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Martin Bihl: This Playground Brought to You by Miller Brewing Company
18 Plays25 days ago
In this episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, Eric Pratum speaks with Martin Bihl — writer, strategist, podcaster, and self-described “recovering ad man.” Known for his sharp wit and reflective takes on marketing, media, and the human condition, Martin challenges conventional thinking about creativity, capitalism, and the culture of business.
The conversation explores how advertising both reflects and shapes our shared values — from branded playgrounds to the myth of the “creative genius.” Martin shares his experience navigating agency life, why he created The Agency Review to critique the industry from within, and how his contrarian curiosity fuels his writing and podcast You’re On Mute.
Together, they discuss the interplay between thinking and doing, why “strategy” has become theater, and what we might learn by viewing business less as a machine and more as a story — one that tells us who we are and what we believe.
Topics Explored
- Why marketing isn’t just persuasion — it’s identity construction
- How capitalism commodifies attention, meaning, and play
- The myth of the “creative” and the illusion of originality
- Why the line between art, commerce, and morality keeps blurring
- The difference between thinking strategically and theatrically
- How irony and sincerity coexist in modern branding
- The role of critique — and why we need more of it inside the industry
Links
- Connect with Martin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinbihl/
- Visit Martin’s website: https://www.martinbihl.com
- The Agency Review: https://the-agency-review.com
- Martin’s article on thinking and doing: https://www.martinbihl.com/business-thinking/i-think-i-can-alternative-business-strategy
- McDonald’s milkshake story by Clayton Christensen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXYm-CVzPQ0
- You’re On Mute podcast: https://www.martinbihl.com/youreonmutethepodcast
For More Episodes
Visit: https://unfoldingthought.com
Questions or guest ideas: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
Martin's Advertising Journey
00:00:02
Speaker
Martin, thank you for joining me. Where does today's recording find you? Yeah, I'm here in beautiful St. Louis, Missouri. moved here two half years ago. used to live out here in the late ninety s so Can you give me sort of the CliffsNotes version of your career and where it's led to you and what it is that you're doing today?
00:00:24
Speaker
So I was born on a small island off the coast of America. um My father was in advertising. My grandfather was in advertising. um i was I didn't want to go in advertising um because I have more respect for people who go into businesses that they did not learn at the dinner dinner table.
00:00:42
Speaker
right like I don't know if you've encountered this, but like I always used to think when I was younger, oh, you know, doctors are, you know, smart or lawyers are smart. And then you like go hang out with them and they're like, this guy's a doctor. Well, his parents are doctors and his uncles and aunts are doctors and everybody he knows
The Art of Mind-Reading in Advertising
00:01:00
Speaker
is a doctor. And so he basically got like a pre-med education, you know, from the time he was born. And same thing with lawyers. or all but lawyers So I was like, I'm going to go and do something different. But I sort of stumbled back into advertising. I was doing production at a shop in Connecticut and I started asking questions about who the target is and what the media was. And they were like, so, uh, I went back and advertising and I mean, I don't, I love advertising. I'm fascinated by it. I think that the,
00:01:29
Speaker
the idea of trying to figure out what people really mean and what they really want and what they really need, despite what they're telling you, um, is, is endlessly fascinating. You know, as I was teaching advertising at a school at a university once and halfway through the semester, students said, ah, so, so what you're saying is you're trying to figure out what's in people's heads.
00:01:52
Speaker
And it was like, yeah. And he goes, wow, that's hard. but that was like, Yeah, but it's that's what's interesting. and then like And then using all those symbols and elements that they're that they're using district tell themselves, this is what they think, or this is what they believe in order to do something else. I've, that to me is just an endlessly fascinating exercise. And, and, um, even if the tactics change, even if things like, you know, AI show up or whatever, it's still, it's still about that.
Role of Strategy and Writing in Advertising
00:02:25
Speaker
And so anyway, so I'm, yeah, I'm fascinated by And that's what I've been doing for much of my life. Um, in ah New York and Connecticut and St. Louis and a bit you know then freelancing in Dallas and Chicago and for agencies around country and around the world. and For me,
00:02:44
Speaker
And the only way to evaluate creative work is by evaluating it against a strategy, and and most people aren't strategic. So i've sort of I didn't intend to become a strategist.
00:02:55
Speaker
um I just was sort of ended up filling a void um the you know because I'm interested in why people do what they're doing and thinking about that kind of stuff and making sure that we have the right question that we're trying to answer um because there's nothing that will make bad work.
00:03:11
Speaker
faster than the wrong answering the wrong question properly am i recalling correctly that you know your specialty if i can call it that or you know if you're executing work you're developing work hands-on that you have more of a copywriting background than something else is that right Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm i'm i <unk> a copywriter by trade, trim and I'm pretty good copywriter.
00:03:40
Speaker
um I've been an art director. um I've been a production person. I've been in a lot of different...
00:03:50
Speaker
roles, all of which was good in order to help me become a better creative director because I sort of had a sense of some of a lot of those things and enough to that I could recognize when something wasn't working or when something was working.
00:04:02
Speaker
Um, um, or when I wasn't getting through and then figuring out who I needed to talk to in order to help articulate that stuff better. But yeah, my background is as a copywriter. I mean, I'm a writer first and foremost. I think if I had to define myself, um, in any role, um,
00:04:20
Speaker
And again, that's one of the things that's fascinating say about advertising is figuring out how the words make people, you know, think about things. So, yes, i'm ah I'm a writer by trade.
00:04:31
Speaker
And did you say that writing was your father's specialty as well? Or no, did you just say that he worked in advertising? Yeah, he was a writer as well. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, he's the one who, who I mean, um who first sort of...
