Zac Regan

Helping you make more from paid ads + content

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

f**k mediocrity.

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

i'd say i'm getting close w targeting on test 1 of the cold traffic webby

will report back with actual lead quality

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

hooks 101…

master the art of grabbing attention

this shit stopped me in my tracks

excellent work

[Buyer of Media @iblamejulius]

Shallom nigga. It's been a while.

Here's 15 laughably powerful persuasion and behavioral sceince principles that you can immediately implement to print more money from your ads, your funnel, your emails, your content, etc.

You can just copy and paste this post into whatever agent you use for your copy, create a checklist and tell it to audit its output against it the checklist.

Do it RIGHT NOW nigga don't delay.

Alr here we go:

1. Identity mirroring. Everyone has an identity that they project internally and externally.
And 9 times out of 10 these identities are idealized versions of who they THINK they should be.
Humans have consistency bias, which means they want to act in a way that ALIGNS with the identity they hold.
If you have a strong understanding of the identities that your avatars and sub-avatars internalize then you can literally call them out in your copy and mirror them so that your sales argument is something that THEY NATURALLY ALLIGN WITH.
Example 1: survival niche
Avatar 1: 40-60 year old men with families, conservative, traditional values.
Identity/identities: providers, protectors, man of the house, etc.
Mirror: “True protectors take action to keep their families safe.”

Example 2: B2S info/ coaching offer.
Avatar: young, self-made entrepreneurs
Identity: driven, successful, hard-working.
Mirror: “Every success entrepreneur took a huge risk that ended up paying off.”

You can apply around with these mirrors and then use them as a base for your actual copy.

2. Perception IS reality. If your market believes that all gurus are scammers then that is the reality that YOU as the marketer now reside in.
Your job is to understand which perceptions stand in the way of your sales argument and which perceptions can actually HELP you.
It takes good instincts to know which is which.
This is why in depth avatar research is so fucking important because you need to understand the ETHOS of a given market (will go in-depth on this in a later post). In the example I made, you don’t try to convince them that not all gurus are scammers.
Maybe you could do that but it’s less efficient.
It’s way easier to just position yourself as being anti-guru.
You hate gurus too.
You aren’t a guru.
Which is funny because some of the biggest info clingers on the planet use this principle.

3. People act out of sub-conscious emotional triggers and use logically acceptable NARRATIVES based on their biases & desires to justify that decision.
The best copywriters understand the core desires and use language that hijacks the prospects existing logical narrative to push a point home.
This is where marketers fuck up, your prospects don’t need an objective logical analysis of the decision, they need a statement that SOUNDS logical/ socially acceptable to them.
Example: AI offer.
Core emotion: FOMO. **THIS IS WHAT THEY ACT ON
Logical narrative the prospect uses to justify the action: "The economy is shifting, and AI is changing everything. If I don't buy into this masterclass/tool right now, I’m going to get left behind. It’s irresponsible not to have this."

4. Justification looping. Every single thing that you say needs to be logically, intuitively justifiable by your prospect. Most people stop at justifying their mechanism, justifying claims about why things their market has tried didn’t work, all the basic shit.
But have you justified your offer?
Why are you giving them such a “no-brainer” offer?
If you have urgency elements in your copy/ on your lander, have you explained WHY this is urgent?
If you introduce scarcity, do you have an actual reason why this is scarce?
You need to understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you don’t provide that evidence then your prospect will automatically call bullshit.

5. The way you say something can be more important than the thing you say, especially when you have a skeptical/ highly sophisticated market (I’ll get to this in a second).
This is obviously specific to video ads/ VSLs, good example was the yapper ad trend. If you look at some of the most popular yappers (ads and TikTok shop videos), the delivery in terms of the pacing, tonality and cadence is all intentionally trying to lower your guard and make you feel like this is just another video on your feed.
Another good example is Tony Robbins. When he needs to drive a point home he increases his volume, he using pauses to give you space to digest his point. Now imagine for example you’re scripting an ad for a marketing offer to a skeptical, sophisticated market and you want to take the angle of other market agencies being scammers. If your vocal DELIVERY in that ad doesn’t match the premise of what you’re trying to say, your market is going to immediately reject you.

