How Ideas Go Viral with Robert Updegraff

<img src="https://copywriterspodcast.com/images/banner/copywriterspodcast156.jpg" /> <br />Today in our Old Masters series, we have someone a little different whose work we’re going to look at.<br /> His name is Robert Updegraff. He wasn’t really a copywriter, but experienced copywriters and marketers know him. In today’s show, we’re going over a short book he published originally in 1916. It’s called Obvious Adams and it’s a story about a copywriter that took the business world by storm.<br /> Jack Trout, author of the modern marketing classic “Positioning,” wrote an article about Obvious Adams in Forbes. This is a guy who knows a thing or two about marketing, and he called Obvious Adams “the best book that I have ever read on marketing.”<br /> The hero of the story, Obvious Adams, had a knack for finding the simplest, most obvious idea. And his ideas led to great increases in sales. It turns out, that’s exactly what a viral idea is. Today, we’ll show you what to look for in an idea — whether it’s a positioning statement, or a headline, or a product idea — to see how likely it is to go viral.<br /> We’ll talk about the book and include the five tests for a marketing idea that Robert Updegraff added to the book years after it was first published.<br /> I first came upon Obvious Adams in the early 1990s. As I reviewed it for this show, 30 years later, I realized what a major impact it had on my thinking.<br /> In the story, the advertising agency who first hired Obvious Adams when he was 18 says his initial impression was that he was “a very ordinary-looking boy, it seemed to me, rather stolid, not overly bright in appearance. [Stolid is an old-fashioned word which means calm and not particularly emotional.]”<br /> What set Obvious Adams apart in the story was his uncanny ability to find the obvious selling points in a product that no one else could, and that the clever copywriters scoffed at.<br /> But over and over, the ads he wrote out-performed everyone else’s. As he rose to the top of the agency, he stayed t