My day had a rough start this morning:
Peanut called, stranded in Sharon, PA, after taking her car to get fixed. As such, I had to spend an hour of my morning driving to pick her up.
(If your business doesn’t grant you this type of freedom, hit reply, and let’s work on unlocking this freedom in your business without sacrificing your income.)
Anyway, while I was driving, a billboard caught my eye.
Most billboards suck.
Half of them are empty.
The other half are corny.
And every once in a while, you see a billboard ad that actually demonstrates a few good pieces of persuasion.
One billboard I saw fell into this latter category. Now, it wasn’t a perfect ad by any means. This ad in particular didn’t even have a call-to-action that could be actively acted upon (but I suppose it had a call-to-action that could be passively acted upon). But it was laced with persuasion pepper, made my mind create a picture in itself, and was rememberable — ingredients which your typical billboard ad lacks.
Anyway, here was the billboard in question:
It was divided into three panel, which had a bit of copy and a powerful image.
The first panel read:
Deadly?
With an image of a shark.
The second panel read:
Deadly.
Then, the shark image zoomed out and it showed that the shark image was actually a YouTube video, insinuating that someone was watching YouTube while driving.
Then the last panel read:
Distracted driving is deadly.
(I forget what the image was for this panel.)
That’s a pretty powerful demonstration of persuasion. Especially considering billboard ads get only a few seconds to capture attention before you drive past them.
Moral of the story?
There are 3 reasons why this ad was so much more effective than most billboards:
1. It was visual, thanks to the images of the shark up close and the shark on YouTube.
2. It highlighted the consequences of not taking action, in this case, dying from distracted dying.
3. It did this in a way that any driver could grasp the message in mere seconds.
You can apply each of these “lessons” to every type of advertising you do, including email.
Anywho:
If you wanna grow your email revenue without lifting a finger, hit reply, and let’s chat.
John
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