Killer marketing secrets that always work (ft. Ogilvy Adman, Rory Sutherland)

there are two ways of making money you can either make desirable things or you can make things desirable and there's not much you can do about laws of physics whereas the laws of psychology are magnificent malleable i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a less travel next we know about you but do you know what you're getting into at all up to a point i know the podcast quite well i know that you're like recently a a kind of a social media star you even though you've even been killing it for decades i heard a story about how someone just started like uploading some of your talks and it went viral and then you said maybe i should do this it happened i think accidentally and i've cut a reversed engineered what happened which is that most marketing people talk about what they do and my argument is of a necessity i started talking about how we think and consequently you know the willingness to accept the fact that surprisingly arbitrary seeming trivial decisions may have a monumental effect on is actually necessary to have a proper understanding of living in a complex in into in a interconnected system yeah if you believe there are important strategic things and then there are trivial things which you delegate down to junior people and in which you have no interest whatsoever fundamentally i think you're missing the point because the real world isn't like that it's you know it's full of butterfly effect silver bullets you know you know small things a me i call my book because you can turn lead into gold you can literally take something which is seen as a product disadvantage and turn it into a strength i think you had a good example of that with have you ever heard sean the story of how horsepower kinda came to be no could tell that story so one of one of my great contention is that when we look at great entrepreneurs or great inventors jobs you know if you say edison ford what bolton they tend to be written up as historians as inventors a argument is that an invention isn't an innovation until it changes behavior that leads stuart at butter field of slack who said something very similar no the only real measure of the effect of you're having on innovation is the extent to which you change behavior and you can invent anything you like but if you can't get anybody to adopt it it's an invention but it's not innovation and what was selling steam engines to my owners and the purpose of the steam engine was to replace the horses they used to walk round and round in circles draining the mine so that miners could go in and effectively mine coal slate cold whatever without drowning what he realized is that you could you as an engineer you could talk around you know the cal capacity of the boiler other length of the piston stroke or whatever and these people didn't wanna know so wasn't bolton amongst themselves said well what are these people really wanna know before they're prepared to buy a steam engine i said they wanna know how many horses they no longer need to feed if they burst a steam how many horses can i get rid of if i buy the steam engine so what went out and invented the unit we still use today which is called the horsepower and the reason it's not named after a famous scientist like the o or the newton or the c or the watts for that matter or celsius or anything of that kind is because it's a marketing unit it was invented for marketing purposes because he could then go and say if you about twenty five horsepower steam engine you can actually get rid of seventy five horses because i think the horses worked in shift so it does the work of twenty five horses but it does it twenty four hours a day so you can now get rid of of seventy five horses and these people would go scribble scribble scribble scribble scribble cost of horses cost of feeding horses cost of looking after horses and you know on the back of an envelope they could then go we'll have two of those by the way went even further than that i mean the industrial revolution was a marketing revolution every bit as much as it was an industrial revolution because there was no point in being able to produce things in abundance if you could create corresponding demand so you know one of the things about the eighteenth and nineteenth century in england was it was absolutely pioneering period in terms of how people marketed things and that included the steam mentioned where what and bolton would go to a minor owner now let me get right some people were already using new engines which were less efficient steam engines than the watt engine and what in bolton would go along to the people who are already using these inefficient steam engines and this is how they priced their their own steam engine they said will supply it for free you pay us a third of the money you save on coal so it was literally hardware as a service bear mind this was seventeen seventy five i mean years later rolls royce started charging airlines for jet engines in the same way effectively you pay us for every hour the engine is in service now what was ingenious about that was of course it aligned the interests of the people selling the steam engines and people owning the minds because the people in the country where cole was most expensive most needed to make to save money on coal that was cornwall with tint whether there's there were tin mines quite a long way away from any available coal field so cole was more expensive there and so the first what engines tended to be installed in places where cole was most expensive which meant the mine owners save more money and watt bolton and made more money so they were actually capturing the upside was if all you've done is said yep it's a hundred guinness for a steam engine you wouldn't mean capturing any of the upside i mean this was you know i have to say this this was pretty smart stuff i mean what one of the worst mistakes you can make is thinking the people five hundred years ago three hundred years ago two hundred years ago were thick they were very very clever and probably they had less time staring at smartphones and more time to be clever to be to honest but they something i discovered the other day is the morrison straight in denmark the danish crown wanted to charge effectively customer's duty on any cargo passing through the straits of denmark and they had a kind of strangle hold over it and the original thing was they'd send people on board and say we'll estimate the value of your cargo and will charge you ten percent and they thought this is a lot of bother so they said they sent to the people passing through the aura straight this isn't like thirteen fifty okay it's you tell us what your cargo goes worth k we'll charge you ten percent on that oh and by the way every down then we'll randomly buy your cargo at the price you quoted dude that's like how we pay taxes it's a jesus you you properly valuation that way you see it simply says you tell us what your house is worth and the only deal is we have the right to buy your house for that amount of money what's funny is i think that in america i think it's like i think point four percent i could be getting the numbers of off could but it's like between point four and like two percent of americans get audited every year and like if you do the math it's like i don't know man it might be worth pushing it and just get audited once every thirty minutes right i mean having said that irs audit from what i've heard is a living nightmare isn't it yeah yeah yeah i'm not actually it's serious you know who needs the modern day horsepower is all of the ai products you have if you if you if you have claude and you have chat g and essentially they're all making the same looking product right it looks like a chat interface and then it you type something and then it gives you something back and so they're not differentiated in the experience or the the the look and feel of the product that much and then they come out with these models and each one has a different you know opus three point o light heavy expert pro plus and you're you you have no idea which to use and then they use benchmarks that are it's like on the cr lightweight benchmark of coding expertise where a three point seven seven nine why don't they just have the equivalent of horsepower why don't they just write iq yeah or win like apple was like the iphone instead of saying like it's x amount of megabytes of gig they said a thousand songs in your pocket if that i was challenging your pocket now this is the classic thing which is that engineers i've talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs on this podcast and i've got a bunch of takeaways but one of the big ones one of them that shocks a lot of the people out there who are product nerds which frankly i am myself is that oftentimes in order to turn something that's going kinda good into something that's absolutely amazing is to fix the marketing not the product and in particular fix how many people know about the product that's like the big thing it's called attention say it with me attention and so this team at starter story they put together a free guide they call it the one million dollar attention guide it's this pretty amazing thirty nine page document that's filled with fifteen tactics to get eyeballs on what you are building and so there's a even a thirty minute recording from pat who's the founder of starter store he has interviewed hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs so he's able to put this together through a bunch of research and experience and so if you're interested in getting more attention which frankly you should be everyone should be then you should click the link below in the description or scan the qr code right here engineers whether they know it or not deep down just want to impress other engineers okay and so a psychological solution in their engineering community will be seen as cheating so i make the same point about electric cars which is you have this thing called range anxiety and we're spending billions and billions of dollars a year trying to produce batteries with a higher energy density it's a really good thing i'm not i'm not saying hey engineers you're wasting your time but isn't it cheaper just to reduce anxiety rather than to increase range because if the way to reduce range anxiety is always to increase range will end up with electric cars being heavier than they need to be more expensive than they need to be and you know with fifty kilowatt hours sitting outside your house ninety five percent of the time effectively doing nothing so reducing anxiety and i realized by the way how irrational this is like explain the story which is it it fa me because one of the things i think that helps if you wanna to do this is to have some degree of meta cognition which is you don't just think you think about your own thinking it apparently true a fighter pilots the really good fighter pilots have good cognitive skills but they also have good meta cognitive skills they don't just go i'm gonna do that instinctively but they also ask is there a reason why i shouldn't be doing that in this instance okay or this time it's different as it were and so my wife's car is a mini cooper electric and it's got about a i i guess it's about twenty eight thirty kilowatt hour battery and a range of about a hundred miles and i've got the lotus tray which is a hundred and twelve kilowatt hour battery range about three hundred miles and i got back from quite a lot of driving i've been down to wales and back and the cars down to sixteen percent okay i'm going and all the lights have gone amber because it's at sixteen percent so i'm i'm i'm going white knuckle on this i'm going gone i'm down it i'm sixteen percent oh my goodness i was down sixteen percent then i look at the actual range and it's about fifty eight miles now my wife's car that's fifty six percent okay in my wife's we drive around at fifty six percent i e with a range of six miles all the time without the slightest smidge of anxiety but when that's expressed to sixteen percent not fifty six miles okay i'm suddenly having connections and really panicking now what that suggests is that range anxiety is much more a factor of psychology than it is of physics and the problem with trying to increase battery range is that laws of physics are actually kind of setting stone to a large part okay there's not much you can do about the laws of physics whereas the laws of psychology are magnificent malleable and so that's the thing that really interests me because we spend a lot of time effectively trying to work within the laws of physics which are immutable when it we a lot easier just to say actually you know why don't we why don't we take this undesirable thing and make it cool pride you know this is the elevators need to go faster no no just put a mirror put a mirror just put a minute we'll be happy looking at the middle gonna and it's actually by the way it gets quite philosophical this because you suddenly realize that literally trillions of dollars of effort are invested by businesses every year in pursuit of metrics which the customer may not notice or care about whereas at the same time no money is spent on things which would actually make a huge difference there are relatively easy wins here for both government and the private sector in saying i'll give you an example of this so i call this reverse benchmarking in other words you look at all the metrics that everybody cares about in the category you find a metric that's being completely and ridiculously neglected and you double down on that thing now i first came across this in will fantastic book unreasonable hospitality he goes to the number one restaurant in the world all of his teams say we ought to copy this we ought to do that thing with the napkins i really like what they do in the bathrooms with the scented let's copy that and gi da is not gonna copy any of that because two one we can't afford to and two they're already doing it what i want to know from you is what out of this evening at the world's best restaurant michel michelin three star restaurants i'm like what was a bit disappointing what was a bit meh and they said the coffee was a bit average you know was nothing special and the beer drinkers probably the chefs who gone along got treated really crap cha compared to the wine drinkers so he goes back to his restaurant and he appoint a coffee somme and a beer and it says your job is not just to benchmark against these people it's to hit it out of the park now if you think about it taking something that's bad about the category not not saying we need to raise our level to the category average but instead doing it spectacularly well something that nobody expecting that was what apple it i would argue okay that's what buck did i don't know if you're buck where where are you in the us yeah i live in texas we we we're big buck guys yeah okay it basically started with an insight around women's restrooms now you could have just had average clean women's restrooms you would have benchmark limited they're like the bloody hole of mirrors at their versailles right i'm i haven't been in them but the men's restrooms are pretty good but the women's ones are apparently sensational and my argument is that you know if you let's see you're a hotel okay everybody will focus on the rack rate and that this and the size of the room and you know so on and so forth have you as a hand a even in a really expensive hotel a laundry experience that isn't a bit of a pain on the ass you know you gotta fill in a form you gotta put in the bag by the way if you get your laundry back they never replace the bag the second day so if you want a second lot of laundry you gotta ring up and ask for another bag in another form okay now what would happen if a hotel if i stayed in the hotel which was i'm not saying you could be totally shit okay as a hotel as long as you have a brilliant laundry service you know apple is you know on a par technologically with other entities but it's sensational good at the emotional component you know buck is what but it's it's it's a thing apart you know uber doesn't have cab that smell of urine i'm not suggesting you can neglect the other stuff but i think what you can do is that when you cause the customer to pay attention to something it consequently becomes more important because it's surprising and because it its attention grabbing it therefore suddenly causes the consumer to completely re weight their utility function now what are my examples would be car rental i don't i don't know if you rent cars at airports presumably occasionally hate doing it yeah exactly hate it that once you've driven out of the car park it's the same shit it doesn't really matter i mean maybe you can make rental return a bit better but let's not worry about that okay i just asked the question why is it that when i book a taxi for a hundred dollars to pick me up from the airport here in london they meet me at arrivals and even push my trolley with luggage to the car park yeah but if i rent a car for six hundred dollars i've got find and cure the car rental desk then i've gotta go and find often in like hundred and ten degree heat i gotta go and find the car and then by the way there is there isn't even an laminate sheet of a four paper in the car saying this is how you open the fuel filler cap this is how you release the hand brake you know there's nothing alright once you're in the car about ten twenty minutes in you start to enjoy it but that initial bit which nobody seems to be measuring is the bit that's terrible now in some cases i would literally happily pay a hundred quid if the deal is we meet you at arrivals okay we take the luggage to the car we handy the keys we answer your questions about how the car works if by the way they also turn the air now you could do this with electric cars if they also turn the air conditioning on ten minutes in advance okay now you've done something which is now there's that thing what what what's that funny thing tour that thing which yeah because it's humans might might be able to create something a bit like that yeah they i i use tour all the time they have a thing where it will the the loner will drive to your home i'm because of that by the way when i rent cars at large american airport at phoenix or someone like that i actually arrive at phoenix take a taxi to the hotel and then book the car the next day because the downtown experience of car rental with no luggage is so much better than the airport experience with luggage you know we asked your a question earlier of like so how do you do it and it sounds like one thing that i'm picking up is you know you pay attention to what irritates you and instead of just complaining about it that's a great source material i think jerry seinfeld us irritation is innovation he i think when he was creating his a his talk show