EBOOK
Seducing Strangers
How to Get People to Buy What You're Selling (The Little Black Book of Advertising Secrets)
Josh Weltman4
(1)
About
How to get someone, somewhere, to do something.
The job is using words, pictures, stories, and music to seduce strangers. In the industrial, mass-media, consumer economy of the past, the job was called advertising, and "Mad Men" did it. In today's service-based, social media-focused, information economy, the job is called life, and everyone does it.
Here's how you can do it. And do it better. “Mad Men” co-producer and advertising creative director Josh Weltman distills everything he knows about the art of persuasion into a playbook of rules, principles, insights, and insider anecdotes, all tailored to making deals in the fast-changing life in the information economy. Josh Weltman is the advertising consultant and a co-producer on the hit show “Mad Men”. A creative director for more than 25 years, he's worked on advertising and marketing campaigns for both global brands and boutique clients. He lives with his family in Los Angeles, California. Introduction
The Job That Was Once Called Advertising
The job was using words, pictures, stories, and music to make someone somewhere do something. In the industrial, mass-media, consumer economy of the past, the job was called advertising, and "Mad men" did it. In our modern, service-based, social-media-centric information economy, the job is called life, and everybody does it.
Once it was the job of these advertising executives on Madison Avenue, "Mad Men", to be the public champions of products and services, making businesses successful and customers happy. Don Draper always seemed to know exactly how to do it. He knew what the business goal of the advertising was. He knew how to create an insightful, persuasive message. And he had teams of experts to help him decide which media would help him do the job best.
In today's information economy, the power to persuade remains the coin of the realm. But persuasion is no longer the job of just a creative director and a host of media buyers. Today it's everyone's job. People working in today's information economy spend all or most of their time and effort trying to get someone somewhere to do something. From the CEO of a multinational company trying to establish a presence on Facebook to a teenager tweeting about a pair of awesome-looking jeans, everyone needs to be able to effectively persuade someone, whether it's a boss or a boyfriend, a customer or a committee.
The problem is that most people today don't feel equipped to craft messages or take action with the same confidence and certainty as Mad Men's Don Draper. Two things confound them. First, most are a lot less familiar with the principles of persuasion than they are with the means. They're not quite sure what makes a message persuasive, but they know how to use a smartphone to tweet 140 characters to millions of people in a second. Second, recent and rapid changes in new digital media technology make doing the job hard, even for experts who do understand the principles of persuasion. Why? Because today there are more ways to go about it than ever. Changes in media affect how we figure out the "somewhere" part of the job. And with all the hype, hysteria, big money, high-tech IPOs, consolidation, disruption, and destruction that is the digital media revolution, people who are trying to get someone somewhere to do something can lose sight of the "get someone" and the "do something" part of the job.
The job is using words, pictures, stories, and music to seduce strangers. In the industrial, mass-media, consumer economy of the past, the job was called advertising, and "Mad Men" did it. In today's service-based, social media-focused, information economy, the job is called life, and everyone does it.
Here's how you can do it. And do it better. “Mad Men” co-producer and advertising creative director Josh Weltman distills everything he knows about the art of persuasion into a playbook of rules, principles, insights, and insider anecdotes, all tailored to making deals in the fast-changing life in the information economy. Josh Weltman is the advertising consultant and a co-producer on the hit show “Mad Men”. A creative director for more than 25 years, he's worked on advertising and marketing campaigns for both global brands and boutique clients. He lives with his family in Los Angeles, California. Introduction
The Job That Was Once Called Advertising
The job was using words, pictures, stories, and music to make someone somewhere do something. In the industrial, mass-media, consumer economy of the past, the job was called advertising, and "Mad men" did it. In our modern, service-based, social-media-centric information economy, the job is called life, and everybody does it.
Once it was the job of these advertising executives on Madison Avenue, "Mad Men", to be the public champions of products and services, making businesses successful and customers happy. Don Draper always seemed to know exactly how to do it. He knew what the business goal of the advertising was. He knew how to create an insightful, persuasive message. And he had teams of experts to help him decide which media would help him do the job best.
In today's information economy, the power to persuade remains the coin of the realm. But persuasion is no longer the job of just a creative director and a host of media buyers. Today it's everyone's job. People working in today's information economy spend all or most of their time and effort trying to get someone somewhere to do something. From the CEO of a multinational company trying to establish a presence on Facebook to a teenager tweeting about a pair of awesome-looking jeans, everyone needs to be able to effectively persuade someone, whether it's a boss or a boyfriend, a customer or a committee.
The problem is that most people today don't feel equipped to craft messages or take action with the same confidence and certainty as Mad Men's Don Draper. Two things confound them. First, most are a lot less familiar with the principles of persuasion than they are with the means. They're not quite sure what makes a message persuasive, but they know how to use a smartphone to tweet 140 characters to millions of people in a second. Second, recent and rapid changes in new digital media technology make doing the job hard, even for experts who do understand the principles of persuasion. Why? Because today there are more ways to go about it than ever. Changes in media affect how we figure out the "somewhere" part of the job. And with all the hype, hysteria, big money, high-tech IPOs, consolidation, disruption, and destruction that is the digital media revolution, people who are trying to get someone somewhere to do something can lose sight of the "get someone" and the "do something" part of the job.