Posts Tagged ‘Advertising’

So What’s the Big Deal About Influencer Marketing?

January 25, 2026

When I First Discovered the Power of Influencers

I will never forget the first time I saw someone playing slot machines on their own television. It was about five years ago, during Covid. I asked her if the site she was using was affiliated with a major casino, and if she knew what percentage of the money gambled was paid out in winnings.

My friend said that it was an offshore company that she didn’t know anything about and she wasn’t sure what the payoff rates were. I was flabbergasted that anyone would use their credit card to gamble when they had no assurance that it was a legitimate operation.

I tried to conceal my incredulity as I asked: “What reason do you have to believe that you have any chance of actually winning money?”

She said: “An influencer that me and my friends like recommended this site.” Apparently, that was good enough for her.

So What’s an Influencer?

According to my friend Gemini, an influencer is “an individual with the power to affect the purchasing decisions, opinions, or behaviors of others due to their authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with their audience.”

For marketers, finding the right influencer to endorse your product can be extremely lucrative. It’s common to hear people boast about ROIs of over $5 for every $1 spent.

Many influencers initially gained notoriety as actors, musicians, athletes, models, and television personalities like Selana Gomez, The Kardashians, Cardi B, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Amber Rose, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Lionel Messi.

Another group of influencers came into prominence as creators, people who develop high-quality content, such as blogs, memes, and videos.

Targeting Is the Key to Influencer Marketing

There are two main strategies for marketers when it comes to finding people who may be interested in purchasing the goods and services you have to offer:

  1. Casting a wide net through traditional forms of media such as billboards and tv ads and hoping to entice a small percentage of that audience to buy your product.
  2. Targeting people who may already be inclined to buy what you’re selling or people who are actively seeking what you have to offer through strategies like direct mail, inbound marketing, and influencer marketing.

Because targeting is a major component of influencer marketing, audience size is much less important than other factors, such as trust, connectedness, expertise, and authenticity.  

For example, Ronaldo and Messi each have over half a billion Instagram followers, but they probably wouldn’t be a marketer’s first choice for endorsing beauty and skin care products.

In the early days of internet marketing, many marketers who were looking to cast a wide net became infatuated with the notion of going viral. The limited efficacy of this strategy became widely apparent after Evian launched its hugely popular Roller Babies campaign in 2009.  

As marketer Luke Sullivan notes:

It’s no surprise their online video featuring diaper-wearing babies on rollerblades might produce 80 million views. But…Evian sales plummeted by 25 percent…Apparently, roller-skating babies have nothing to do with selling water (1).

According to author and fitness influencer Amanda Russell, viral “is a wildly empty metric….A social post can rack up huge numbers and still not drive any sort of meaningful action. A bunch of eyeballs does not equate to impact, and being the hot topic of conversation isn’t the same as being trustworthy” (2).

Amanda goes on to say: “People assume 10,000 followers are better than 1,000 followers…but it’s just not the case. It’s the loyalty, support and engagement of that following that matters most” (3).

According to Nate Jones, an executive for the Nex Gen practice of UTA Entertainment marketing, “zeroing in on micro-communities can be a more cost-effective and targeted strategy,” than “working with attention-grabbing social media stars such as Alix Earle, MrBeast or Kai Cenat” (4).

What Are People Looking for in an Influencer?

There are influencers for just about any type of interest or activity you can think of, including mommy bloggers, NASCAR dads, fishing aficionados, and beauty product vloggers. What people are looking for when they choose an influencer is:

  • Knowledge
  • Authenticity
  • Engaging content

Being an influencer doesn’t require credentialed authority in a particular field. That’s why “an influencer does not have to be an expert like a dermatologist to give skincare advice, as long as they are a consistent content creator about the topic of skincare.” (5)

Video Content Rules

Although blogging, making personal appearances, books sales, and other activities can all be an important part of the influencer’s toolkit, we’ve come to an age where video content rules, whether it appears on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Snapchat, or any other social media channel.  

According to Atlantic Monthly contributor Derek Thompson, these days Everything Is Television.

