TBYB is a strong proponent of identifying the life you want and trying to get it. I notice that the life I yearn for lately has more leisure and fewer commitments; unexpected morning adventures and lazy afternoons. Larger areas of white space, to use a publishing metaphor.

Sounds like someone who needs a vacation, doesn’t it? So I’m going to slow down the writing pace for a little while, to enjoy the summer and recharge the ol’ battery. Maybe I’ll plant a mental cover crop. What I’m saying is, it will be longer than usual before the next post.

No reason to wait for me to get more control over your attention, though. If, you’re raring to go with your personal marketing campaign, this site is loaded with material to get you started. 10 steps to powerful personal marketing is a great place to begin. Another really easy place to start is Make a motivational poster at Big Huge Labs.

Other popular jump-off points include:

• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 1
• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 2
• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 3

Oh, and if you too are scheming about how to spend your summer vacation - or especially if you’re one of our southern hemisphere friends in the middle of winter right now - you might want to check out Advertise your way to paradise and Put yourself in the picture. Bon voyage! Drop us a postcard in the comments.

I’m going to take a break for a few weeks, and then I’ll be back with a new season of posts about personal marketing, in which I’ll show you step-by-step how to take control of your own attention by advertising to yourself. If you’ve not done so already, you can subscribe to my RSS feed to be notified when the series begins again.

I watched lot of softball this week on the NCAA Women’s College World Series. It turns out that Katie Burkhart, the pitcher of the winning Arizona Sun Devils - is a very successful personal marketing practitioner. For starters, she’s been visualizing herself playing in this tournament in an Arizona State uniform since she was a little girl!

According to the announcers, she spent a lot of time working on her mental game in the past year, and one of the tactics she now uses is to write messages to herself on the back of her glove, to remind her of thoughts that help her focus out on the pitching mound during the game. How cool is that? I briefly saw a close-up shot of her glove during one game and counted several different messages.

Whatever she’s doing, it’s working. Her performance was amazing during the whole series, and she pretty much blew out Texas A&M in the final two games for the national championship.

Katie Burkhart is the real deal! Burkhart was a magician on the mound for the entire Women’s College World Series–exactly what you would expect from a pitcher of her caliber, and exactly what it takes to win it all. Burkhart pitched 35 of 35 innings played by Arizona State during the tournament–5 complete games. She only allowed 15 hits and 2 runs TOTAL during those 5 games, and she struck out 54 batters. Striking out 54 batters in 7 games means that Burkhart personally accounted for 51% of all the total outs recorded by Arizona State.

Wow. Where do you need to consistently pull off peak performance to achieve an important goal? How could you embed a couple of ads right there where you need them?

Related articles

• Use ads to focus on the outcome you want
• Aren’t these just affirmations?

I looked at the site a few times previously and thought it was pretty interesting and made a lot of sense but I didn’t spend a lot of time there because I was in surf-mode (usually at work). But because I was intrigued I would periodically keep going back to it, and each time I would think, “Wow, this is great stuff! But there’s so much to read and I don’t have time.” So I have taken away bits and pieces (the gorilla is a great example) but just keep feeling like I didn’t have the time to read everything I want to and get a good grasp on where to start. So it ends up on my never-ending, ever-growing To Do List.

If anyone else is feeling like that, the ten steps below will show you exactly how to apply a marketing mindset to achieving your own goals. Want a short-cut? Try just doing #1, #6, and #9 for your first ad.

If this is your first visit, you might want to read a couple of foundational articles before you begin to grok the concept of personal marketing. These three articles illustrate the problem with mental clutter, and why I believe advertising to yourself makes a difference.

• Holy piranha, Batman!
• Use ads to focus on the outcome you want
• Aren’t these just affirmations?

How to get started with your own personal marketing campaign

1. Pick a goal

Personal marketing can help you with many different kinds of goals. To start this process, pick one that you’d most like to work on, such as:

• Improve yourself mentally, physically or spiritually
• Improve your relationships with other people
• Go someplace you’d love to, across the world or in your home town
• Get a better job, or perform better at the one you have
• Acquire a tangible object such as a house, or make the one you already have into more of a home
• Do something else you dream of that’s a bit (or a lot) of a stretch for you

Can’t decide? Here’s a way to figure it out fast. Shut your eyes and ask yourself, “If I won the lottery, I would ___________.” Your first answer to that question will give you an excellent clue about where to start changing your life. When you’ve chosen a goal, go on to step 2.

2. Analyze your situation

Next, take an honest look at yourself. What are your strengths and weaknesses in relation to the goal you have chosen? What resources do you bring to the table? Where will your challenges be? What factors outside yourself represent opportunities and threats to your success? What or who is your competition? What have you already tried? I think it’s helpful to write down your answers to these questions.

3. Research your target market (you)

Now we’ll look deeper, to find out what motivates you to succeed. This is where you throw out the shoulds - the things that should motivate you - and get real honest about the kind of things that actually DO get you moving. What do you care about? What are your biggest concerns? What do you fear? What do you enjoy? What and who are important influences on you? What do they want you to do? What do you see as the benefits of achieving this goal? What do you see as barriers? Again, it’s helpful to write your answers.

For more about this topic see Target market research (it’s all about you).

4. Decide how to position your change

Based on what you’ve learned in the previous two steps, select a strategy for positioning your goal. For example, exercising could be positioned as being fun, practicing discipline, making you more attractive, or saving your life. You need to decide which one is most likely to work with the person you’ve been writing about above. It’s important to pick ONE approach and use it consistently in all of your marketing efforts. You want to brand this behavior change in your mind as being all about the position you have chosen. My exercise campaign is a good example of positioning.

You’ll probably find it helpful to read a few articles in the Hierarchy of Needs or Psychology of Persuasion series to get ideas. The task for this step is to read those articles, then let your subconscious mind take over for a few days until you have a good idea. When you’ve decided on a strategy, move on to step 5.

