Brand Shorthand

The Wizard of Ads

• Mark Vandegrift and Lorraine Kessler • Season 1 • Episode 19

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Marketers - if you haven't read Roy William's 3-book series, The Wizard of Ads, you're missing a real treat. Mark and Lorraine dive into three of his chapters with topics on: 1) finding your diamond, 2) the perspective of your ads, and 3) whether audience targeting is the holy grail. Learn more about the simple approach Roy takes to creating great advertising.

Spend 30-ish with Mark and Lorraine to learn more about advertising, marketing, and positioning.

Mark Vandegrift:
Welcome to the latest episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me is a diamond in the rough, Lorraine Kessler.

Lorraine, Fall is upon us. What all do you have left to do to close out your gardens for the winter?

Lorraine Kessler:
Oh my gosh, well, there's always pruning, yard clean up, all the sticks and debris from heavy winds in winter, then some harvesting and canning. I learned to can just a few years ago and have learned to really enjoy it.

Mark Vandegrift:
Very good, what'd you can this year?

Lorraine Kessler:
Well, I will make from tomatoes and my own sauce products. My what we called our Sunday gravy.

The Italian sauce of my family from Bari, Italy. And so I can that sauce and then have it for the holidays and whatever else.

Mark Vandegrift:
Very good. Did you get a pressure cooker or you just do a warm bath?

Lorraine Kessler:
I just do a big, big pot and a hot bath and that's the old fashioned way.

Mark Vandegrift:
Good, well, for today's topic, I wanted to provide our readers with a small window into the work of our upcoming podcast guest. Roy Williams, known as the Wizard of Ads. Roy published three wizard books about two decades ago, and as we've been reading through them, the truths that these books share about advertising really are still true today, perhaps even more so. Lorraine, you've been following Mr. Williams for a long time. Can you give us some background on how he's impacted you personally?

Lorraine Kessler:
Yes, I think, you know, as a brand strategist, a communication strategist, Roy is really focused purely on communication as an advertiser. Why people buy, why they think what they think, the pitfalls of what happens when advertisers really aren't thinking in terms of walking in the sandals of their customers and really coming from their perspective and understanding who they are and respecting that and figuring out the best way to appeal to that. 

Why I make that comment. that he's a master communication strategist, is that there are many strategists that talk about the broader piece of a company's strategy. You think about Michael Porter, for example, going to talk about a broader sense of strategic focus, or David Akers, who's specific to brand. But I would say that Roy gets down to the nubs. I mean, he really is brass tacks, and he gets down to what a real, what people who have to really write ad messages or create advertising have to think about in terms of their craft in creating effective advertising. And I don't know anyone else who quite does it as well as he does.

Mark Vandegrift:
Yeah, he seems like a psychologist almost. His little snippets are just great. They're almost the length of a maxim and it's like you get that point and then you move on. And he does a really good job of that. Our listeners might recall that a few episodes ago, we covered one of Roy's Monday morning memos from 2007, Why Most Ads Don't Work. and the four primary reasons that he listed. Today, I thought it would be neat to maybe pull out a few chapters from his books and read them. And you might go, listener, oh my goodness, listener, sorry, you're going to think this is a lot. These chapters are 30 seconds max, most of them. They don't take really long to read. And if our viewers are not familiar with these three Wizard of Ads book, I really think... I would encourage you to go out and get them. They're an easy read. You can pick them up and set them down very quickly if you're interrupted. So you'll get a sense for that as I read this chapter from book two called Digging for the Diamond. And it shouldn't take us more than 30 seconds to read it. So here it goes. 

There's a story that is uniquely and wonderfully your own, but you'll never uncover it by trying to imitate the success of others. When digging for the diamond that is your own unique selling proposition, you'll have to sift through a lot of worthless dirt before you find a single nugget of radiant truth. But in the end, it's worth it. Don't be discouraged. Dig for the diamond. Find the story that is uniquely and wonderfully your own. Then tell that story with every ounce of your being. 

That's it. That was the entire chapter. So these are short nuggets of truth, as I said, and Lorraine, it might be obvious as to why we chose to start with this chapter, but for our new listeners, explain why this truth is so core to our marketing philosophy.