00:04:50
Speaker
clued me into certain things about writing that
00:04:56
Speaker
made me aware of what was possible. you know, sort of put me on that first path of like, ah you know, you you read stuff and you're just reading it because you're just consuming content. And and occasionally person will say, well, but look, it's doing this or here's how it's structured or here's what's going on. go,
00:05:12
Speaker
wow, I had no idea. And then you sort of, i can point to sort of point things along my life where those things were sort of revealed either by teachers or or by by books or something like that. But yeah, he was ah he was a writer. He wrote um as a copywriter for agencies like um uh, Leo Burnett and, um, uh, some others in, in the sixties and in New York. And, and my grandfather who was in advertising, he was actually a color separator back in the day at at an agency called, among others called Blackett Sample, uh, who invented the soap opera, um, in Chicago, but he was a color separator. So he would look at, um, and, uh, you know,
00:05:55
Speaker
proofs and say, no, we need more red here, more, you know, green here or something like that, which i always thought was fascinating because his father, and this is at the point, I guess, where the most of the listeners have already turned off, um his father,
00:06:10
Speaker
So that'd be my great-grandfather. He worked in the steel mills in Chicago. And his job was to look at the steel when it was in the furnace and figure out if it was hot enough and whether it should be taken out. And he did that by looking at the color. always thought it was interesting that my great-grandfather looked at color in terms of steel in order to make decisions.
00:06:30
Speaker
And then he sort of, in a way, passed that on to my grandfather, who had a white-collar job in your office, but doing that with sort of print. And then my father didn't go on the art side or the production side, but was interested in advertising and took that a step, you know, sort of a step further.
00:06:47
Speaker
So I always find that interesting. I find that really interesting, you know, and to... To find some of those threads now and then, it can be really fascinating.
00:07:01
Speaker
So did you end up as a copywriter by trade through, you you know wanting to be a creative writer? There are a lot of copywriters out there who you know, have that novel in them and they've never written it. Or were you drawn to writing for some other reason?
00:07:22
Speaker
So let me, there's a bunch of things in that. Let me take sort of the simplest one, and I think, to answer. So, um, no, I don't have a novel in my drawer.
00:07:33
Speaker
Uh, I'm, I'm not a fiction writer. I learned that in college when I was a writer, where I was a writing major. um but I learned that I'm not any good at, at, um,
00:07:46
Speaker
Although I read a lot of fiction, I'm not even good at writing fiction, really. um As a professor, ah when we moved out here, you know you have to go through all the stuff in your old house and sort of figure out what you're keeping, and what you're going to move, and stuff like that. And so I went through all these old papers, and I found this paper that from from a writing class in college.
00:08:06
Speaker
And the teacher had written on it, you're more interested in ideas than you are in people. and i And she was talking about the stuff in the story, but I was like, you know.
00:08:16
Speaker
There's a lot of truth beyond the word, get to the page of that. um And so, yeah, so I was never, i realized I was never a fiction person and I was a novelist, and and but I was always ah interested in essayists and essays. And George Orwell was a huge ah influence um in the way he would construct stuff.
00:08:35
Speaker
And um so I was... um I became, felt that was sort of the way somebody would say, that sort of writing is sort the way that I connect with the world. helps me figure things out. It helps me express things. that help me learn helps me learn things.
00:08:49
Speaker
um and And writing in advertising, despite ah the world being a sort of a visual visual first world, um there's so ah there's a lot of room for writing in advertising. And a lot of it has to do with, in a very simple way,
00:09:10
Speaker
when I try to teach advertising, and try to explain print ads to students. First, I have to explain to them what magazines were, which I explained as I say, like so a magazine is like a website that you can hold in your hands.
00:09:25
Speaker
And they go, oh okay, that makes sense. um But in print, the visual gets the attention, but the copy makes the argument, right?
00:09:37
Speaker
generally speaking, right? If you sort start from there, then yes, you can break those rules however you want to, but that's sort of generally how it works. And I think the same thing is also true when you're at an agency and you're writing a deck or whatever, you're there's a lot of writing that is explaining why we're doing what we're doing, what we're thinking about, why this idea does what it does. it sort of helps people get from A to B to c um That is you know extremely useful. And I've done that.
00:10:00
Speaker
I've written decks. I've written decks for design verbs because they're like, yeah, you just explain to people what they're looking at. and Sure, no problem. So to me, there's always been a role for writing that's been fascinating in advertising, even if it's not the stuff that winds up in the actual
Marketing vs Advertising: A Business Perspective
00:10:18
Speaker
ad. So, you know, you know that social media has an interesting relationship with copy, you know, um, out of home, um,
00:10:29
Speaker
It has a limited role. When I was working in sales promotion and, you know, you're writing these things, you're creating these campaigns are going to be literally in retail point of sale, you don't have a lot of time to explicate a problem an idea so um despite those sort of limitations there's a lot of uh stuff that i found fascinating about writing within within the agency world within advertising so do you differentiate between marketing and advertising when you're describing your work or are you using advertising as you know
00:11:04
Speaker
Yes, there may be things that you have done that often are are not advertising per se. You're really just referring to the industry as advertising.
00:11:15
Speaker
Or do you view your experience as being largely advertising, you know, more promotion focused? Hmm, that's interesting. um
00:11:28
Speaker
I probably... refer to it as advertising just because, as a sort of more general universal term, if I dig into it a bit, mean, I think that if I talked about marketing, and I've taught marketing ah universities, um to me that always feels like it's more on the business side, right? It's more like what the clients are doing, right? And and And then I the same thing with communications. I mean, to communications, it's it's a corporate approach. it's it's a different It's a slightly different discipline. I think that the Venn diagram for those things all overlaps significantly, of course.
00:12:05
Speaker
um And I gestured overlapping in case nobody listening knew what the word overlapping meant. Sorry. um But I... um But i don't because of that overlapping, I don't think you can do advertising without thinking about marketing. Or let me clarify that.
00:12:21
Speaker
I think a lot of agencies do advertising without thinking about marketing. I don't believe you can do successful advertising without doing a lot of marketing. Because the marketing is fundamentally, if I'm sort of parsing this through right now, um...
00:12:37
Speaker
It's about the business problem. And and the point I have always made to every agency I've been at has been that, you know, advertising isn't just, you know, hey, we'll do some funny ad and people will laugh.
00:12:53
Speaker
It's really about, it's a tool that uses creativity to solve business problems, right? And and so it's so it's a different way. There are business ways of thinking about things. There are financial ways of thinking about things. And I think there are creative ways. Not that business is not creative, not that finance is creative, but I think that there are creative, you know, if you think about creativity.
