Fooling Yourself

There is a song from Styx, Fooling Yourself.... That is not what this is about.

No, this is much, much more serious.

This story is from The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, which I update every Tuesday morning.

Here's the latest, and you can go here Tuesday for the next chapter.


"Everybody knows about my business"... and other lies you are telling yourself.

And your advertising rep.

Two stories about what happened last week.

Monday afternoon, the first day back from the New Year's Holiday, I get a phone call from the advertising agency that handles the Hoosier Lottery.

She wants to know if we can place one commercial per hour on my radio station that afternoon and Tuesday afternoon.

Any other traditional media would have been powerless to respond and get it done. Newspaper, TV, Billboards. Too late . It was even past our deadline at the radio station.

But... I was able to do it. Between 3pm and 7pm and then Tuesday between 6am and 7pm, we aired 1 commercial per hour.

What was so urgent? $355,000,000 MegaMillions jackpot, that's what.

Now some people think that a $355 Million dollar jackpot wouldn't need extra advertising, after all, doesn't everyone know about it?

Nope. The drawing was 11pm Tuesday night, and the Lottery folks and their advertising agencies were smart enough to know that they had a limited time to sell as many tickets as possible before the 10:45pm cut off and so they increased their advertising.

Tell more people, tell them over and over until the deadline and you sell more and more and make more and more $$.

It was a real deadline, not an artificial deadline like some stores like to set "Sales ends soooon"!

That was Monday.

Tuesday night two people won the jackpot, so it starts over at a measly $12 million.

Something else happened on Tuesday. I met with the owner of a Tax Preparation business with 4 locations. She is neck and neck with anyone in town for the number of offices in our city. But there are at least 50 places in town that do tax prep, plus the online services.

She is not sure if she wants to advertise this year. After all, "..we're established, we have a good name, blah, blah, blah..."

Yes, but....

Everybody doesn't know about your business, or there wouldn't be 46 other competitors.

She, like the lottery, have a deadline in April. Nearly everyone has to file their taxes between now and then. And if they don't visit one of her 4 offices, then she lost their business until next year... or forever.

I'll be seeing her today and telling her this story and we'll see how smart of a business owner she really is.

Stay tuned....

UPDATE:

She is ignoring the opportunity, despite the story and "may do some last minute advertising for the second wave in March" In the meantime several of her competitors saw the light and are on the air now.

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