The Persuasion Power of IMperfection

Nathan (0:08)

Unveiling the secrets A-list copywriters use to make themselves and their clients millions. This is the Copywriters Podcast with your host, the world's greatest copywriting coach, David Garfinkel.

David Garfinkel (0:26)

In the larger world of culture and fashion, we've reached the breaking point.

And this is important for copywriting because of something we've always known and practiced. And today we're going to take a wide-ranging look at the opposing forces of perfection, which is not real, and authenticity, which is not perfect. Both perfection and authenticity have been used to sell stuff. And we've seen a lot of people, especially in social media, stretching notions of perfection about as far as they can go.

So the perfection trend seems to have reached the breaking point I was just talking about. I saw this interesting article exploring the trend in Bloomberg Businessweek. Quote, We've been looking at perfect faces and vacations and homes on Instagram for more than 15 years. And on TikTok for most of a decade. During which time, creators have pursued new audiences by pushing what already works further towards a logical extreme.

The uncounted perfection of everything. At this point, so little is left to upgrade. Now they're posting ways to improve the color of your armpit skin.

The article is entitled, The Optimization Backlash Has Begun. And it's all about how people are getting really tired of having images and standards of perfectionism rammed down their throats.

The writer, Amanda Mull, took a good look at this new trend showing your flaws as part of marketing and movies and social media.

We'll go much further than the recent past to set the stage and then burrow into some great ways you can take advantage of this trend in your own copy and video marketing. But first, let's burrow into this. Copy is powerful. You're responsible for how you use what you hear on this podcast, and most of the time, common sense is all you need. But if you make extreme claims and if you're writing copy for offers in highly regulated industries like health, finance, and business opportunity, you may want to get a legal review after you write and before you start using your copy. My larger clients do this all the time, all right. Businessweek writer Amanda Mull was focusing on the latest and the greatest as any news magazine journalist should do. She talked about rapper Travis Scott, whose face is the first one you see in the new film, The Odyssey. Scott plays the Greek poet, Phemius, who recites lines like these to open the movie.

Sing news of a man, a man, a thought, a trick, a trick to break the walls of Troy and burn it screaming to the ground. The uproar Amanda Mull reports about, interestingly enough, was not about the words or Travis Scott's performance. It was about his teeth, specifically that he has perfect looking teeth, cosmetic dental veneers that can cost several thousand dollars a piece per tooth. Typical of the criticism were the words of entertainment podcaster Hunter Harris. Travis Scott and his big ass veneers have no place in Ithaca. Ithaca, of course, being the opening setting of the Odyssey in ancient Greece. So now, coming back from ancient Greece to the present day in 2026, big ass, perfect looking veneers do have a place on celebrities, wannabe celebrities, professional athletes and lots of other people. And we've seen them over and over again for the last 10 or 15 years on Instagram and TikTok. But that's changing and it's part of a much bigger and more important trend. The Businessweek writer Mull reports high-end cosmetic dentists are seeing more and more clients who don't want to look like they have veneers. Plastic surgeons who are being asked to leave a few wrinkles in. The tide, she suggests, is turning. Well, at the most visible end of what's hot and what's not, in the broad culture at large, that may be the way it is. But overall, the move away from perfectionism and towards authenticity has been peeping its head up every now and then for a long time. And I'm still talking about the larger culture. We'll get down to copywriting and direct marketing and brass tacks and nitty gritty in just a minute. But first, we need to reach way back in time to see where this whole trend started, for example in TV.

In the 1950s and early 60s, most shows followed a format like father knows best or leave it to beaver. Every day life took place in a very unreal, perfect setting with perfect parents, perfect kids, perfect houses, perfect neighborhoods, all perfectly fake. In the 1970s, a new show called All in the Family starred a racist, short-fused guy named Archie Bunker. But that was just the beginning. In the 1990s, NYPD Blue introduced a deeply flawed character, Detective Andy Sipowicz, who, besides being racist himself, had fits of uncontrolled rage and violence, as well as severe alcohol problems and other stuff.