00:13:14
Speaker
And there are ways to sort of ah take that approach and and apply it to creativity. solving business problems. And I, and so that's a wise reason that I um often asking business questions when I'm in the room with clients and asking them wanting to understand their business better. And I'll go to factory floors or I'll, you know, um, want to understand the competition better in a way that isn't just like, so look, it's a monkey and he's got a diaper on. Isn't that a funny answer? That's not the point. The point is, the point is, you know, you have a problem. What is it? The problem that you're,
00:13:48
Speaker
you know, your customers think that your product is dusty or is it that your customers are old and they're dying off or is it that there's just not awareness or is it that you're a challenger brand and, you know, your competition is outspending you, you know, 10 to 1 in terms of dollars or whatever it is. Like, there are a lot of business, you know, or you don't have the distribution and you can't get the distribution because the distributors in other markets don't think that you're supporting the brand or like, there are a lot of business things that advertising, know,
00:14:16
Speaker
thought of in that way um can solve or can at least help with. And that's the way i always I have always looked at it. even to the you know and and I've always been aware of that. So um it's just not something that most agencies think about it. So I use the term advertising.
00:14:35
Speaker
It's a shorthand for that. I don't mean specifically TV, print, and radio.
Understanding and Solving Business Problems
00:14:40
Speaker
I don't, you know, because I've done guerrilla marketing, advertising. I've done sales promotion, and I've done digital, and I've done, you know, ah social and events and and traditional. So, i mean, I've done all these sort of different tactics, but to me, all those tactics, for me, again, just ladder up to this idea of what do we...
00:14:58
Speaker
You know, it's like the the thing that I always say in a meeting about like but what the brief is, right? And the brief to me is basically starts with basically four questions.
00:15:09
Speaker
Who we talking to? What do we want them to do? Why aren't they doing it? Why should they give a fuck? And once you can answer those four questions, which are fundamentally business questions, and um then you can start making work. And and most of the time, agencies and clients don't do that. And I think that's because they don't think that advertising works or is a meaningful business um exercise. so
00:15:40
Speaker
How's that? So I believe that a lot of arguments that we have, you know, maybe not so much on your
00:15:56
Speaker
more political news channels, 24-hour news channels or whatever, but some in in those places, some in social media, a lot of things that might sort of appear to be philosophical or values arguments. Yeah.
00:16:12
Speaker
I believe a lot of them aren't actually arguments about philosophy or arguments about values as much as they are arguments about the meanings of different words.
00:16:26
Speaker
And so somebody might very well hear you say something to the effect of, or though what they hear in their head is, oh, Martin said he's an ad man.
00:16:37
Speaker
And then they tell themselves, Well, advertising doesn't work anymore or something of that nature. And now you might be arguing about whether or not advertising works and...
00:16:54
Speaker
we never really got clear on what are we talking about? Are we talking about literally dictionary definition of advertising or are we talking about a something broader perhaps?
00:17:07
Speaker
And i think you could apply this to a lot of left, right, political things, religious issues, who knows what. And, I, of course, I have all my own opinions about one tactic channel, who knows what in this space. But when when you say advertising, if you were to say, you know, I'm hardcore advertising.
00:17:36
Speaker
TV commercial advertising, something of that nature, then that gives me a much greater sense of what you mean than you say advertising and there is a broader way that I can understand or read that.
00:17:53
Speaker
You are right that there's a um flabbiness in conversation in terms of definitions of words generally.
00:18:04
Speaker
right I think it's always been that way. um But I think, you know, um since I'm an old man and there are no children on my lawn to yell at, i can yell about this for a while.
00:18:15
Speaker
um so i But I i think, though, that advertising among those terms is a bit of a Rorschach test, right? And i'm I'm sort of a big fan of the of doing stuff like that in in meetings and things like that. I love too say an inappropriate thing or so or something just to sort of see how people in the room react, because it reveals um
00:18:46
Speaker
the power structure, the but the politics of the room, but it also can reveal um sort of the definitions. And so, yeah, um I've... Sometimes I say I'm in advertising, people...
00:19:02
Speaker
You're like, oh, so you're like Don Draper. And I'm like, sure, okay, I'm like Don Draper. i mean, I'm not sleeping with your wife and I'm sober, but sure, I'm Don Draper.
00:19:14
Speaker
um And we can talk about that. Or some people think it still think it's glamorous. Oh, that must be cool. i bet you get to go. like, okay, that's fine. Some people, um yeah, a number of people who've told me that advertising doesn't work or doesn't work on them, don't.
00:19:28
Speaker
um which i believe um it's hard for me you know when i would be sitting in a classroom invariably when i was teaching introduction to advertising at the university and there'd be students who like oh advertisers work on me and i'm like how much did you pay for those nikes pal you tell me that those are the only shoes that you could get that were like the way they look why do you like the way they i mean it's like you know it's all that that kind of that kind of stuff or
00:19:59
Speaker
ah friend saying to me when he was over at my house with his dog he was like yeah I don't think advertising works I was trying to explain you know i think that they're wrong and their dog had had a ball and it had gone under the table they couldn't get the dog couldn't get the ball so it was barking and while we were talking my boyfriend said oh sorry she's, she wants me to get her, she's barking because she wants me to get her ball.
00:20:34
Speaker
And I said, oh, you mean she's advertising that the ball is. So I think, I think that it, I mean, and I realize, you know, I'm a man with a hammer, so of course everything's a nail, but I do think it, I think it works ah and I think it can work. And I think, but I think that, that, that the fact that people have that opinion,
00:20:57
Speaker
ah And a vast majority of the people, a vast number of people who have that opinion are in advertising agencies and are clients. A lot of them don't think it works or makes any sense at all, which is fine.
00:21:10
Speaker
um Which is why there's a lot of noise being created. um And, you know, I like to think in my more optimistic moments that that gives me um more opportunity to have better success with people who do believe it works.
00:21:27
Speaker
So, um, but yeah, it's, I, I, just to sort of circle back to things. So yeah, I, I, I kind of, when I say advertising, it allows me to have something quick to say, but it also allows me to sort of see how they interpret the Rorschach of that and what they take and take away from it. And they go, I, one guy even said to me, so so you like buy ads in like magazines and you place that. It's like, Hmm.
