http://www.takebackyourbrain.com Take Back Your Brain is about reclaiming our attention from the advertising industry. I will teach you how to use personal technology to deliver messages to yourself about things that matter to YOU! Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:13:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/summertime-and-the-livin-is-easy/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/take-it-out-to-the-ball-game/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/10-steps-to-powerful-personal-marketing/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/how-to-plant-a-mental-cover-crop/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/send-yourself-voice-ads-with-wakerupper/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/motivate-yourself-with-rewards-and-threats/ Take Back Your Brain! wrestled with an interesting ethical dilemna recently. 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/should-i-sell-your-attention/ 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. ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/your-assignment-while-im-on-the-road/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/holy-piranha-batman/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/better-than-taking-a-magazine/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/target-market-research-its-all-about-you/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/ads-on-the-moon-are-you-freaking-kidding-me/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/marketing-101/ It's the last week of my marketing class. Yikes! I need to finish my homework, so I'm going to take a bye on writing a new article this week and instead refer you to a really interesting thread I ran across a few days ago. The posts I link to below ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/your-brain-wants-benefits/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/how-to-make-a-quick-text-ad-on-your-windows-mobile-device/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/the-merchants-of-cool/ Consider the following two examples of persuasive communication: 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/how-does-your-marketing-stack-up-to-super-bowl-ads/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/no-brainer/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/my-exercise-ad-campaign/ 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 ... http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2008/target-your-hierarchy-of-needs-part-3/