The difficult task of selling without deception

How hard it is to sell real, concrete things; how hard it is to avoid selling false promises, magic wands, dreams, and illusions. Sadly, people want to buy the latter. There is a reason miracle products continue to sell in great quantities. Most people would rather buy a “magic” cream that will make them slim than a gym membership, knowing that the latter entails a long process full of sacrifice and pain, but one that undeniably works. It is impossible to refute that if you diet and go to the gym every day for two hours, giving it your absolute best for a year, you will get a result. It is entirely possible to refute that merely rubbing on a “magic” cream will make you lose weight in a matter of days. Yet the vast majority of people will prefer the cream because they are not interested in buying results; they are interested in buying hope.

It is exactly the same in the advertising world. Brands and companies, from the smallest to the largest, throw away vast amounts of money every day on the hollow promise of gaining more customers. For someone like me, who works in digital advertising, it is frustrating to watch the most outrageous forms of advertising, sold by the most deceitful and despicable salesmen, repeatedly win the trust of desperate, ignorant, and naive business owners who hunger for false promises and are ready to let someone pick their pockets.

For my creative studio, trying to sell the truth has been difficult day after day, as has letting clients and projects go because we try to sell them realities. They prefer the smoke and mirrors of every snake-oil salesman from every new or old agency that comes along each day flinging hollow promises wholesale. You are going to sell so much; you are going to reach so many customers; you will see how, in one month, you will not be able to keep up with all the sales. The promises are that moronic, and that is how disgustingly they swallow them. A month later there will be no results, the charlatan will already be stalking his next victim, and the only one left bent over with his ass torn apart will be the idiot who wanted to buy his lies.

Yes, I am angry. Yes, I am desperate because people do not want honesty, professional work, truths, estimates, or realities. They do not want to go through the long, demanding process that will give them real, tangible results; they would rather buy the miracle solution that will be of no use to them. This is not a magic wand. The results will come, but they will take time because this is a process. There are no magic formulas. We have to learn along the way, we must be consistent, and we will manage to reach our goals. Do not get desperate; we have to keep going. Those are our words to clients, our explanations as we try to be transparent, to tell them the truth, to show them that we have many success stories achieved by conducting advertising in a planned, intelligent, and well-targeted way for more than a year. But those very words are what scare clients away and send them fleeing in search of someone who will sell them lies, someone who will soothe them with the false feeling that everything will turn out fine by magic.

The stupidest marketing techniques, the most outrageous forms of advertising, and the most improvised sales strategies can seem worth their weight in gold as long as a charlatan decorates them with his words. And I watch angrily as a business owner or a company's marketing manager falls into the trap and throws away their money, driven by their ignorance (forgivable) and intellectual laziness about getting informed (unforgivable).

We are going to do an activation; we are going to use influencers; we are going to go hard on BTL; we are going to V-I-R-A-L-I-Z-E you up the ass; we are going to plaster the city with flyers; we are going to have little cars with your sign circling the block like idiots; we are going to send up a small plane to blast announcements; we are going to wish people good morning on social media; we are going to put out a QR code; my God, we are going to use augmented reality and VR; we are going to make an app—what am I saying, an app, an Uber—and it will be in the cloud and all that, with algorithms and data mining and big data and ultra data and a shitload of things that even we do not know what they are or what they are for, but we are going to mention them to make your head spin and impress you so that you think we are fucking amazing and, in desperation, pull down your pants, bend over, spread your ass cheeks, and beg us to fuck you.

Ah, but if instead I come along and tell you that I am going to design a strategy for you; that we will use concrete information and your knowledge of your target market; that we will conduct a campaign aimed specifically at that target market to reach potential customers; that we will establish control methods so we can measure the results; that we will adjust the campaign according to the needs we uncover and what we learn along the way; that we will keep refining that campaign until it is as efficient as possible; that it will be effective, but the whole process, although it produces real and measurable results, will take time, money, and effort... ah! Then I am the asshole because I cannot triple your sales in 24 hours.

The big problem is that people seek immediate gratification over lasting benefit. They prefer the immediate (and fleeting) gratification of someone giving them hope over dealing with someone who, instead of a few days of hope, will deliver results for years after several months of work. They would rather go have a shaman pass an egg over their head than undergo an operation that will hurt but might save their life. And techno-shamans abound today, except that instead of herbs they use grandiose words in English (which they do not even understand themselves), and instead of votive candles and saints, they spit out promises of “likes” and “clicks.”

If only likes paid the rent; if only clicks covered payroll... if only that database of 10,000 stolen email addresses, most of which are inactive or saturated, were enough to keep the lights on at the business for one more month.

And even so, I refuse to sell lies. I refuse to whisper the words they want to hear into their ears, because doing so would make me feel like an idiot. So be it. I will have to keep telling the truth and keep losing projects; keep being honest and keep losing clients.