How to Become Invisible

There are two ways to become invisible, and both are easily accomplished.

1. To become invisible to yourself: get lost inside your own head. When you ignore other people, it never occurs to you that they can see you. This is how you become invisible in your mind.
2. To become invisible to others: say what people expected you to say; do what they expected you to do. This will blur you into the background and make you invisible. To make people see you again, all you have to do is say something new, surprising, or different.

These techniques also work in advertising.

1. If you get lost inside your own head, your ads will focus on your company, your product, and your service. You will ignore the things your customer cares about, and speak only about what they ought to care about, what they should care about, what you want them to care about. You will answer all the questions that no one was asking. You will be visible to yourself, but invisible to others. When your ads talk to you, about you, for you, no one other than you is interested.
2. When you say what people expected you to say, they quit listening. Ads that sound like ads are filtered from conscious thought. The mind is constantly scanning for the new, the surprising, and the different, and for pain, pleasure, urgent necessities, and entertainment. If your ads look like ads and sound like ads, you can be certain they will be invisible.

Bad advertising is about you, your company, your product, your service. Good advertising is about the customer, and how their life will be altered if they allow you to come into it.

Talk to your customers about them, not you.

If you want to talk about you, find an old pay phone and drop a quarter into it. Call your mother. She’s the only one who cares.

I slapped you just now because you are delirious, and you need to wake up. My slap may have stung a little, but it was an act of love.

Five paragraphs ago I said, “The mind is constantly scanning for the new, the surprising, and the different, and for pain, pleasure, urgent necessities, and entertainment,” because these are the things that interest us.

1. The New is always interesting because it might be relevant to us. When we have judged it to be irrelevant, it disappears.
2. The Surprising is interesting, but only until it is no longer surprising. A magician knows that every surprise must be followed by another surprise, or they will lose the attention of their audience.
3. The Different is interesting because it might be an improvement. But if we conclude it is not an improvement, we dismiss it.
4. Pain is interesting because we want to avoid it. When your ads speak to pain, you become associated with pain, and the minds of your customers will recoil away from you. If you want to test this theory, just kick your dog every time you see it.
5. Pleasure is interesting, always. But if your statements about pleasure are not judged to be credible, your listener will feel they are being manipulated and you will be viewed as a seducer, a con-man, and a snake.
6. Urgent necessities are interesting because we need them, and we need them now. This is why so many advertisers spend copious amounts on Google ads. The problem with this strategy is that all your competitors are doing the same. This results in a high cost per click and a low rate of conversion.
7. Entertainment is interesting because it allows us to escape into the lives of interesting characters. When you are watching a football game, the mirror neurons in your brain allow you to be part of the game as you live vicariously through the actions of others. The same is true of TV shows, movies, well-written novels, and interesting ads.

Win the heart and the mind will follow. But please don’t be so foolish as to believe that people bond with soulless corporations.

Personalities bond with personalities.

Does your company have a personality? Does the public understand how and why your company came into existence? Do they understand the forces that shaped and formed your company to become what it is today? Do they know what you believe and why you believe it? Do they understand what your company stands against, and what you are trying to eliminate? Do they understand your quirks and eccentricities, and do they know what caused them?

When the public knows these things about you, they talk about you because they find you interesting. They no longer type their urgent need into the Google search window. They type your name instead.

Cheap click. High conversion rate.

When your company has a personality, it becomes a character with which your customer can bond. People read, watch, and listen to your ads when your ads are interesting and entertaining.

Then, when they need what you sell, yours is the first name that comes to mind, and the name they feel the best about.

When you want to win the hearts of the public, give them ads that feature colorful and interesting characters. People intuitively understand the motivations of characters. This is how they will know what your company believes, why you believe it, and what makes you do the things you do.

You can advertise in the way that I just described to you, or you can do what everyone else has always done, and hope that it works out better for you than it did for them.

Again, I slap you only because I care.

Roy H. Williams

When two historians start talking, the conversation can skip across centuries like two little girls playing hopscotch. On this week’s episode of Monday Morning Radio, historian Maxwell Rotbart talks with historian Ron Shafer about how the future is looking a lot like the past. If Rod Serling were alive, he would say, “Consider if you will, two historians who looked into the Mirror of Time [pause] and saw the Future.” Or perhaps one of those little girls playing hopscotch will someday grow up to be Snow White, and Lucille La Verne is the evil queen looking into that mirror in 1937. You’ve seen the movie. Say it with me, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall…” [pause, followed by four notes stair-stepping downward in a minor key] MondayMorningRadio.com