5. Tweak the elements you can control

The classic elements of marketing are Product, Price, Place and Promotion - called the four P’s. These represent all of the variables you have control over in a given marketing task. Before deciding how to promote your goal to yourself, first do everything you can to sweeten the offer by tweaking the first three P’s. Think about how you could increase the benefits and reduce the barriers you identified in step 3 above by challenging assumptions you’re making about what you want to do, what you must give up to get it, and where you will do it. For example,

• You really want to buy a new house, but anything in the area you want to live is way outside your price range. So you begin to consider a different neighborhood, or buying a fixer-upper. (Product)
• You schedule an extra 30 minutes when you go to the gym so you have time to reward yourself with a sauna. (also Product)
• You hate to get up early in the morning to exercise. It’s always a struggle. You suffer. So you try scheduling workouts in the evening instead. (Price)
• You know your life would go better if you meditated regularly, so you spend an afternoon creating a lovely little sanctuary in the corner of your bedroom. (Place)

Steps 6-9 are about the fourth P - Promotion. However, what you want to do in this step is make promotion less necessary because the offer you’re making - to the person you are - is a very good fit.

6. Take (or find) a picture of your goal

If at all possible, take a picture of yourself that looks like your goal is already achieved. This image will start getting your mind used to that reality. Check out the Put yourself in the picture series for ideas and instructions about both technical and non-technical ways to get that picture.

A tool that really helps is the Joby Gorillapod - an inexpensive flexible tripod that makes it easy to take photos of yourself in almost any situation. It comes in several sizes; one of them is appropriate for any camera.

7. Write a slogan

This step is optional, but it’s quite effective. In fact, you can make a pretty good ad that’s only text. Write a slogan for your ad that embraces the positioning you selected in step 4. See the articles Punch up your headline with Phrases that Sell and Target your hierarchy of needs - part 2 for tips about writing slogans. How to write an effective ad on a Post-It note has some helpful suggestions, too.

I highly recommend picking up a copy of Phrases That Sell, a $10 book that really makes it easy to choose powerful language for your ad.

8. Produce your ad

Next transform the picture you took and the (optional) slogan you wrote into a form you can use for an ad. The time required to complete this step can vary from a couple of minutes to several hours, depending on how elaborate you want to get. For example, you might just print the picture and write your slogan on it by hand. On the other hand, Put yourself in the picture with Photoshop gives directions for producing a more technically complicated ad. Check out the category How to make ads for a lot of other ideas.

Steps 8 and 9 are closely related, since how you produce your ad will depend on the delivery system you choose. I think the most important part is the tangible act of engaging in the process, so please don’t worry at all about perfection.

9. Set up a system to automatically deliver your ads.

The important thing about your delivery system is to choose a method that’s “set and forget”. That is, once you’ve set it up you don’t have to do anything further to expose yourself to the message several times a day. Keep in mind that you don’t have to DO anything to receive messages from Sprint or Nike. Your ads should be like that too.

If you want to start with an easy delivery system set the ad you made in step 8 as your computer’s screensaver or background wallpaper, or just print it out and tape to the refrigerator or the wall in front of your toilet.

10. Evaluate and adjust

After you’ve run your ads for a few weeks, check in with yourself to see if you need to make any adjustments. Take a look at both the results you’re getting, and the gut feeling you get when you encounter the ads. Either can suggest that you’re on the right track, or that you need to try a different approach.

Even if you’ve responded well to a campaign, it’s effective to freshen it once in awhile. See my How I got an RV with my most successful ad campaign for an example of a very aggressive campaign that evolved over a year and a half. Don’t worry - you don’t usually need to work nearly that hard to get good results!

Bottom line

This stuff works if you make time to do it. The first step is to choose a goal. Now. Then sign up for my RSS feed and I’ll nudge you with new ideas once a week to keep you moving on steps 2-10.

I didn’t have time to grow a spring garden this year. I could have just let it go as a fallow playground for weeds and cats for a few months, but instead I decided to plant a cover crop.

A cover crop is one or more plants (in this case fava beans and rye grass) with qualities that feed the soil with nitrogen while they grow, and feed it again with organic material when you plow them under. So during the spring months while I was busy with school, the soil in my garden got better on its own.

Similarly, you can’t advertise to yourself all the time. I guess you could, but it would be time-consuming and exhausting, sometimes you don’t really know what you want to work on, and other times you’re just busy with other stuff. Besides, if you do it too much you risk having your own ads become part of the mental “clutter”.

What you can do during the fallow or busy times is take advantage of the delivery channels you’ve already established to throw up very easy, low-maintenance messages that inspire or nourish you until you’re ready for the next round of progress.

Benefits of a mental cover crop

Choke out the weeds

In the course of our normal lives we get an astonishing amount of input. Much of that is very low quality, or at least low value to us (spam, infomercials, sit-coms, and attack ads come to mind). Planting intentional messages in your environment is one way to counter all that input.

Provide mental nutrients

To our brains, everything is learning. So it’s important to make sure some of the constant input in your environment is nourishing to you. Because most of TBYB’s delivery systems are set-and-forget, they can be a very low maintenance way to fertilize your consciousness with high quality input.

Stake out sovereignty over your attention

The tsunami of persuasive messages coming at you doesn’t slow down just because you’re busy doing other things. A cover crop is one way to maintain some control over your mental space, even if you don’t have time to do a full-on ad campaign.

Here’s how to set yourself up

1. Make a folder named “Cover Crop” (or something like that). It can be a digital folder on your computer, or a real paper folder, depending on how you like to advertise. An online data collecting application like Evernote works well, too.

2. Create a blank document in your folder for collecting quotes. Again, this document can be either electronic or paper. If it’s digital, name it something like “Quotes”.

3. Whenever you read something that inspires or nourishes you, take a moment to add the text of it to your Quotes document.

4. Similarly, when you see photos that inspire or delight you, grab a copy and put it in your Cover Crop folder. See How to download and print pictures for instructions, if you don’t know how. This could include photos of people who inspire you, or who care about your progress.

Before long, you’ll have a nice collection of quotes and photos that feel nourishing to you.

How to “plant” your cover crop

If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you may have already set up one or more delivery systems for your ads.

We’ve discussed many delivery systems for photo ads. Some of my favorites digital methods are the Google Sidebar Photos gadget, Windows Vista Slide Show gadget, my computer’s desktop background or screensaver, and my mobile phone background.

Good locations for paper ads include on the refrigerator, in front of the toilet, and in your Hipster PDA.

Systems for delivering text ads include Backpack, The Quote gadget, Windows Mobile, and Wakerupper voice messages.

Any of the above methods could be quickly adapted to use the material in your Cover Crop folder. The next time you realize you’re between goals, or are too distracted to focus on a personal marketing campaign, try fertilizing yourself with a cover crop!

