Back in January I gifted Email Players subscribers a booklet called:
“Obvious Adams”
A great little volume the man who is universally considered to be the World’s Greatest Living Copywriter Gary Bencivenga sent me back in 2008, and that I have read probably 100+ times since. And I was recently reminded of Obvious Adams while reading about something that happened during the first Method Acting class Marlon Brando took.
What happened was this:
The teacher told the class to pretend they are chickens and nuclear bombs are about to drop out of the sky onto them. And the entire class started freaking out and bawking wildly, running to & fro.
That is, except Brando.
He calmly pretended he was laying an egg without a care in the world.
When asked why he said:
“I’m a chicken. What do I know about bombs?”
A perfect metaphor for today’s gaggle of copywriters all majoring in the minors.
We all fall prey to this, yes, including me.
It reminds me of some masterminds I’ve been to.
Including co-hosting my own that lasted a few years before the band broke up.
One of the reasons I generally disliked them is how insistent everyone is in majoring in the minors – focusing on ticky-tack little dumb things that don’t move the needle at all, vs the big, sweeping things that do. It was frustrating, for example, to see people literally telling the room to put “re:” in the subject line or “sent from my iPhone” in an auto-responder email or how many times to put a link in an email or what to do about lagging open rates and clicks… instead of focusing on writing emails people want to read selling them offers they want to buy.
But direct marketers and copywriters tend to not want to hear that.
They prefer to bawk and cluck and run ragged about the sky falling instead.
I don’t know who needed to hear that but we are all susceptible to majoring in the minors.
So this ain’t just me lecturing, it’s also reminding myself too.
I remember, for example, the great Gary Halbert talking about a mistake he made. He said he wrote an entire full page ad for a newspaper… presumably using every copywriting trick in the book which he was well known for… including probably his post dated check trick, etc… only to forget to put the phone number in it so people could actually buy.
i.e., Majoring in the minors.
Anyway, do what you will with that info.
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Ben Settle