it's because he had been for years he'd been famous he got invited on late night talk shows and he would go it's just if you look at every late night talk show it's the exact same there's the guy at the desk there's the cheesy music there's the band guy that they have you know sort of forced laughter with and when he created comedian and cars getting coffee it was the equivalent of a talk show he's like what's the opposite of everything i hate about those things and then he created something and i think licensed it for like a hundred million dollars to netflix starting with irritation at the way that this thing i was working there's a british show i don't know if this exists in the us called room one zero one i don't know it room one zero one is i think it's from all well it's the room to which you'd bad things that you really want to get rid of and people will come in and just have a rant and it will be everything from you know potholes holes slightly boring choice to come bonds or something similar like that you know peter it's something that people do to think is utterly necessary and needs to be eradicated and your absolutely right irritation is innovation and so one of the things is that i would argue that there in a sense there are two really valuable things one of which is what you might call the meta stuff which is what are you really in the business of now you know n tell and i had this conversation about why you actually buy the things you buy and my joke is you know my jokes were the reason you have a swimming pool isn't to swim in it it's so that you can walk around your garden in a bathing costume without feeling like an idiot okay so on a hot day you can walk outside and and lie outside without wearing many clothes without feeling stupid okay and a dishwasher isn't principally valuable because it washes your crocker plates it's valuable because it keeps them out of sight but when you when you look at these things and go maybe it's not about this maybe it's all about that what you have to acknowledge is two things i think one you gotta let go two hand at once which is what makes it difficult one is economic logic you know if we reduce the price more people will buy it economic logic is has very bad predictive value i think in the you know in consumer behavior and the other thing you've gotta you gotta partly abandon is conventional approaches to market research where you you think that we've asked the customer what it is they want and they will tell us because most of what we feel isn't even thought let alone spoken and and also there are very very large areas of consumer behavior which are there may be meta rational at some level but nobody will ever tell you i would buy that product if it were more expensive but there are plenty of documented cases of exactly that happening i think you your your buddies with the daniel k donovan i didn't yeah and he in his book thinking fast and slow i don't know if you've read that sean but one of his like one of the famous examples was the economist i think it was or something like throughout the d the d they like do this thing where they say you can get the economist for twenty dollars a month and you get all of these things and if you get the other version of the economist you get all of these things plus digital access paper paper only paper plus digital and digital only and paper only and paper versus digital were the same price so you looked at that and your mental frame was if i get the if i get the paper version i'm getting the digital one for free vanishing the few people ordered paper only now if you remove the paper only one so you you know effectively you had digital or digital plus paper vanishing me few people chose the one in the middle but the presence of the middle option increased by about two or three hundred percent the number of people who subscribe to paper plus digital instead of digital it i i think it shifted the ratio from one direction to the other and by the way that's pretty valuable to the economist because my hunch is that their paper circulation is much more valuable in terms of advertising revenue than their digital circulation is one of the best og ads my favorite ad is david og writes this letter and it i think it's called how we write ads at og and he like has this like long maybe thousand or two thousand word essay on like the eighteen points on how they create ads that are effective and some people might be like well why would you give your secret away and he was like well i'm gonna teach them how we think that there's also really interesting aspect in business which is if you give your a secrets away you assume that people will copy you and the old thing is they don't and quite often the reason is they're just culturally incapable of doing it so for example if you point out that physical direct mail is very successful for a business you'd think that your competitors would go well that's a use learning i must do some more of that what you then discover is know actually they're culturally they just find using for example an old fashioned advertising medium simply too difficult to justify or too un unreasonable or whatever it may be to be comfortable with it and so even if you just give away the evidence of how you do what you do what you find is that you're copied much less than you'd expect hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses you said you study how we think or you like to talk about how we think versus what you do let's break that down okay so if i just asked you a very simple question that's probably very broad and you could take it any direction you want how do we think i think what happens is that small businesses family owned businesses to some extent founder led businesses are an exception here what's interesting is simply being able to understand that value is not really produced in the factory it's produced in the mind and that there are two ways of making money you can either make desirable things or you can make things desirable and each of them is as profitable as the other for some reason once the business fit hits a certain size it gets focused on what it does not what it means and i think there's a kind of invisible loss there now similarly at the same time i think those businesses lose the capacity to innovate as well something something rather depressing happens which is you effectively get caught in a mindset where you probably have a mental metaphor for your business you're looking at it as if you're an engineer looking at a piece of machinery and it's reduction it's about optimizing the parts rather than optimizing the whole and at some level i think that model becomes unhelpful but also what happens i think is that you become more and more uncomfortable with uncertainty and this is where it gets quite interesting there's a wonderful story i always tell which is richard t the nobel prize winning economist and behavioral economist the author of na he once spoke to a board of about ten people very large company and he goes to the eight heads of the largest divisions of this company and he asked them all simultaneously a question would you take a decision if it had a fifty percent chance of be increasing our profits next year by fifty percent and a twenty percent chance of reducing your profits by thirty percent and six out of the eight of them said no and fail goes back and says well you know you're all good enough mathematicians i assume to realize these are highly favorable odds to a gambling man you know this is a very very good bet and yet yet you declined to take part why is that and they reply six out of the eight of them because twenty percent of the time or thirty percent of time i'd lose my job and then the interesting thing happens which is the chief executive is sitting at the end of the table and looks a guest at the eight people and goes but i want all of you to take those odds because net net in aggregate we'd almost certainly end up massively better off yes two divisions one division might have a slightly disappointing year but four of them would perform spectacularly and you realize that the way that businesses are structured as you push responsibility and accountability further and further down the organization they become more and more risk ave adverse and they become more and more uncertainty adverse so they would prefer a definite five to ten percent to a prob a fifty percent chance of fifty percent and what happens then is that you fundamentally you become highly conservative you're more worried about downside avoidance than you are upside opportunity and as a result obviously both innovation and marketing i would argue a fat tailed activities where ten percent of what you do is probably more valuable than everything else you know you can't tell in advance which ten percent it's going to be they are processes of exploration and discovery and what you do is you get rid of the discovery layer in the pursuit of efficiency and in the short term it looks like a great idea but in the longer term it's it it proves fatal i think because you've lost the capacity to adapt to reinvent to reposition in pursuit of the occasional or the occasional breakthrough we we have a a very startup up oriented yeah audience of which a lot of people are founder led businesses or or they wanna be so we could talk about like how big companies turned around but what's an example of a startup or small company that you look at and you're like oh they nailed it