By “television,” I am referring to something bigger than broadcast TV, the cable bundle, or Netflix….Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. (6)

by Richard W. Bray

  1. Luke Sullivan. Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: The Classic Guide to Creating Great Ads, p 191
  2. Amanda Russell. The Influencer Code: How to Unlock the Power of Influencer Marketing, p 41,
  3. Amanda Russell. The Influencer Code: How to Unlock the Power of Influencer Marketing, p 4
  4. Gillian Follet. Why brands are turning to local leaders–not just social stars–the to build trust and connection, AdAge, August 1, 2025.
  5. Holly Frew. New Research Unveils Key Strategies for influencer authenticity, Georgia State News Hub, February 20,2025
  6. Derek Thompson. Everything Is Television. Derek Thompson dot org, October 10,2025  

									


				
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Marketing 101 — Why Do We Do the Things We Do?

				March 2, 2024

				

					










The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.
–David Oglivy. (1)


According to Richard Shotton, when it comes to making buying decisions, “people often don’t know their genuine motivations.” (2) Shotton describes an experiment conducteded by Adrian North at Leicester University where a supermarket alternated the music they played in their wine aisle. 


When they played German oompah music, 73 percent of the wine they sold was from Germany, and when they played French accordion music, 77 percent of the wine they sold was from France. But 86 percent of wine shoppers claimed that the music had no impact on their decision.


In his book Everybody Lies, researcher Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers page after page of examples of people saying they want one thing when they really want something else. For example, when Netflix started streaming, they asked people what kind of movies they wanted to watch, and customers would “fill the queue with aspirational, highbrow films, such as black-and-white World War II documentaries or serious foreign films.” 


But it turns out Netflix customers overwhelmingly preferred to watch “lowbrow comedies or romance films.” Stephens-Davidowitz concludes that “People were consistently lying to themselves.”


Human motivation is one of the great mysteries of life, and people are frequently mystified by their own actions. To make sense out of our wacky lives, people just make things up. As social scientist Jonathan Haidt wryly observes: “The conscious mind thinks it’s the oval office, when in reality it’s the press office.” (3)


So What’s a Marketer to Do? 


Research. Research. And more research is the best way to comprehend human motivation. But instead of asking people what they would do in a given situation, you must observe and record their actual behavior. Here are some of the fascinating things researchers have discovered about our species:


    

  • People are more likely to use a cake mix when they have to add water and an egg instead of just adding water. (4)
    • 

  • People are more likely to donate to a cancer charity after you make them wear a Cancer Awareness button for a week. (5)
    • 

  • People are more likely to eat ice cream when they’re at the beach, at the movies, or on vacation. (6)
    • 

  • “Chilean sea bass” sounds a lot more appetizing than “Patagonian toothfish.” (7)
    • 

  • People are much more likely to respond to your emails if you address them as an Influential Trendsetter. (8)
    • 

  • Briefly holding a warm beverage in their hands causes people to rate strangers as being more generous and friendly. (9)
    • 

  • Evolution has designed humans to crave novelty. (10) Lester Wunderman tells us that NEW is the second most powerful word in advertising, right after FREE. (11)
    • 



Maybe I’ll expound on some of these topics in future blog posts if I get a chance. Or maybe I won’t. One of the first rules of advertising is Don’t Overpromise.


by Richard W. Bray


    

  1. The Dark Art by Rory Sutherland
    2. 

  2. The Choice Factory by Richard Shotton
    3. 

  3. The Dark Art by Rory Sutherland
    4. 

  4. The Illusion of Choice by Richard Shotton 
    5. 

  5. Using Behavioral Science in Marketing by Nancy Harhut
    6. 

  6. How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp
    7. 

  7. The Dark Art by Rory Sutherland
    8. 

  8. Using Behavioral Science in Marketing by Nancy Harhut
    9. 

  9. Blindsight by Matt Johnson
    10. 

  10. Using Behavioral Science in Marketing by Nancy Harhut
    11. 

  11. Being Direct by Lester Wunderman 
    12. 

									


				
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Emotion Always Wins (Using Words to Sell Stuff)

				January 20, 2024

				

					











Reason…can never, of itself, be any motive to the will, and it can have no influence but so far as it touches some passion or affection. Abstract relations of ideas are the object of curiosity, not of volition.
–David Hume, super smart Scottish guy who lived in the 18th century

Business schools have long been dominated by a ridiculous notion called rational choice theory, which is basically the idea that people make their buying decisions by carefully weighing the pros and cons.

It should be readily apparent to anyone who knows any actual humans that rational choice theory is a crock because people aren’t rational. Sometimes we arrive at decisions that are rational, but decision-making is not a rational process.

As copywriter extraordinaire Herschell Gordon Lewis points out: "When emotion and intelligence come into conflict, emotion always wins." According to Lewis, a great way to make your advertising copy a heck of a lot more effective is by replacing intellectual words with emotional words. 

