The wisdom of great minds can truly be timeless.
Here’s a quote from Claude Hopkins – many, many years ago.
He’s considered one or the fathers of advertising. He also invented the coupon.
Coupons weren’t actually primarily designed to give customers discount – they were simply to track sales so marketers knew what worked.
Celebrity gossip sites, Instagram and the tabloid press are a constant reminder to us all of other people’s success.
If you’re waiting on success it’s worth keeping yourself in check and remembering that it doesn’t happen overnight.
Often a long and gruelling process.
Take for example the hit TV show ‘Mad Men’. Its 92 episodes ran for seven seasons – reaching audiences across the world.
It’s widely considered to be one of the best TV shows ever made.
But, Mad Men’s success wasn’t sudden. It took a long time.
The show’s head writer, Matthew Weiner, had been working on the concept for ten years before the pilot aired.
He was working as a researcher and staff writer for other people’s TV shows.
But all he really wanted to do was work on his own series.
The future wasn’t looking good though. Weiner faced rejection after rejection.
Company after company telling him that they didn’t think audiences would want to see a show about advertising executives.
So, night after night, once he’d finished his day job he’d sit in his study working on his ‘advertising project’.
Legend has it he’d even carry a copy of the pilot script in a briefcase with him wherever he went. Just in case.
Often he’d attend dinner parties and socials with his successful wife.
When he’d tell her friends that he was a writer, they’d ask if he’d written anything they might have seen…his answer was always no.
And then…quite suddenly…after talking to enough of the right people…his script landed on the desk of someone who liked it. An influential someone, at that.
The rest was history. TV history. Now, Matthew Weiner is one of the most successful TV writers of all time and has definitely written something that you’ll have heard of.
Great advert for ‘skinny’ food and drink.
“According to the laws of aerodynamics the bumblebee can’t fly. But the bumblebee doesn’t know that, so it just carries on flying around.”
– Dave Trott
For as long as we humans have walked the Earth, many of us have been honest.
Many of us have wanted to work hard, help others and then reap the rewards for our labour.
However, there are also those of us who look to to scam and deceive everyone around us!
These scam artists often tend to be very creative…I guess not all of us creatives can be good, can we?
Let me take you back the sixties and seventies. The war was well over, the baby boomers were here and people had a quality of life that would have seemed alien to them some years before.
Gadgets were all the rage (as they are now).
Solar-power was one of the buzzwords of the time and everyone wanted to use it whenever they could.
Why not help out the planet as and when you can?
A man called Steve Comisar was out to make some money.
Print advertising was big back then.
So he put an advert in the magazines and papers selling this amazing new gadget:
“Solar-powered clothes dryer – just $39. The planet friendly way to dry your clothes – never use your tumble-dryer again. Send the money and I’ll have one sent out to you within a week, free delivery – life-time guarantee!”
Believe me when I say that people bought into the idea. Families rushed to send over their hard-earned dollars.
And then they waited. Curiously. Sitting there, in their homes, imagining how this new, wacky invention might look.
You can imagine their surprise when it arrived. It looked just like this:
Yep, just your average, run-of-the-mill clothesline. One that you can find in nearly every garden in the country.
As you can imagine people were pissed, and Steve Comisar is still doing time now for that and a combination of other scams.
(I believe that the only U.S. con artist bigger than him was Frank Abingale – he was the guy the film ‘Catch Me If You Can’ was based on.)
Of course I’m not saying that we should go around scamming people, and I’m not advocating a crook.
But – there’s creativity here.
Comisar looked at the current market, saw a theme that everyone was interested in (solar power) and then found a new way to market something around it.
Why don’t we embrace creativity like this and use it to market and sell genuine products?
Or perhaps, if we’re writing fiction – we can take a standard plot, and re-imagine it in such a way that it gets a new lease of life?
“A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.”
– David Ogilvy
A nice, succinct nugget of wisdom there.
(image credit: magic designs)
I found this in Liverpool.
It’s nice to see a brand not taking itself too seriously.
It knows its target market and doesn’t claim to be anything its not.
Void of pretentiousness.
Apologies for being quiet over the last few days. Work took me out of the picture and away – which meant that I didn’t write.
I debated bringing a laptop, but as is the way if you bring a book somewhere, You spend half your time answering questions about what you’re doing (or ‘what you reading?’)
While out, I came across this advert and had to take a wonky (beer-induced) picture.
The simplicity and the colours really work on this.
And, as Aperol is such a popular name, they don’t even worry about putting anything complicated in the copy.
Simple. On point. Whets the appetite.
I saw this on a train yesterday, and I couldn’t help but be impressed.
Simplistic font, no images to distract, first headline draws you in and the rest of the copy keeps you reading.
Great honesty too.
Let me introduce you to someone.
It’s the guy in the featured picture. His name is Eugene Schwartz – I don’t know if you’ve heard of him? I’ll be honest, I hadn’t until fairly recently.
Why should I write about him? Because he had an interesting theory on maximising productivity and beating writer’s block. Reason enough, right?
He made an absolute mint as a copywriter. He also wrote several books that you might want to check out if you’re interested in advertising and copywriting – mostly published in the 1950s and 60s.
He only wrote for (roughly) 3 hours, 5 days a week. Not a lot, is it? I mean you’d think a professional writer would be pulling in 12 hour days, seven days a week – wouldn’t you?
He measured out the exact time in which he could be creative for (without being distracted) and set an alarm.
The time would be 33 minutes and 33 seconds.
During this time he wrote. He made himself write, working in intense spurts where his thoughts were only on the blank page in front. Kind of like high intensity training, where you work out at a really difficult level for a short amount of time, before slowing it down.
Schwartz was strict on himself during that time and, unless a flying saucer or something landed outside, he wouldn’t leave the chair. He’d keep his focus.
Once that alarm went he’d stop whatever he was doing, even if he was half-way through, and go procrastinate for 15 minutes or so.
Then he’d go through the same process again.
His success speaks for itself. To use an old English phrase; ‘the bloke wasn’t short of a bob or two’.
It makes sense though. If you were a runner you wouldn’t run for ten hours straight, with just a short lunch break, would you? Creativity can be just as exhausting, albeit mentally, so maybe Schwartz’s method is the key to being productive?
Plus, I often wonder if forcing yourself to write for too long can inadvertently lead to writer’s block.
Here’s his most famous book, in case you’re interested.
(image credit: wikipedia)
by Ashley Brown
whyididntwritetoday.com 