Related articles

• Send yourself voice ads with Wakerupper
• Personal marketing in the bathroom: better than taking a magazine!
• How to make a quick text ad on your Windows Mobile device
• How to rotate picture ads with the Vista Sidebar Slide Show
• Change the picture on your cell phone screen
• Hipster PDA version
• How to rotate text ads with The Quote gadget
• How to rotate picture ads with the Google Photos gadget
• Rotate your ads with a screensaver slideshow
• How to send yourself text messages with Backpack
• How to customize your computer background
• Extreme makeover - refrigerator edition
• How to download and print pictures

Wakerupper is a free online service that delivers reminders to your phone. I’ve tested several voice services and found two that are very useful for sending myself voice messages. For now, I decided Wakerupper edges out the runner-up Braincast because it’s easier to use. Both services are free.

How voice ads can help

It’s always good to remind yourself about the benefits of a behavior you want to adopt. The scheduling feature of Wakerupper gives you the power to remind yourself right at the time you might need that support the most. For example:

• A call right before a scheduled workout that reminds you why you want to get in shape.
• A call in the middle of the afternoon or late at night, or whenever is your snack time, to remind you of the most important benefits to you of losing weight.
• A call right after payday reminding you why you want your long term financial goals and encouraging you to put away money for those goals first.
• A call in the morning reminding you about the benefits of riding your bike to work, such as improving your health and the environment.

You can also schedule calls anytime to remind you about qualities you want to embody more, such as patience, courage and kindness.

Get started immediately

Sending a message with Wakerupper’s basic service could not be easier:

• Go to the website at www.wakerupper.com.
• Choose a date and time to deliver your message.
• Enter your phone number.
• Type the text of a short message.
• Type in a couple of human-readable words to foil spammers
• Click the “Schedule my call” button.

That’s it. At the appointed time your phone will ring, and a pleasant male robotic voice will deliver the message you typed.

Add more features with free account

For the purposes of personal marketing it would be more useful to be able to schedule delivery of the same message multiple times. Fortunately, you can get access to this functionality by requesting a free beta account.

To get an account, just send an email message to beta@wakerupper.com and wait a couple of days for them to send a link to sign up. Account setup requires a username, password, phone number and email address. You can login immediately, and they’ll also send you an activation email to complete the sign-up process.

I worry about the privacy of my phone number with a service like this, so I read their privacy policy carefully. This is what they claim:

“We do not sell, rent or otherwise share your personal information with any third parties except in the limited circumstance of when we are compelled to do so by a valid, binding court order or subpoena, and in such cases we will only provide such information as minimally required to comply with the request.”

Once you login you’ll have two important new options: you can record voice messages, and you can schedule your messages to deliver multiple times. Both of these features are good for advertising

Scheduling an ad to deliver multiple times is good because you can leverage the effort required to set up a message into several reminders, and space them far enough apart to feel helpful instead of annoying. There are several options for scheduling repeat calls, such as “Weekdays” and “Monthly”.

My wish list for the service would be the ability to deliver a message at random, unexpected times. I love the feature of Backpack’s reminder service that gives you the option to send yourself a text message “Tomorrow afternoon”, “In a couple of days”, or “In 2 weeks”.

Setting up an account also gives you the ability to record voice messages, in addition to the text-to-speech functionality of the basic service. This is pretty cool. You’ll need to attach a microphone to your computer if you want to record a message. The message form finds your mic automatically, and asks you to click a button allow it.

A human voice potentially adds a very compelling new dimension to your ads. You can either record them yourself, or use someone who’s a celebrity spokesmodel in your life. For example, depending on the goal you’re advertising how about recording messages from your coach, your therapist, your spouse, or your kids? Or if you have a coaching role in someone else’s life, consider scheduling a few messages during the week to support the work you’re doing together.

Mobile version

Wakerupper also offers a Mobile interface, so you can schedule messages when you’re away from your computer. So far the mobile version can only do text-to-speech messages, but if you’ve set up a free account you are able to schedule repeating messages. Mobile access might be useful in a therapy or coaching situation, where you and your coach or client could agree on the content of your messages and set them up together on the spot. The mobile URL is m.wakerupper.com.

Related articles

• How does your marketing stack up to Super Bowl ads?
• Aren’t these just affirmations?
• The psychology of persuasion - consistency
• How to rotate text ads with The Quote gadget
• How to send yourself text messages with Backpack
• How to write an effective ad on a Post-It note

Thanks to a reader from Canberra, Australia for sharing these awesome personal marketing ideas:

I just thought I’d let you know about a personal ad campaign that has worked really well for my Dad. He is trying to lose some weight at the moment, and has given himself some incentives to do so.

First of all he tried a negative approach. He gave some money to my Mum and told her to keep it. If he did not reach his target weight by a set date she was to use it to get him a personal trainer to come and wake him up and train him every morning. He put very intimidating commando-like pictures of personal trainers on the fridge door to remind him. Well, this approach apparently scared him enough to reach his target weight.

Since then he has set new targets and has tried a positive approach. He has bought himself both a vacuum cleaner and a book and given them to me. When he reached his new targets he would be rewarded with the gifts, otherwise I was to give them away. He printed out reminders of his rewards and placed them around the house. Fortunately I was not forced to throw his money away as he reached both targets.

This is similar to buying souveniers before a trip, as you mentioned, making it seem like the ads desired outcome was already a reality. This approach helped my Dad to lose about 15 kgs, so I hope it’s helpful to you and your blog.

I love the creativity of her Dad’s approach, and there are several things that impress me about his strategies:

• I think the core brilliance of his plan is that while he felt motivated he set events in motion that would be implemented automatically in the future, whether he took any further action or not. Once Mum held the money to buy the personal trainer and our reader had the gifts, the outcome was out of his hands. The only way to prevent a result he didn’t want was to actually follow through on meeting his weight-loss goals.
• He set up commitments and expectations with people whose opinion really mattered to him. In doing so, he activated the psychological principle of consistency.
• He set up visual reminders to keep himself on track, like the commando-like pictures of personal trainers on the fridge door. Those images reminded him both of the commitment he had made and the consequences that would occur if he didn’t follow through.
• He picked stuff he cared about. This is a core principle of personal marketing. You know yourself really well. You know what benefits you care about, and what threats will get you moving. For example, a vacuum cleaner probably wouldn’t do it for me, but the thought of a personal trainer waking me up in the morning would scare me too!