6. People believe that their situation is unique. And they’re looking for reasons why your offer WOULDN’T work for them.
The most common obstacle that occurs in a sales process is some version of “Will this work for my specific situation”.
If you’ve ever been in a sales org you know this.
You need to go through your market research flows and make sure you have enough data for a deep understand of the unique situational constraints that your market has (both real and perceived).
Make a list, have AI order them by commonality then audit your ads, VSLs and landers and ask yourself if you’re overcoming the most common ones.
Are you overcoming them at all?
Are there any constraints that would be specific to an angle you’re running that you haven’t even mentioned in the ad? (This is a very common mistake).

7. Human behavior is ultimately driven by three fundamental psychological needs:

Autonomy: The deep desire to be the author of one's own life, free from constraint.
Competence: The urge to feel effective, skilled, and capable of overcoming challenges.
Relatedness: The craving for belonging, status, and connection within a tribe or peer group.

These core needs directly influence people’s motivators when the actualization of any of those needs is threatened.
"Competence" example: “I’ve been trying to make my ads work for weeks I need to figure this out”. This is their CONDITION. And they naturally become receptive to any message that aligns with that condition.

And so to align with that condition you can make them feel competent by telling them that they already have the skills, they already have the knowledge, they’re just missing one small thing that will make it all click. This kind of narrative is literally EVERYWHERE, especially in the online marketing/ coaching space. If you want to do more autism research into this just loop up “Self-Determination Theory, Dr. Edward L. Deci”

8. Dimensionalization. You want to use words that burrow into people’s brain and infect it with your message. Notice the words I used. “Infect” “burrow”. It FEELS like some foreign parasite taking control.
Doing this is simple: take any vague, abstract line of copy (especially when describing a problem or making a change-state claim) and think “how can I make someone feel, see, hear, smell, taste this idea”.

9. Associations can be more powerful than outright declarations.
Think about the supplement offers like turmeric pills that claim that ancient cultures used the core ingredients for their gut health (or whatever).
Association with ancient cultures = healthier, more natural.
Second-order assumption = this product is healthier and more natural.
Now take shit like bull testicle pills for testosterone. Association with bulls = high testosterone, high vitality.
Second-order assumption = this product will increase my testosterone.
It doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not, the association did all of the selling for you.
Another example: Amazon FBA mass market bizop. Association with Amazon: Amazon is a massive, billion dollar business.
Second-order assumption: If I sell on Amazon there’s a high likelihood that I’ll make money.
Here’s the thing, you can exploit this even if you’re selling a product/ service without an obvious association. I like to do this by taking whatever my core methodology (or mechanism) is and connecting a specific aspect of it to an anchor (a key figure/ thought leader, a company, a culture) that my market idolizes. Example: I’m selling a metal focus offer to entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs idolize Elon Musk. Elon Musk uses “algorithmic thinking”, which my offer teaches. Notice how this is different from authority proof (which a lot of people implement) since we aren’t claiming that the anchor actually used the product. They don't need to because the ASSOCIATION is just as powerful.

10. The second your ad appears on someone’s feed, that person’s brain is subconsciously looking for ANY reason to ignore you.
The brain is bombarded with millions of stimuli every single day. To actually PAY ATTENTION to a stimuli, the brain has to expend a ton of energy.
And since the brain wants to conserve energy, it decides to filter out what it predicts as “sameness”. (Look up the reticular activating system (RAS) if you want to go into detail).
The most effective way to bypass the RAS is by presenting an idea of reality that’s so bizarre, counter-intuitive, mysterious, unbelievable, offensive in your hook/ headline that the brain can’t PREDICT what’s about to happen.
Here are some common copy frameworks for this:
a. The hidden mechanism/ weird culprit: “This buried IRS loophole lets real estate investors save 80% on their tax”/ “This banana is the real reason why your skin sags after 50”

b. Statistical impossibility : “This 4-word email generated $575,789”

c. Attacking a universally accepted rule in your market (one of my personal favorites): “Testing more creatives is killing your brand” “Moisturizing your skin every night is giving you more acne” “Here’s how eating pizza for lunch can help you lose more fat than chicken and brocolli” (V-Shred printed multiple 9 figures on the back of this idea btw).

d. Herd-follower bias:“The top 1% of law firms are trying to keep Googles new “AI visibility” update a secret”

e. The unspoken truth: “here’s what the gurus refuse to tell you about starting an AI agency”

f. EXTERNAL CATALYST NIGGAAAA IYKYK (if you don’t know look up “catalyst hooks” on my page you’ll see a full guide : “This new Facebook ads update called sequence learning just killed creative testing” “

11. The fear of loss is more immediately motivating than the potential of gain.
Simplest way to exploit this quickly is by taking any hooks you have running right now that are promise/ outcome/ benefit driven and flip the narrative to a negative. I’m running a hook rn that says “if you want your law firm to lose money you should hire an SEO agency” and it’s one of my top performers.