and here's why they nailed it even though if if this was pitch at a big company this would never have worked but here it is kicking and ass i mean the example that i always feature in my book is red bull which is an example of a business that makes no sense in other words you could only really justify red bull on the basis of intuition there was some pre existing popularity in thailand where i thought i think it was bought by lorry drivers to keep a with eight kip eight k but someone there was capable of making the leap of imagination into into an uncertain future where a drink which cost a lot of money came in a tiny can and research told them consumers basically fund mildly repel k in defiance of all the rational odds this had potential and it's worth noting that generally there's always a lot of data from the past because all big data comes from the past there generally isn't much data about the future there are two problems there one of which is if you insist that every single decision is based on data all your decision making has a status quo bias because all your data comes from the past there isn't any data about the future the second problem that happens is that the the things you tend to focus on tend to be the same things that all your competitors are focused on which means that you un perhaps become more and more similar to every other business in your category which means you become more and more indistinguishable and less and less distinctive which effectively means you get involved in a kind of race to the bottom you create kind of red water competition and one of the things i would say is an almost unveiling trick to innovate both to innovation and to brand building actually is to find the metric which your competitors have neglected which they don't even bother to measure or which is difficult to measure got often it's an emotional metric rather than the you know a time based cost price distance metric what's an example of that but apple in that everybody was asking the question what can a computer do in silicon valley you know in the nineteen seventies and steve asked the question yeah but what does it feel like while you're doing it he asked aesthetic and emotional questions in an industry where everybody was focused on technological questions but another example the uber map is an example of that where riding in an uber is more or less the same as running at any other tech see what uber completely transformed was the experience of booking and waiting for a taxi and by the way at the other end of the journey the experience of paying for it so the uber map whether this was intentional or whether it was just some software guys thinking would be a cute thing to do when you booked a taxi by telephone you rang up having no idea of what the likely availability or wait time would be in many in many cases they say yeah we'll have a curfew few in ten minutes you kinda go it's too early you know you had no idea you had no expectation of car availability and then when you'd booked the car you had no idea when the car was gonna show up and you'd have to hover around on the sidewalk you know waving at any likely looking passing car that appeared to be looking for your address suddenly uber changed all that because it gave you an estimate of availability it gave you an estimate of price it approved your payment in advance and then it showed you an acute map what the license plate number was of the car and where it was and how long it was gonna take to get that the funny part is i think i remember sean and i lived in san francisco when uber first came out and you would pull up your app and be like oh you'd see the cars driving around you and you like oh there's one nearby maybe i could snag it and i don't think that was even real i think they'll the fake i've also heard the same thing about pizza delivery which is when they say it's in the oven you know it's be you know it's being prepared it's in the oven you just have to add probably it's probably in the oven i to be honest i don't think they're actually scanning a barcode on every piece that goes in there is a component to it however which is that if you feel that progress is being made but mcdonald's probably may and kfc probably make a mistake here in that if you order on screen of mcdonald's it basically says in preparation ready for collection and they could probably play a game there where they say you know being prepared you know on the you know on the tray they could give you an impression of forward movements because it's also due with dopamine and and sort of effort and reward and consequently it's a little light if you imagine a chimp hacking away the termite mound if it comes across one or two little termites you know just small pieces of reward it'll keep going it'll feel content to keep on going whereas if you have a long period of effort without any any seeming reward fundamentally the experience is very very different i mean i remember a brilliant case of this and it's simply know it's it's mind hacking i i make no apology for it i probably would defend in court the practice of domino's creating somewhat fictitious delivery cycles of the grounds that it simply makes people feel better now the the the having the car circling around i've heard both stories that they are to some extent accurate or their kind of what you might call their fig so they they they show you car density without actually showing you the accurate actual accurate accurately location of a car i've heard various stories about this there are also by the way elevator buttons at the door close which are placebo buttons so they don't actually speed up the closing of the doors of the elevators at all but they give impatient people in the elevator of eight is something to do is that true or is that a room yeah no no the the it it's effectively the illusion of agency and i'm i'm i'm kinda mixed of this because my argument this gets very complicated i mentioned this my book which is that neuro fan which is it kinda of like advil and there were various variants more expensive than the standard variant which were you know neuro for period pain neuro for cold and flu and these were formulaic in some case his identical to the base product and my problem there is that the psychology of pain relief is so full of placebo effects they're taking something that says four period pain and cost a little bit more will actually reduce for period pain more even though the chemical constituents of the t bolus less the same there are debates about the placebo effect and you know all the way from people who claim that you can do placebo surgery i mean there are people who claim that if you actually attempt to fitted a gastric band then you don't fit the gastric band for whatever reason the person will still lose weight i so there are people who are absolute placebo effect fundamentalist all the way to people who are fairly skeptical but where it's universally agreed is in the area of kind of anal logistics and pain relief psychological factors perception plays a massive role and of course there are forms of pain which are enjoyable this is get a stranger still so if you have if you have a cut on your your shin say and you put some sort of anti theft on it you want it to sting in a way because the sting is evidence of efficacy the fact that it's hurting proves is working and so your reaction to this stinging pain is not entirely discomfort because you've reframe it as this is proof that it's doing its job yeah it's like burning off the the burning off the bad things etcetera and so you know this is where gets really strange but my argument is that nearly all organizations and this is where innovators and and and family owned businesses have an advantage because family owned businesses are for example private end businesses founder led businesses are free to use intuition in a way that publicly held companies aren't because most people in a public held organization feel that everything they do has to be rationally just from the get go now once you do has to be just eventually they probably did doing something which fails decade after decade i get that but the freedom to actually act on hunch to act on intuition to place bets for which there isn't much pre existing evidence is an advantage the entrepreneurial business over the established business because they can explore a much larger solution space hey can i ask you a question on how you got good at this stuff because i know that you're a thought leader when it comes to this stuff but you're are a practitioner for years and i think you're a direct response copywriter well well the story is even better i think you were not in copywriting got fired and came back into the copywriting department and went to the top which is probably a lesson in fit and knowing your strengths and your nature rather than i'm just thinking i'm good or bad now i have to admit it wasn't an accident in that from about week three working as a graduate trainee in og made the direct which was the direct response wing of og david og was a massive advocate of direct response advertising yeah because he believed that you learned what works and he was absolutely right really quick define direct response of people who don't understand gay so his historically and back in nineteen eighty eight when i started work when there was there was an death technically but there was no web it typically meant direct mail and coupon press advertisements or more