Lorraine Kessler:
Well, first of all, in that little reading you gave, he does point out that it's your diamond, it's your thing. It's what sets you apart, right? And yet marketers and companies have an urge to copy. It's just a natural human thing. And that's the opposite of differentiation, right? And yet we have this urge to if, you know, finding your diamond breaks that habit, if you will, or that tendency, I think it's more of a tendency. And, and many clients find comfort in copying. And yet it's deadly. It's commercial suicide. I think Bill Birnbach said that. 

So, I think in the last episode, you know, we discussed Papa John's and how they came upon its positioning idea, right? Better ingredients, better pizza. That was Trout finding the diamond in the litany of things that John Schnatter was rolling out about what Papa John did that he thought was part of their success. And we've also discussed in the past Domino's and their absolutely relentless commitment to the delivery idea and delivery. which they have continued to evolve on from first inventing the ovens in the car to the software that pinpointed your address to then being the EV vehicles and then most recently this pinpoint kind of finding you wherever you are, even if it's on the top of Mount McKinley and delivering your pizza, which I'd like to try. So. 

So you asked why is this so core? And it's because a brand can only stand for one idea in the mind. And the more meaningful the idea, relevant, and the more unique, differentiating, the higher the value, right? So that's, I call this the R&D of the brand. So if you have a high relevance and a high differentiation, the value of the brand will be so strong that you'll not only sell more, but you'll be able to charge more.

And that's really the ultimate goal of any company is profit, profitability and corporate value. There's no other way to get at it. 

Now, just practically speaking, the minds of customers were pretty simple. We are bombarded today with the problems emanating from too much competition, which creates too much communication. So we've gone from over communication to hyper communication or hyper clutter. And we can't possibly take it all in and then add it to it is what we've talked about is this media fracturing that has created a huge amount of media overload more than any human can take. So this has really exacerbated time poor people. Now, if you look at old ads and I think it's really fun to go back, right? I don't think there's a better read on pop culture than to go back and what people were thinking in the day, then advertising.

You can tell, you go back to the 20s and you can see what the values were, the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s. You can see what, I mean, I'm talking about lifestyle values, the normal way people thought in their day, the operating systems. But you go back to ads from the 20s and 30s, and I think you'll find that they're feature rich, information rich, and they worked in that day. And why? Because choice was limited, advertisers were few, time was available. 

Well, it's a totally different environment today. So you can't think what worked then is going to work now. So today, the more you add to a brand, the more you detract. So I think that aim, the core of this is to find that simple idea, that diamond. And that diamond is characterized by a strong R&D, both relevance and differentiation, and then fuse that idea to your brand name so that the two become synonymous. And brands like IKEA, Coca-Cola, BMW, Apple, Nike, Disney, Google. And even smaller brands like John Deere and Cisco, Viking, and Trane in their markets have become modern icons because they stand for something important that people want. And that gives them a magnetic influence over the audiences. So there is absolutely, it is the killer strategy to have that kind of differentiation.

Mark Vandegrift:
Well, and he picked out diamond. That was a good word to use since you said that's the highest value. And we know that's the highest value stone.

It's interesting because he never uses the word position, but he could have easily swapped out unique selling proposition with the word position. While we don't consider those concepts perfectly equivalent by definition, this description not only points to positioning as we know it, but we also have the answer to how to dig for the diamond, which is our pursuit of discovery process. So, you know, I know we tell a lot of people, well, think of your USP versus position, but I think you have a perspective on how those vary.

Lorraine Kessler:
Yeah, the USP unique selling proposition was developed by Rosser Reeves as a concept and his book is seminal and anybody in advertising should read it. If they can find it, it's hard to find, but it's called Reality in Advertising. And he was really a genius in the industry, and he came up with the unique selling proposition and he insisted that an advertisement or commercial should show off the value or unique selling proposition of a product, the one reason the product needed to be bought relevant to its competitors, and that the ad should show that off, not the cleverness or humor of a copywriter. 

Okay, so now that was foundational, but Trout and Reese, who wrote Positioning, and Trout acknowledged many times that positioning really is a genesis from the USP. It was an evolution of his idea. And the reason it's an evolution is as markets got more complex, products got more complex. And positioning is more expansive. It goes beyond the narrow definition of just a product as a tangible product. You have to remember, Ross Reeves lived in the era where America was mass producing products, right? Putting them on grocery shelves en masse. So His USP was very product focused. I think positioning goes deeper, it goes broader, it encompasses brands, companies, services, and finding an idea. And it's more prescriptive of things that USP may, USP was specific to a product. I think positioning is more prescriptive of corporate behavior, your belief system as a corporation or company that makes products or goods. structure that you're going to have, your operating systems. So it's really USP to the extreme.

