First Principles of Advertising

Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

You are inside your business, looking out.

The customer is outside your business, looking in.

Your inside-out perspective makes you blind in one eye.

Confirmation bias makes you blind in the other eye.

You cannot see yourself the way your customer sees you. You imagine how they see you based on your mission statement, your policies and procedures, your employee training, and your good intentions.

But you alone know those things, see those things, and care about those things. Your customer doesn’t know, doesn’t see, doesn’t care.

Bad ads talk about all the things the customer would care about if they knew everything that you know.Good ads talk about what the customer already cares about.

When you have convinced an ad writer to see your business in the same way you do, that ad writer has nothing left to offer you but flattery.

I’m not trying to offend you, friend. I am trying to open your eyes.

Why do so many business owners think effective advertising can be discovered by studying the data?

Bob Hoffman is an old ad guy like me. I’ve never met him, but I like him.

Bob writes,

“Our industry is drowning in math and starving for ideas. We need people who can dream shit up. We need impractical, illogical people. We have plenty of data. We need more of the opposite. We have forgotten that the only unique benefits we can provide to clients is imaginative thinking and creativity. Everything else, aside from ideas, they can get somewhere else. Good ideas are good ideas. Things that are entertaining, interesting and uplifting will always be attractive to everyone.”

“On social media, for every success there are 10,000 failures. You have to be really good at it and there are very few people that can do it. Why are 97 per cent of all ads, books, movies and films crappy? Because it’s really, really difficult to make good stuff. And it’s the same with social media. Most of it is worthless and has no creativity or imagination to it.”

Instead of look at the data, we should be looking at first principles.

“First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, ‘What are we sure is true?’ … and then reason up from there.”

– Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX

“Good inventors and designers (and marketers) deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys.”

– Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com

“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them… Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.”

– Peter Thiel, Paypal

Great ad strategies are discovered when we return to first principles.

These are the first principles of effective ad creation.

1. Don’t try to convince the customer to think and feel like you do. Learn how to think and feel like the customer.
2. The customer isn’t looking for a product or a service. They are looking for transformation.

Those first principles will never change.

Everything else is execution, which requires impractical, illogical people who can dream shit up.

Roy H. Williams

“Life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference between those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other… I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.”

– H.P. Lovecraft

“Tell me, what’s troubling you?”

“Profits are down. Our employees are unhappy. And I don’t know where I should be going.”

The client is not a person, but the therapist is real. Dr. Nikki Blacksmith uses data analysis to help companies diagnose the business personality traits that are preventing them from achieving their goals. Dr. Blacksmith, an industrial-organizational psychologist, tells roving reporter Rotbart that many businesses fail because they don’t understand the company-wide psychology required to achieve success. Prepare to be amazed at MondayMorningRadio.com