Ideas that are allocated no attention at all – those that are never exposed to anyone – make no impact on the world, by logical extension, since no one sees them. The 50 per cent of YouTube videos with less than 500 views don’t individually make much impact on culture. So attention is a powerful thing – but what kind of thing is it?
Excerpt from: Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World by Faris Yakob
Fundamental attribution error was conducted in 1967 by Edward Jones and Victor Harris at Duke University. They had students read speech transcripts of debaters both in support of and in opposition to the political ideologies of Fidel Castro. (Today they might have used Osama bin Laden.) The students correctly attributed the speechwriter’s ideas as influenced by the speechwriter’s internal feelings when told the person who gave the speech had chosen his own position. If, for instance, the debaters said they disagreed with Castro, the students said they believed them. When the students were told the debater had no choice in the matter and was assigned the position as either pro- or anti-Castro, the students didn’t buy it. If the debater was assigned a pro-Castro position and then gave a pro-Castro speech, the students reading that speech told the researchers they thought the debater really believed what he or she was saying. The situation’s influence didn’t play into their assumptions; instead they saw all the debaters’ words as springing from their character.
In their field experiments Keizer and his colleagues tested to what extent various subtle signs of disorder in an environment could influence the proliferation of other undesirable behaviors. In one study the researchers found the perfect setting for their test: an alleyway near a Dutch shopping mall where shoppers typically parked their bikes. While the shoppers were at the mall, the researchers affixed one of the store’s advertisements on the handlebar of each bicycle with an elastic band. In one condition, the researchers left the alleyway just as they found it; in a second condition, they added graffiti to the alleyway. Because there were no garbage bins in the area, shoppers returning from the mall to find a printed advertisement attached to the handlebars of their bicycle had a simple choice. Do they remove the advertisement and take it home with them—or do they instead drop it on the ground?
The results revealed that 33 percent of the bicycle owners littered the paper when there was no graffiti to be seen in the alleyway. However, 69 percent did so when graffiti was present.
Excerpt from: The Small BIG: Small Changes that Spark Big Influence by Robert Cialdini, Noah Goldstein, and Steve Martin
Several studies have demonstrated that we are more likely to help those who dress like us. In one study, done in the early 1970s when young people tended to dress either in “hippie” or “straight” fashion, experimenters donned hippie or straight attire and asked college students on campus for a dime to make a phone call. When the experimenter was dressed in the same way as the student, the request was granted in more than two thirds of the instances; but when the student and requester were dissimilarly dressed, the dime was provided less than half the time. Another experiment shows how automatic our positive response to similar others can be. Marchers in an antiwar demonstration were found to be not only more likely to sign the petition of a similarly dressed requester, but also to do so without bothering to read it first. Click, whirr.
Excerpt from: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
One of the first experiments on the topic was run in the USA by Solomon Asch. He asked subjects to evaluate a person simply on the basis of a list of six adjectives describing him. They might be told that he was ‘intelligent, industrious, impulsive critic, stubborn and envious’. Other subjects were given exactly the same six words but in the opposite order, ‘envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious and intelligent’. All subjects were then I asked to fill in a rating sheet in order to evaluate the person. For example, they had to indicate how happy they thought he was, how sociable he was, and so on. The subjects who heard the first list, which began with favourable adjectives evaluated the person considerably more highly than did those given the list beginning with the derogatory words. This effect – being more heavily influenced by early than by late item – is called the ‘primacy error’.
Excerpt from: Irrationality: The enemy within by Stuart Sutherland
When researchers from Columbia University analysed more than three-quarters of million individuals associated with a leading investment group, the team found that for every additional ten retirement savings funds available, participation declined by about two percentage points.” In essence, the more options available, the fewer people went on to save for their retirement. “The fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better,” reinforces psychologist Barry Schwartz. He calls this the paradox of choice.
Excerpt from: Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking ancient innovation to solve tomorrow’s challenges by Sam Tatam
Beware loading your prose with too many jokes and verbal conceits. As a rule, the plainer you keep things, the greater effect of the occasional flourish.
Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD
Any copywriter has to strike a deal with the reader. And as far as the reader is concerned, the deal is this. I’ll keep reading for as long as you keep me interested. So always ask yourself: have I expressed this in as original a way as possible? Have I been ruthlessly concise? Have I kept my side of the bargain?
Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD
- Pay careful attention to your first ideas. They are formed with the same innocence, naiveté and lack of jadedness that consumers have when first exposed to your advertising. There is value in that innocence and simplicity.
- On the other hand, don’t stop too soon. Even if the essence of your first ideas is correct, explore every possible expression of that essence. Write every headline 100 different ways. Advertising is art, and like poetry, every comma will affect the balance of meaning.
- Understand what the perceptions of your product are no. The current attitude of the consumer is the starting-point and the desired attitude is the finish line. Often, clients are reticent to admit what the current attitude towards them is. You have to make them understand. You can’t start a race in the middle.
- Once you have placed yourself in the mind-set of the consumer, relax and be human. Don’t be afraid to think cynical thoughts or joke about the product as you work. I’ve found that a lot of great ideas started as jokes which, when explored, could be turned around to make a powerful, positive statement. Ideas that start this way have an honesty the consumer appreciates.
Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD
Some (until now) unwritten rules I set myself:
- Know when to shut up. The best copywriting isn’t always in the lines. It’s also between them.
- Know there’s always a fresh way to tell an old, old story. Stand-up comedians are brilliant at this, taking the most mundane subject — life — and retelling it in ways that make us laugh, wonder and think.
- Know your target audience. Not intellectually, but intuitively. Think like them, empathise with them, identify with them. Because at some level, the reader needs to like the writer.
- Know that we are all creative creatures. Everyone enjoys the quirks and whimsy of creativity. You don’t have to logic people into a corner, you can charm them into wanting to come out and play.
- Clive James said that humour is common sense dancing; Following the great advertising tradition of “borrowing’ from someone much cleverer, I would say that copywriting is persuasion dancing. So if it doesn’t dance, go back and do it again until it does.
Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD
Novelist Joseph Conrad once described his task this way: “by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see.” When Gene Roberts, a great American newspaper editor, broke in as a cub reporter in North Carolina, he read his stories aloud to a blind editor who would chastise young Roberts for not making him see.
When details of character and setting appeal to the senses, they create an experience for the reader that leads to understanding. When we say “I see,” we most often mean “I understand.” Inexperienced writers may choose the obvious detail, the man puffing on the cigarette, the young woman chewing on what’s left of her fingernails. Those details fail to tell – unless the man is dying of lung cancer or the woman is anorexic.
At the St. Petersburg Times, editors and writing coaches warn reporters not to return to the office without the name of the dog.” That reporting task does not require the writer to use the detail in the story, but it reminds the reporter to keep her eyes and ears opened.
Excerpt from: Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark
We want above all, throughout this brief historical overview, to draw attention to an aspect of advertising which is too often forgotten today: a certain openness, an innocence which we find in the earliest forms of advertising. It comes just as much from a liking for spectacle, for playing with words, for putting on a performance, as it does from a desire to sell. These two things are intimately bound together: the actual sale is only one element in the acting out of a shared event, which is infinitely richer than the simple two-way relationship of seller and buyer…
Excerpt from: Why Does The Pedlar Sing?: What Creativity Really Means in Advertising by Paul Feldwick
Despite universal cynicism towards salesmen in general and ads in particular, there’s a part of us that really wants to believe we’ll have more and better sex if we use a certain aftershave or hair conditioner. Unfortunately that part is patrolled by a beefy armed guard who can easily wrestle inanities like this to the ground. What our beefy armed guard needs is enough supporting logic to accept your premise and not look like an idiot. DDB’s advertising for Avis didn’t just say Avis tried harder; it said when you’re only number two you have to — or else.
Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD
because we hate cognitive dissonance: we can’t stand a mismatch between our actions and thoughts. So if we find ourselves helping someone out, we’ll unconsciously adjust our feelings for them. After all, we don’t want to feel we’re valuing someone who doesn’t deserve it. In one key study, students won money in a contest; afterwards, some were asked to return it because, they were told, it was the hard-up researcher’s own cash. In a subsequent survey, that group liked the researcher significantly more than those who weren’t asked to give any money back.
The implications are striking. Don’t suck up to your boss – make demands. Don’t shower your friends with gifts – ask to borrow their stuff.
Excerpt from Help!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done by Oliver Burkeman
There’s a neat trick – first suggested, as far as I can discover, by the American academic Rebecca Johnson – for identifying a passive construction in case of doubt. Try adding ‘by zombies’ after the verb. If you can do so, you’re looking at the passive voice.
‘Everyone loves by zombies’, America’s Got Talent, is recognisably not English. ‘America’s Got Talent is loved by zombies’ is not only a grammatical sentence, but probably true.
One of the oldest and most persistent writer’s tips is that you should prefer the active to the passive voice; or, in its extreme form, that you should always avoid the passive.
Excerpt from: Write to the Point: How to be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page by Sam Leith
‘Like laughing at your own joke,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald of this most gaudy of punctuation marks. He had a point. Overusing exclamation marks makes you sound hectoring and overexcited. That idea of laughing at your own joke – of paying yourself a compliment – has been there from the beginning. When they arrived in the language in the fourteenth century, David Crystal tells us, they were called the ‘point of admiration’ – and later, the ‘admirative point’ and the ‘wonderer’. It’s since Dr Johnson that we’ve had ‘exclamation’ – shifting the emphasis from admiration to the expression of strong feeling.
Excerpt from: Write to the Point: How to be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page by Sam Leith
The Power of Confirmation
Three scientists, Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper, recruited forty-eight American undergraduates who either strongly supported the death penalty or strongly opposed it. They presented them with two scientific studies; one offered evidence regarding the effectiveness of capital punishment, and the other data showed its ineffectiveness. In reality, the studies had been fabricated. Lord, Ross, and Lepper had made them up, but the students did not know that. Did the students find the studies convincing? Did they believe that the data provided good evidence that should alter their minds? They did!
But only when the study reinforced their original view. Those students who strongly supported capital punishment thought the study that demonstrated its effectiveness was well conducted. At the same time, they argued that the other study was poorly executed and not compelling. Those who were originally against capital punishment assessed the studies the other way around. As a result, believers in the death penalty left the lab supporting capital punishment with more passion than ever, while those in opposition to it ended up opposing capital punishment with more zest than before.
Excerpt from: The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others by Tali Sharot
I designed an experiment to test this idea. It involved designing Converse shoes. First, I would invite volunteers into the lab and ask them to evaluate eighty different Converse shoes on a computer screen. Each shoe would be slightly different in color and design. Then, for each volunteer, I would divide all of the shoes into two groups: half the shoes would be assigned to the “create” group and half to the “just watch” group. For the forty “create” shoes, the volunteer would have to log on to the Converse website and use the special online tool there to recreate the exact same shoe. The Converse website used to have an application that allowed anyone to design their own shoe. Notice, however, that the design and colors of the shoes in this experiment were predetermined; the volunteers did not create their favorite design—they simply re-created a design we had already made. For the forty “just watch” shoes, I asked my volunteers to watch a video on the computer screen of the shoe being created. They would sit passively in front of the computer watching, rather than clicking buttons themselves. That was the only difference between the “create” shoes and the “just watch” shoes. When the volunteers were done, two hours later, they were asked to evaluate all the shoes again.
Similar to my oil painting saga, the volunteers liked the shoes they thought they had created two hours before better than the ones they remembered “just watching.”
Excerpt from: The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others by Tali Sharot
Figure 5.2. People’s desire to know their own worth is related to market performance. The black line represents the S&P 500, and the gray line represents the number of times people logged on to their accounts to check on their stocks. When the market goes up, people are more likely to take a peek at the value of their holdings than when it goes down.
