A persuasion powerhouse teaches you how to craft messages in the attention economy

Advertising oracle Dee Madigan learned the “dark art” of persuasion during the Wild West of commercial advertising in the early 1990s.

Her job was to have the ideas that would make you buy Coca-Cola instead of Pepsi, and she built a formidable career shooting big-budget campaigns across the world.

“People don’t want to be best friends with the brand. They want how the brand makes them feel,” she says – wisdom that can be applied to both business and personal brands.

Dee Madigan is one of Australia’s leading political communicators. Here’s her tips on how to craft and control your message.

To get your audience to pay attention, tap into their needs

Consumer attention has become a commodity in the digital era. We’re busier than ever, and the number of competing messages can feel so overwhelming that we tune out entirely.

Madigan says effective messaging goes beyond facts, and appeals to emotions and needs.

“I think what happens is people inside the brand drink the Kool-Aid a little bit, and they feel like, ‘Oh our brand is so good and it does all these good things.’ This is where brands have stuffed up. They talk about what they do, and not what that does for someone,” Madigan says.?

She says brands should be asking: “What need do they have that I answer?”

“I always say this to politicians: No one cares about you. They care about themselves. How do you make them feel?”

A great idea wins every time

We used to see huge brands with even bigger budgets betting it all on big campaigns – Britney Spears with Pepsi and Michael Jordan with Nike.

The exponential growth of social media has changed the advertising landscape, and given rise to influencers and micro-targeting. So not all messages have the cut-through power they once did.

“When the internet first started, everyone got excited about having content everywhere. And then they realised shit content is just shit content, and they’ve created all this stuff that’s not building their brand. Or it’s building an influencer’s brand and not theirs,” Dee says.

“Influencing has less cachet now because everyone knows influencers are being paid to say stuff.”

Dee says one great idea still has pulling power. “A lot of the brands now, instead of spreading out everywhere, are doing one clever idea,” she says.

“The one thing I really like about TikTok. It reminds people that content that’s entertaining, that has an idea, gets shared. A really clever TikTok video will get shared on Facebook, will get on Instagram. A good idea is still a good idea.”

Know what you’re not good at – and what you’re not

By 2012, Dee Madigan had more than a few wins under her belt, and a regular spot on the ABC TV show Gruen. But the itch to use her talents for something bigger grew, and she shifted into political advertising.?

Her first campaign, for the Queensland Labor Party in Australia, resulted in a monumental loss. Madigan was crushed, but she also gained a new sense of purpose.

“We got smashed. But for me, it was a bit like heroin.”

“Well, I assume like heroin, I’ve never tried heroin,” she jokes.

“There’s something really addictive… when for the first time in your life, you feel like you’re doing exactly what you should be doing. Doing electric campaigns, spur-of-the-moment things, thinking quickly and working with words, and understanding strategies.”

She went on to launch the Campaign Edge advertising agency. “I’d been thinking about starting an agency. I mentioned it to [businessman] Ray Smith, and he said, ‘We’ll back you.’ It was just like that. I think he had the lawyers’ papers drawn up the next day,” she says.

It wasn’t a difficult choice for Madigan to accept capital in exchange for a stake in the company she’d dreamed up.

“Occasionally you think, ‘Man, I’d like more of the dividends’, but I know what I’m good at, and I know what I am not good at. That stuff I’m not good at would actually stress me out to the point I wouldn’t be able to do things I am good at,” she says.

“It’s an ongoing joke in the agency that I’m not allowed to talk about money,” Dee says. “If I had been in charge of those things, we would not be eight years down the track still going well – we’d be broke.”

Curveball is a production of podcast consultancy and production company Deadset Studios. Curveball’s host Kellie Riordan is a leading podcast strategist and was the head of podcasts at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.?