Author: Lynn

  • Attitude matters

    Attitude matters

    One of the most successful ad campaigns I ever ran was designed to get myself to ride my bike to work. Instead of basing it on standard motivators for exercising like health and fitness, I observed how commercial advertising works hard to associate positive feelings with a product and modeled my campaign after that. I…

  • Put yourself in the picture with glue

    Put yourself in the picture with glue

    Here’s a very easy, low-tech way to put yourself in the picture. It works just as well as technology-based methods like Photoshop, but the only tools you need are scissors and glue. This project is cheap, simple and fun … and you may get to buy school supplies!

  • Put yourself in the picture with Photoshop

    Put yourself in the picture with Photoshop

    Want to float the Amazon River? Climb Mt. Everest? Visit the Taj Mahal? No problem. Maybe you want to attend the Olympics, the Tour de France, or Burning Man. Heck, maybe you want to win the Olympics! You can use photo editing software to create a believable picture of yourself in any situation you can…

  • A great digital camera

    A great digital camera

    The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX8 is small, light, phenomenally easy to use, and has one of the best designed user interfaces I’ve ever seen. This camera makes it really easy to do the thing I care about most – take decent pictures and transfer them to my computer.

  • Put yourself in the picture to get a job

    Put yourself in the picture to get a job

    A few months ago I met a woman I’ll call Fran at a party. When the inevitable “What do you do?’s” were exchanged, her answer boiled down to: “I’m looking for a job and worrying about it.” I told Fran about personal advertising, and suggested that the primary thing I it could do to help…

  • The battle for your mind

    An amazing (and disturbing) video posted recently on YouTube. Think of your attention as the baby buffalo…

  • Get a gorilla to hold the camera

    Get a gorilla to hold the camera

    Soon after I started making ads that put myself in the picture I discovered what the challenge was going to be: who would hold the camera and take the picture? About the time I was getting really frustrated, Cool Tools came to the rescue with a review of the Joby Gorillapod tripod. I love my…

  • Put yourself in the picture

    Put yourself in the picture

    Visualizing yourself achieving a goal has traditionally meant seeing it in your mind. But technology like digital cameras and photo editing software gives us the ability to actually SEE a picture of ourselves doing something that we have not done yet in real life. With a little imaginative costuming, props and scenery you can take…

  • Illustrate your ads with Google Image Search

    Illustrate your ads with Google Image Search

    While Google bots are out crawling the internet to discover web pages, they also keep track of the pictures those pages contain. You can get access to that entire collection of pictures with a feature called Google Image Search. Image Search is especially useful when you’re looking for a picture of something really specific. That…

  • Use ads to focus on the outcome you want

    Use ads to focus on the outcome you want

    I can remember vividly how difficult it was to learn how to drive nails. When I was training we used to practice by pounding hundreds of long, thin 16 penny box nails into a large beam – trying over and over to drive them all the way in without bending. Most of them did bend…