Excerpt from: The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others by Tali Sharot
If not quite a ‘rule’, it’s at least a strong guideline for successful rhythm that you should put the shortest term in any list first and the longest last. This is the principle of climax underscoring the rising tricolon. ‘I am Scottish by aspiration, birth and choice’ has nothing of the drum-roll about it. ‘I will be fishing for cod, blue-fin tuna, the inedible but mighty basking shark, and the many-tentacled deep-sea octopus’ just, somehow, tends to sound better than ‘I will be fishing for the many-tentacled deep-sea octopus, blue-fin tuna, the inedible but mighty basking shark, and cod.’
Excerpt from: Write to the Point: How to be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page by Sam Leith
The bias runs deep. Few of us, surely, think of ourselves as having a fixed, monochrome personality: we’re happy or sad, stressed or relaxed, depending on circumstances. Yet we stubbornly resist the notion that others might be similarly circumstance-dependent. In a well-known 1960s study, people were shown two essays, one arguing in favour of Castro’s Cuba and one against. Even when it was explained that the authors had been ordered to adopt each position based on a coin-toss – that their situation, in other words, had forced their hand readers still considered that the pro Castro author must be deep down, pro Castro and vice versa.
Excerpt from Help!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done by Oliver Burkeman
Psychologists Gretchen Chapman and Brian Bornstein tested this idea in a 1996 experiment, when Liebeck v. McDonald’s was much in the news. They presented eighty students from the University of Illinois, U.S.A., students with the hypothetical case of a young woman who said she contracted ovarian cancer from birth control pills and was suing her health care organization. Four groups each heard a different demand for damages: $100; $20,000; $5 million; and $1 billion. The mock jurors were asked to give compensatory damages only. Anyone who wants to believe in the jury system must find the results astonishing.
The jurors were amazingly persuadable, up through the $5 million demand. The lowball $100 demand got a piddling $990 average award. This was for a cancer said to have the plaintiff ‘almost constantly in pain… Doctors do not expect her to survive beyond a few more months.’
Excerpt from: Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone
Bottom line: it’s hard to change someone’s mind when you feel morally and intellectually superior to them. As Megan McArdle memorably put it: “It took me years of writing on the Internet to learn what is nearly an iron law of commentary: The better your message makes you feel about yourself, the less likely it is that you are convincing anyone else.”
Excerpt from: The Scout Mindset: The Perils of Defensive Thinking and How to Be Right More Often by Julia Galef
When the new school year started, teachers at Spruce Elementary learned that an acclaimed scientist by the name of Dr Rosenthal would be administering a test to their pupils. This ‘Test of Inflected Acquisition’ indicated who would make the greatest strides at school that year. In truth it was a common or garden IQ test, and, once the scores had been tallied, Rosenthal and his team cast them all aside. They tossed a coin to decide which kids they would tell teachers were ‘high-potentials’. The kids, meanwhile, were told nothing at all. Sure enough, the power of expectation swiftly began to work its magic. Teachers gave the group of ‘smart’ pupils more attention, more encouragement and more praise, thus changing how the children saw themselves, too. The effect was clearest among the youngest kids, whose IQ scores increased by an average of twenty-seven points in a single year. The largest gains were among boys who looked Latino, a group typically subject to the lowest expectations in California.’ Rosenthal dubbed his discovery the Pygmalion Effect, after the mythological sculptor who fell so hard for one of his own creations that the gods decided to bring his statue to life. Beliefs we’re devoted to — whether they’re true or imagined — can like-wise come to life, effecting very real change in the world. The Pygmalion Effect resembles the placebo effect (which I discussed in Chapter 1), except, instead of benefiting oneself, these are expectations that benefit others.