Most of the time TBYB advocates advertising about stuff you DO want, but I think the results here speak for themselves. (For those like me who had to look it up, 15 kg equals 33 pounds.) A really creative, interesting approach. Thanks for sharing!

Related articles

• Personal marketing in the bathroom: better than taking a magazine!
• My exercise ad campaign
• Get the t-shirt
• Make a motivational poster at Big Huge Labs
• Use ads to focus on the outcome you want
• The psychology of persuasion - consistency
• Extreme makeover - refrigerator edition
• How to download and print pictures
• Advertise your way to paradise

Thinking about that offer provided an opportunity for me to analyze advertising from a different perspective than I usually do. What I realized about it was:

• It was good for me. Money would be deposited directly into my PayPal account.
• It was good for the companies doing the advertising. They would receive incoming links and perhaps new customers.
• It was good for her. She would obviously get some kind of cut or wouldn’t be doing this.

The problem is that the offer didn’t provide any value for YOU!

From your point of view the products you saw advertised would be very random. That’s because the ads would not really be intended for you, but for search engines. For example, they wanted to insert an ad for a company that does background checks on this page because it mentions the work “background” in the title.

Another sample ad I reviewed contained a total of five links. Those links went to three different businesses in two countries, and included two offers to sell very specific printer cartridges. If you clicked on one of those links the destination would be very unlikely to be relevant to you, or even to be what you expected.

Basically she wanted me to sell a piece of your attention, and perhaps waste a few moments of your time, to benefit someone else.

It could be argued that’s a fair exchange, since you’re receiving this material for free that I’ve put a lot of work into researching and writing. I certainly deserve to get paid for my effort. If a company that sells background checks or printer cartridges wants to pick up the tab for my time, what’s wrong with that?

I really thought about that. What is wrong with it? After all, accepting text ads is a very common way for bloggers to monetize their websites. I’ve always assumed I would do it at some point. But I’ve been aware that implementing such a model is going to be a little tricky for TBYB, since I’m very critical of the way advertising fractures our attention.

I thought about her offer long and hard. While I’m very pleased that TBYB has reached a critical mass where it’s attractive to advertisers, the conclusion I came to, for now, is that it just doesn’t feel right to insert third and fourth parties into the mix who don’t bring any intrinsic value to what we’re doing here (except for paying me money, which would be nice!). I decided it bothers me too much to invite someone else to just skim a piece of your attention off the top, without contributing value to the process in any other way. So I said no.

It was tempting, though.

So what do you think? Is my stance too “pure”? What do you think a business model would look like that’s good for you too?

Related articles

• Holy piranha, Batman!
• Ads on the moon? Are you freaking kidding me?!
• The Merchants of Cool
• The battle for your mind
• Is advertising evil?

TBYB is on vacation. Your assignment this week is to go back and implement one of the suggestions you’ve read about in a previous article. Here are the steps:

1. What do you want?

What would you do if you won the lottery? Write down the first thing that came to mind. Now think of a tiny way your life could be more like that today. This will be the topic of your ad.

2. Create an ad

The process of making a personal ad can be as elaborate or as simple as you want. Here’s a list of articles about various ways to make ads for yourself. Many of them include step-by-step instructions.

3. Deliver your message

You want to place your ad someplace where you’ll see it frequently. Here is a list of suggestions, both technical and non-technical, for methods you can use to deliver your message.


We’ll return next Monday to your regularly scheduled blog.

You’re exposed to some kind of persuasive message every 70 seconds, on average, for your whole life. Seventy seconds! And each of those messages has at least one thing in common with the others: ALL of them are about someone else’s priorities!

That’s insane. How did you come up with seventy seconds?

“It has been estimated that by the time the average American reaches the age of 65, he or she will have been exposed to approximately 136,692,500 ads of various forms, and will have watched over 2 million television commercials.” — Belch and Belch, Advertising and Promotion: An Integrated Marketing Communications Perspective, p. 103.

OK, let’s do some math. Belch and Belch claim Americans are exposed to 136 million ads in 65 years. If you figure that people sleep 8 hours a day, they are awake for 2,657,200 hours. Multiply that number by 3600 seconds in an hour and divide by 136,692,500. The result is an ad every 69.98 seconds.

The January 2008 issue of Adbusters presents an even worse scenario. A quote in that magazine says people are now receiving as many as 5000 messages a day. Multiply 16 waking hours by 3600 seconds an hour to get 57600 seconds. Divide 57600 by 5000 ads and you are interrupted by some kind of persuasive message every 11.52 seconds!!

“The number of messages hitting our brain [in 2007] soared to an astonishing 5000 per day…2007 also saw millions of people making the breakthrough connection between advertising and their own mental health.” — Adbusters No. 75, p. 2.

That sounds pretty distracting

Wow. How in the world is a person supposed to keep up with their own dreams and priorities, not to mention their responsibilities, with all that going on?

As I’ve discussed in About TBYB and Is advertising evil, I don’t necessarily have a gripe with advertising, per se. Businesses have every right to try and make a living - we all do. The problem is that the mental environment is completely saturated with those messages, and it’s profoundly distracting to have our attention constantly interrupted with all of those bids for attention to someone else’s agenda. The result is that it can be very difficult to sustain attention for our own short and long-term goals.

“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.” — Is advertising Evil?

“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.” — About TBYB

What can we do about it?

Personal marketing, of course. The whole point of Take Back Your Brain! is to get some of our own messages into the game, in order to prompt us to return our attention to our own priorities. One more quote from me, in How I got an RV with my most successful ad campaign, about how I used personal marketing to reach a goal that was important to me:

“I had conceived of buying an RV as a possible solution to achieve some really important objectives about health, recreation and connection. What I think the ad campaign did was keep that gestalt of priorities/solution in my consciousness. Or rather, it kept returning my attention to that gestalt. In spite of many competing distractions over many months, the ads kept nudging me with reminders about the goal of owning an RV, which in turn prompted me to take the many small actions that finally led to its realization.” — How I got an RV with my most successful ad campaign

By the way, I’m out on another road trip in that RV for a couple of weeks. Definitely worth it to achieve your dreams!

Related articles

• The Merchants of Cool
• How I got an RV with my most successful ad campaign
• The battle for your mind
• Use ads to focus on the outcome you want
• Is advertising evil?
• About TBYB

Thanks to “Bathroom Reader” for suggesting my new favorite location to place ads! Bathroom Reader posted a comment on Ads on the moon? Are you freaking kidding me?! a couple of weeks ago:

“Speaking of bathrooms, how about on the wall in front of the toilet seat? Some of us spend quite a bit of time staring at those walls. My health club has a “stall talk” sheet posted on the inside of their toilet stalls, and manages to market their weight-loss programs, personal trainers, etc to us as we sit there. It’s one of those unused pieces of blank wall on which a great ad could be posted.”

