Ever heard of emotional transference? Frankly, it’s unlikely, since I just made up the term. Here’s the idea, which is not in itself particularly original: feel good about one thing, and you’re likely to feel good about anything it’s associated with. Or anything happening at the same time. You’ll have experienced this any time you hear triumphant or sad music backing a film scene. And you can see it again...

Banging the ‘know your audience’ drum again… Here’s a guy who knows what he’s doing. Mike Geary’s The Truth About Abs is a global phenomenon. One of the reasons it’s done so well is that he’s a huge proponent of testing. He’ll test and tweak his ads over and over until they’re delivering the best results possible. So it’s probably no accident that he uses different sales...

Time to be serious. This post is thought provoking, and more than a bit depressing: I went to the mall and a little girl called me a terrorist While, you should read the whole thing, the key part is this: It didn’t matter that I was a nice person.  All that mattered was that I looked different. Yes. All that matters is the look. That’s what makes the instant first impression, and that’s what colours all our judgements. To take a...

A guy called Richard Neill recently put up a Facebook post expressing surprise that his girlfriend’s periods were not the time of happiness, rainbows and power chords he’d come to expect from watching Bodyform adverts. Bodyform responded with this totally sincere apology: You might remember that I was wittering a few weeks ago about how there are two types of advertising – the advertising designed to sell, and the advertising...

I’ve talked about understanding your audience before… But seriously, this MATTERS. If you’re trying to sell something, it matters more than anything else. If you don’t understand who you’re selling to, then you can’t understand how to sell. If you can’t understand how to sell… well, let’s just say you should maybe put off that Caribbean holiday for another year. Every social group has...

Here’s a quote from the late, great, Jim Young, one of the old masters of direct marketing. He said the purpose of advertising was to do 5 things: To familiarise To remind To spread news To overcome inertia To add value not in the product You could rephrase these: To make people aware you exist To remind people you exist To give people a reason to care you exist To let people take advantage of your existence To tell people why your...