00:21:52
Speaker
No, ah don't. But that's really surprised that you, you know, that that's where you took that. So it lets me sort of see where their, where their heads are at about it. You have sort of talked about this throughout the conversation here and there.
00:22:08
Speaker
And I think that this is really closely related to some of the things that you were saying. So on your website, it says, I get people to care about stuff they don't care about.
00:22:22
Speaker
And I have... a pretty strong sense of what you mean there, but I wanted to ask you what you mean by that because I feel like you're being a bit provocative, but also if I only take it at the surface level or my initial read, I think it's really easy to misunderstand what I believe you're saying.
Connecting with Audience Desires
00:22:49
Speaker
Yeah, that was just the placeholder headline that came with the template for the website. So I don't exactly know what it means. so No, but I'd be interested to hear what youre sort of but you you sort of parse all that out for me. What do you think it means and what do you think it's it's misunderstood and all that kind of stuff?
00:23:04
Speaker
It seems to me that some of what you've been saying, like you had a student, I think it was, who said something along the lines of what I wrote down was that you figure out what people want.
00:23:17
Speaker
And you had made some other statements along those lines. And It seems to me that you connect with or seek to connect with what someone wants at perhaps an unconscious level or...
00:23:38
Speaker
you know I guess, yeah, unconscious is what I'm going to go with. Something that they might not recognize, that they have a need or a desire or whatever it is for this thing. And so they might say, when asked, I don't care about this or I don't want that.
00:23:54
Speaker
But then it seems like some of the things that you have said would also perhaps go along with a statement like... Well, maybe you're not that interested in what's the famous quote, the Theodore Levitt quote, right?
00:24:08
Speaker
Nobody wants a quarter-inch drill bit. What they want is a quarter-inch hole. Nobody buys a shovel, they're buying a hole, right? Exactly. And it seems to me like some of the things that you have said would align with, you know, getting people to care about stuff they don't care about because they don't care about the shovel.
00:24:31
Speaker
They care about what it allows them to do or become or the life they're able to have as a result. I think it's a really good line, whoever wrote it, um, because I think it, it kind of cuts in a bunch of different directions.
00:24:47
Speaker
Right. And I think that, um, uh, I get people to care about stuff they don't care about. You know, if, if you're, you know, uh,
00:24:59
Speaker
They're not buying your potato chips. They don't care about your potato chips. I get them to care about your potato chips over the potato chips they're already buying. Or they don't buy potato chips at all. They don't eat potato chips. They don't.
00:25:10
Speaker
Well, now I'm going to get them to care about potato chips, right? I mean, so I get them to care about things they're not caring about. Or I get them to care, um to your point, about things that they that they think they don't care about, but that they actually do care about.
00:25:25
Speaker
um And I just have figure out how to get get there. i ah ah Since we're talking a lot about words, I quibble with, i don't I don't figure out what people want. or Because that makes it, or I wouldn't characterize it that way.
00:25:39
Speaker
um Because I think that that... um
00:25:43
Speaker
almost sounds like I'm wasting a need on them, right? In the way that, yeah you know, and the in the and the thirty s when when when advertising, like i think for Listerine, came up with halitosis, right? Oh, bad breath, people, and all that kind of stuff. And it was like, everyone was afraid of bad breath.
00:26:03
Speaker
They weren't afraid of bad breath. They had bad breath because they didn't brush their fucking teeth their teeth were falling out. But I mean, they weren't they were upset about it. but But then you think about the fact that they were in cities and they were up against each other more and it was you know there was a lot of social friction and it's like, okay, that makes a lot of sense. My point is that I'm not foisting, of I'm not interested in foisting a need onto people.
00:26:24
Speaker
You know, people don't like you because you don't have this car whatever. What I'm interested more in finding out is like, okay, well, you're upset about something or you're, something is lacking or you want to make a decision. Like, what is it that you, what is driving you?
00:26:42
Speaker
You say it's this. I don't think it's that, you know. You're eating because you're hungry. I don't think you're eating because you're hungry. I think you're eating because you're out you have anxiety or you're nervous about something. You're what is the thing, right? And that gets back to that thing with the students. Like, what's in their head?
00:26:57
Speaker
Despite what they're saying, despite what they're doing, what's actually in their head that's sort of driving these actions, right? And so... um So to me, it's like, know, whether it's sort of, I get people to care about things they don't care about, meaning that they don't, they say they don't care about it, but they do care about it, right? Or, uh, or that they literally don't care about it. not on their radar. How do I, how do I tell, explain that this is a thing that does meet and meet a need for them, does solve a problem for them? So, um,
00:27:32
Speaker
you know, or or to find some real differentiation that resonates. You know, well there's a lot of talk in advertising or outside of advertising within it as well, guess, about, you know, everybody's a huckster, everybody's lying, everybody's, you know, saying whatever they want to say, there's no truth and everything. I really, i don't, I don't function that, I try not to function that way.
00:27:53
Speaker
um I try to find out what the thing is that is actually driving the person and then figure out how to make that relevant, I mean, what I have relevant to that. And so I give you a sort of, I think this is an example of of that, but it's not one that I think people would think of at first blush. um I was working when I was living here, the first time was living here in St. Louis, and um We do work for Miller Brewing Company and i was working on their malt liquors because clearly I'm a malt liquor drinking guy.
00:28:25
Speaker
And um we were doing focus groups in South Central l LA and we were talking to guys from... you know, Compton, I mean, guys who were, you know, I mean, and and these guys were, you know, they have to fill out in focus groups, you have to fill out, you know, how much of products you drink or like irrelevant stuff like that. And you tell the guys who like literally drinking by their estimate, 800 ounces of this shit a week, but just massive quantities of this alcohol, right?
00:28:56
Speaker
And i was there behind the mirror with, think maybe somebody else from my agency. And there was ah another agency there that had their idea. It was like the lead agency. And they're like, we want to do this idea.
