By admin 
When starting in business, it’s usually to make a profit.
If you do it well though, by the end of it you’ll be left with something a lot more valuable, and if you’re lucky, maybe some profit as well.
I jest, but in any case I was thinking about old-timey business books. I recently picked up one that’s been collecting dust on my shelf, Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz.
I’ve read a lot of these types of books at this point, where the timeless advice of marketers from the past weigh in on how to make money in any era.
I think the thing that always bugged me though was that in reading these books, I could never figure out how to apply their advices in the same way. They always reference things like “listicles” and “mail-order” marketing.
I don’t even know what that is in today’s day and age.
One common adage from those great marketers of the past is that you cannot create demand, only harness it.
I think this makes a lot of sense, but I think I’ve always been a bit confused on the “how”.
A lot of focus is placed on reading the direction of the desire in markets. In ideal circumstances I’d have the ability to listen in on every conversation in the world happening at once and generate a little 2-4 word snippet on the sentiment of the conversation.
But that would be impractical, right?
This is the hypothetical perfect form of having a “pulse” on desire.
In their heyday, the great marketers of the past could only dream upon a star to have such capabilities.
But in modern marketing, we dream no more.
Where they previously had to sift through lists for hours and hours to find a perfect mailing list that had strong desires / income to spend, only to have to spent countless more hours crafting the perfect product solution, we now have facebook and google.
These platforms actually managed to do it. They are actually able to listen in on every conversation in the world, and get a sentiment on how the entire world is feeling at once.
They can get a perfect pulse.
Okay so we finally have that now. I can just go to one of these providers and have a near-perfect match of my ad to the intended audience.
Then why does modern advertising suck so much?
Is it that those platforms lie to us? That they secretly bank on our failure and make it harder on purpose?
That might be partially true, but honestly there’s probably a reason they make so much money and that print marketing is all but dead.
I think a more believable answer is that in handling our prospecting and pulse-keeping for us, they’ve stripped us of something fundamental required to make good advertisements.
They’ve taken our intuition away in favor of their own algorithmic variant.
You see, in the past where we might have spent several hours taking the time to think through and research our targets, learn about them, their habits, and ultimately desires, we would have previously spent so much time with them that we become them – at least a little.
You don’t need science to understand your own desires after all.
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I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use facebook or google. All I’m doing is bringing light to why the solution isn’t having the 100x performance increase compared to print advertising that it should be having, given how ultimately perfect the solution is.
All in all, it’s missing feedback.
Spend more time with prospects, ask them questions, get in front of them with novel ways to express old solutions.
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They were able to get a pulse on so many people because they were able to create a community for them. Create the biggest, most robust, most vibrant community and you’ll have an incredible pulse on things. In the initial stages, scraping tools can perform well for simply accessing the pulse that they’ve already put together.
One example is reddit’s api.
That’s a very simple one to execute given that it has many ponds of varying sizes, and so a very simple setup would be to scrape and index all the problems in the given micro communities.