It sounded like a good idea to me, so I taped a copy of one of the ads I printed for my Exercise ad campaign in front of the toilet.

That location meets several of our criteria:

• Once you place the ad, exposure occurs with no further effort on your part.
• You see it automatically in the course of a normal daily activity.
• You are exposed to it several times a day.

Early testing indicates that this location is a winner, folks! I’ve tried placing copies of pictures from the exercise campaign in several different locations - on the bathroom mirror, kitchen cupboards and over my desk. But I seem to notice the ad more, and even to experience a more positive response to it, in front of the toilet than anyplace else I’ve tried so far. I have no idea why that is, but who cares? Go figure.

Maybe there’s a reason there’s a cliche about taking reading material into the bathroom!

Related articles

• Ads on the moon? Are you freaking kidding me?!
• My exercise ad campaign

One of the first rules of marketing is to understand as much as you can about who you’re trying to market to. The clearer picture you have of your target consumer, the better you can position your product to meet their needs.

In the case of commercial or social marketing, the target consumers are other people. But in personal marketing, the target is you. This difference has the potential to give you a huge advantage. While others must be content with grouping people into “market segments” with similar characteristics, you have the luxury of communicating to a demographic of only one person…a person you know very well!

Still, I think there are some important lessons in classic market research that can be applied to personal behavior change. When the “product” being promoted is a behavior change, such as in social marketing, understanding your consumer can’t be faked, spun or sold. You have to actually understand where they are coming from and what their priorities and concerns are so you can position your behavior change to actually respond to those needs. The exchange has to be a win/win, because ultimately they are the ones who must voluntarily perform the behavior.

Yet when we go to change our own behavior many of us adopt a strategy that looks something like, “I don’t like to do _______ (fill in the blank) but I know I should, so this time I’m going to have enough discipline and self will to really do it, even though I don’t want to.” A marketer would never approach you in this way because he knows the odds of success are too low. Instead, he would try to find out what does matter to you (or people like you), really, and then position the product or behavior change to deliver that benefit.

We’ll get into cost and benefit strategies in a later article, but for now we’re going to do some market research. In this article I’m going to both model how to do it and invite you to do a similar process for yourself.

TBYB market research

In order for Take Back Your Brain! to be more successful, I need to make sure it keeps having more value for you. I could guess how to do that, but I don’t need to. Instead, I’m going to ask you. For example, it would be enormously helpful for me to know things like:

• What behaviors you are interesting in changing?
• What goals you would like to achieve?
• How do you think personal marketing might be able to help?
• Have you tried any of the techniques described in TBYB?
• If so, what has been your experience?
• If not, what do you think has prevented you from taking action?
• What else would you like me to know about you?
• What kinds of articles do you find most helpful?
• How do you think I could improve TBYB to better meet your needs?

You’ll find all of the questions above on my new Reader Survey tab. I invite you to participate in my market research right now by responding to any or all of the questions on that page. All answers are anonymous, so enter early and enter often! Seriously, if you think of something that would help you, I’d love to hear about it.

Your market research

Answering the questions for TBYB above should have given you a good start on thinking about yourself, too, especially if you wrote them out (such as on my Reader Survey…hint!). You may find it helpful to continue thinking or writing about questions like:

• Who are you?
• What and who are important to you?
• What kinds of activities do you truly enjoy?
• What are your hopes and dreams? What are your worries and concerns?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• What kinds of things are easy and difficult for you to accomplish?

I suggest that you pursue questions like this until you feel you have evoked the answer to the one big important question a marketer really wants to know: what do you CARE about?

Your answers to the questions above will give you critically important clues about how to position the changes you seek in order to deliver benefits you care about. Many of them will remain true about you from project to project. However, each time you start an important new ad campaign you may also find it helpful to interview yourself in relation to that specific goal or behavior change. The more honest you can be with yourself about your real motivations, the more effective you’ll be able to make your ads.

Remember, marketers don’t guess, they research.

Related articles

• Marketing 101
• Your brain wants benefits
• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 3
• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 2
• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 1

Fortunately, it turns out they are - at least for now. The message in this ad campaign is designed to get our attention, and it definitely worked on me when I drove by this billboard a few days ago. I noticed it, remembered it, even went to the website to see if it was true. And now I’m telling you. OK, they got me.

But it’s worth noting that from the time I saw this billboard until I checked out the website a day later I wasn’t sure they weren’t actually planning to beam beer ads onto the moon! I think that speaks volumes about the state of our mental ecology.

If there were truly ads on the moon it would mean there is no place on earth - not a single one - that is free of marketing messages. But consider how close that is to being true already. From the time we wake up in the morning until we fall asleep again at night most of us are almost constantly exposed to marketing messages of one kind or another.

I was often stunned in the marketing class I took last quarter to realize the sheer number of different locations advertisers routinely insert their messages. I found out that they really are plotting to intrude into our lives almost anyplace they can. In addition to locations you would expect like magazines and TV, there are ads on vehicles, benches, shopping carts, luggage conveyors, sports venues, school busses, ATMs, urinals, the space shuttle, and even on eggs. Eggs!

Because ads are almost everywhere, each vendor must try to find a way to stand out to get your attention. They call it breaking through the clutter. One way to do that is to put their messages in unexpected places. Like the moon.

That got me to thinking about finding new places to display messages to myself. After all, I not only have to break through the clutter of everyone else’s messages, but my own ads become less effective when I get used to them.

We’ve already discussed many ways to deliver ads to ourselves with our computers and mobile phones. We’ve also talked about physical locations like the refrigerator, bathroom mirror, t-shirts, posters, postage stamps, and our trusty Hipster PDAs.

As commercial marketers grow ever more aggressive and intrusive with their ads we also need to think outside the box and generate new locations for placing our messages. Below is a list of ideas I’ll add to all week as I notice locations in my environment at home, at work, and in my car that would be suitable for displaying ads. Please help me out in the comments.