On pages 38-40 of Lewis’ book Direct Mail Copy That Sells, the author graciously supplies a list of emotional v. intellectual words that “show you how easy it is to shift word choice in favor of emotion."

If you’re a copywriter who wants to convince people to buy stuff – which is, of course, your job – get hold of a copy of Direct Mail Copy That Sells, Xerox pages 38-40, and tape it to your refrigerator.

Here are a few examples of what Lewis is talking about:

Emotional word: build
Intellectual word: construct

Emotional word: tired
Intellectual word: fatigued

Emotional word: eat
Intellectual word: dine

Emotional word: smart
Intellectual word: astute

Emotional word: death
Intellectual word: demise















Herschell Gordon Lewis

by Richard W. Bray 

									


				
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Selling Swedish Coffee in the Mail

				February 9, 2020

				

					
Lester Wunderman


Brand storytelling is about standing for something and striving for excellence in everything your business does. It’s about framing your scarcity and dictating your value.

—Bernadette Jiwa, The Fortune Cookie Principle


The Stories We Tell Ourselves


The human mind tells itself stories to make sense out of this crazy old world. We think in narratives. For example, if I told you there were ten thousand orphans created by the latest war, that would upset you. But you would be much more moved by the details of the plight of a single orphaned child.


The Father of Direct Marketing


Lester Wunderman was “the first direct marketer ever to be on the senior board of a major (advertising) agency.” He’s often referred to as the Father of Direct Marketing.


Decades before the internet existed, Wunderman envisioned a future where “a better, less time-consuming way of shopping would evolve, and the home would become the shopping center of the future.”


A New Way to Buy Coffee


In 1980, when he was working for Young & Rubicam, Wunderman was convinced he could sell premium Swedish Gevalia coffee by mail, but he faced three significant hurdles:


    

  1. Getting people to pay a premium price for a brand they’d never heard of
    2. 

  2. Getting people to buy coffee through the mail
    3. 

  3. Getting people to believe that great coffee comes from Sweden
    4. 



Although Y&R’s research showed that Americans enjoyed the taste of Gevalia, Wunderman knew it wasn’t going to be an easy sell.


First of all, there are countries that we naturally associate with coffee – think Brazil, Kenya, Columbia, Italy, or Costa Rica. But Wunderman realized that “No one in America thought of Sweden as a source of great coffee.”


(Actually, the Swedes are crazy about their coffee! Only their Nordic neighbors in Finland drink more coffee than the Swedes. Maybe it’s those long, cold nights.)


Automatic Replenishment


Another problem was getting people to accept a brand new way to buy consumable products. In 1980, Americans weren’t used to receiving packaged goods in their mailboxes.


Wunderman decided he needed a come up with a “new word” to “describe the process of selling something people regularly consumed.” He settled on the phrase “automatic replenishment.” This would allow people to buy a coffee “subscription” so they “would never run out of Gevalia.” It was a very shrewd marketing strategy.


Automatic replenishment is an evocative phrase, and the word replenish contains some very pleasant connotations (refresh, restore, renew). In copywriting, it’s important to remember that the connotations of words trigger all sorts of emotional responses.


The Quest for the Perfect Cup of Coffee


When it came time to write the copy for Gevalia, Wunderman realized that he had to do more than simply choose the right adjectives. Clever advertisers had already sold a lot of coffee by convincing people that it would provide a rich, strong, aromatic, and satisfying experience. These are some wonderful words that convey a sense of wealth, power, comfort, and even a hint of sexual gratification.


It was time to try something else. So Wunderman used storytelling to convince Americans to buy expensive Swedish coffee through the mail. He decided to focus on the tale of Gevalia’s master coffee roaster Victor Engvall and his “obsession with the perfect cup of coffee.”


The Rest of the Story


How did Wunderman do it? To hear rest of the story, see Lester Wunderman’s exceptional memoir Being Direct, Chapter 22.


If you read the whole book, you’ll learn a whole bunch of fascinating stuff: Wunderman’s involvement in the early days of record clubs; how he used catalogues to sell millions of rosebushes; how he helped convince people not to leave home without the American Express Card; how he was courted by the legendary David Oglivy.


Spoiler alert: Wunderman was very impressed by Oglivy, “the best presenter of advertising I had ever seen,” but he decided to merge his firm WRK with Y&R instead.


by Richard W. Bray

									


				
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