12. The best way to introduce a new/ novel concept I.e. in your UPM/ USM is a way that makes your prospect inherently understand it is by mapping an unknown concept to a known concept.
You do this primarily using metaphors.
The “known” part is determined by the sophistication of your market.
Unique problem mechanisms example for mass market joint supplement offer (just off the dome):
Novel concept: “Age-related joint degradation is caused by matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) breaking down the extracellular matrix of cartilage faster than chondrocytes can synthesize new collagen.”
Re-written with a “known” concept: "Think of your knee joint like the door hinge.
When that hinge is brand new, it opens and closes effortlessly because it has a rich layer of grease making everything glide smoothly.
Now, imagine what happens if you squirt a drop of acid onto that hinge every single day. That the grease dries up."...
"Most people think their knee pain is just 'getting old' or 'wear and tear.' But that’s dead wrong. 'Wear and tear' doesn't cause pain. Corrosive Enzymes do.
Inside your joint, your body produces tiny pac-man-like enzymes called MMPs. When you were 20, your body produced enough protective fluid to wash these enzymes away. But as you age, your joint stops producing that protective fluid. Those enzymes get trapped inside your knee joint, eating away at your cartilage like acid on a door hinge until your bones are grinding together with every step you take."

13. You must limit the cognitive load in your prospect as much as humanly possible.
When someone is watching your ad, their brain is running on a very limited amount of energy.
And if you exhaust that energy, the person is going to scroll. Cognitive overload does NOT mean too long. there are 45-minute VSLs pulling eight figures/month. Overload happens because of processing friction. There are a bunch of ways that you might be creating that friction but the two biggest offenders that I’ve seen: a. Too many overlapping ideas, outcomes, problems or mechanism drivers. These are some of the most cognitively “dense” parts of your message. And so when you keep adding more and more of each you’re just increasing the strain on your prospect’s brain.
There’s a reason why most of the copywriting OGs taught to focus on ONE core idea, focus on ONE core reason why everything your prospects have tried before failed.
The second offender happens when there’s gaps in your argument that confuse the prospect to the point where they have to fill in the gaps.
The simplest example happens when you don’t bridge certain blocks of copy properly or you just don’t include them in the first place.
Example of no bridge: “Cold outreach is dead, use our AI software to close more deals.”
With the bridge: “Cold outreach is dead because prospect inboxes are saturated with spam filters.
Our AI bypasses inbox filters by simulating human writing patterns, dropping your message straight into the primary inbox where 90% of deals are actually closed.”

Now these gaps can be incredibly nuanced. An example of another gap: people have semantic associations. These are mental connections between two concepts that are wide spread across a population. Most people think of the liver as a “filter” or the brain as a “muscle” or memory as a “hard drive”. I’m going to use the liver as an example. Let’s say you’re writing about the forces of nature in your mechanism and you talk about the liver acting as a sponge. This might seem insignificant but when someone heard the liver acting as a “sponge” it clashes with their semantics which creates cognitive load.

14. Belief shifts. I hear people talk about it all the time but I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about how you ACTUALLY shift someone’s beliefs.
You cannot attack a core belief head-on, or you trigger the backfire effect.
This is a cognitive bias in which presenting a person with objective, undeniable facts that contradict their deeply held beliefs does not change their mind.
You can spot this bias EVERYWHERE, in normie ragebait reactions, on gender discussion on Reddit, in the comments under your ads, political arguments etc.
Instead of attacking that belief, you VALIDATE it as being entirely logical based on their past evidence ("You're right to think cold email is dead, because the old spray-and-pray method was saturated"), and then introduce a narrow wedge that expands their paradigm.
Mechanistic example: “That method is dead, but a hyper-segmented micro-channeling approach is getting agency owners a 20% reply rate right now”.
External authority example: “But if cold email didn’t work at all then why are Fortune 500 companies spending million of dollars hiring people whose only job is to send emails?”
When dealing with NEGATIVE identity-based beliefs i.e. “I’ll never lose weight” a good tactic is to externalize blame onto a third party aka the “common enemy” trope.
Ex: “It’s not your fault. The reason why you aren’t losing weight isn’t because you aren’t disciplines enough or motivated enough. You were just fed a bunch of fad diets and useless at-home workouts by greedy fitness coaches.”