• Display in a picture frame
• Better yet, rotate in a digital picture frame
• Subscribe to the magazine
• Make a book cover
• Stick on your car dashboard
• Hang from rear view mirror
• Mow it into your lawn
• Tape to the kitchen cupboards
• Change your passwords
• Make business cards
• Find a ring tone to remind you
• Set your browser home page
• Insert in your calendar or planner
• Change your PDA screen
• Print as a wallet photo
• Tape to the side of your tissue box
• Get a wrist band
• Decorate your mint tin
• Over the kitchen sink

Related articles

• Marketing 101
• The Merchants of Cool
• Advertise to your friends and family with custom postage stamps
• Get the t-shirt
• Hipster PDA version
• Make a motivational poster at Big Huge Labs
• How to build a motivational poster ad campaign
• How to write an effective ad on a Post-It note
• Extreme makeover - refrigerator edition
• Refrigerator makeover update: who could say no to that face?

Advertising is not the same thing as marketing. Most of you probably know that, but I thought the terms were pretty much interchangeable until I took a marketing class last quarter. It turns out that advertising is a subset of marketing, which is a much larger endeavor that involves strategizing about every element of the process by which you and your customer trade something of value.

For example, 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 the “promotional mix” can include direct marketing, interactive marketing, sales promotion, 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.

My goal in taking the class was to backfill what I’ve gleaned from reading advertising books with a solid, basic foundation about the principles of marketing in order to help you create better ad campaigns for yourself. Learning about how all of the pieces above fit together has been fascinating, exceeded my expectations, and certainly will be very useful for our purpose.

In addition, I think I’ve gained an expanded, albeit uncomfortable appreciation for how much the application of these strategies forms the world we live in. I must admit to coming out of the class feeling less agnostic about the evils of marketing, especially after viewing films like The Merchants of Cool and “Toxic Sludge is Good for You”. The latter one pretty much made all of us feel like crawling into a cave and never exposing ourselves to media again!

However I also learned about social marketing - a relatively new field that applies the principles of commercial marketing to problems like AIDS, addiction, and climate change. It’s very exciting to consider applying these powerful strategies to some of society’s most difficult challenges. And since its primary focus is behavior change, social marketing has a lot of insights to contribute to the personal marketing we’re doing here at TBYB. I’ll be taking another class specifically about social marketing spring quarter.

I’m more convinced than ever that advertising (um, I mean marketing) is where the action is when it comes to understanding how to change human behavior, and therefore those of us who are motivated to grow can benefit greatly from learning about its fundamentals. I’m excited about integrating the insights from learning about marketing theory into Take Back Your Brain!, and am looking forward to strategizing together about how we can devise more effective ways to apply this information to achieve our personal goals.

Related articles

• The Merchants of Cool
• Is advertising evil?
• How my own ads made me a blogger
• The REALLY personal ads

The posts I link to below cite research which finds that the reward centers of your brain seem to be stimulated by anticipating a benefit in a way that’s very similar to actually receiving it. The implication for marketing is that you can create a very rewarding experience for your consumer - you - by helping yourself to vividly imagine how good the outcomes of a behavior are going to be.

• Why Brains Crave Beneficial Copy - post on copyblogger.com
• Why Good Ad Copy Works - post on neurosciencemarketing.com
• Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions - the book both posts refer to

It seems that when you position a product (or in our case a behavior) you want to emphasize experiencing the benefits. Focus less on what it is you are persuading yourself to do than on how good it will be for you to do it. I don’t mean good for you in a you-should-eat-your-peas kind of way, but in a this-is-going-to-feel-AMAZING way!

The idea is that by stimulating the reward center in your brain, you will create positive associations about the target behavior. By advertising the benefits to yourself it may be possible to begin collecting positive, rewarding experiences from a behavior before you even begin to do it!

Related articles

• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 1
• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 2
• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 3
• Use ads to focus on the outcome you want
• Aren’t these just affirmations?

Here’s a quick and easy ad hack for Windows Mobile users: write a text message on your Owner Information screen, and set it to display every time you turn on the device. It’s a great place to display a goal or affirmation that you really want to keep in your awareness for a couple of days.

1. From the Start menu, choose Settings. Make sure you’re on the Personal tab of Settings and click on the Owner Information icon.

2. Owner Information has three tabs: Identification, Notes and Options. Go to the Notes tab and type in a text message to yourself. This is a good place for an affirmation. Remember to write your statement in present tense, as if the reality you want to create is already true. Even though the text entry box is almost as large as the screen it will only let you enter about 5 lines of text. Be sure to click OK when your message is complete.

3. Now go to the Options tab. It will say, “When the device is turned on, display:” Make sure Owner Information is unchecked and check Notes, then Click OK.

The next time your device wakes up from sleep mode, it will display your message until you tap the screen. You can turn the device off and back on again to test it.

When I’m not using this feature for personal marketing I use the Owner Information Notes screen to offer a reward to someone who might find my phone. However unless I’m traveling I don’t display that screen every the phone wakes up. It would drive me crazy! I find this technique works best for a short-term ad blast, as that extra tap can get pretty annoying after a couple of days. Your mileage may vary.

I’m using Windows Mobile 6 and have not tested this technique on version 5. Please let us know how it works in the comments below if you try it on Windows Mobile 5.

Related articles

• Write a headline for your cell phone ad
• Punch up your headline with Phrases that Sell
• Aren’t these just affirmations?
• How to rotate text ads with The Quote gadget
• How to send yourself text messages with Backpack
• How to write an effective ad on a Post-It note

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.

Of course marketing is happening to all of us all the time, and no one is completely immune to its influence nor exempt from its reach. But the sheer size and purchasing power of the present generation of teens - and thus the money to be made by getting inside their heads - has created a gold rush of relentlessly agressive brand messaging that’s both ubiquitous and goes to great lengths to adhere to the most important rule in persuading this demographic - don’t let your marketing show.

“Teenagers are the hottest consumer demographic in America. At 33 million strong, they comprise the largest generation of teens America has ever seen–larger, even, than the much-ballyhooed Baby Boom generation. Last year, America’s teens spent $100 billion, while influencing their parents’ spending to the tune of another $50 billion.”

The film describes a feedback loop in which marketers conduct exhaustive ethnographic studies of teens to figure out what’s cool, then amplify it and feed it back to them via media that is controlled by fewer and fewer hands. Ultimately this process not only affects, but in fact creates the culture it’s studying.

“What this system does is it closely studies the young, keeps them under constant surveillance to figure out what will push their buttons,” says media critic Mark Crispin Miller. “And it blares it back at them relentlessly and everywhere.”