00:29:09
Speaker
They're kind of trying to force that onto them. You know, agencies often do, here's the solution. What's the problem? and um And the client was there. And I was listening to these guys talk about,
00:29:22
Speaker
you know, there's two days of focus groups and listen these guys talk about their wives and their families and alcohol. And one guy said, you know, you guys, you guys should do like a,
00:29:37
Speaker
you guys should like build a playground in my neighborhood, right? You guys should do, you know, playgrounds for my kids in the neighborhood, right? I mean, I spend so much money on your on your guys. yeah should You should put some money back into my community.
00:29:53
Speaker
And the client was still a friend of mine, but he was like, okay, we can't do that. i mean, you can't have, you know, this playscape for five-year-olds brought to you by, you know, Miller Rowing Company. We can't do that.
00:30:05
Speaker
And I said, yeah, but that's not he's really asking you to do. What he's really saying is he wants you to launder their money. And everybody in the room went like, what? And I was like, the only way these guys can get through their lives, as far as they can tell, is to anesthetize themselves.
00:30:22
Speaker
They're so miserable. And they know that the amount of money that they spend anesthetizing themselves in order to get through their day is would be better spent on their kids. But they can't because if they stopped drinking, they wouldn't be able to get through their day.
00:30:41
Speaker
So they want you to take that money and help them do the things that they would otherwise do with that money. And they were like, oh, it makes a lot of sense.
00:30:53
Speaker
We're not going to do that.
00:30:57
Speaker
But like to me, like that's like, if we had done that, that would have gotten them to care about something they don't care about. You know mean? And that's the thing to me that's always interesting.
00:31:09
Speaker
And it wouldn't have been an ad. Again, the other thing about that line is it's not about, you know, I don't, I mean, yes, I write print ads, I do TV commercials, I do whatever, you know, but it's not about the medium. It's about
00:31:22
Speaker
it's not about me foisting the medium on somebody. It's like, okay, how do I get people to care about this stuff that they don't care about? Do I need to be in a place that they use that I didn't think that they were? Do I need to show, do I need to do and gorilla thing to get their attention, to, to, to cut through, to get them to care about it? Do I need to, do I need to get the client to start making playgrounds in order to get them to care about, like, what do I need to do to make this person care about something they don't care about?
00:31:46
Speaker
And then also, I think it cuts in terms of, because I am passionate about this stuff. I am interested in this stuff. You know, I get people, I get people in agencies to care about advertising again.
00:31:58
Speaker
I get people in agencies to care about clients who are like, this is the worst client in the world. I don't care about this. I don't care what they do. It's like, yeah, but here's the problem we're trying to solve. Here's what we're trying to do And I get them, I get agency people who care about that. I get clients to care about.
00:32:13
Speaker
created in a way that they hadn't cared about it before because they thought it was just like helping their wife pick out the drapes or something that's like no dude we're trying to figure out how this is actually gonna get you that one more customer a week that you need in order to make your fucking numbers right like that's that's that's what i that's the stuff that makes me interested in this business getting people to care about shit they don't care about so that's what that line means to me make sense It does make sense. And I'm having a really hard time getting past the visual in my head of, you know, with recycling and we have all these products nowadays, it's made from 100% recyclable materials.
00:32:56
Speaker
I don't know. I really do think that we could have a playground made from 100% recycled malt liquor cans. I don't know about the bottles. I don't know how that would work on the playground, but...
00:33:07
Speaker
You could. Yeah. um Yeah. ah Yeah. I know. And yeah. Right. And, and yeah, you get it because like, cause even, cause and that's a wonderful build on top of that. Right. Because then it's like, now it's also, it's not just helping this community. It's sort of helping the whole world. Look, I'm, this thing that I'm doing is, is helping the community on all these different levels. Right.
00:33:27
Speaker
The pushback that you received there, you know, I hesitate to, Monday morning quarterback or whatever it is diagnosed from afar, even though Monday morning is now however many years past.
00:33:41
Speaker
But so there might have been a lot of things going
Strategic Thinking Over Efficiency
00:33:44
Speaker
on. But you wrote a while back about how companies prioritize doing, overthinking.
00:33:53
Speaker
And so maybe it wasn't occurring in that situation, but i think I could speculate that potentially one or more people in that room was thinking, well, we don't build playgrounds.
00:34:09
Speaker
You know, what we do is we printouts or who knows what. And so we don't have to necessarily analyze that situation,
00:34:21
Speaker
but I did want to tee up that topic of prioritizing doing overthinking because it sure seems to me like you're interested in the outcomes of the doing but you're also spending a lot of time thinking about what's really going on here what are you trying to do you know getting back to that the point about being a strategist and so where does the doing overthinking come from I suppose you wrote about it and then if you could expand upon your thinking I would appreciate it yeah a couple couple things there so so one
00:35:03
Speaker
to um ah just to sort of tie up ah the example that I used without turning this into the Miller Rune Company playground episode. um i I really do think it was a matter ah of We can't make, but we can't put our name on a playground. I mean, I'm not going to fight. I'm not going to go fight, you know, with legal about that and and burn use of all the capital for this, these malt liquors, which was not my priority. But I think it was like all that kind of stuff. It's like, no, no, what we want is we want like ah a couple of ads and a PR thing. Like, that's what we want. It's like, okay, cool. You don't, and a I respect that. That's that's the business decision.
00:35:44
Speaker
I get that. But I think that corollary to that is um
00:35:54
Speaker
You know, any good salesman will tell you that to make a sale, you have to have a relationship, right? And so that idea was about, and that thinking was about trying to think about, well, how do we build start building a relationship with these people?
00:36:10
Speaker
If we don't build a relationship, then we're just going to be a commodity, right? And if you have a relationship, you cut through being a commodity. And you, you know, like said, really good salespeople the, actually, in my experience, are really good listeners and they're and not just listeners in terms of just sitting there waiting for the person to shut up so they can start talking but like they remember shit and they remember what's important and they remember you know whether it's tedious stuff like birthdays or kids names or they but they remember things so they can build a relationship and i think that that's the thing that is fundamental in advertising and is fundamentally it's always been fundamentally lost i mean it's it's it's always um
00:36:51
Speaker
It's always fashionable in any moment to say that this moment we forgot these these truths. But I've been around this business and generationally involved in this business for so long. But I know that it's always it's always the thing that's lost.