Excerpt from: Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
This rule is known as Chesterton’s fence, after G. K. Chesterton, the British writer who proposed it in an essay in 1929. Imagine you discover a road that has a fence built across it for no particular reason you can see. You say to yourself, “Why would someone build a fence here? This seems unnecessary and stupid, let’s tear it down.” But if you don’t understand why the fence is there, Chesterton argued, you can’t be confident that it’s okay to tear it down. Long-standing customs or institutions are like those fences, he said. Naive reformers look at them and say, “I don’t see the use of this; let’s clear it away.” But more thoughtful reformers reply, “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
Excerpt from: The Scout Mindset: The Perils of Defensive Thinking and How to Be Right More Often by Julia Galef
The original manager of the Rolling Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham, acted out his own form of emotional contagion in 1965 , from the back of the theatre where the band would perform. As the band came onstage, he noticed that if he crouched down to be out of sight and screamed in high-pitched voice, then everyone would would scream with him. The rest, as they say, is rock and roll history.
Excerpt from: Tarzan Economics: Eight Principles for Pivoting through Disruption by Will Page
If we take the UK’s most listened-to radio show- BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show – then the songwriter can expect the Performing Right Society for Music expect Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) to collect roughly £60. Stare at a royalty statement which lists £150 for a spin alongside £0.005 for a stream and you can understand the fear of letting go of the old wine.
But the economics don’t support that fear. A ‘spin’ on BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show will reach 8 million people; you need therefore to divide the £150 by the 8 million pairs of ears to get a comparative unit value per listener, and this results in £0.00002 – which is less than half a percent of the £ 0.005 that you would get from one unique person on a streaming service. What’s more, this is not an either/or comparison as those who listen to it on the radio may be more inclined to stream it on Spotify. To bring this calculation full circle, had those 8 million listeners streamed the song on Spotify (which is not beyond the realms of possibility), a cheque of £40,000 would be paid across to the artist and songwriter – not £150. ‘Not too shabby’ as some Americans like to say.
Excerpt from: Tarzan Economics: Eight Principles for Pivoting through Disruption by Will Page
If you’ve ever wondered why every poster and every trailer and every TV spot looks exactly the same, it’s because of testing. It’s because anything interesting scores poorly and gets kicked out Now I’ve tried to argue that the methodology of this testing doesn’t work. If you take a poster or a trailer and you show it to somebody in isolation, that’s not really an accurate reflection of whether it’s working because we don’t see them in isolation, we see them in groups. We see a trailer in the middle of five other trailers, we see a poster in the middle of eight other posters, and I’ve tried to argue that maybe the thing that’s making it distinctive and score poorly actually would stick out if you presented it to these people the way the real world presents it. And I’ve never won that argument.
In the first few decades of cinema, patrons would buy a ticket that granted general admission to the theatre. Several features would be playing on a loop, and you could choose whichever you fancied. You might enter halfway through the main movie, watch it until the end, see the cartoons and the newsreel and then start from the beginning to catch what you’d missed. It functioned rather like a big public television. Then, in 1960, a director decreed that no one would be permitted to enter screenings once his new film had begun: the integrity of the viewing experience was paramount. The film was Psycho and Alfred Hitchcock’s edict – part artistic statement, part marketing ploy – placed new emphasis on plot twists in the final act. (He also asked critics not to discuss those key details.)
Excerpt from: Unconventional Wisdom: Adventures in the Surprisingly True by Tom Standage
Consider a study I helped conduct, led by my doctoral student Aneesh Rai, which involved thousands of volunteers at a large nonprofit who had promised to work two hundred hours within a year of joining but were falling short of their pledge. Knowing that facing such a massive goal can be demotivating, my collaborators and I instead asked the volunteers to comm it to four hours each week or eight hours every two weeks-which, of course, is basically the same as two hundred hours a year. But these smaller commitments, despite amounting to the same annual pledge, yielded 8 percent more time volunteering overall than simply prompting people to make progress on a yearly commitment. (Likewise, the online financial services company Acorns has found that it’s more effective when people are asked to set aside monthly even though these amount to the same thing.) If a commitment is bite-size, it appears less daunting to us, and we’re more likely to stick to our world.
Excerpt from: How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Katy Milkman