late or later advertisements with a coupon or a phone number but it was an advertisement which invited the consumer buyer customer interested party to respond directly to an identifiable advertisement so for example like here's one it's like an ad for something and and there'll be a letter and at the end there's like a coupon and it says fill this out and tell us you wanna buy you this vacuum and the coupon would have a dotted line around it with a pair of scissors to encourage people to cut it out or indeed to rip it out and put in their pocket what would happen is on that coupon there would also be a code at u be asked to quote the code if you telephone which related both to the creative execution and the media placement of the ad now bear mind in i think certainly in the nineteen twenties possibly in the nineteenth century long before medicine and science had grasped that there was such a thing as a randomized control trial the am advertising industry had started testing this kind of thing ages ago direct response copyright would for example test headlines by running small classified advertisements at very low cost each with a different little headline in a you know in an size of a couple of postage stamps and they would they would learn which one got more responses and they would therefore when it came to doing more expensive large full page advertisements they'd use the headline that had worked in miniature but what had happened and i assume this was at the be of advertisers but i don't know for sure is that newspapers in the united states and the united kingdom when they produced newspapers they were printed on two or sometimes four parallel presses just to produce the number of newspapers you needed now when these newspapers came off the presses they were inter leave so it wasn't all the newspapers from from printing press a went to north boston and all the all the newspapers from printing press b went to south boston the output from the two presses was inter leave a bit like shuffling a deck of cards what that meant was you could run one advertisement in on press air and a different advertisement on press b and you'd created a randomized control trial where effectively which of the two advertisements you saw was effectively random in other words you and your neighbor might well get a different adverse advertisement but it solved that problem where have you not done that into leaving you might have had a case where all the rich people got one adverse and all the poor people got another and of course statistically then the result wouldn't be very very valid and because of this threat response advertisers endlessly tested both creative changes and indeed media selection they'd find that one medium would work you know four times better than another and one creative execution would work twice as well as another and sometimes very very small changes would make enormous differences so for years this would have run from something like the nineteen thirties to the nineteen fifties there was advertisement for a correspondence course which basically taught people to write more dramatically and the headline was originally do you make mistakes in english then someone out of the word these do you make these mistakes in english which then peaks the curiosity of the reader so they want to know whether the whether they're the mistakes that they're making and then somebody else added the word do you make these common mistakes in english which des the idea that if you're making these mistakes you're an and so you would actually have in direct response businesses levels of testing at that level of kind of of detail and the reason that's so important is that what you realize is that in psychology there are butterfly effects all over the place you can do surprisingly small trivial things and they make an inordinate difference to how people respond how they emotionally respond and consequently how they behave and in many cases that means whether they buy or whether they don't buy and so consequently long before there was behavioral economics there was direct response advertising and in fact anybody who works in direct response advertising would have gone to one of those early practitioners in behavioral economics that said yeah we've done that for years right and i'll i'll give you an example this is it's something like nineteen ninety one ninety ninety two and i'm working on direct response advertising for the phone company and we simply were offering people the chance to pay a couple of pounds a month extra to receive what what called star services i think in the united states network services which is you could have call diversion you could have call waiting on your phone and you could have something else wake up call or something like that and and if you've paid a certain them amount monthly these facilities added to your home phone line and we read people letters and it said either send back the pre laser coupon below in the in the postage paid envelope or call this number and quote code begin the choice of post or phone and we had a slightly bonkers client who didn't want to offer the postal response i don't know why i'm no idea why to this day okay and so we said well let's test it that let's not just get rid of a coupon response because that's dangerous because you know if you know if if you don't test this rigorously you could end up effectively damaging your business grow significantly on a whim and simply tested three kinds letters fifty thousand people each randomized completely randomized selection as with the newspapers and one lot got postal only one lot got phone only and one lot as before got the choice of phone or post post only five percent response rate phone only two percent response rate when you offer people a choice it was just it seven percent not quite but almost nearly i think the sum total of the of the two independent response rates that that may not surprise strike use all that weird but to an economist this would be completely baffling because it would suggest that the more important factor affecting whether you bought the product was not what the product was or how much it cost but how you were able to actually order it and from that moment on i remember thinking okay this is extraordinary because every now and then there are almost certainly brilliant businesses which are failing because they failed to unblock some sort of psychological bottleneck in this case the psychological bottleneck map might have been that you know all you know people just hated using the phone to order something and you could have rationally spent millions of millions and millions of pounds trying to improve the product or to spend ages demonstrating what a great product it was and yet if you fail at one psychological hurdle you can do yourself and so it's very painful i when people say how'd do you get good at this stuff i'll tell you i'll tell you my one trick which is i think i have adhd broadly speaking i'm not very interested in the middle of things so i'm interested in looking at a question from a deep philosophical level and i'm interested in trivia i'm not really interested in as in the in the middle because i think in complex systems there are two things you can do you can tinker with the details and achieve surprisingly valuable responses or you can effectively come up with a new paradigm for what you're doing it's very similar to direct response advertising where the rule is you either test one thing or you test everything so in direct response advertising this will go back to the nineteen twenties the nineteen thirties is people like you know claude hopkins and the early kind of practitioners of scientific advertising as they like to call it which is you know you either test the single word or you come up with a completely different advertisement with a different visual if you test five things you can't be sure which one of the five is making a difference okay so you've probably have heard this on the podcast but if you're running a company i think that the number one attribute that will determine if you are gonna succeed in business is how fast you can learn from others specifically hop fast you can learn from other entrepreneurs but there's a problem with that i have this problem and in fact you probably have it too that's one of the reasons why you listen to my first million in the first place the problem is that finding other successful entrepreneurs to learn from it's a pain in the butt and so that's why a few years ago i started a company called hampton you can check it out at join hampton dot com we have thousands of members and they exist for this exact reason so here's how it works if you're a founder that does at least three million in revenue and you make it through our incredibly thorough vetting process we then match you and put you in a group with nine other entrepreneurs you meet in real life in your city once a month and it becomes your peer group that will frankly change your entire life it's change mine i'm in the group as well and so if you're a founder that does at least three million in your revenue check out join hampton dot com again the url is join hampton dot com you know you've said a couple of things that i i think are pretty fascinating the first one that i wrote down was competing on a different dimension so you mentioned the taxi versus uber example and i love this because if you just sat down with a piece of paper you gave somebody a creative