00:37:04
Speaker
It's about building these relationships. And the agent in the in the work that builds relationships is the work that is actually ultimately successful. So that, though, to sort of, okay, that's done.
00:37:16
Speaker
Um, the thinking and doing things. So that was, I don't, I don't think it was a thinking and doing thing. Um, in that case, the thinking and doing thing that I wrote earlier this year. I think, um, I wish I could remember what it was called, what the essay was called, but anyway, was inspired by, ah so that there's a book that I reviewed for the agency review called, um, ah ah about the power of habit, I think by Charles Duhigg.
00:37:42
Speaker
And in that book, he, uh, one of the stories he talked, one of the people he talks to is Tony Dunstie, the Superbowl winning coach, um, who had for longed who had an insight into how to be ah make a team more successful that he kept, when he was an assistant coach, he was trying to be get ah finally get a head coaching job, he kept presenting this. It's like, this is the way I think about this stuff, and this is what i I'm going to implement.
00:38:09
Speaker
And everybody was like, you're wrong. No, but that's just stupid talk. We're not doing that. um Also, Tony Dungy's black, so that really did—he really had no fucking chance of being innovative and in in the the NFL. But somebody did give him a job, and he did make it work, and he wins the Super Bowl, and he's a Hall of Fame coach.
00:38:28
Speaker
And so i guess what? He was right. um and And his insight was um he didn't want—paraphrasing—he didn't want linemen to think Because the game was moving so quickly that if they, you know, a football, but like there's all this it you know stuff going on on the line.
00:38:47
Speaker
If they had to stop and analyze the situation before they did whatever they were going to do decide who to figure out who block or where they were to move or how they're going to, whether they're going to step forward, step back or whatever it is. If they had to think, they were lost because the defensive lineman was already going to be in the backfield. So he needed to figure out ways to to make them not think, to, in a sense, just react. And I think it it it worked into that and the Duhigg's book because, in a way, reaction is a sort of a habit.
00:39:17
Speaker
Anyway, so I was thinking about this idea that he was oh its just limit thinking because of the nature of the business. overdoing And then I ah connected that with this this um idea that um most businesses that I've been involved with, and I've been involved with Fortune 500 businesses and startups and small mom and pops and companies that have been around for a long time, and and consistently they're really good building or they they they focus on doing.
00:39:48
Speaker
They focus on, hey, we need a campaign for next year. What's the campaign going to be, right? And we block this media or, hey, we want to, you know, we're going to expand into such and such.
00:39:59
Speaker
But they're not great at thinking. in And by that, I mean that they not great they did or they're not none the sense there's not great at thinking. They're not focused on thinking. They're not because business is moving too quickly. They don't have time to sort of sit down and like, let's just think about this. At best, they'll have like, we'll have ah a summit. We'll all go off for a weekend somewhere. We'll think about this thing for the, you know, and that'll be the thinking we do for the whole year. The rest of the year are all doing it, right?
00:40:23
Speaker
And so the idea in the essay was, it it would it be a viable business strategy? um especially if you would say a challenger brand to do things that made your competitors think, right?
00:40:46
Speaker
um And so like, because if you if you did things that made them have to think about what they were doing, then everything would kind of stop for them while they thought about it, while they figured out what to do, why they what they as opposed to just keep the the assembly line going, right?
00:41:03
Speaker
And so that idea was about ah how do you create a business strategy it wasn't It wasn't a strategy of of, you know, just bomb throwing and just like, you know, creating chaos or the sake of creating chaos.
00:41:18
Speaker
It was a strategy of if you were able to think about things that made your, that challenged the fundamental underlying assumptions of your competitors, right? And I think like so and i think an example of this that I think I use in the essay is, you know,
00:41:39
Speaker
the the ah thinking that resulted when Steve Jobs brought out the iPhone was within the phone industry, like it, it, it stopped phone company. Like all the phone manufacturers like had to stop because they had to now think about stuff. It wasn't everything that they were doing up to that point was like, we have, you know, we're going to do this. We have this benefit. We have this distribution. We have this relationship with the scary with this, like their do, do, do, do. do
00:42:10
Speaker
And he comes up with this thing and people go, shit. Now we have to think. And it's, you know, like, what does this mean for us? And I remember talking to a friend of mine who used to work at Nokia at the time. And he's like, yeah, it's exactly what happened. I mean, we all just froze because we recognized that it was sort of a fundamental change to the industry.
00:42:33
Speaker
And I mean, we're talking about doing all of these things. i All this thing has to be fundamental changes. But I think it's just this idea of like, if you're in an organization that is only about, or is fundamentally about doing and not about thinking,
00:42:45
Speaker
and you force them to think, either they have to stop what they're doing and think, but also they probably have not promoted to levels of authority or have the processes in place to do thinking.
00:43:01
Speaker
Why would they? if It's not a priority, right? So they're not going to know how to do it. They're not going to know how to how to solve this thinking problem. And it just felt to me like on some level that that was...
00:43:16
Speaker
it could be a really big strategic advantage for companies that decided to use it. And I don't think companies think that way, if that makes sense. Does that make any sense? I think it does. And so I...
00:43:29
Speaker
Might end up having multiple questions, but we'll see where the first one takes us. get a lot of responses like that. We could describe this in many ways, but I think that there's the potential to think about this in terms of, well, how do we characterize characterize what we are as an organization.
00:43:52
Speaker
How do we think about change? How do we think about what is our specialty or unique advantage or whatever else it is? But as a starting point,
00:44:03
Speaker
So Tony Dungy gets his offensive linemen to, you know, when the ball is snapped, they all know based on certain plays or best practices or whatever it is, that they are going to stand up and they're going to start stepping backwards or stepping to the right. Whatever the thing is. It's like, yeah.
00:44:23
Speaker
They've done it so many times there's muscle memory or whatever it is. And then... Okay, one scenario in which I might cause a problem for that is that my linemen or linebackers or whatever, if I'm on the opposing team, now show something that causes the linemen to go, what are they doing?
