By the Ocean
Rain Can’t Stop Surfing 74 Degrees
8:46 a.m.
Surely the great Claude Hopkins never imagined a world where humans were bombarded with thousands of media pieces every single day.
And I doubt that even Eugene Schwartz would be surprised at what we’re dealing with these days. He instructed copywriters to watch all of the popular media sources like movies so you could keep your finger on the pulse of the public. So you could better understand the conversation inside of their head.
GOOD. LUCK. WITH. THAT.
Phones and social media have created a siloed version of reality for each individual. Everyone’s receiving a different recipe which means everyone’s mind is in a different place. Once you show the borg what you like, that’s all you get baby!
What you end up with is one version of reality per human.
This is why it pays to keep things simple. Because while the reality for each human has changed, the human being has not.
Once you add in high levels of cynicism, skepticism and a few doses of extremely low trust, you’ve got a puzzle that is just a bit over the head of your average “direct response” approach.
As far as I can tell, what we’ve got now is indirect marketing. You do something over there and a result pops out on the other side.
If you’re a control freak, this is enough to make your head explode.
The good news is that direct response is still alive and well. Every decision to sign=up, optin, show-up or buy is a direct response to something. The challenge is you may never find out what that something is.
Indirect marketing is what we’ve got.
You don’t know which ingredient in the cake is responsible for the magic, but as long as the cake comes out tasting great, it doesn’t really matter.
So the focus goes on the cake as a whole, not each individual ingredient.
The smart move (according to me) is to move to a systems-based thinking instead of event-based thinking.
Manage the system instead of obsessing over managing the outcome of any one event.
This is why the Media Platform approach works so well. It’s a system that generates magic over time. How exactly that happens is anyone’s guess.