“It’s one enclosed feedback loop,” Rushkoff says. “Kids’ culture and media culture are now one and the same, and it becomes impossible to tell which came first–the anger or the marketing of the anger.”

I found “The Merchants of Cool” to be an incredibly powerful documentary, well worth watching. Three comparisons keep occurring to me as I turn it over in my mind:

1. Quantum physics.

There’s idea in quantum physics, called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that the act of observing something changes it. One take-away message from this film is that the intense scrutiny we’re all under to figure out how to sell things to us fundamentally changes culture.

2. Colonization.

Colonization occurs when an external power comes in and exploits a nation for its natural resources, then packages those resources and sells them back to the native people at a dramatically increased price. The colony becomes a market for finished products that are made from raw materials that were stolen from them in the first place. That process is eerily similar to exploitation of youth culture that’s portrayed in “Merchants”. One interviewee in the film actually uses the term colonization, describing the youth market as “Africa.”

3. The Borg.

This evil race Star Trek race consumes the mind and will of every being it encounters, adding that individual’s unique experiences to its collective hive mind and while leaving the former owner a mechanized zombie. “Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated!”

How to view The Merchants of Cool

You can watch The Merchants of Cool for free on the PBS website, or purchase the DVD at amazon.com. It’s highly recommended for anyone, and almost required viewing if you’re under 20 and want a shot at keeping dominion over your own mind.

There may be hope. From the March/April Adbusters:

“Suddenly, people are waking up in droves from the dreamland of corporate cool. We’re realizing that ever since we were little babies crawling around the TV sets in our living rooms, we’ve been lied to, propangandized, and told incessantly, day after day, that we can find happiness through consumption.

Now the fog is lifting. We’re finally beginning to understand where this bogus cool has been leading us …This is the magic moment in which capitalist cool can stumble and authentic cool can start bubbling back up again … The rest will follow.”

Related articles

• What Would Jesus Buy?
• The battle for your mind
• That perfect gift - part 2
• Is advertising evil?

Exhibit 1: Super Bowl ad

Exhibit 2: Resolution to-do list

Resolutions for 2008
- Write a blog article every week
- Exercise regularly
- Clean out the garage

Multimedia ad vs. to-do list

Evaluation by message importance

First let’s evaluate the messages above in terms of importance. Let’s say the items on the list in Exhibit 2 are my New Year’s resolutions.

• Writing these articles for you is very important to me. It’s interesting, creative, and I feel it makes a small contribution to the overall mental ecology.
• Exercising regularly is also very important to me. It affects my body, my brain and my overall sense of well-being. It makes me feel better, look better, and literally extends the span of my life.
• And hey, let’s just say I really REALLY need to clean out the garage!

Drinking Pepsi, on the other hand, is an extremely trivial concern. There have been times in my life when I drank a lot of Pepsi, and others like now when I drink none. Either way, branded colored water is not very important to me at all.

Evaluation by media presentation

Now let’s evaluate the messages above in terms of production values:

• Exhibit 1 contains many multimedia elements, including color, sound, motion, drama, music, humor, and human faces. It includes catchy music, reference to popular culture, and even a cameo celebrity appearance.
• Exhibit 2 consists of several words printed in plain black text.

Not really a fair contest, is it? Although goals in Exhibit 2 are much more important to me, the presentation of the message in the Super Bowl ad is dramatically more compelling. There’s a good chance I’ll remember it, probably associate the product with the humorous positioning, and maybe even hum the tune or tell a friend about the ad. Any chance I’ll do those things with a line item in my to-do list? I don’t think so!

Step it up!

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. Maybe you can even figure out a way to add humor or music.

Perhaps the most important thing to emulate from the big league ads is strategy; just like in football, it works better to have one. I’ve written about some ways you can use marketing strategies in the psychology of persuasion series and the hierarchy of needs series.

Obviously most of us are never going to produce slick 30 second video spots advocating for our goals (though that would be very cool), but my experiments have shown that adding any kind of imagery to a reminder about your goal is an order of magnitude more effective than just writing it on a list!

Related articles

• My exercise ad campaign
• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 3
• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 2
• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 1
• The psychology of persuasion - scarcity
• The psychology of persuasion - authority
• The psychology of persuasion - liking
• The psychology of persuasion - social proof
• The psychology of persuasion - consistency
• The psychology of persuasion - reciprocation
• The psychology of persuasion - perceptual contrast
• The psychology of persuasion - because

A couple of recent comments are missing as well and I apologize to those readers. Thanks for weighing in. I did get your messages.

To the bloggers in the group - who do you use to host your site?

Update 2/13: Finally heard back from my host. They were unable to locate the version of the database they lost so I guess I’m on my own. I’ve been recommending eMax Hosting to people for years, but no more. For a little-known hosting company eMax used to offer some of the best service and support in the industry, but something really fundamental has changed over there in the last year or so, and not in a good way! The last month, in particular, has been a complete nightmare.

Look for a new article next Monday. By the way, I’m noticing that the Exercise ad campaign is going really well.

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.

Target behavior

I chose exercising regularly as a goal that would benefit from this approach since it has been resistant to other more conventional efforts to motivate myself, including other ad campaigns. Specifically, I identified walking, rowing, cardio machines, water aerobics, and weight training as the behaviors I want to encourage.

Slogan

The working slogan I chose in step 5 was “Gives you the freedom to be yourself”. I thought that slogan would resonate with my target demographic (me) because freedom has been showing up as an important theme for me in all kinds of ways lately.

I ruminated on that slogan while collecting photos, thinking about how to tie it in both visually and conceptually with the goal of exercising regularly. A couple of days later I had a Eureka! moment when I thought of this modification: “Exercise the freedom to be yourself.” I love the way that statement contains both direct and ambiguous meanings about my theme at the same time. It’s perfect.

Photos

I enlisted the help of a friend to take pictures of me doing the target behaviors I want to encourage with this ad campaign:

• Walking on a trail near my home
• Rowing my boat
• Working out on the elliptical machine
• Doing water aerobics
• Weight training

I already had a boat picture but needed the others so I packed a gym bag with workout clothes, a swimming suit, and a digital camera and headed over to our fitness club. It felt weird at first to be doing something so atypical in that environment, but after awhile we got into it. We photographed me doing several different activities so I’d have plenty of photos to choose from when I got back to my computer. My job for each of them was to look like I was having a good time!

