| … If so, what can they teach you? Recognise some of these lines? – You won’t believe how these 9 shocking clickbaits work! (number 8 is a killer!) – Man tries to hug a wild lion, You won’t believe what happened next! – Mycha started drinking two glasses of bitter-guard juice everyday for seven days and the results are amazing. – A school girl gave her lunch to a homeless man. What he did next will leave you in tears! – 21 stars who ruined their face due to plastic surgery. Talk about regrets! – Man divorced his wife after knowing what is in this photo – 15 hilarious tweets of stupid people that makes you think “Do these people even exist?’ – Is your boyfriend cheating on you? He is if he does these 5 things. – Can you solve this ancient riddle? Only 9% of people gave the right answer! – Girls won’t be able to resist you if you apply this one simple trick. Actually, you may NOT recognise the first line. Why? Because the writer – Zerone in Nepal made it up. Which just goes to show there’s a lot more to Nepal than Mount Everest. Anyhow, don’t sneer at clickbait lines. They are as old (and successful) as the hills. The best headline ever written may be “They laughed when I sat down at the piano – but when I started to play… “ It is ripped off regularly – including by us. Clickbait follows exactly the same format. It’s called what I term relevant surprise. How relevant must you be? I often refer to something my old boss – Ken Roman, CEO of Ogilvy & Mather said: “Never promise more than you can deliver: always deliver what you promise.” You could say Clickbait never delivers what it promises. Often you’re about to be sold something dodgy. Or what you see after you click disappoints. The first few stories are interesting – then you’re reading about actors you never heard of. But by then you’ve been exposed to lots of ads – where these people make their money. It all works by inducing you to keep looking at things that interest you. The other day I watched a clickbait video titled “Top 10 Weird and Crazy Celebrity Houses”. Have you seen it? I have – maybe because practically everything interests me, which I guess is why I write pretty good copy. Be that as it may, if you study Clickbait you will find formulae that work. The difference is that you are selling something better than wasted time. By the way if you don’t want to go looking for your Clickbait inspiration I have a simpler solution – drop me a line. You’ll see if we can’t write stuff that gets people clicking. In 97.5% of cases it does. Because I spend my time thinking about things you don’t have time to. And you reap the benefit. Here’s that link again – db@draytonbird.com. Best, Drayton P.S. Know anyone who’d appreciate my Bird Droppings? Tell them to sign up to my mailing list here. |
Does the devil have all the best tunes?
About the Author
In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.
He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.
Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.
He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.