15. The best copy uses momentum to pull the reader to an inevitable conclusion. Joseph Sugarman (absolutely goated copywriter) called this the slippery slide. This is a measure of how well each core “block” of copy (i.e. promise, claim, mechanism, proof, catalyst, etc.) FLOWS from one to the other. I want you to read through the last ad script, VSL script, whatever you wrote and as you’re reading ask yourself: “is there any point where I suddenly jumped from one premise to another without establishing a clear bridge?” “Does each premise feel like a natural RESOLUTION to the premise that I established before?”

[Buyer of Media @iblamejulius]

Shallom nigga. It's been a while.

Here's 15 laughably powerful persuasion and behavioral sceince principles that you can immediately implement to print more money from your ads, your funnel, your emails, your content, etc.

You can just copy and paste this post into whatever agent you use for your copy, create a checklist and tell it to audit its output against it the checklist.

Do it RIGHT NOW nigga don't delay.

Alr here we go:

1. Identity mirroring. Everyone has an identity that they project internally and externally.
And 9 times out of 10 these identities are idealized versions of who they THINK they should be.
Humans have consistency bias, which means they want to act in a way that ALIGNS with the identity they hold.
If you have a strong understanding of the identities that your avatars and sub-avatars internalize then you can literally call them out in your copy and mirror them so that your sales argument is something that THEY NATURALLY ALLIGN WITH.
Example 1: survival niche
Avatar 1: 40-60 year old men with families, conservative, traditional values.
Identity/identities: providers, protectors, man of the house, etc.
Mirror: “True protectors take action to keep their families safe.”

Example 2: B2S info/ coaching offer.
Avatar: young, self-made entrepreneurs
Identity: driven, successful, hard-working.
Mirror: “Every success entrepreneur took a huge risk that ended up paying off.”

You can apply around with these mirrors and then use them as a base for your actual copy.

2. Perception IS reality. If your market believes that all gurus are scammers then that is the reality that YOU as the marketer now reside in.
Your job is to understand which perceptions stand in the way of your sales argument and which perceptions can actually HELP you.
It takes good instincts to know which is which.
This is why in depth avatar research is so fucking important because you need to understand the ETHOS of a given market (will go in-depth on this in a later post). In the example I made, you don’t try to convince them that not all gurus are scammers.
Maybe you could do that but it’s less efficient.
It’s way easier to just position yourself as being anti-guru.
You hate gurus too.
You aren’t a guru.
Which is funny because some of the biggest info clingers on the planet use this principle.

3. People act out of sub-conscious emotional triggers and use logically acceptable NARRATIVES based on their biases & desires to justify that decision.
The best copywriters understand the core desires and use language that hijacks the prospects existing logical narrative to push a point home.
This is where marketers fuck up, your prospects don’t need an objective logical analysis of the decision, they need a statement that SOUNDS logical/ socially acceptable to them.
Example: AI offer.
Core emotion: FOMO. **THIS IS WHAT THEY ACT ON
Logical narrative the prospect uses to justify the action: "The economy is shifting, and AI is changing everything. If I don't buy into this masterclass/tool right now, I’m going to get left behind. It’s irresponsible not to have this."

4. Justification looping. Every single thing that you say needs to be logically, intuitively justifiable by your prospect. Most people stop at justifying their mechanism, justifying claims about why things their market has tried didn’t work, all the basic shit.
But have you justified your offer?
Why are you giving them such a “no-brainer” offer?
If you have urgency elements in your copy/ on your lander, have you explained WHY this is urgent?
If you introduce scarcity, do you have an actual reason why this is scarce?
You need to understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you don’t provide that evidence then your prospect will automatically call bullshit.

5. The way you say something can be more important than the thing you say, especially when you have a skeptical/ highly sophisticated market (I’ll get to this in a second).
This is obviously specific to video ads/ VSLs, good example was the yapper ad trend. If you look at some of the most popular yappers (ads and TikTok shop videos), the delivery in terms of the pacing, tonality and cadence is all intentionally trying to lower your guard and make you feel like this is just another video on your feed.
Another good example is Tony Robbins. When he needs to drive a point home he increases his volume, he using pauses to give you space to digest his point. Now imagine for example you’re scripting an ad for a marketing offer to a skeptical, sophisticated market and you want to take the angle of other market agencies being scammers. If your vocal DELIVERY in that ad doesn’t match the premise of what you’re trying to say, your market is going to immediately reject you.