Set up a PhotoShop document

I decided to do my layout in PhotoShop so I would have maximum creative flexibility. I started a new document and set the size to 600 x 800. This created a document that has “portrait” orientation. Often “landscape” works better, depending on the delivery system you plan to use. For example, computer desktop backgrounds and screensavers are in landscape orientation. If had I wanted landscape I would have set the size to be 800 x 600. In either case, a 4:3 or 3:4 width to height ratio usually works well.

Next I opened each of my photo files in its own PhotoShop document, cropped the area I wanted to use, and resized it to match the 600 x 800 size of my master document. Then I copied and pasted each photo into its own layer in the master document. The advantage of using layers for the photos (and text, below) is that I can manipulate each of these elements independently while I experiment with the layout.

Text layout

In order to augment the ambiguity of my slogan I decided to use “EXERCISE” as a large headline and “the freedom to be yourself” as a smaller tagline. I made two text layers in my master document, one each for the headline and the tagline.

I checked and unchecked layer visibility so I could see my headlines over the different photos. I moved the text elements around until I found a location for each of them that worked well for all of the photos. I experimented with the font, color, and size of each element. I thought white worked the best for the effect I wanted but it sometimes looked a little faded out, so I added a drop shadow.

Note: this part is fun. There are lots of variables and many “right” answers. The most important thing, since you are the intended consumer, is that you like it.

Publish

Depending on the delivery method you select in step 9, publishing these ads can either mean saving a copy of each ad to a file or printing it. I decided to print them as 5″ x 7″ mini-posters, so I ended up doing both. I checked the visibility of each photo layer one a time, saved each of version as a .jpg, and then printed them all at once with with the Windows Photo Printing Wizard - a slick way to print multiple pictures at the same time.

Finally, I taped one of the ads in each of the places where I eat, sleep, dress, and bathe - all of the locations where I care for myself. It’s too early to tell you yet how well this campaign is working, but I really like the ads and that’s usually a very good sign!

Related articles

• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 1
• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 2
• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 3
• Put yourself in the picture with Photoshop

In part one of this series, I showed you how to manipulate Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to decide how to best frame a message to motivate yourself. In part two we selected a slogan, took photos, and developed a creative concept. This week we’ll create the ads for your campaign and set up an automatic system for delivering them to yourself.

If you’ve not done so already, I suggest reviewing steps one through seven in Target your hierarchy of needs - part 1 and Target your hierarchy of needs - part 2 before continuing with the rest of this project, below.

8. Combine your images and slogan to make the ads.

Once you’ve developed your creative concept in step 7 there are many ways to create ads with your slogan and pictures. The method or methods you choose will depend on which tools you have available, the level of technology you are comfortable with, and the amount of time you want to devote to the project. All of the following articles provide instructions for making ads that combine both pictures and text:

• Make a motivational poster at Big Huge Labs - An easy online tool that quickly produces very slick results.
• How to build a motivational poster ad campaign - Use the poster builder above at Big Huge Labs to create several related ads.
• Advertise to your friends and family with custom postage stamps - another easy online tool.
• Change the picture on your cell phone screen - Do the photo shoot in step 6 with your mobile phone to implement this one.
• Write a headline for your cell phone ad - Edit the custom text greeting on your phone to add your slogan to the above ad.
• Put yourself in the picture with Photoshop - A bit technical, but a great way to go if you know Photoshop or another image editor because you can create any ad you can imagine.
• Put yourself in the picture with glue - On the other hand, this arts and crafts project only requires the ability to operate scissors and a glue stick.
• Hipster PDA version - Use the Photoshop or glue methods above to create custom cards for your faithful hPDA.

Use one of the tools above to make an ad or a series of ads based on the creative concept you developed in step seven. In some of them you’ll need to decide how big to make your ad and whether to orient it in “portrait” or “landscape” format. Those decisions will depend on your choice of delivery methods, below.

This is the time to pull out the stops and be artistic if you are. Try cropping your photos in interesting ways, or using different fonts for your slogan. Experiment with different colors and layouts, and notice how they affect the way the ad makes you feel. Have fun and try to make ads that you really like.

On the other hand, if you don’t have an artistic bone in your body that’s OK too. I think much of the effectiveness of these ads occurs because you focus so intently on your goals while you make them, so even artistically challenged ads will help you your dreams come true.

9. Deliver your ads automatically.

The final step is to make sure you’re exposed to the ads you have made on a very regular basis. It’s important to set up your delivery method so that no further action is ever necessary on your part in order for you to see the ads frequently. Keep in mind what you’re up against! The average American is exposed to several thousand ads a day without taking any initiative at all to get those messages. TBYB also has readers in Europe and Australia, and I’m guessing the mental ecology is not much better in those areas. You want your ads to be like that too - frequent and automatic.

We’ve discussed many methods for automating delivery in previous articles, ranging from low-tech locations like your bathroom mirror and refrigerator to screensavers and widgets on your computer. All of them work really well.

• How to rotate picture ads with the Vista Sidebar Slide Show - If you’re running Windows Vista, this method is dead simple. Just drag the files for your ads into the Slide Show’s folder.
• How to rotate picture ads with the Google Photos gadget - Takes a little set-up, but it’s a very slick method that works well on XP.
• Rotate your ads with a screensaver slideshow - Just about any computer can do this. Save the finished files for your ads into the folder your screensaver slideshow displays.
• How to customize your computer background - One of the very easiest display methods, changing the wallpaper on your computer’s background to display one of your ads. Again, any computer can do it.
• Hipster PDA version - If you made custom cards for your Hipster PDA in step 8 above, just put them in your deck!
• Extreme makeover - refrigerator edition - For old school glue stick fans (and who isn’t?), slap that baby up on the refrigerator. Or bathroom mirror. Or bulletin board. Or locker…

That’s it!

Sure, it took a little effort to get your campaign set up, but it was kind of fun wasn’t it?

Now that your delivery system is automated just let it run for awhile. Set and forget, and let your unconscious take over. How long should you run an ad campaign? Until you’re tired of it; usually at least a few weeks. During that time you’ll be exposed to your message several times every day. Each exposure will reinforce the idea that performing your target behavior is directly associated with fulfilling unmet needs that you really care about, because they reside at the level of Maslow’s hierarchy that is most motivating for you!

Related articles

• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 1
• Target your hierarchy of needs - part 2