Mark Vandegrift:
That’s a good delineation.

Well, next up is a chapter from his first book, chapter eight called Home Movies, and I thought this was so well illustrated. This one really, it just tickled my funny bone. It's slightly longer, but he does such a great job of pointing out the subtle difference between good marketing and bad that I'm just going to read the whole thing. So here it goes. It's called Home Movies. 

This is me at the Grand Canyon. This is me standing in front of Niagara Falls. This is me scuba diving in the Caribbean. This is an idiot showing home movies. The problem with home movies is never the content, but always the perspective. Scuba diving in the Caribbean is an adventure best experienced without some fool standing in front of the camera telling you what he had for lunch or what he's about to do. The genius of Jacques Cousteau, is that he points the camera always at the underwater cave, the shark, the sunken ship, never at himself. We experience his undersea world and are hypnotized. Jacques takes us there. 

You see only the tip of the canoe at the bottom of the screen, the smooth, swift river ahead. The current quickens and you hear a distant roar. The horizon draws near. As the river shortens and the water grows more insistent, the roar now deafening, the current compelling, the tip of the canoe hangs for a moment in empty space, then tips sharply 90 degrees. You fall 186 feet in an internal three seconds. Suddenly, the roar is gone, and all light disappears with it. You are momentarily in absolute darkness. Now light reappears and grows slowly brighter as you rise gently toward the surface. This is how Jacques Cousteau would show you Niagara Falls. 

If you will write powerful advertising, you must point the movie camera of language to that place in the mind where you want the listener to go. The imagination can be a powerful thing, but only when the listener is a participant in your movie. Bad advertising is like home movies. In your ads, please never point the camera at yourself. You're just not that interesting.

Lorraine Kessler:
Oh my gosh.

Mark Vandegrift:
I loved that chapter. And again, that was a whole chapter right there.

Lorraine Kessler:
Well, I don't think you're old enough to remember when people would invite you over to show their home movies when they made a trip somewhere.

Mark Vandegrift:
Oh, I was. Yeah, slide shows. Oh my gosh, those slide shows.

Lorraine Kessler:
No, it's like, it's just like, oh my gosh. And that's before I had the enjoyment of wine. So there wasn't enough Pepsi drinking in the world to talk worse through that. 

Yeah, Roy's story reminds me of something that Bill Birnbach said, and that is that an idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it. I mean, it takes really, it takes enormous talent, not just writing talent, but talent to put yourself into the world of the audience and to make that connection through imagination so that they feel that they're part of the story, that you've actually, you know, have brought them into the story. I mean, if you bore them to death, B-O-R-E, right, then they won't board, B-O-A-R-D, in your journey or on your journey. So... The difference between that is really what Birnbach says. It's going to turn to magic or dust, depending on the advertiser's skill.

Mark Vandegrift:
Yeah, and how many times have we seen that? We get a great, we find the diamond, right?

And then we'll have, I don't know, call them short clients, not long lasting clients. They go away and they think they can execute on it. And then it dies, and they go, oh, you didn't get the right idea. No, you didn't get the advertising right. And it hasn't happened a ton. I mean, most of our clients follow through with us dramatizing the position. But, talk about, I mean, how much advertising just points to these companies today and it's just boring stuff. Yep.

Lorraine Kessler:
Banal. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I don't think people need more information to bore them. They've got a sufficient amount of advertising and information.

