October 12th, 2008
Images get to us; we remember them and act on them. Sometimes we even seem to try to make our world look like it does in the picture. Advertisers know this, so they make sure to expose you to lots of images of their logos and products, especially pictures of people that look like you using their products.
This is one reason it’s so effective to visualize a result you want - to see yourself succeeding in your mind’s eye. Your brain sees the outcome in your imagination, believes it, and gets busy changing the parts of your world that don’t match that mental picture.
We can do even better than mental pictures, though, because technical toys like digital cameras and photo editing software give us the ability to externalize our visualizations, and then to repeat our exposure to them more frequently than we might remember to do on our own. Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s advertising.
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May 26th, 2008
Personal marketing uses commercial and social marketing principles to help us succeed at goals we have chosen for ourselves. It’s powerful stuff that can really help your life. But the following feedback from a reader made me realize that some of you may be feeling overwhelmed about how and where to begin. This article shows you how to find that starting point, and then how to continue step-by-step to develop a great ad to influence yourself.
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April 28th, 2008
Take Back Your Brain! wrestled with an interesting ethical dilemna this week. For the first time, someone approached me with an offer to advertise on the site. It was a pretty decent offer, too - more than two hundred dollars for doing very little work. Thinking about that offer provided an opportunity for me to analyze advertising from a different perspective than I usually do.
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April 14th, 2008
You’re exposed to some kind of persuasive message every 7 seconds, on average, for your whole life. And every one those messages has at least one thing in common with the others: ALL of them are about someone else’s priorities!
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March 16th, 2008
After taking a marketing class winter quarter I’m more convinced than ever that it’s where the action is when it comes to understanding and changing human behavior, and therefore those of us who are motivated to grow can benefit greatly from learning about its fundamental techniques.
Marketing includes deciding exactly what you’re selling, honestly assessing your strengths and weaknesses, sizing up the competition, learning as much as you can about your consumer, and strategizing about how to position your product to appeal to him. It includes deciding how to manipulate the four classic variables over which you have control: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Promotion, in turn, is divided into many possible persuasive activities, one of which is advertising. Other elements of a “promotional mix” can include direct marketing, interactive marketing, sales promotions, public relations and personal selling. In other words, advertising is just one tool in what is often a carefully planned and well-orchestrated campaign to convince you to do something.
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February 24th, 2008
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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February 17th, 2008
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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December 6th, 2007
Americans spend a half trillion dollars on Christmas. 60% of them carry more than $13,000 in credit card debt. Friday I went to the Seattle opening of What Would Jesus Buy? - a documentary movie by Morgan Spurlock that follows Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir on a month-long road trip [...]
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November 5th, 2007
The Christmas season is a fascinating time to study advertising methods. The rule set of the festival (everyone buys a gift for everyone else) ensures that more money is spent during these few weeks than at any other time during the year; thus the competition for holiday dollars heats up into a massive no-holds-barred persuasion frenzy.
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August 26th, 2007
In the blizzard of sensory input I encountered while driving through the neighborhood yesterday morning why did this particular sign catch my attention? There was nothing particularly attention-grabbing about it, other than being relevant to one of my goals.
I submit it’s exactly that relevance, reinforced by my collage and slideshow ads, that made the sign stand out. I think we notice opportunities that are related to whatever has been introduced to our attention as significant. By running ads about improving the soil in my back yard I had put my brain on notice that this is an important project, and when I saw the sign I recognized its message as a potential match between that intention and opportunity.
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June 17th, 2007
An amazing (and disturbing) video posted recently on YouTube. Think of your attention as the baby buffalo…
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May 22nd, 2007
I can remember vividly how difficult it was to learn how to drive nails. When I was training we used to practice by pounding hundreds of long, thin 16 penny box nails into a large beam - trying over and over to drive them all the way in without bending. Most of them did bend for the first few weeks until I learned the secret: focus all of my attention on the nail going in.
I think that’s exactly what we’re trying to do with the techniques I’m describing in this blog: keep our attention on the outcomes we want. Whether that outcome is a job, a behavior change, an adventure, an object, a relationship, or whatever - encountering images and messages about it regularly helps keep our attention focussed on that goal.
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March 6th, 2007
Sure. Affirmations are messages to ourselves advocating things we want, repeated many times. That’s exactly what we’re doing. But 21st century technology gives us tools to do it really, really well.
The idea was first introduced by a French psychologist named Emile Coue in the 1920’s. What has changed a great deal in 80-plus years is the technology we have available to create and deliver those messages.
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January 12th, 2007
Last week I wrote about making a virtual model of improvements I want to make to my front yard, and about how spending time “there” has helped me experience a future in which those changes have already happened. I also saved a picture of the model as my computer’s desktop background, and since then I have seen that picture many times each day.
A few days later I had an experience that demonstrates my unconscious mind is already busy transforming my exterior reality to resemble that model…I find these results to be exciting because they demonstrate to me that my behavior seems to be influenced by my ad campaigns, even when I am not consciously aware of it.
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January 7th, 2007
Computers can dramatically increase our ability to imagine a desired outcome. That computer background is not just a digital picture on a screen. It’s a frequent reminder of pleasant time I have spent hanging out in a convincing visualization of my desired future. The changes I want to implement in my yard have already occurred in my imagination – and those changes are being massively reinforced by the imagery I have created for myself. Apparently that’s a really powerful combination.
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November 22nd, 2006
The problem I have with advertising is not the fact that it exists, but that it’s distracting. The ratio of messages that benefit advertisers to the ratio that benefit us is wildly unfavorable to us. In fact, the ratio is not just unfavorable; it’s a shut-out.
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November 12th, 2006
Several years ago I began to wonder if there might be a way I could turn around all of the effort advertisers have put into conditioning me to be receptive to their marketing and use that training to my advantage. What would happen if I could control even a few of the messages I receive every day? What if there was a way I could insert advertisements to myself into my environment?
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