Repeating What Works

You’ve most likely heard the phrase, “Diamonds Are Forever.”

This came from an ad campaign of diamond magnate, De Beers but in the 1940’s.

Like good fashion, good marketing repeats itself by simply stealing from a previous era and showing it to a new audience.

Here’s how to use AI to find hidden gems from the past and apply them to your business today.

1. Head to whatever AI tool you like (Deepseek is free and pretty much as good as any paid model)

2. Use the following prompt: “Can you find the most iconic advertising campaigns and their slogans from the '50s, '60s and '70s and explain why they were iconic?”

   

3. Use the follow-up prompt “I run an (X) business in 2025 - please create a list of ways I could incorporate this into our marketing mix today?”

   

   Example of incorporating these in our marketing agency business

From here, you’ll have some good jumping-off points for exploration.

AI doesn’t create great marketing, but it does help with the heavy lifting of finding those who have done it in the past.

Good marketing doesn’t change, but the audience who sees it does.

1-for-100 Decisions

I'm once again living the too many things to do, not enough attention to give them life.

This seems to happen to me periodically. Somewhat in line with the growth cycle of my businesses.

Grow, plateau, fall-back, grow again.

Get slammed, catch up, relax, get slammed again.

When this happens I like to remember a rule I heard from Tim Ferriss. " I'm not reading new books".

"For years, I’ve had a public policy of not blurbing books. This is to avoid picking and choosing among friends, which is awful. I’ve put this policy on the blog and in my email auto-response, but it’s not visible enough; I am still asked on a weekly basis. Things can and do get uncomfortable. So, I’m publishing this blog post and fixing the problem further upstream: I’m not even reading any new books in 2020. No “What I’m reading” bullets in the “5-Bullet Friday” newsletter will feature books published in 2020."

That one decision, removed hundreds of smaller ones from Tim's life.

With enough walking and thinking time, I always manage to find some of my own.

And it only takes a few of these 1-for-100 decisions to get above water.

This week it was;

• A new content rule - "If you don't hear from me, publish it anyway".

• Linking up with a marketing consultant to make marketing decisions for me.

• Rewiring our sales funnels at the gym so I stop receiving micro complaints/requests for help, about it.

A couple of hours work to remove 20-or-so open loops from my mind and free up attention for higher priority items.