Magic MarketBuying and selling in the marketplace of ideas

Have you seen those ads on Facebook about “weird trick to losing weight” and “weird tricks to whitening teeth” and so on? Usually discovered by a mom who JUST SO HAPPENS to live in either the same town as you, or the same town as your proxy server?

Yeah they’re pretty dumb. But they do activate some primitive part of the human brain that’s hard to resist. “WHAT IS THE WEIRD TRICK! I MUST KNOW!”

There’s something about the unexpected that piques our interest, and once it’s piqued, something irresistible about having the unexpected explained to us.

Which is why I love this fake ad so much.

Spotted at the utterly NSFW webcomic Oglaf.

I’m going to try using the “What Would Seth Godin Do” Wordpess plugin: it greets brand-new users with a special message. In this case, it’ll be an introduction and a reminder to subscribe. Currently, readership of the site is pretty low, including RSS, so I’ll be interested to see if this has an impact. Couldn’t hurt, right?

Right?