Swiping From The Best

      Joe Sugarman is one of my favorite copywriters because a) he wrote some books that influenced me a lot and b) I used to read his copy when I was a kid. Sugarman promoted electronic gadgets through space ads running in magazines like Popular Mechanics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The technology of microprocessors was undergoing revolutionary upgrades every few months in those days – and the digital watches, calculators and primitive personal computers of the day seemed pretty miraculous to a ten year old kid.

     Of course in those days I didn’t have money to buy $200 digital watches but I drooled over the ads anyway. I’m not that interested in technological gadgets these days, because even though I find the wizardry interesting I prefer to stay engaged with it only to the extent that I can use it to get my goals.

     Last summer I ran across a bunch of old magazines with Sugarman ads in them at a flea market. I was there with my lady (who is a talented multi-media artist) looking for old tools and other assorted junk that interests me, and the magazines were a lucky find. What’s most interesting about these is the context of the advertising.

     One thing you need to really grasp about advertising is that it is contextual to our culture and times. People buy from advertising when they identify with the images presented there. People get their sense of self, their identity, through a combination of inner exploration and external role models. Advertising presents role models which teach us what it is, in our culture and times, to be attractive, sexy, smart, virile, hip, and so forth. None of us are immune to it’s influence, but as you get on the other side and basically start manipulating people’s minds with advertising you start to think more like a puppet master and behaving less like a puppet.

     This may seem a bit sinister, but it’s just a byproduct of learning about psychology and persuasion. Advertising is about selling, and people want to buy what they believe they are supposed to want. You present images of pretty young white moms in your advertising and and white young moms will respond to it emotionally, somehow forming a small part of their identity from the images your present. The effect is cumulative – it takes a lot of investment for cigarette companies to continue to make smoking look virile, sexy and cool when there is an onslaught of public service advertising and social pressure teaching that it is unhealthy, smelly and dumb.

     The war for the public’s favor is waged every day in the trenches of mass-market advertising. But Sugarman (and yours truly) are direct response guys. We run ads with phone numbers and order forms on them. We aren’t trying to win a preference for our brand of toothpaste in your mind so strong you march down to the drug store and ask for it. Instead we are asking for something altogether simpler: your order, right now.

     Here are the videos:

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