Mark Vandegrift:
Good. Well, there's one more we'll go through today. And I know our listeners don't want me reading a book to them for very long. But again, this chapter is probably a little bit longer than 30 seconds. So I'm going to jump past a few items. And in this day of targeting, it probably will come across as a bit controversial. But as you say, Thing 1, Roy is always the provocateur. Here's a portion of this chapter from his first book:

Advertising began to deteriorate the day we let the scientific types get involved. Now don't get me wrong, I think there's a place for every type of person, but scientific types should stick with things scientific. Unfortunately, someone forgot to lock the door one day and a scientific type slipped in and said, the secret to more effective advertising would be to reach the right people. I wish I had been there. I would have casually turned to him and said, "'It's not you or it's not who you reach. "'It's what you say, stupid.'" And ended the whole thing right there. But I wasn't in the room. And since he was a scientific type and his idea made sense, everyone began walking in circles, mindlessly parroting, "'Reach the right people.'" '"Reach the right people.'" The problem is that advertising is not scientific. Trying to reach the right people usually leads to over-targeting and over-confidence. It has caused more stupid mistakes, frustration and failures than any other myth in the history of commerce. Every American is reached by multiple... vehicles of advertising every day. Having the right message is what matters. It's not who you reach, it's what you say. 

Lorraine, this is probably the most controversial thing I've read in his books. Give us your perspective on this, because I know at times we talk about targeting quite a bit.

Lorraine Kessler:
Well, I agree with them 100%. And I always have. Because I think the true secret of advertising is to say the right thing to as many people as you can afford to reach over and over again. And there's some, you know, you look at, there's checks in that. You have to have the right thing, you're saying the right thing to as many people as you can afford to reach over and over. So this suggests that a) you have to know who you're targeting, b) you have to have the right psychology, the right method. You mentioned psychology, and Roy sounds like a psychologist. You can't be a good advertiser if you're not a psychologist.

Because what's a psychologist? It's a study of human behavior and attitudes and how attitudes create then lead to behaviors. And you need to affect attitudes in order to affect behavior. So you have to know how people think and what they think about in the way they think about it, not the way you think about it. And I think that was a huge mistake. 

With Bud Light which we've talked about that CMO going to an elite college. Probably lived an elite life in a very upper scale community our whole life is so 180 from the audience who was buying Bud Light she had no relationship whatsoever and um and so When how can you possibly have the right message, right? You can't um, so I'd rather reach less of the right people with the most powerful ad and do it over and over again than reach a ton of people with a crappy ad once or twice. I mean, if that's the choice. So of course you want to try and expand meaningful reach.

But I think over targeting happens when buyers buy in a vacuum, and they look only at demographics. They're not looking at psychographics. And they're also not looking at what broadcast did so well in our time, when my time, when Ed Sullivan was on Sunday night and, you know, a Maxwell coffee ad, good to the last drop, you know, hit everybody watching Ed Sullivan, is that it wasn't just one person watching that TV, it was the family. So all of these people today, we call them influencers, but Roy calls them inside champions. Okay, so siblings, husband, children, your neighbor. So when you're just so narrow focused on, this target reach, although only the person you think will be the buyer, beware, you could be missing the mark. And I think the important question for advertisers to ask is why would a person choose to do business with you at all? Why would they choose to be interested? A lot of times it has very little to do with the product, even it has to do with what other people are buying, what my neighbor bought that I want to emulate, what it will do for me, how it makes me feel. So it's a lot of other things. 

So I think that's really important. And I think what's happened is there've been an over fascination with digital media and targeting because it's the new toy. In one hand, you know, and it's the new thing. But what I found is that, you know, and of course there's a fascination, what is scientific is the measurement, right? You can look at the measurement. The problem is I find that so often agencies and clients don't know what measures really matter. They're measuring things that have no value, all right? And they're getting overloaded with all these measures that don't add up to something of value. So scientific people love them, clients love them. The problem is what are you measuring and why? And then what stick are you measuring with?

And some of the greatest things to me in advertising, what it can affect, both purchase intent and purchase follow through, but then loyalty and how I feel about the brand. There's kind of short-term measures we have in analytics today, can't get at.

And so, just be cautious. I think that's a great caution for the time. Make sure you have the right message.

Mark Vandegrift:
Well, when we have Roy on the podcast in a couple of weeks, I think that's one of the questions I want to ask him is, if you had this chapter to rewrite, would you alter it at all? Because if you think about it, this was written in the late 90s, 1998, I think, and we're 25 years past that. And frankly, we do know that targeting has increased in its capability. I mean, it's been a long time coming. I remember in the mid 90s where they were promising all these different, like the white fence domestic woman. And the, I mean, they had these names for them and you could go out and partner with these places but they never delivered on what they promised. But fast forward 25 years, we still aren't there with perfect targeting but we're a lot closer to be able to pick audiences.