00:44:51
Speaker
like I've never seen this before. And now maybe they continue to do go through the muscle memory sort of same motions, But what they're doing either doesn't work or they're thrown off of the path that they were on, you know, this step, that step, move this way, because ah just sort of interrupted it. I think that's one way in which we might take the, you know, you cause your competitor to think thing and then take it back to football. Am I thinking correctly here? Yeah.
00:45:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. So two things about that. like one One is um i i believe um and that looked that the way that Dungy was explaining to Duhigg was even simpler than that.
00:45:39
Speaker
It was almost like you're the offensive tackle and you see linebacker lined in front of him in front of you, you're hitting that if you see ah If you see a defensive end in front of you, you're hitting this guy over here. That's all you have to think about.
00:45:52
Speaker
And then even if it doesn't work, If I see that you did that, then I know that you're doing the right thing because it's then going to be on us to make sure that we've sussed out the situation properly, right? So you don't have to think about it because you have that much time to figure it out, right?
00:46:05
Speaker
Okay. But the other part of that, um I know, when did you move here to St. Louis? Early 2019. Okay. okay So ah the first time I here in St. Louis was one the one when the Rams won the Super Bowl, okay? The first Super Bowl.
00:46:20
Speaker
but The St. Louis Rams won the Super Bowl.
00:46:24
Speaker
And um if you missed that and you're a football fan, man, you missed something amazing. um Because ah exactly what we're talking about. You had Mike Martz. I mean, it you know, he had, you know, he'd send all this money on the great quarterback and he breaks his leg on the final play of the preseason.
00:46:42
Speaker
And they throw this guy, Kurt Warner, in who had been bagging groceries like the year before. you know, take ah i believe it's going to be another miserable year for the Rams, right? And the NFL didn't want the Rams in St. Louis anyway, so it was just like a disaster, right?
00:46:56
Speaker
But what the the opportunity that that gave someone like Mike Martz was he just like, well, I'm just going to all kinds of crazy shit. Right. And so you would see lineups, you would see guys in positions on the offensive, you know, you'd see running backs in weird places, wide receivers, you'd see wildly unbalanced lines and stuff like that.
00:47:18
Speaker
And you could you could look into the eyes of the middle linebackers, and people who aren't big football fans, if you're still listening, the middle linebacker is like the quarterback of the defense, right? He's the guy who really sort of calls the defensive play and sets the thing.
00:47:35
Speaker
And you could see those middle linebackers freaking out. Because they would do decision trees to figure out what defense to run, right? Oh, look, that guy's there. That means they're probably going to one of these three things. So I'm going to have this guy. Oh, this guy's in motion. So I'm going to like, but they would come to the line and they would see shit that they had not only never seen before, but they didn't know what it meant.
00:47:59
Speaker
Right. And so they had to think, and they not only had to think, but they had the other 10 guys on the field had to think too. And the once the Rams had those guys thinking about stuff and trying to figure shit out, nothing was coordinated because everybody on the defense was sort of trying to figure it out. i got I got five wide receivers on my side. Dude, what am I supposed to do with that? I'm one guy.
00:48:24
Speaker
Well, maybe the defensive end will come over help you. Okay, well, but who's going to... It's like all that kind of craziness.
Disruptive Strategies in Business
00:48:29
Speaker
The Rams were, you know, then the Rams were creating a strategic advantage because the defenses had to start thinking about stuff that they didn't know how to think about.
00:48:37
Speaker
And again, This isn't me being condescending about the ability of defensive players to think about stuff or football players to think about stuff. It's just recognized, or even, or clients think about stuff.
00:48:49
Speaker
It's recognizing that, you know, you hire people to do certain jobs, right? To execute, right? And you promote people who are really good at executing, right?
00:49:01
Speaker
Right? And you sort of winnow out the people who in a moment's notice can sit there and go, Okay, guys, here's what we're going Because ah guys none of us have ever seen this shit before, so here's what we're going to do.
00:49:12
Speaker
You've weeded those people out, right? Because they're not as good at executing.
00:49:20
Speaker
Right? They're not as, it's like, you know, So that to me, so that becomes the advantage. Not only is it, you're making if they do if they are good at thinking, you're making them stop doing in order to think, which is an advantage because you've or you're a step ahead of them on that level.
00:49:40
Speaker
But then you're also asking them to do a thing that they have not built themselves to do. They're built to be, and we know this, I mean, you know, so um ah publicly held companies, right?
00:49:55
Speaker
they're They're judged on how profitable they are, how efficient they are. Everybody's how efficient now are they, right? I mean, certainly on the creative side, it's like, how long is it going to take you to come up with that campaign? don't know. Well, gave you two hours. If you do one hour, that'd be even better, right? Like, it's like, it's about that kind of stuff, right?
00:50:10
Speaker
And so, If you get people, you know, where companies are faced with, I mean, think about like we went through this, we all went through this with COVID, right? Where it's like suddenly everybody had to think about how they were going to do their jobs. How are we going to function? How are we going to get work out the door, right?
00:50:27
Speaker
Everybody had to stop and think about that stuff. And all the people who were in sort of senior management positions who were really good at pushing work out the door because of the process and making the process work and getting people to, it's like, suddenly it's like, I don't know how we're going to do this.
00:50:41
Speaker
That's the point. So that's, that's, that's how, that's, that's what makes sense to me about that. So you're reminding me of, A somewhat well-known story in, I think it's Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Solution, but wherever it comes from, it's tied to jobs theory or jobs to be done theory.
00:51:07
Speaker
And so the short version is probably you know, this fast food chain brought in these anthropological consultants. and And don't think they state who it is, but it sounds pretty clearly like it's McDonald's.
00:51:22
Speaker
And it was in California somewhere, Bay Area LA or I don't know what. And They were thinking of taking shakes off the menu, and one of the researchers at one point noticed that they would sell a bunch of shakes in the morning during rush hour, and then they'd have a big lull, and then they would sell them around dinnertime in the morning,
00:51:52
Speaker
No one was staying at the McDonald's. You know, it was a lot of drive-thru or walk in, get your milkshake and then leave. And in the evening, it was mostly families that were eating in and then they'd end up throwing the milkshake away before they would leave.
