About TBYB
Every waking moment someone else is working very hard to convince us that our priorities should include things like pizza, luxury automobiles, refinancing, body spray, diamonds, athletic shoes, liquor, breakfast cereal, baldness remedies and telecommunications services. We receive persuasive messages embedded in news, entertainment, politics and even our clothing.
According to the industry’s own estimates each of us receives several thousand advertising messages every day. They may be as flashy as a Super Bowl ad or as subtle and unconscious as the logo you see when you glance at your watch. What these messages all have in common is that they are hijacking space in our brains for someone else’s agenda.
I’m not opposed to advertising per se. I believe it is neither good nor bad. Nor am I that interested in debating whether it influences us. I believe it does, but that doesn’t really matter. My gripe is with how much mind space it all consumes, and how distracting that is from other, quieter, deeply important agendas we may have for our own lives. TBYB is interested in taking back some of that bandwidth for ourselves; in reclaiming our attention from the seductions of those mental predators so that we may use it to achieve our own goals.
How to Take Back Your Brain
1. Learn the techniques professionals use to persuade us and borrow any that seem useful.
Advertisers have spent billions of dollars developing and testing ways to influence us. There’s no need to repeat that research since much of it is published and free for the taking. There are clues in many other human hacking systems as well - NLP, psychology, religion, propaganda, politics, social engineering and sales, to name a few.
While we bravely use techniques like good intentions and willpower, they are deploying powerful time-tested strategies that are almost guaranteed to influence the human mind. Why shouldn’t we use those strategies for ourselves? For example:
- The psychology of persuasion - because
- The psychology of persuasion - perceptual contrast
- The psychology of persuasion - reciprocation
- The psychology of persuasion - consistency
- The psychology of persuasion - social proof
- The psychology of persuasion - liking
- The psychology of persuasion - authority
- The psychology of persuasion - scarcity
- Target your hierarchy of needs - part 1
- Target your hierarchy of needs - part 2
- Target your hierarchy of needs - part 3
- Punch up your headline with Phrases that Sell
2. Use our personal technology tools to make effective ads aimed at influencing ourselves.
Our brains respond powerfully to pictures because our relationship to visual imagery is much more ancient even than language. Advertisers know this, and make sure your environment is saturated with images that remind you to use their products. How well do you think a hand-written item scrawled on a to-do list is able to compete with an emotion-driven focus-group-tested visual extravaganda like a Super Bowl ad?
We can use digital tools to level the playing field a bit by using the Internet to find images for our ads, and using cameras, scanners and image editing software to create them.
- Put yourself in the picture
- Put yourself in the picture with Photoshop
- Put yourself in the picture with glue
- Make a motivational poster at Big Huge Labs
- Advertise to your friends and family with custom postage stamps
- Hipster PDA version
- Play dress-up with your avatar
- My exercise ad campaign
3. Use personal technology again to automate delivery of those messages.
Look around you. Unless you’re in a wilderness area you probably see dozens of advertising messages right now on a variety of surfaces. But unless you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, none of them are for goals you have chosen.
TBYB wants us to get our own messages into the game. I show you how to use a wide range of media to deliver advertising messages to yourself, from sticky notes and 3×5 cards to your computer and cell phone. The goal is to get messages that advocate for our own goals into the media stream that surrounds us.
You can use personal technology to set up systems that automatically deliver messages to your computer or cell phone without any further intervention on your part. Low-tech methods can be very effective too, like putting a picture on your bathroom mirror. Either way, you are frequently prompted to return your attention to a goal you have chosen for yourself.
- How to rotate picture ads with the Vista Sidebar Slide Show
- Rotate your ads with a screensaver slideshow
- How to rotate picture ads with the Google Photos gadget
- How to make a quick text ad on your Windows Mobile device
- How to send yourself text messages with Backpack
- Change the picture on your cell phone screen
- Get the t-shirt
Personal marketing can change your life
We can’t stop the torrent of advertising streaming toward us every day. What we can do is make sure at least some of it is advocating for objectives we have chosen for ourselves. My experiments have demonstrated to me that simply changing a few drops in that torrent via the creation of ads by and for myself is incredibly powerful. It seems to influence the choices I make in a way that tips the balance from merely thinking about the life I want to getting up and doing the things necessary to achieve it. I invite you to explore the articles I’ve written about this topic and encourage you to experiment with these and other advertising techniques to help focus your attention on the outcomes you want to create in your life.