#430 How to Write Ads That Sell

#430 How to Write Ads That Sell

Claude Hopkins was the greatest copywriter of all time. His ideas were so valuable that when he wrote them down in a book the founder of his advertising firm locked the manuscript in a safe for 20 years. When the book was finally published it sold over 8 million copies. David Ogilvy said that nobody should work in advertising until they had read the book seven times. This episode is what I learned by reading Claude Hopkins' autobiography My Life In Advertising and his legendary book Scientific Advertising [https://amzn.to/4hVid0t]. Made possible by: Ramp: ⁠⁠https://ramp.com [https://ramp.com]⁠⁠ Applovin: ⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com [https://www.applovin.com] Vanta: ⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders [https://vanta.com/founders] Some of my favorite quotes: 0:00 — "Any man who by a lifetime of excessive application learns more about anything than others owes a statement to his successors." 5:12 — "The man who works twice as long as his fellows is bound to go twice as far, especially in advertising." 5:30 — "If I have gone higher than others in advertising or done more, the fact is not due to exceptional ability but to exceptional hours." 6:48 — "To poverty I owe the fact that I never went to college. I spent those four years in the school of experience instead of the school of theory." 9:08 — "Which is work and which is play? If a thing is useful, they call it work. If it's useless, they call it play. But one is hard as the other. All the difference I see lies in the attitude of the mind." 9:32 — "I came to love work as other men love golf. I love it still. The love of work can be cultivated just like the love of play." 9:58 — "We do best what we like best." 13:05 — "A good product is its own best salesman. It is uphill work to sell goods without samples." 15:00 — "We must never judge humanity by ourselves. The things we want, the things we like may appeal to a small minority." 15:23 — "We must submit all things in advertising to the court of public opinion." 17:48 — "Some of the greatest successes I have ever known in advertising were ignorant men. One wrote copy which would induce a farmer to mortgage his barn to respond, but every sentence had to be edited for grammar." 20:23 — "John Powers created a new concept of advertising. He told the truth, but told it in a rugged and fascinating way." 25:47 — "Study salesmen, canvassers, and fakers if you want to know how to sell goods. No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration." 26:35 — "The average salesman seeks favors. He seeks profit for himself. His plea is, 'Buy my goods.' He makes a selfish appeal to selfish people, and of course, he meets resistance. I was selling service." 28:45 — "We must treat people in advertising as we treat them in person." 31:23 — "Others have never told this story. It will startle everyone in print. I gave purity a meaning." (On Schlitz Beer jumping from 5th to 1st.) 32:03 — "Tell the pains that you take to excel. The maker is too close to his product. He sees in his methods only the ordinary." 34:08 — "The greatest two faults in advertising lie in boasts and in selfishness. People will listen if you talk service to them. They will turn their backs when you seek to impress an advantage for yourself." 41:23 — "People will do anything to cure a trouble, but little to prevent it. Prevention offers slight appeal to humanity in general. They want to be told of rewards." 1:01:30 — "Genius is the art of taking pains. The advertising man who spares the midnight oil will never get very far. This is no lazy man's field."

#429 Bob Dylan's Autobiography

What I learned from rereading Bob Dylan's autobiography [https://amzn.to/4gyadB7]. Made possible by: Ramp: ⁠⁠https://ramp.com [https://ramp.com]⁠⁠ Applovin: ⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com [https://www.applovin.com] Vanta: ⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders [https://vanta.com/founders]