6. People believe that their situation is unique. And they’re looking for reasons why your offer WOULDN’T work for them.
The most common obstacle that occurs in a sales process is some version of “Will this work for my specific situation”.
If you’ve ever been in a sales org you know this.
You need to go through your market research flows and make sure you have enough data for a deep understand of the unique situational constraints that your market has (both real and perceived).
Make a list, have AI order them by commonality then audit your ads, VSLs and landers and ask yourself if you’re overcoming the most common ones.
Are you overcoming them at all?
Are there any constraints that would be specific to an angle you’re running that you haven’t even mentioned in the ad? (This is a very common mistake).

7. Human behavior is ultimately driven by three fundamental psychological needs:

Autonomy: The deep desire to be the author of one's own life, free from constraint.
Competence: The urge to feel effective, skilled, and capable of overcoming challenges.
Relatedness: The craving for belonging, status, and connection within a tribe or peer group.

These core needs directly influence people’s motivators when the actualization of any of those needs is threatened.
"Competence" example: “I’ve been trying to make my ads work for weeks I need to figure this out”. This is their CONDITION. And they naturally become receptive to any message that aligns with that condition.

And so to align with that condition you can make them feel competent by telling them that they already have the skills, they already have the knowledge, they’re just missing one small thing that will make it all click. This kind of narrative is literally EVERYWHERE, especially in the online marketing/ coaching space. If you want to do more autism research into this just loop up “Self-Determination Theory, Dr. Edward L. Deci”

8. Dimensionalization. You want to use words that burrow into people’s brain and infect it with your message. Notice the words I used. “Infect” “burrow”. It FEELS like some foreign parasite taking control.
Doing this is simple: take any vague, abstract line of copy (especially when describing a problem or making a change-state claim) and think “how can I make someone feel, see, hear, smell, taste this idea”.

9. Associations can be more powerful than outright declarations.
Think about the supplement offers like turmeric pills that claim that ancient cultures used the core ingredients for their gut health (or whatever).
Association with ancient cultures = healthier, more natural.
Second-order assumption = this product is healthier and more natural.
Now take shit like bull testicle pills for testosterone. Association with bulls = high testosterone, high vitality.
Second-order assumption = this product will increase my testosterone.
It doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not, the association did all of the selling for you.
Another example: Amazon FBA mass market bizop. Association with Amazon: Amazon is a massive, billion dollar business.
Second-order assumption: If I sell on Amazon there’s a high likelihood that I’ll make money.
Here’s the thing, you can exploit this even if you’re selling a product/ service without an obvious association. I like to do this by taking whatever my core methodology (or mechanism) is and connecting a specific aspect of it to an anchor (a key figure/ thought leader, a company, a culture) that my market idolizes. Example: I’m selling a metal focus offer to entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs idolize Elon Musk. Elon Musk uses “algorithmic thinking”, which my offer teaches. Notice how this is different from authority proof (which a lot of people implement) since we aren’t claiming that the anchor actually used the product. They don't need to because the ASSOCIATION is just as powerful.

10. The second your ad appears on someone’s feed, that person’s brain is subconsciously looking for ANY reason to ignore you.
The brain is bombarded with millions of stimuli every single day. To actually PAY ATTENTION to a stimuli, the brain has to expend a ton of energy.
And since the brain wants to conserve energy, it decides to filter out what it predicts as “sameness”. (Look up the reticular activating system (RAS) if you want to go into detail).
The most effective way to bypass the RAS is by presenting an idea of reality that’s so bizarre, counter-intuitive, mysterious, unbelievable, offensive in your hook/ headline that the brain can’t PREDICT what’s about to happen.
Here are some common copy frameworks for this:
a. The hidden mechanism/ weird culprit: “This buried IRS loophole lets real estate investors save 80% on their tax”/ “This banana is the real reason why your skin sags after 50”

b. Statistical impossibility : “This 4-word email generated $575,789”

c. Attacking a universally accepted rule in your market (one of my personal favorites): “Testing more creatives is killing your brand” “Moisturizing your skin every night is giving you more acne” “Here’s how eating pizza for lunch can help you lose more fat than chicken and brocolli” (V-Shred printed multiple 9 figures on the back of this idea btw).

