champagne.
This book is for anyone expected to make something happen by using words, pictures, stories, or music.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Jon Hamm ixIntroduction: The Job That Was Once Called Advertising 1
Part One
The Secret Purpose of Advertising 5
The Job of Advertising Is to Make People Happy 7
Does Advertising Work? 9
The Truth About Liars 12
You’re Brought In to Back Off 17
Do You Want to Sell or Seduce? 22
Throwing Speedballs 25
Brands Aren’t Magic—They’re Math 31
One Question, Four Answers 37
Dissecting a Frog Is Easy; Making One Is Hard 41
Part Two
Four Secret Ways Out of the Box 45
The Four Fundamental Questions 47
What Is It? Introductory Ads 51
The Curious Case of Soviet Jeans 53
Why Do I Need It Now? Limited-Time Offers 55
What Makes It Different? Differentiating Ads 60
A Shade Different—Belle Jolie 67
Who Else Thinks It’s Good? Mutual-Love-and-Respect Ads 71
It’s Not About Me—It’s About You 75
Going Negative in a Zero-Sum Game 81
Surviving When Outgunned and Surrounded 87
How Low Can You Go? 91
What the Hell Do We Do if Something Goes Right? 94
Part Three
Secret Motives, Agendas, Traps, and Techniques 99
Choose, Align, Anticipate 101
Bottom Line or Top Line? 103
What’s My Motivation? 106
Big Ideas, Killer Ideas, and Big Idea Killers 109
Advertising Is a Toolbox: Pick a Tool 113
The Sizzle Sucks. The Steak Rocks 115
No More Content for Me—I’ve Had Enough 117
Three Reasons to Take a Job; Pick Two 122
Great Idea! Now Sell It!. . 125
Making You Work for You. 128 Show How the Idea Will Rock Their World 130
The Upside of Downside 133
They Didn’t Come to See the Props 135
You Are the Solution—Not the Problem; Act Like It 137
What Have They Got to Lose? 139
Be Willing to Walk Away a Winner 141
Final Thoughts on Presenting 143
Part Four
The Secret Story of Online Seduction 145
A Medium Message 147
Building Babel One Bit at a Time 149
The Mission of Mini Media Moguls 154
Metcalfe’s Law 157
Techno Trekkers: Four Stories of One Hero 159
Excuse Me, Would You Please Get Out of My Movie? 164
Going Viral Is the Internet Applauding a New Possibility 167
Captains of Empathy 169
A Trout, a Swiss Army Knife, an iPad, and YouTube 171
Acknowledgments 177
About the Author 179