#428 How Claude Shannon Worked

Claude Shannon changed your life and you probably don't even know it. Claude is the father of information theory. He transformed information into bits and created the intellectual foundation for computers, the Internet, digital media, high-speed communication, and Artificial Intelligence. The way Claude Shannon worked is what interested me the most. He combined extraordinary abstract reasoning with an engineer’s instinct to build. He reduced complex problems to their essential structure. He connected ideas across mathematics, engineering, cryptography, artificial intelligence, investing, chess, juggling, and robotics. He treated every experience as material that he might later combine into a new insight. He was also relentlessly independent, guided more by curiosity and freedom than recognition, money, or usefulness. This episode is what I learned from rereading A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age [https://amzn.to/4wlykI2] by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. Made possible by: Ramp: ⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠ [https://ramp.com⁠⁠%20] AppLovin: ⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com [https://www.applovin.com] Vanta: ⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders [https://vanta.com/founders] 0:00 — "The great insights don't spring from curiosity alone, but from dissatisfaction... A genius is simply someone who is usefully irritated." 1:36 — "It seems to be much easier to make two small jumps than one big jump in any kind of mental thinking." — Shannon 4:41 — "He was a man almost entirely written out of a history that's defined by self-promoters. His was a life spent in the pursuit of curious, serious play." 5:20 — "He worked with levity and played with gravity. He never acknowledged a distinction between the two." 6:00 — "Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they do is the same as what they most want to do." 6:59 — "I do what comes naturally, and usefulness is not my main goal. I keep asking myself, 'How would you do this? Is it possible to make a machine to do this? Can I prove this theorem?'" — Shannon 11:50 — "Chemistry always seemed dull to me. There's too many isolated facts and too few general principles for my taste." — Shannon 19:09 — "Specialization is the death of genius." — Vannevar Bush 19:18 — "The possibilities of being at once both broad and deep did not pass with Leonardo da Vinci or Benjamin Franklin." — Vannevar Bush 25:13 — "I had the freedom to do anything I wanted from almost the day I started. They never told me what to work on." — Shannon on Bell Labs 26:41 — "I've been working on three different ideas simultaneously, and strangely enough, it seems a more productive method than sticking to one problem." — Shannon 32:55 — "My fondest dream is to someday build a machine that thinks, learns, communicates, and manipulates its environment in a fairly sophisticated way." — Shannon 35:05 — "Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits." 38:04 — "After the effort of discovery, the effort of communication was secondary by far. He had solved a problem to his own satisfaction, and that, as far as he was concerned, was enough." 40:55 — "I've spent lots of time on totally useless things... He made no distinction between his interest in information and his interest in unicycles. They were all moves in the same game." 46:54 — "Shannon seemed to think with ideas more than with words or formulas. A new problem was like a sculptor's block of stone, and Shannon's ideas chiseled away the obstacles until an approximate solution emerged." — Ed Thorp 47:19 — "I simply removed everything that was not David." — Michelangelo 47:25 — "I don't think I was ever motivated by the notions of winning prizes. I was more motivated by curiosity, never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together." — Shannon 47:49 — "I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity." — Shannon 48:37 — "The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, the Newtons, the Beethovens, whose work continues to grow influence in a positive fashion." — Shannon

#427 How Raymond Plank Built a $50 Billion Oil Company

Raymond Plank founded Apache Corporation with just $250,000 in 1954. 50 years later his company was worth $50 billion. This episode examines the life and entrepreneurial philosophy of Raymond Plank through his memoir A Small Difference [https://link.amazon/B06p66GSA] Rather than presenting a conventional history of Apache, this episode focuses on the lessons, maxims, and beliefs Plank accumulated over seven decades in business. Written when he was nearly 90, the memoir reads like a lifelong diary of how to think about opportunity, courage, cost control, resourcefulness, and adaptation. Lots of wild stories in this one. Made possible by: Ramp: ⁠⁠⁠https://ramp.com [https://ramp.com]⁠⁠⁠ Applovin: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com [https://www.applovin.com⁠]⁠ Vanta: ⁠⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders⁠ [https://vanta.com/founders⁠] ⁠Add your email here⁠ and I will send you my top 10 quotes from every episode: https://davidsenra.substack.com [https://davidsenra.substack.com]

#426 How Obsession Built Christopher Nolan

Obsession is the engine of Nolan’s career. This episode examines Christopher Nolan’s life, working methods, and philosophy through The Nolan Variations [https://amzn.to/4wnsLcP]by Tom Shone. Made possible by: Ramp: ⁠⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠⁠ [https://ramp.com⁠⁠⁠%20] Applovin: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com⁠ [⁠⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com⁠] Vanta: ⁠⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders⁠ [⁠⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders⁠] ⁠Add your email here⁠ and I will send you my top 10 quotes from every episode: https://davidsenra.substack.com [https://davidsenra.substack.com]