assignment you said abe make a better taxi they would almost always focus on the ride the cost of the ride would be the first if i could make it way cheaper that would be great if i make it way faster that would be great if i could make it way more premium in some way the ride and what you pointed out was that there was a psychological bottleneck that was preventing people from doing it when uber first came out i remember people thought it was over valued and i was living in san francisco they were raising money and they were doing this analysis of what percentage of the taxi market if uber made up twenty five percent if it if it took fifty percent market share of the taxi market and what ended up happening was in san francisco alone uber tripled the taxi market within a couple of years i have a very brilliant friend who had the idea for effectively dynamic market in transportation before uber actually he patented something before uber did and he has a letter responding to his idea from guy kawasaki which said i can't really see this working in the united states he said americans don't take taxis very much maybe in new york and actually when you think about it pre uber you know la was a motor market if you were if you had a car and it was a public transport market if you didn't it the taxi market was was relatively small new york chris new york obviously that new york cab were a major thing but you're absolutely right everybody was looking at it is if it was purely cannibal an existing market now what the economists and what the harvard business review would say is that they achieved this through lower prices i don't think they did i don't think uber was actually reliably cheaper necessary right okay i think they achieved it through better psychology and the example i had of what i call these are the sort of fat tailed jeff bezos puts in very well he says you know in baseball the most you score is for but in business you can hit a thousand and i think that the fear of uncertainty and the and the unwillingness to experiment in business is causing people to endlessly try and sort of hit singles and at the expense of occasionally drawn ahead a thousand but how do i like sean and i are both business owners like how do we go from being academic and also looking at past results in analyzing past results because what's interesting is like you guys were talking about uber if you read their c deck even they said they're like we think that you know if we knock it out the park this might make a hundred million dollars a year you know now they make hundreds of millions every week what can you tell me where for the next week or two weeks i can shift my thinking and create a framework or something like this where i can go and deploy this stuff on my team maybe a habit or a question i can start asking myself an action i can take to get this sort of different happen of thinking you i'll give you a real world example i worked on american express which is probably david og always said if you want to be a copywriter spend the first five or six years your life working in direct response because you learn what works you also learn what matters you also learn what not to leave out i'll give you an example of that you know if you are selling a product by mail order and the coupon did not say somewhere expect your product within twenty eight days or it will be sent to you by post within twenty eight days you'd probably have the number of people ordering because you've now created uncertainty you you've now created a degree of ambiguity so it also it also taught your attention to detail actually in advertising which i think a lot of mainstream advertising misses which is that's all very well and good you've made a wonderful claim you've changed people's minds about something but actually if you want them to act they require a far greater degree of certainty than could offer be achieved in just a post or tv ad so it was a it was a brilliant training working on american express was probably the best account you could possibly work on in the sense that they do a bit of everything it's a brilliant brand but it also is a very very professional direct marketing operation and they do everything they do member get member they do car member communications they do acquisition communications you know etcetera you know you know all matter of stuff david og by the way always wanted american express to do a very simple thing which they never have the courage to do which was to write a letter which basically said take out the american express card and if you aren't happy if you don't want to keep it after your first year will refund you double the fee and nobody ever had the courage to do it i still think it would actually it would work but here was the interesting thing working on american express there are little things that american express did like putting members on the card which cost nothing but have been worth an american express people have told me this have been worth billions of dollars to american express since the card was started people are more reluctant to cancel because they don't want to you know rejoin and go back to year zero if you like you know you know i'm sixty years old if i a card with med since twenty four on it it doesn't quite say the same thing as member since ninety three or whatever ninety five million okay so that was a tiny little bit of psychology which cost absolutely nothing but it also is a testament to the kind of relationship they have which is you we're you know you're a card member we don't just issue your a card from one year to the next you know we can you know it's a it's an information that they're in a relationship with you but here's something that was it was client idea know not i'm although the agency helped but it was a client idea this is the late eighties early nineties we're encouraging people to get the american express gold card which was pretty expensive i mean was something like eighty pounds back in the eighties and we wrote long long letters explain all rational reasons where you want the gold card you know and this client i think had the leap of intuition which was people wanted the bloody gold card anyway k it's the late eighties right you know it's a you know an area a period of fairly cons ridiculous consumption and is it they want this car anyway you know to be honest we could just say it's a great looking cart yeah people would play the reason they're on applying is fear of rejection and so he managed to find a way in which you could actually say all you need do to receive your card apply for your card but receive your card is sign your name on this form what we know about you suggest you're virtually pre approved for membership and the reason we made this so simple is we want you as a card member now think about the difference there psychologically between applying to yale and getting a letter from yale saying we want you to a apply right okay or or think of it in dating terms you're interested in the girl or a bloke okay and the difference in terms of your thought patterns if you thought that person was interested in you but by the way there is i don't know if you read the rules by i i think all the game by neil strauss actually out the pickup artist community is it's an interesting book brother look at us we've been we study i you should see us when are fourteen okay we not only did we read that there's more highlighted parts than there aren't but the interesting thing is it's actually for most guys effectively proposition everybody you fancy is a workable strategy most people can't bring themselves to dead because of fear of rejection it fundamentally most people haven't got the you know the bar to just chat up and proposition everybody they fancy because you know you'll get a ten percent hitting maybe a five percent ten percent hit rate which is of course all you need but nonetheless it comes at the cost of you know significant dense to the the ego i'm very much an amateur historian and like two major takeaways have had from reading hundreds of history books is human nature has been the same and will always be the same and so you can just copy other the people who have done something or being be heavily inspired by them and the second thing is that when humans talk to each other we use these phrases like well just be rational just be this like don't be an animal like just be rational and it's like well we are animals we are not rational people and therefore you can't use logic in order to build something or you can't use too much logic in order to like build something great humans are like very irrational beans it's very interesting because this idea that you should this is not to say that rationality isn't valuable it's question of when you deploy it and david hu the philosopher said reason is and should only be the slave of the passions now there's a great book by french mathematician called david be called mathematical where he argues used that very little progress in mathematics is actually made logically what mathematicians do is they use maths to sense check their dreaming effectively it's brought in to correct your emotional behavior when it goes wrong but actually the idea that in business that the explanation of a decision is more important than the out come of the decision to your career that the def defense ability of a decision is what you're really focused on not the act the quality of the outcome of the decision what that means is