Cashvertising Summary

1-Sentence-Summary: Cashvertising teaches you how to become an expert at marketing by using techniques like using the power of authority, following the three steps of writing a perfect headline, and appealing to the eight basic desires people have instead of spending millions on ads.

Read in: 4 minutes

Favorite quote from the author:

Have you ever stopped to watch a YouTube ad? Most often we skip them, but occasionally, one catches our eye and we listen. What is it about those that hook us? Is there a way to tap into this power?

That’s exactly what Drew Eric Whitman explains in his book Cashvertising: How to Use More than 100 Secrets of Ad-Agency Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything to Anyone. In no time, this book will help you use the power of psychology to make appealing advertisements that get people to buy.

Here are 3 of the greatest marketing lessons I’ve got out of this book:

1. Humans have eight core desires that you must appeal to for marketing success.
2. Follow these three steps to craft a persuasive headline that gets people to click and read.
3. Writing longer articles won’t scare people away but is proven to draw them in better than shorter copy.

Ready to learn how to make some ca$h from your advertising? Let’s go!

Lesson 1: To have a successful marketing campaign, you need to know and appeal to the eight core desires of people.

Marketing is just applied psychology. Those that are best at getting people to buy know the most about human nature. So what is it that they know that the rest of us don’t? 

It’s all about hitting the right triggers for people, which come from eight core desires, also known as the Life-Force 8 (LF8). These are wired into our brains and are what helped our ancestors survive. They are:

1. Staying alive
2. Food and water
3. Safety and freedom from pain
4. Sexual companionship
5. Good living conditions
6. Protecting those we love
7. Approval from others
8. Becoming excellent

More sales come from these eight motives than every other human want combined. This is because when these needs aren’t met we feel tension pulling us to satisfy them. Hunger, for example, makes us eat, thus fulfilling our need for food. The pattern here is simple:

Tension → Desire → Action

Imagine you’re selling cat food, for example. Let’s say you’ve got a special mouse and cucumber smoothie to offer and you want to appeal to one of the LF8. Outline the tension, which will make the consumer think of their desire and make them act to fulfill it. You might try this by focusing on the owner’s devotion to protecting his pet. 

To appeal to this desire, identify the tension that’s preventing their cat’s safety. You could say that the animal may go blind from not having enough taurine because cats can’t produce it on their own. Then introduce your smoothie, which has a lot of taurine in it, as the solution to their need to protect their pet.

Lesson 2: A persuasive headline that gets people to click and read is as simple as following three steps.

Most titles aren’t exciting enough to get people interested. It’s estimated that 60% of those that see an ad only look at the headline!

This is why you need to use the following three tips to make sure that you can grab people’s attention enough to get them to read the entire article. Here they are:

1. Start with the biggest benefits first.
2. Check that you’re appealing to the right audience.
3. Use action words to make the perfect headline.

Let’s explore each of these further. 

All your customers care about is how your offering is going to change their life for the better. If they don’t see an immediate benefit that’s significant enough to make them read on, they’ll leave. So it pays to have the most persuasive part, which is the greatest perk, first.

Next, make sure that the wording you’re using catches the eyes of the type of people that you’re marketing to. 

Real business success happens when you match the right product with the type of people that really need it. If you’re selling chocolate pastries, for example, you probably won’t appeal to someone with the word “masterpiece in your title. They’re more likely to go for something that appeals to their identity as a chocoholic instead.

And last, use powerful words in your headlines to catch people’s attention. Good examples include “how,” “new,” “free,” and “just released.”

Lesson 3: Shorter articles don’t do as well as longer ones for drawing people in.

People are busy these days. They probably don’t have time to read an in-depth article, right? Although a lot of marketers think this way, it’s actually not true. People like to get the details of purchases they’re considering. And if you give that information, they’ll keep reading, even if the copy is long.

This works for all kinds of people and products. If a person really wants to buy something, they’ll want as much of the specs as possible. And the better you provide this by really going deep on it, the better your chances of convincing them to buy.

Take this new 16” MacBook Pro I’m writing on right now. I’d been researching it for months before finally deciding to get it. I read all kinds of detailed articles and watched in-depth YouTube reviews. Every new feature I learned about made me want it even more. By the time I went into a store to test it out, I was sold. It was only a matter of a few days before I got it.

This brings up another important point about advertisements. It didn’t matter always what the title of the articles or videos were. I was interested so I was going to buy it anyway. 

The length of the content I saw didn’t discourage me from consuming it, in fact it only made me more excited to buy. This same thing will happen for your consumers if you have long copy too!

Cashvertising Review

I enjoyed Cashvertising but also think that some things have changed in the time since 2008 when Whitman wrote it. The mention of ads in a magazine, for example, feels a bit outdated. However, the principles around human nature and online content are timeless and give great tips we can use even today.

Who would I recommend the Cashvertising summary to?

The 34-year-old blogger who feels like they know next to nothing about marketing, the 56-year-old business executive that wants to understand consumers better to cater to their needs, and anyone that would like to get better at selling.

Last Updated on September 8, 2022