How the world’s ugliest car can help you siphon more email profits…

Every once in a while I like to go back to the fundamentals – to revisit and reinforce certain principles of good marketing & persuasion.

One of those fundamentals is an ad from 1972 – written by the legend that is David Ogilvy – called:

How to create advertising that sells

(The former CEO of Ogilvy’s agency noted that people, at all levels of marketing, were still requesting reprints TEN years after the ad ran originally – a testament to its impact on the marketing space.)

Even though it’s 54 years old…

…i believe you need only make a few tweaks/updates, and it would also work like a charm today.

So as I was going through it again recently…

I decided to write those few tweaks/updates down for my own edification.

And I’m sharing it here for yours too because… well…

It certainly can’t UNHELP you!

There are 38 maxims in total, but I chose to focus on only four – two of which I agree with and believe are actually even more relevant/impactful than before…

…and two which I disagree with because times have changed, and following them would bring great disservice to your marketing efforts.

So here’s the first one – Maxim #5:

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    A first-class ticket. It pays to give most products an image of quality––a first-class ticket.

    Ogilvy & Mather has been conspicuously successful in doing this–– for Pepperidge, Hathaway, Mercedes-Benz, Schweppes, Dove and others.

    If your advertising looks ugly, consumers will conclude that your product is shoddy, and they will be less likely to buy.

===

Perhaps this was the case back in the mid-20th century – when graphic design tools were primitive, editing was manual and time-consuming, and producing polished visuals took special equipment, and expert craftsmanship…

…so most marketing materials did look rough by default, and “looking good” was a credible signal of competence & investment.

But today it’s actually reversed.

Nowadays?

Everything is PRETTY!

You can pull up Canva right now and create a neat & slick-looking graphic for a pre-workout promo.

(Heck, if you give a half-decent prompt to any AI model… you can get that done in less than 5 minutes.)

Sure:

Perhaps you won’t make it pretty-poster-like as a professional graphic designer can…

…but it’s „pretty“ enough to be categorized as not-ugly.

So herein lies the update for this maxim:

It is the UGLY ad that gets attention today.

It is the turd-coloured Nissan Juke that stands out in a parking lot full of white Teslas…

(Don’t Google that car, it’s actually REALLY ugly lol.)

It’s the main reason – albeit there are a few others* – why I run my marketing emails in plain-text form.

(*More on them in my Book – specifically Blind Spots #4 and #7)

Which is a complete 180° from the rest of this industry – where virtually every marketing email I see is a pretty HTML Lidl-catalogue style email.

(If you want some examples, check out Blind Spot #4 in my book – especially the side-by-side collage that demonstrates well just how much a plain-text email pops out.)

And when you’re trying to make it in as cutthroat and saturated a market as this one is?

JUST getting attention is 80% of the game.

(The last 20% is not fucking up the rest – like inducing analysis-paralysis in potential customers, which I also wrote about in my Book in Blind Spot #6.)

There’s never been a better era to be ugly than it is today.

Sadly…

Most marketers can’t get over their own cognitive biases, so they’d rather keep making everything pretty…

(And automatically blend in with… oh just EVERY ONE OF THEIR COMPETITORS.)

…than try out something new which… hey!

Does actually make quite a lot of sense!

Those folks I can’t help – I have no cure for obstinacy…

(Nor am I eager to waste my time looking for it.)

But you?

If you being on this newsletter – and reading THIS far – is anything to go by…