that you're effectively saying you cannot use intuition which is a bit like going to a detective and saying you can only use information which has value you can't use gossip you can't use anecdote you can't use intuition you can't use a hunch you can't use you know your sense of smell as it were you can only use evident value to arrive at to to actually solve a crime and it massively limits your ability to solve complex problems because what what your intuition is telling you to do is where to focus your attention and in the case you know in the case of crime you might ask a very open ended question did anybody notice anything unusual last night between the hours of eight and ten pm now very open question all someone will say is a weird man drove past in a white van or something k doesn't you know no evident value but it tells you what to investigate next and if you demand that every single business decision is based on stepping stones of of pure pre existing data and logic you can only get to about five of the possible twenty five places where a solution might be found and the places you'll get to will all already be occupied by your closest competitors because they're using the same stepping stones you are why why didn't you ever wanna start a your own company you you you have all these like crazy cool ideas well there is one which i did inspire which is a coffee brand called flat white or golf wait wait wait hold on did you say you created a coffee called it exists it it might currently be in some sort of legal dispute about the trademark not with me i'm happy for them to take somebody trademarked off somebody else had this idea let let me let me explain the idea okay it's it strike me that there were places where you wanted a high quality cover coffee but you didn't want to queue behind people who are all customizing their own bloody drinks and the technology would contact this payment now allows you to basically tap pick up a coffee which has been made in advance and walk off and my argument is that the flat white which is a new zealand slash australian invention with which is i think the right ratio of coffee to milk and with micro as well i think i think it's basically the you know it it's the happy medium of sensible coffee drinking and this is quite interesting because my assumption was that the place to put this is they only have two versions for the vegans there's an oat flat white and there's a regular milk flat white you walk up you tap your card you pay four pounds you pick up a pre made coffee in wall off and my logic was at the time train stations and airports were the natural home for this thing they're expensive real estate so the fact that you can sell more coffees than a given time it's henry four applied coffee basically okay the argument is that starbucks and the customization and the time is absolutely wonderful if you're in downtown santa fe and you're meeting a friend for two hours but it's not suited to airports railway so anyway this thing launches it's only it's only at the trial stage at the moment but something really interesting happened which is shortly after we launched and got some publicity someone came to us and said actually the natural market for this isn't even train stations and railway stations it's conferences quite often the coffee at a business conference is rubbish because it's it's badly made filter coffee because you have to serve a lot of people simultaneously or you have a customizable coffee thing right where there's a massive queue because everybody comes out of the p session they all want a coffee so they've got something to hold in their hand and not look like an idiot which is one of the reasons we buy coffee by the way doesn't to do with drinking it it's effectively access ourselves okay and the point about flat white or off is its high quality coffee not crappy filter coffee that you can produce at scale by simply reducing the customization level here's where is interesting henry ford was a brilliant marketer why did he say you can have every any color as long as it's black because at the time paint dried at differing speeds depending on the color and therefore if you had a variety of pink colors on the ford production line it completely messed up the flow of the production line because some cars would take longer to drier than others and it turned out that black was the fastest drying color so they basically imposed black on the hole ford fled so it's absolutely fine not to give people something to ask people to make a trade off so long as you make them aware of the trade off in advance okay that's why it's called flat white off off it doesn't you if you turned up at a branch of starbucks and they said we we only serve flat whites right you go what the hell he's talking about no no now i want a f cappuccino with you know almond milk can mean blah blah no no okay no you can't have that it's you know now the reason called flat white off off is it makes explicit the trade off before someone turns up so you if anybody the joke is if anybody turns up and ask for a cappuccino you pointed the logo and you say the answer in the name right now there's an example of this which was fascinating to me and you're fan of the mo hotel chain oh i stated once in new york they're like a kind of upscale like kind of more modern contemporary type of chain so it's quite interesting because the rooms are tiny there's no rub service there's no laundry okay but the grand floors is kind of a bit like a well a a solvent we work right and you there's a ready for our barista there's a you know you know there's a usually there's some making really quite good cocktails you're checking at the bar you don't check you know the con the checking desk there isn't a concierge none of that bo okay don't go stay down your honeymoon don't go stay there for a week but if you've got one or two nights to stay in a place it's exactly what you want okay it's small room very good tv very good wifi the other great advantages after you've checked out in the morning and had breakfast to be honest you can hang out there for another five hours if you want to you know whereas if you try doing that the conventional hotel you'd you'd feel a bit unwanted it's it's it's basically a brilliant brilliant explicit trade off and they always said when i spoke to them they said basically ninety percent of our customers love this and the reason they love us is either because they've stayed before they understand the trade off and they buy into it or else they know about how the mo works and they get the deal are they've decided in advance that's the trade off i want ten percent of their customers are expecting the marriott and their pissed off as hell and it's a classic example of actually you know expectation minus reality you know is the formula that matters you can provide less of something so long as you don't actually disappoint right have you seen the slate truck yes what is it so it's an absolutely minimalist electric vehicle it's about twenty five thousand dollars and you can effectively customize it with all manner of sort of automotive bling but but but the the core trade off is up front they're like there's no heat seater there's no screens there's just knobs you gotta crank the window yourself is basic we're not filling it up with stuff but it's if you want simplicity and you want the price to be it's a twenty five thousand dollar electric pickup and you're just not gonna get all this random junk that every car company puts in we're not doing that so it was absolutely explicit and in a sense that's what you know avi with where number two so we try harder this is you know don't okay we don't have the scale of the other guys but we make up for it somewhere else and the consumer very happy making trade offs so long as they're explicit the problem with a lot of kind of cost reduction and you know and efficiency pursuit in business is it isn't chosen by the consumer it's imposed on them which is a very very different thing but no the slate truck is a brilliant example of what you might call explicit minimalism but but it's brilliant they they under did the competition where everybody else tries to overdo the competition and they were just very explicit about it and it resonated like crazy i mean i put i mean i've no i would have never bought a pickup truck and i put a deposit they put a deposit if you really didn't help it i i love what they i love what they're all about and if i'm right i think they'll discover something really valuable interestingly which is everybody's talking about the idea that cars become shareable now i would share my slate truck with anybody else right you know what's the worst that happens they vomit it if i have to hose it done and right i'm not gonna share my my existing car with anybody right i don't even don't even let my wife drive it right and so you know what of the what they'll do when you do these eccentric things as with discovering that f or f o is a is a is an absolute gods sent for conference organizers what you often do when you do something eccentric is that you plan and you do your you know cost and analysis in your feasibility study but generally when you do something unusual you discover that your target audience is actually bigger than you expected and also it's bigger than you expected because you don't have the same competitors that everybody else starts you know if you think about the marriott versus the hampton inn versus the