Look Here Writing

Another reason @Shane_Hunter and I have so much fun talking about marketing goes beyond the marketing itself. We both like to try stuff out in marketing that we think is cool. If we think it's cool, even if everyone else thinks it's silly or stupid we don't really care and never have, driving mutual clients and friends crazy with our antics in many cases in the process. It doesn't mean it always works (I have had many failed ideas I thought were cool). But even if it doesn't work, it often leads to an idea that does work, even if it is totally unrelated to whatever it was we originally thought was cool. Reminds me of something a client in the self defense niche I used to write ads for would say in all his videos that I have found to be especially true in marketing: "The only thing you can wrong is nothing." This week I banged out 33 comicbook-style ads to run through the 2025 issues (I do them well in advance due to the vagaries of securing artists, logistics, etc, like I talk about in my Markauteur book in the section about this). I have no idea which ones will hit a nerve or be totally ignored. I did them just because I thought it'd be fun. I also worked @stefaniasettle into some of them purely for fun and she looks at them as love letters to her. In other cases, the ads are just dad jokes I wanted to tell, in some cases I had some pretty good USP ideas I wanted to work in, and in still more cases I just wanted to do something that gets attention using a media format few really understand, and even fewer still are able to use much less teach. The shallow thinking in the marketing world is an absolute gift if you are one who likes to think outside the box. I think the main problem holding a lot of marketers back, and especially copywriters, is giving a shyt what someone else thinks. Everyone secretly or openly wants someone's approval. But approval-seeking is the death knell of great ideas. And the ones who most adamantly insist they are not approval-seeking tend to be the ones who are seeking approval the hardest from someone. I know this because I used to be that way before I got into direct marketing some 20 years ago. But I looked around early on and saw how everyone would just glob on to a goo-roo (or even a legit marketing guru) and ape that person's style, parrot everything they said, completely resistant to trying to break, challenge, or stray from that guru's orthodoxy. It's not even the guru's fault in most cases. Dan Kennedy's fanboys, for example, are the worst of this, in my experience, even as they are defying something he always has written about for decades: "All dogma is bad" even his. yet, his fanboys sound like Brainy Smurf saying "Papa Smurf always says" except they say "Dan Kennedy says..." whenever giving unsolicited advice. They are literally a trope of themselves in some cases. But you gotta do the opposite. Seek ye not someone's approval (mine or anyone else's) but their disapproval. It won't always yield a big win, but it doesn't have to. It just has to keep you in the game, advancing in the game, racking up wins in the game - big or small - over time. Eventually, you start working out your own ways of doing things, creating your own tactics (many that work for you, but not others), and making your own way in this game, often in complete defiance of those insisting you need to do it their way or you're not gonna make it or whatever stupid platitude they use that is usually said by people who really are not gonna make it - as 2024+ will show. That whole line about when the tide goes out you see who's been swimming naked is a good metaphor and always has been. I don't know how many tangents from the main point I can possibly go on here. So I'll just shut my yap and get back to work..