d. Herd-follower bias:“The top 1% of law firms are trying to keep Googles new “AI visibility” update a secret”

e. The unspoken truth: “here’s what the gurus refuse to tell you about starting an AI agency”

f. EXTERNAL CATALYST NIGGAAAA IYKYK (if you don’t know look up “catalyst hooks” on my page you’ll see a full guide : “This new Facebook ads update called sequence learning just killed creative testing” “

11. The fear of loss is more immediately motivating than the potential of gain.
Simplest way to exploit this quickly is by taking any hooks you have running right now that are promise/ outcome/ benefit driven and flip the narrative to a negative. I’m running a hook rn that says “if you want your law firm to lose money you should hire an SEO agency” and it’s one of my top performers.

12. The best way to introduce a new/ novel concept I.e. in your UPM/ USM is a way that makes your prospect inherently understand it is by mapping an unknown concept to a known concept.
You do this primarily using metaphors.
The “known” part is determined by the sophistication of your market.
Unique problem mechanisms example for mass market joint supplement offer (just off the dome):
Novel concept: “Age-related joint degradation is caused by matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) breaking down the extracellular matrix of cartilage faster than chondrocytes can synthesize new collagen.”
Re-written with a “known” concept: "Think of your knee joint like the door hinge.
When that hinge is brand new, it opens and closes effortlessly because it has a rich layer of grease making everything glide smoothly.
Now, imagine what happens if you squirt a drop of acid onto that hinge every single day. That the grease dries up."...
"Most people think their knee pain is just 'getting old' or 'wear and tear.' But that’s dead wrong. 'Wear and tear' doesn't cause pain. Corrosive Enzymes do.
Inside your joint, your body produces tiny pac-man-like enzymes called MMPs. When you were 20, your body produced enough protective fluid to wash these enzymes away. But as you age, your joint stops producing that protective fluid. Those enzymes get trapped inside your knee joint, eating away at your cartilage like acid on a door hinge until your bones are grinding together with every step you take."

13. You must limit the cognitive load in your prospect as much as humanly possible.
When someone is watching your ad, their brain is running on a very limited amount of energy.
And if you exhaust that energy, the person is going to scroll. Cognitive overload does NOT mean too long. there are 45-minute VSLs pulling eight figures/month. Overload happens because of processing friction. There are a bunch of ways that you might be creating that friction but the two biggest offenders that I’ve seen: a. Too many overlapping ideas, outcomes, problems or mechanism drivers. These are some of the most cognitively “dense” parts of your message. And so when you keep adding more and more of each you’re just increasing the strain on your prospect’s brain.
There’s a reason why most of the copywriting OGs taught to focus on ONE core idea, focus on ONE core reason why everything your prospects have tried before failed.
The second offender happens when there’s gaps in your argument that confuse the prospect to the point where they have to fill in the gaps.
The simplest example happens when you don’t bridge certain blocks of copy properly or you just don’t include them in the first place.
Example of no bridge: “Cold outreach is dead, use our AI software to close more deals.”
With the bridge: “Cold outreach is dead because prospect inboxes are saturated with spam filters.
Our AI bypasses inbox filters by simulating human writing patterns, dropping your message straight into the primary inbox where 90% of deals are actually closed.”

Now these gaps can be incredibly nuanced. An example of another gap: people have semantic associations. These are mental connections between two concepts that are wide spread across a population. Most people think of the liver as a “filter” or the brain as a “muscle” or memory as a “hard drive”. I’m going to use the liver as an example. Let’s say you’re writing about the forces of nature in your mechanism and you talk about the liver acting as a sponge. This might seem insignificant but when someone heard the liver acting as a “sponge” it clashes with their semantics which creates cognitive load.