double tree versus the hilton it's all kinda like okay right whereas the distinct do you know what mo but why the mo is called the mo it's because the project was called marriott on generation x and why and so it was called project mo and then never got rad coming up with a new neck and it fuck the way but the interesting thing is i'm old right i'm sixty but my wife and i my wife sixty one okay cradle snatch and shit you know we both we both choose that as i said you know five days you know you know maybe five days a bit too long sale amongst if you've got any one or two or three nights day it's what we go for because actually i'm not quite a boomer i think i what of i probably german between gen x and boom i mean anyway but mean i'm way outside their intended target audience and so you know it's very interesting if you focus on one target audience you'll generate generally find that as a byproduct of your focus you'll find incremental target audiences who by the way but just very interesting in terms of tech because there's a lot of tech out there which is really valuable to the old okay but the problem is you can't market explicitly to old people because then young people won't buy it so cars from you if you take someone of the volkswagen golf the average age of a volkswagen golf buyer who's buying a new golf is probably about fifty nine but when they advertise they show fifty nine year old they show you know twenty eight year old or thirty three year old or whatever and so quite often you have this very interesting thing that old people are quite badly served by marketing because marketing is always really eager to show the product in the hands of young people and there are covered several examples of this one of which is bone conducting headphones i don't now they're marketed at jog and swimmers and the idea is that if you have bone conducting headphones when you go jogging you don't lose all spatial awareness and run in front of a bus because your air your ear holes are still open and all the sound is transmitted through effectively the bones that transmitted to the bones in your inner ear absolutely brilliant for people with hearing loss because it bypass the stir and the an and whatever it is inside the air which are the bits that deteriorate when you get older and the sand goes straight basically to your oral nerves absolute gods sent to old people no old people know about this and the other one is actually i've got one here the samsung folding phone okay sorry bloody cameras wandered off there we are got that zooming in like so okay but this folding phone k there's a secondary market there in anybody over sixty because the standard mobile phones handset said is too fucking small you know once your eyesight is you know goes a bit i've at a cataract operation k your standard phone handset is pretty much unusable so there's a whole little of tech out there which really intriguing me because it's actually brilliant for older people but they just aren't told about it hey can i ask you one last question you you're you seem very well read very ec i have this og on advertising book but if i wanted to get better at writing copy but also coming up with ideas and frameworks can you suggest a few books that i can read some of okay some of them are very old obvious adams robert up graph published in nineteen sixteen where it you can read it basically on a single toilet visit it's about fifty sixty pages i'm delighted so say i think amazon keep reprint it or somebody keeps reprint it obvious adams the story of a successful businessman got it now when you first start reading it you'll think jesus this is a bit corny okay but it was one of david og these favorite books and it's actually about an advertising man and has his approach to problem solving and everybody it really delight me because every now and then i mentioned on a podcast and it goes to like number one in advertising books on hammers amazon uk i was i always take a bit of a thrill for this because this guy died in about nineteen forty eight you know and these books still influencing people and there's another great one called the specialist but i think charles sale these are some of these old american business books which are absolutely prices scientific advertising by claude hopkins for example there's a book called how to become an advertising man by james webb young who is at jay thompson in chicago for many years now there are the great books obviously in behavioral science richard sc has written some superb book school for example the choice factory or the illusion of choice and they're really really worth reading in terms of understanding the counterintuitive maturity of aspects of human psychology if you learn okay they i really really recommend them i also recommend you just read widely i'm missing tale is one of my biggest influences because i think differently about statistical things now i realized that the real world is actually fat tailed it's not a normal distribution and that you know a small number of things have a disproportionate amount of par in terms of writing david og be obviously anything by him is very very good not least because he's a very very good writer of books as well as a very good writer advertisements there's also a which is desperately difficult to get hold of called the copy handbook published by dna in the uk but unfortunately that you have to buy on ebay and they never did a reprinted it's about three hundred quid but see if you can find that because it's great copyright writers describing how they write dr bird a british he's kind of the british version of lester wonder and indirect marketing various books for example common sense direct marketing there's a great book published by og vehicle that i think it's called how to write this is how to write in business from one business person to another it's not so much about copywriting but the guy there was joel russell and ken roman wrote it they were too og v very senior people i knew joel the other reason i'm really i'm suggesting old books is that an awful lot of things in advertising stop being used this is why i've suggest to anybody here listening to their student an entrepreneur go and look at some advertising archaeology and the reason is that advertising people just as engineers want to impress other engineers advertising creative want to impress other advertising creative which means they want to do something that's brand new never been done before them actually loads of things get discarded by the advertising industry which never stop working long copy press advertising never stop working direct mail never stop working jingle never stop working although you have to call it sonic branding now and one thing that's fascinating me which never stopped working it just became un fashionable if you go to the nineteen fifties there are a lot of advertisements which are cartoon strips right you know they're like half page quarter page cartoon stories with people speaking in speech bubbles david og always said look that is the single most readable form of print if you put anybody down it with a newspaper they'll read the comic strips first and yet for some reason it was massive until the nineteen fifties is even the nineteen sixties lots of advertising took that form where you told a story in print and for whatever reason nobody's doing it now here's what's interesting okay what are kids into dow it's manga right if you actually wanted to reach young people ironically reverting to this nineteen fifties form of advertising where it's effectively okay it'll have to be you know differently illustrated maybe but it's effectively manga would be about the coolest thing you could do this is the fascinating thing and as david og said you're not advertising to a standing army or advertising to a moving parade and new new customers you know new members of new target audiences are are appearing all the time who aren't aware of the things that the people born ten years earlier already now and so the opportunity i think to literally be innovative by simply learning from the past because the advertising industry is very bad at it now as david know we would say you have to you you sometimes you had to break the rules but you had to know the rules in order to break them if you ever what mean you had to be aware of the fact you're breaking a rule and you had to have a good reason to do it that was fine you are you're a funny hang well hope it's been useful well i feel like we did maybe twenty percent of what what i think we could have talked about and so i think the i think we're repeat i'm very happy to do repeat dude have like all these notes i'm about like run my marketing team i'm being like do all this bye that was awesome total pleasure and time really delighted i feel like i could rule the world and i know i could be what i want to apartment at all in it like a day off on a less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break just talk about a podcast because if you're listening to this you like podcast and what's better than one podcast another podcast and let me tell you another podcast you should check out it's called success story if you like hearing about different success stories and hearing q and a sessions with successful business leaders or hearing keynote presentations or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics this is a great podcast for you so check it out 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