Terence Dove from the UK sent me this email:

To: Perry Marshall
From: Terence Dove
Re: The Curse of Perry Marshall

Perry, your marketing system is great and everything but have you ever thought of how you can mess people’s heads up!!!!!!

Advertising is everywhere, most people ignore most of it and can get on with their day. I used to be one of those people before I got the system. Now I can’t ignore any advertising at all. I am tormented, I look at every ad and think “that doesn’t work, they should do it this way, maybe if they wrote blah blah”. I can’t even walk into a store without checking ALL the headlines on the magazine shelves and just last night, in the pub, I realised how deadly this curse really is.

I was getting pretty drunk with a few friends and needed to visit the gents (the bathroom). So, like i say, advertising is everywhere, and in this place they have A4 size ads at head height above each individual urinal. That’s great space because you have to read it, you can’t look anywhere else. Anyway I read the ad, selling personalised license plates, thinking this ad is crap, it’s just a list of example license plates that don’t apply to me, maybe if they wrote etc etc.

So i finished, washed my hands and then the curse really kicked in…..I returned to the urinal and stood there, studying the ad with my hands on my hips thinking of how to improve it!!! There are guys walking in and out of the bathroom wondering ‘what the hell is that crazy man doing, he’s been standing in front of that pisser for ages, staring at the wall’. I only snapped out of it when one guy actually asked me if i was ok!!

So, for heavens sake, you must include a warning with your toolkit like “Warning: Using this system may cause you to embarrass yourself in public places”.

Regards, Terence Dove

P.S. Hey, I just thought, even as I write this “I have just written a great article for Perry – damn, what a great headline – the curse of Perry Marshall”… AAAARGH I’m doing it now, this curse is too much.

I was very moved by this note, and wanted to console him. So I sent him this reply:

Dear Terence,

Thank you for your touching story of angst and advertising dysfunction. I feel your pain – really, I do. But you’ll eventually adjust to seeing stupid advertising everywhere and accept it as part of the ugly reality of life

— besides, the money you’re making from your own efforts will console you and calm your troubled spirit.

Yours Truly,
Perry Marshall

Now that Terence recognizes good advertising when he sees it, he knows that most of the rest of the folks in ad-world are clueless.

Never forget this:

Ignorance is bliss, but you can’t un-learn a truth.

To the uninitiated – to people who haven’t spent time sitting in board rooms, listening to executives pontificate about what they think is going on inside their companies – the business world appears to be sophisticated, savvy, and populated by very, very smart people.

Lee Iacocca had a different point of view:

“If you make believe that ten guys in pin-striped suits are back in a kindergarten class playing with building blocks, you’ll get a rough picture of what life in a corporation is like. Grown men in a meeting will do anything — absolutely anything — to avoid being shown up. If someone doesn’t know the facts about a subject, he’ll ad-lib, just like a kid.”

Once you become informed and truly, genuinely competent in even just one aspect of running a business – management, marketing, advertising, finance, operations, quality control, whatever – you’ll start to see that most people in business are posers. They just bluff their way through everything.

That’s how ad agencies stay afloat, folks. They don’t really know what they’re doing – I repeat, they really don’t know what they’re doing. Because if ad agencies did know what they’re doing, they would advertise, too.

They just sound like they know what they’re doing. Their real job is to stroke the egos of insecure posers, not to bring in new customers. The ad agency business, and all their self-centered puffery, exists for the purpose of stroking executive egos.

The ads you see in magazines and on TV are what VIPs want to see… not what customers want to see.

Photo credit: Dan4th Nicholas cc by-sa

About the Author

Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.

He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.