14. Belief shifts. I hear people talk about it all the time but I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about how you ACTUALLY shift someone’s beliefs.
You cannot attack a core belief head-on, or you trigger the backfire effect.
This is a cognitive bias in which presenting a person with objective, undeniable facts that contradict their deeply held beliefs does not change their mind.
You can spot this bias EVERYWHERE, in normie ragebait reactions, on gender discussion on Reddit, in the comments under your ads, political arguments etc.
Instead of attacking that belief, you VALIDATE it as being entirely logical based on their past evidence ("You're right to think cold email is dead, because the old spray-and-pray method was saturated"), and then introduce a narrow wedge that expands their paradigm.
Mechanistic example: “That method is dead, but a hyper-segmented micro-channeling approach is getting agency owners a 20% reply rate right now”.
External authority example: “But if cold email didn’t work at all then why are Fortune 500 companies spending million of dollars hiring people whose only job is to send emails?”
When dealing with NEGATIVE identity-based beliefs i.e. “I’ll never lose weight” a good tactic is to externalize blame onto a third party aka the “common enemy” trope.
Ex: “It’s not your fault. The reason why you aren’t losing weight isn’t because you aren’t disciplines enough or motivated enough. You were just fed a bunch of fad diets and useless at-home workouts by greedy fitness coaches.”

15. The best copy uses momentum to pull the reader to an inevitable conclusion. Joseph Sugarman (absolutely goated copywriter) called this the slippery slide. This is a measure of how well each core “block” of copy (i.e. promise, claim, mechanism, proof, catalyst, etc.) FLOWS from one to the other. I want you to read through the last ad script, VSL script, whatever you wrote and as you’re reading ask yourself: “is there any point where I suddenly jumped from one premise to another without establishing a clear bridge?” “Does each premise feel like a natural RESOLUTION to the premise that I established before?”

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

@iblamejulius the hook on this is impeccable

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

my favorite skill i've acquired recently is the ability to be extremely direct with people and tell them things they don't want to hear

you get so much more out of your team

and being able to call those close to you out on their bullshit is massive

fuck peoples feelings, do right by them regardless of how they'll feel

they'll respect you for it

and you'll watch them grow 10x as fast

took me a long time to finally master this

don't waste time getting to this point

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

in regards to info i could give a fuck about if someone still does the business model or not

as long as they can drive a result and solve a problem i have i will throw money at you

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

@_basedxavier_ was thinking the same shit this morning

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

i’m about to steamroll my way through the entirety of the marketing industry

no one will be able to compete

just wait and see

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

i've been going on autism rants about brand recently

imo it's the biggest lever by far

i fully intend to heavily gate keep this in public until proof of concept is established in 5 years

will return to this post in 2032ish

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

i helped a balkan guy spin up a profitable funnel

he spoke broken english

his ads were in serbian (or whatever language it was)

i couldn't read a damn thing

yet the same marketing principles applied

and lone behold two weeks later they turned profitable

give me a translator and i'll run up some profitable ads in any market idc what language you speak

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

your number 1 job is to protect the culture

if someone does not take action when they say they will cut them out fast

waste of energy and effort

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

you will never take aggressive action until the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of making a change

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

this is why i named my offer First Principles lol

agree with half this take

the other half has me bring up consulting companies like:
- McKinsey & Company
- Deloitte
- KPMG

let alone the massive amount of coin going to university

info will always be around

never let a marketer gaslight you into thinking something is "dead"

had me in the first half ngl

[serge gatari @SergeGatari]

Info so cooked because of AI that anyone making Millions/month is no longer sharing their offer, market & funnels🤣

Iykyk.

We’re experiencing an industry evolving in front of our eyes & the game forcing operators to cook from 1st principles.

Find a market with pain & where demand is higher than supply…print 8 figures without telling anyone!

The “I make a $1m/month teaching from teaching you how to make $1M/month” is not a real business & doesn’t last unless you’re running an actual business doing the dirty work and collecting data/insights.

Imagine Jensen teaching other chip manufactures how to create a $5 trillion company…🤣

It would be the dumbest business model ever as it’s the fastest path to making Nvidia a commoditized business.

Building service companies is back in style👨🏾‍🍳

Info is a great industry to get rich quick, and the worst to get rich FOR SURE.

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

ever since i stopped looking to others for marketing strategies and started focusing on the principles/ what i observe i have consistently been 2-4 weeks ahead of a lot of the big players in the space

really interesting to observe in real time

organic + paid, actually addressing TAM, time compression, audience quality, etc

not claiming to have invented these concepts by any means

but i sure as shit didn't see anyone talking about them when i posted about the topic

just look at my youtube for receipts

think for yourself and a lot of the answers are right in front of you

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

one of the main reasons i started my own offer is to call out other biz owners on their shit and lead by example

offer is still really small, but my lord does having it carry weight

one of the best decisions i’ve made in a while

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE

[Zac Regan @startrunningads]

normalize aggressive levels of growth