(By Alex Kaufman, Slate.com, July 30, 2013)
So ... do
the "1 trick" ads really work? You’ve seen them. Peeking out from sidebars, jiggling and
wiggling for your attention, popping up where you most expect them: those “One
Weird Trick” ads. These crudely drawn Web advertisements promise easy tricks to
reduce your belly fat, learn a new language, and boost your credit score by 217
points. They seem like obvious scams, but part of me has always wanted to follow
the link. What, I wonder, makes the tricks so weird? How come only one trick
(or sometimes "tip"), never more? Why are the illustrations done by
small children using MS Paint? I’ve never pursued these questions, though,
because a fear of computer viruses and identity theft has always stayed my
hand. One curious click, I imagine, and I could wake up hogtied on an oil
tanker headed to Nigeria.
Thankfully,
Slate has allowed me to slake my curiosity, and yours. They gave me a loaner
laptop, a prepaid debit card, and a quest: to investigate these weird tricks
and report back to you. I also contacted a bevy of marketing experts to help me
parse what I found. The individual tricks themselves are peculiar, but the
larger trick—of why this bizarre and omnipresent marketing strategy works—tells
us a lot about what makes us click, buy, and believe. Newly emboldened, I clicked on my first ad,
which promised a cure for diabetes. Specifically, I hoped to “discover how 1
weird spice reverses diabetes in 30 short days.” The ad showed a picture of
cinnamon buns. Could the spice be... cinnamon? Maybe I would find out. The link
brought up a video with no pause button or status bar. A kindly voice began:
“Prepare to be shocked.” I prepared myself. As “Lon” spoke, his words flashed
simultaneously on the screen, PowerPoint-style. As soon as he started, Lon
seemed fixated on convincing me to stay until the end. “This could be the most
important video you ever watch,” he promised. “Watch the entire video, as the
end will surprise you!”
Every time
Lon seemed about to get to the spicy heart of the matter, he’d go off on a
tangent. This video wouldn’t stay on the Internet for long, he said. The cure
is for people “ready to put down the flaky answers.” Indeed, “if you’re looking
for a miracle cure or new age fad, leave this page now.” Lon also took pains to
trash the medical establishment. Big Pharma has been lying to you, he said.
They profit every time you take their pills, or inject yourself with their
needles. But the secret spice Lon discovered can free you of the lies and the
needles. You will “look and feel like you were never sick.” Your doctor will
confirm your cure, astounded.
What is Lon
up to? “People tend to think something is important if it’s secret,” says
Michael Norton, a marketing professor at Harvard Business School. “Studies find
that we give greater credence to information if we’ve been told it was once
‘classified.’ Ads like this often purport to be the work of one man, telling
you something ‘they’ don’t want you to know.” The knocks on Big Pharma not only
offered a tempting needle-free fantasy; they also had a whiff of secret
knowledge, bolstering the ad’s credibility.
It’s
doubtful, though, that Lon has much in the way of insider info. He’s an actor
hired by Barton Publishing, a firm based in South Dakota that puts out a wide
variety of crankish health literature—there’s nary a foodstuff that isn’t the
cure to some ailment in one of Barton’s booklets. Most “one weird trick” ads
are hard to trace back to a specific marketing firm with flesh-and-blood
employees, but Barton is open about the kind of publishing it does, with
pictures and bios of their contributors on its website. (Notably, the first
person listed is not a homeopath but a “split tester.”)
The Barton
brain trust seemed surprisingly sincere, which I kept in mind as I turned to my
next ad. I clicked to learn “the REAL reason why Obama is trying to take your
guns away.” You’d think health quackery and gun paranoia would have little in
common, but soon I was brought to a page with a self-playing, pauseless video
and a male voice urging me to watch to the end. Apparently Obama has signed an
executive order authorizing him to institute martial law and “steal your food
supply,” but “Matt” has developed “a weird but incredibly effective system” to
survive the coming storm.
In the
interests of journalism, I also checked out the “1 Weird Secret That Pornstars
Use to Get BIG DICKS.” Sure enough, this involved a dude talking at me while
words flashed on the screen: “Stay until the end of this video... it will shock
you.” But before he spilled the beans on “what’s holding you back from the big
penis you deserve,” he needed to regale me with tales of his buddy Kyle, who
added 2 inches and improved his confidence with the ladies.
What really
puzzled me about this formula—as I sat through video after video, alternately
bored and enraged—is that there’s no way to shut the guy up and just buy the
dick pills already. The videos were all 15 to 30 minutes long, and you had to sit
through the whole thing before you can hand over your credit card. I’d thought
the point of all this teasing was to inspire impatience—provoking customers to
pay up to end the suspense. I was wrong.
“Research on
persuasion shows the more arguments you list in favor of something, regardless
of the quality of those arguments, the more that people tend to believe it,”
Norton says. “Mainstream ads sometimes use long lists of bullet points—people
don’t read them, but it’s persuasive to know there are so many reasons to buy.”
OK, but if more is better, then why only one trick? “People want a simple
solution that has a ton of support.”
What about
all the weirdness? “A word like ‘weird’ is not so negative, and kind of
intriguing,” says Oleg Urminsky of the University of Chicago Booth School of
Business. “There’s this foot-in-the-door model. If you lead with a strong,
unbelievable claim it may turn people off. But if you start with ‘isn’t this
kind of weird?’ it lowers the stakes.” The model also explains why some ads ask
you to click on your age first. “Giving your age is low-stakes but it begins
the dialogue. The hard sell comes later.”
Poorly drawn
graphics are a deliberate choice as well. “People notice when you put something
in the space that’s different, even if it’s ugly,” Urminsky says. “This might
hurt the brand of established companies, but the companies here have
non-existent or negative brand associations, so it may be worth it for the
extra attention.” Plus, “if the ad were
too professional, it might undermine the illusion that it’s one man against the
system,” Norton says. Slick ads suggest profit-hungry companies, not
stay-at-home moms or rogue truth-tellers trying to help the little guy.
There may be
another reason for the length and shoddiness of the ads. “The point is not
always to get the customer to buy the product,” Urminsky says. “It may be to
vet the customer. Long videos can act as a sorting mechanism, a way to ‘qualify
your prospects.’ Once you’ve established this is a person who’ll sit through
anything, you can contact them by email later and sell them other products. Those Nigerian prince scams are not very
convincing,” he adds, “but they’re meant not to be. If you’re a skeptical
person, the scammers want to spend as little time with you as possible. These
videos may screen people in a similar way.”
Though “one
weird trick” ads may not be aimed at the average consumer, they show how deftly
marketers have learned to manipulate our beliefs. There may be little daylight
between the temptation of learning a weird trick at the behest of a sketchy
mail-order outfit and the provocative headlines of mainstream news outlets like
BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, or—indeed!—Slate. The science of grabbing and
directing your attention advances each time you click a link on your Facebook
feed.
Arguably,
this very article has behaved like a one-weird-trick ad in delaying
gratification this long. So what does happen when you grit your teeth and watch
to the end of the videos? Well, your dick gets bigger with MaleFormulaXL, an
herbal blend that runs you $89.95 per auto-renewed bottle. You can survive the
Obama-calypse with a booklet on bunker-building and water purification.
Eliminate belly fat using the thoroughly disproven extracts of garcinia
cambogia and acai. And diabetes—just add cinnamon. The weirdest trick of all,
of course, was getting anyone to click in the first place.
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