Monthly Archives: February 2008

The Merchants of Cool

More than any generation in history, people who are young today are not free to create an authentic culture of their own. Instead their hopes and desires are intensively studied by marketers, then amplified and sold back to them in a diabolical feedback loop.

That’s the premise of the PBS Frontline documentary “The Merchants of Cool”, which makes a chillingly compelling case for the distortion of youth culture by its massive commercialization.

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How does your marketing stack up to Super Bowl ads?

TBYB encourages you to level the playing field, as it were, by stepping up the production values of your own advertising. Though you’ll likely never decide to sink a million bucks into producing an ad to influence yourself, it’s certainly possible to add a little color, a photograph, or a slogan. Rather than just writing your goal on a list, consider introducing interesting imagery to reinforce the concept.

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No brainer

Hey guys. I sat down late last night to publish the article I had written for you this week and discovered to my dismay that due to problems with my host (don’t get me started!) that version of the Wordpress database has vanished. ARGH!!!!! Hopefully this is a temporary situation that can be resolved from either their backup or mine, but in the meantime I encourage you to browse the article index for tips about personal marketing that you may have missed.

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My exercise ad campaign

For the past three weeks we’ve been looking at a tool that marketers use to understand and manipulate human motivation - Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I showed you how to locate a goal you have for yourself on the hierarchy of needs, intentionally frame your messaging about that behavior to a different layer on the hierarchy, and then design advertisements to yourself based on that strategy. See Target your hierarchy of needs - part 1, part 2, and part 3.

This week I’ll show you the details about how I used the instructions in those articles to make a group of ads for myself about exercising.

Posted in How to make ads | 1 Comment