Welcome to day four of “Making Your Stuff Cool.” To review, we covered the little-known “RADIO technique” on Monday, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tactic on Tuesday; Wednesday was about making predictions, and today is about details.

We’ve all heard the saying that “the devil is in the details,” but I’m going to tell you that the money is there, too.

Claude Hopkins taught me that. Of course, I never met Claude, because he died forty-three years before I was born. But he lives on in the ads he created for the companies that were clients of the ad agencies he worked at. And yes, ad men and women can definitely become Thought Leaders. It’s their business to lead the public.

Let’s talk about one of his ads and see if we can steal the tactic he employed.

If you never saw the very first episode of “Mad Men,” you should probably do that. In the show, a Madison Avenue ad agency Creative Director named Don Draper is trying to come up with a “hook” for an advertising campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes.

At the last minute, he has a stroke of genius. He says to advertise this phrase: “It’s Toasted.”

Of course, all tobacco companies toast their leaves as a standard part of their production process, but Don made the point that nobody talks about it. By giving consumers something to think about (besides the fact that cigarettes will kill you), their company gets to sidestep that issue and set themselves apart.

It’s genius.

And it was pulled from real life. That “Mad Men” episode was based on the campaign that Claude Hopkins came up with in 1917 for Lucky Strike. It was a very successful campaign.

So that’s a great story, but what can you and I do with it?

Let’s look at the technique itself: Claude learned as much as he could about the product (just as a Thought Leader should) and then took a single, little-known detail that he could talk about in a fresh, new way.

The tactic was so successful, Claude also used it for Schlitz beer, Quaker Oats, and other companies.

If you put a little thought into it, you could use this tactic as a way to draw interest to your thought leadership content and products as well.

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Welcome to day 3 of “Making Your Stuff Cool.”

As previously discussed, I’m talking about driving up the interest of your audience by making your information “cool.” On Monday, we talked about the “Radio Test.” On Tuesday, we talked about combining the interests of your audience in new and original ways. Today, we’re going to apply the technique of fortune-telling to your thought leadership.

Here’s what we know about all people: they’re fascinated with predictions. I was just reading an article the other day about the end of the NHL regular season, and the writer talked about his predictions, and the predictions of readers who commented on them, at the beginning of the season.

You might or might not be surprised to learn that the writer was completely wrong about a number of things he thought would happen. In spite of that, the article was still informative and enjoyable to read.

The point I want you to take from that is that while it’s even more fun when people get it right, nobody cares when they get it wrong.

In fact, if you make a lot of predictions and only get a few right, you can focus on those few correct ones and people will generally forget that you got some of the others wrong.

Now let’s take this one step further, beyond just making predictions.

You can use those predictions to draw a crowd by how you talk about them. For example, you could make a prediction about what you think smartphones are going to be like in a year, and then point to a major change that will happen because of that. Maybe people will trade in or throw out their iPhone, and that’s how you begin your story. Of course, not everyone will upgrade, but if a few people do, that’s a valid prediction.

Maybe you could talk about what industries will be in decline, or what will happen if the President gets re-elected, or if his opponent gets elected. Maybe you could talk about technologies that will be made obsolete.

My prediction is that if you use this to your advantage, you can make your content fun and interesting to the people you want to attract and bond with.

Coming up tomorrow, we’ll talk about using a technique from a marketing copywriter who was born in 1866. You’d never believe this tactic is so old because it works so well. I’ll see you then.

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