A big part of my world involves advertising.

Most of it is just text based advertising. Much of it however consists of search engine marketing and direct marketing pieces — like the paid placements you see in pay per click or google adwords.

On a rare occasion I take a client into some light print advertising stuff, but when I’m working in financial services even this is often only boring black, white and gray-scale and utilizing a very small area and I need to put together an attention getter, a benefit or two, and a call to action in a very small space.

There is typically not much room to get very “artistic”.

Regardless, I like to look around at what the other wizards are doing in other spaces/markets/mediums, and one of my favorites is the world of “subliminal advertising”.

While copywriters do it all the time with inferences, and suggestions (get this or you’re a loser and your family won’t love you anymore) the really funny/interesting ones are when the photographers and graphic elements folks get in the mix, as it usually involves the suggestion of sex.

The Coke Bottle

Coke Bottle's Classic 'Hourglass' Shape

While there is some argument that the developers of the original coke ‘hourglass’ shape actually knew what they were doing, they’ve undoubtedly benefited from having the iconic bottle shape.

Pierre Cardin Men’s Cologne Bottle

While there are a million other examples, the one that has always cracked me up as being absolutely *blatant* is the pierre cardin men’s cologne bottle.

Phallic inspired Pierre Cardin Bottle

The television commercial that they ran in the late 80’s on this one is just classic. Alas, I was unable to find it on youtube. So, unfortunately, you’ll have to live with my description. In short, it is a series of quick, sexy cuts that builds up to a climax that has the bottle “exploding” and gushing forth the contents at the end of the video. Subtle.

Sex Sells in Latin America

I spent the last few years living in South America. Below are some classic snap shots I took while walking around town I wanted to share with you.

Ta Ta Stores Punta Del Este Uruguay

I’ll start slow with the venerable Ta-Ta stores. Ta-Ta in and of itself isn’t that funny unless taken with the next entry

Tits Store

Fun with Food

Photographers and videographers have a lot of fun creating sexually suggestive images and video clips with food elements.
Below are two pictures that I snapped while grocery shopping in Montevideo, Uruguay

Strawberries in the Grocery Store Sign

This last picture shows up on floor coolers in retail outlets.

Tastes Creamy!

In summary, until proven otherwise, I think we have to assume that sex still sells

One of the most frequent mistakes I see entrepreneurs make is in partnering with other start up companies. It can be as simple as relying on a young company for a critical piece of technology, or having a start up in your supply chain, or even working with a small, unproven company in some ‘non-critical’ part of your company’s operations.

The allure of working with other start up companies is undeniable. As struggling entrepreneurs, you are ‘brothers in arms’. They are eager to prove themselves and more likely to work with you and be flexible. Simply put, they just ‘try harder’.

Why Shouldn’t Start Ups Work with Other Start Ups?

Simply put: Start ups fail.

While this statement should not come as a revelation to anyone — least of whom, anyone with any entrepreneurial experience, I’d like to walk through a through experiment with you to drive this home and help you internalize this concept.

For this exercise I’m going to borrow a formula I first became familiar with while doing online marketing for the sports book industry in the 90’s. Please bear with me for a moment while I explain.

The Parlay Formula

One of the biggest moneymakers in sports booking is the ‘parlay’. To win a parlay (often 3, 5, or even 10 team parlay), the bettor must correctly wager on the winning team 3, 5 or x number of games.

In any given contest the sports book looks to even the betting on both sides (and thus maximize the chances of getting the ‘juice’ or ‘vig’ for the entire book). That said, roughly, by throwing darts at a board you will have close to a 50/50 chance of winning on a sports bet. Expressed as a decimal, that is .50.

Bettors are attracted to the parlay because a winner will be paid better than in x number of separate standard wagers. For example, a 3 team parlay will typically pay 5 for every 1 wagered.

Why the Parlay is a Sucker’s Bet

While every bettor figures they can choose the winner of three games and thus win 5x their wager, the fact of the matter is that most don’t understand the math of probabilities working behind the scenes.

To accurately calculate the chances of a parlay bet coming in you have to take the probability of any individual bet being wagered correctly: .5

Then, take the probability to the power of the number of consecutive bets which must pay off…. In the case of a three team parlay, this is 3.

So, to calculate our odds, we calculate:

.5^3 or .125.

If we express this another way, that is a 1 in 8 chance to win 5x.

If we add just one more game to the mix, the chances for success drop to .0625 or 1 in 16

What Do Sports Book Odds Have to Do with Start Ups?

Each and every variable you place in your critical path to success increases your odds of failure exponentially. Literally.

Start ups, meanwhile, have a much higher failure rate in general. So, placing young companies anywhere in your critical path accelerate the exponential formula’s decline towards zero.

By way of example, if we are ‘betting’ on three outcomes each with a 30% probability of success, the predictive formula looks like the following:

.30^3 = .027.

Or, expressed another way, three things that have to work out that each have a 30% chance of succeeding give your project a 2.7% chance of success.

That’s the definition of ‘long odds’

Lessons from Your Bookie

Like any good bookie would teach you, you increase your probability of success in two ways.

1.) decrease the number of successful outcomes necessary for overall success of your project
2.) ensure each critical factor which defines your success is as close to a ’sure thing’ as possible

I hope this article was able to provide you some food for thought. If you have any comments or questions, go ahead and drop me a note. It’s a dofollow link for anyone with relevant commentary.

As an aging technocrat, I enjoy sitting (hiding) behind mountains of information, disconnected from the reality that each bit of datum represents a real person.

What are that person’s hopes, goals, fears, dreams, and aspirations?

It’s incredibly easy to lose site of the fact that your website, landing page, sales letter, opt-in page (whatever), is a one-on-one selling tool that needs to tap into your target audience’s emotional triggers if it will ever be successful.

Yes, it’s true that there are sites like Corporate Raiter that aren’t trying to be ‘commercial’, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not selling anything. I’m ’selling’ you on the fact that you should read beyond the headline. I’m trying to entice you into coming back and seeing what is new. As you read through the content, I’m pleading with you to continue reading to the end of the post. I want you to believe that the ‘ah ha’ piece of information that will ‘change everything’ for you and your online experience is in the next paragraph.

For newbies, just starting out, they can look at the blinding number of statistics I track on my web properties and be a bit overwhelmed. Even on the not-for-profit Corporate Raiter, I’ve written blog entries detailing my traffic metrics by looking at google analytics to check my traffic flows, the number of comments, my goolge page rank and my alexa ranking.

However, the reality is, for most website one metric trumps all others: Gross Profit / Marketing Dollar

This, obviously, gets back to that whole ‘efficiency‘ thing I talked about in an earlier post.

If you think about your website like a ‘black box’ whose sole purpose is to turn marketing dollars and effort into profitable sales, how efficient is it at carrying out that task. And, as machines often do, how does that efficiency change over a range of volumes?

Those website owners who understand this metric and how it effects everything they do will have a natural ‘feel’ for the size of their market or niche. Some markets are so large and under served that you can increase the energy you put into the site seemingly forever without getting to the point of dimishing returns.

However, in most cases you will quickly determine the ’sweet spot’ in terms of the ratio of effort which returns the greatest amount of profit for a given niche.