Lorraine Kessler:
I've seen some mistakes and I'll just give you anecdotal mistake that I've seen. I own a dog. So somehow they know that through data, right? Because I buy on Chewy and who knows how. And I watch a lot of streaming programs. If I see one more Farmer's Dog ad, I'm going to find the agency and the makers and I'm going to do something terrible, right? I am not their customer. But all their targeting would tell them I am. All right, and so not only do I see the ad with some frequency that I would recall it, I see it ad nauseum. So it's to the point where I'm irritated.

Now most of the clients we deal with will never get to ad wear out. I would love to have that be a real problem. I remember that became real big in the 1980s and 90s, this idea of ad wear out. Well, we don't have clients that spend like Nike or farmers dog. So the chance of that, the chance of clients spending far less than too much is much greater, spending far less.


Mark Vandegrift:
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a please-opt-me-out button for individual brands as you're either watching TV or you're on your phone or something like that? I mean, it would be a service to advertisers if someone said, I'm just not going to be your customer. But I know you can block things in certain ways, but…

Lorraine Kessler:
Oh, Mark, that's a genius idea.

Mark Vandegrift:
I'm talking like literally an easy opt out button.

Lorraine Kessler:
I'm telling you, if you can invent that with your techno mind, that would be worth marketing because it would actually be a value to the, I would consider the brand being really in tune.

So, even though I wouldn't buy it, but I would credit it. So I wouldn't have these negative feelings. But then, you know, every time an advertiser reaches a prospect that is not going to buy, that's a zero return. If I were the marketer, I'd want to remove as many zero returns from my marketing mix as I possibly could. So you telling me that helps me enormously.

Mark Vandegrift:
Yeah, you know what advertisers fear though, is that we're all going to opt out of all advertising, which I don't think is true. I mean, I appreciate certain ads and need to be reminded of those things at certain times. And I don't mind new ads coming aboard. That's the other thing. You can show me a new product or something. I don't know if I would want it yet or not.

But if, I mean, it's like we shop at a Giant Eagle and they have an affinity card and for years. I mean, talk about not using data. We've been getting cat coupons for cat food and cat products. I'm terribly allergic to cats. I mean, how stupid is that? But apparently, they have not gotten the message on that. So, I don't know.

Lorraine Kessler:
Yeah, I think the bottom line is you have to, you can't do these things on auto mode. You have to be thinking strategy all the way through and making really well informed system 2 thinking decisions, not system 1 automatic decisions. You really have to put in the time and the mental matter, on the message, on the audience, on the targeting, on the measurements, what really matters.

Mark Vandegrift:
That's going to get worse though, because with all this AI stuff that everyone's touting to make better decisions, I've only seen AI make bad decisions so far, honestly, in most cases. I shouldn't say it's universal, but AI is not the solution, but what it's going to do is we're all going to stop thinking. And so, oh, well, AI is smarter than me. So I'm just going to press a button and I'll sit back here and look at my social media. I think it's going to actually get worse. And I don't think we're going to invest the effort that is the application of the human mind, which is an amazing, amazing creation because we want to go paint our nails or play sports or bet on our sports or whatever it is that... people do in their off time. I think AI is going to become yet another crutch, unfortunately.

Lorraine Kessler:
Well, I think the thinking person will always rise supreme, at hope, because they'll be able to think through those fallacies. But there's no doubt that people want to push a button and make it happen.

That's what AI gives them.

Mark Vandegrift:
Yep. And if it did a good job, great, but I'm not seeing that.

Anyhow, well, this is amazing stuff. I encourage our listeners or our viewers to go get Rory Williams books. They are on Amazon. Unfortunately, only two of the three are available on Kindle, but all three are available physically. So we suggest you try them out. Assuming our schedule holds up, he'll be on air in a couple of weeks, and we encourage you to tune in and learn from the Wizard of Ads directly, where we'll be asking him questions. If you'd like to submit a question ahead of time, email me at mark@innismaggiore.com. Otherwise, we'll close for the week. Thank you to our audience for viewing and listening. Please like, share, comment, subscribe, tell your best friend about us. Then join us for our next episode of The Brand Shorthand as we discuss the core concepts of positioning. Until then, have an amazing day.