00:52:09
Speaker
And i think if I recall the story correctly, one of the researchers noticed this. And so he started following people back out to their cars and saying, why'd you buy this milkshake more or less?
00:52:21
Speaker
And what they found was that People in the morning, we're purchasing milkshakes as their breakfast, you know, because if you eat a bagel, it crumbles or, you know, it's messy. It's also easier, it's easier to drink a shake while you're driving than it is eat a bagel while you're driving. Sure.
00:52:41
Speaker
Exactly. And all these other, you know, alternatives, they would have one comparison or another. And then in the evening was, I just picked my kids up from daycare. They spent all day in school. Then they went to some form of daycare or afterschool program or whatever.
00:52:57
Speaker
and And don't want to go home and have to make dinner. So I'm just trying to have a good time with my kids before we go home. But the thing is that they've eaten their Happy Meal or whatever it was, because maybe it wasn't McDonald's.
00:53:10
Speaker
And now they get to the milkshake. And they're not finishing it. And I need to go because I got to get the kid ready for tomorrow. And then I got to go to bed and all that. And so we end up throwing the milkshake away because they're not taking it in the car because have you seen what they do to the backseat?
00:53:26
Speaker
You know? So, um, What they did was they made the, in the morning, they apparently made the milkshakes thicker and the straws smaller so that it would take longer to drink it. So it's kind of like get you to work in the morning.
00:53:45
Speaker
And yeah you're eating the whole time. And then in the evening, supposedly they made the milkshakes thinner with larger straws so that by the time the kid got to it, the kid could drink the milkshake much more quickly.
00:53:59
Speaker
And you then you don't walk out of the McDonald's with your kids screaming at you because they didn't get to have their milkshake. but And i forget details of the story, but I believe that some of the messaging, like on the billboards, was, you know, get a milkshake to get you to work in the morning.
00:54:17
Speaker
Well, now, if you're one of the competitors, one of the alternatives to McDonald's, you're like, so I guess they're just advertising milkshakes in the morning. That's their campaign.
00:54:29
Speaker
And you start copying that. But the thing is that... you're not really responding to, you're not really dealing with what's going on because they also had to change the straw and the recipe.
00:54:43
Speaker
And so that's quite a long story, but you're reminding me of this because It seems like when I see my competition, whether it's a football team, you know, and I'm watching the scouting report or watching, you know the tape from their game last week and we're coming up against them this next weekend, whatever it is, and I'm looking at it and I what are they doing there?
00:55:08
Speaker
And if I, I don't know what the corollary would be with football, but with, you know, this advertising marketing thing here with McDonald's, if I just go, well, I guess they're going to try and see if they can sell more milkshakes in the morning. So we'll do the same thing.
00:55:27
Speaker
Then, yeah, I'm thinking, but again, not dealing with the real issue. Yeah, right. and i think and i And I think that that kind of circles back to
00:55:41
Speaker
until they made those changes, until they had that insight about why people were doing what they were doing in the morning. I would bet that for consumers, the milkshakes were a commodity, right?
00:55:59
Speaker
So I go to this McDonald's because it's on my way, but I could just as easily go to a Burger King or I could just as easily go to a Wendy's or whatever, right? Because I'm just here for a milkshake.
00:56:12
Speaker
That insight right makes them care about McDonald's milkshakes in a way that they didn't care about McDonald's milkshakes before. They simply care about something they didn't care about. right And it's not foisting on them something like, I want you to care about my milkshakes.
00:56:28
Speaker
It's understanding this is this is the why. Now, how do I make that relevant? How do I do something that that resonates with that? So um I hadn't heard that story before. I think that's... said i to say, I hope it's not apocryphal, but even if it's apocryphal, there a lot of apocryphal stories that I use all the time. You keep beating into them the kind of consciousness in the hoax that somebody will eventually just think it's true.
00:56:53
Speaker
um But I think that that makes a lot of sense because, you know, it comes back to this sort of basic idea of like, well, why don't we just why don't we just listen to people and ask them what the hell, but why they're doing it, and and then sort of like listen through what they're saying, right? Right.
00:57:08
Speaker
Like not just sort of like, why are you getting the milkshake? I don't know. Cause like milkshakes. Like I went to a, again, another beer story.
00:57:20
Speaker
When we first moved out here, uh, we'd go back at Christmas. We put my family's, my wife's family, my family's back at East. And, uh, And I would always go to on store checks. I would always go look at stores wherever I was, right, to sort of see what the displays looked like and what the competition was doing, and especially when I went back east because all the brands I was working at that time were brands that were primarily in the northeast, you know, Molson and stuff like that.
00:57:46
Speaker
So I went into this the ah liquor store. it was in Connecticut. was called Package Stores, but I went to very large package store in Connecticut with my son who was about one and a half then.
00:57:58
Speaker
Um, and, uh, I'm, you know, looking at stuff and I'm talking to some of the sales crew about what they're doing and how, what's moving what's not moving. And then the owner comes over to me he's yeah, I work for the the book advertising for for Molson and for Miller and blah, blah, blah. And talking about this sort of stuff.
00:58:17
Speaker
And, uh, you know, I'm trying to figure out like what's resonating with people and what, you know, and he goes, you know, it resonates with people price, knock a dollar off the price. That's what people care about. All they care about is price.
00:58:28
Speaker
And I'm, Now, in if my son wasn't there, I probably would have gone off on this guy. But my son was there and I was trying to you know be a better father. And i so i said, okay, I'm going to use this as i'm learning and a teaching moment for myself.
00:58:43
Speaker
I said, wow. Well, I appreciate that insight. So I'm guessing that the biggest selling product that you have in this store is probably like Milwaukee's Best, right? Which you can buy in about the 24 pack up for like $3.99, right? I mean, it's probably that's because that's the lowest price and the greatest quantity, right? It's like based on your thing. like No, oh man. i mean, like the number one thing we got is like, I mean, Guinness, man. We can't, you know, Guinness is flying Can't Guinness is flying up.
00:59:12
Speaker
And Guinness is like, you know, four-pack and it's like, it was like eight bucks or something. I was like, well, what are you selling the Guinness at? Like how much, because to make it competitive with that, it's like, well, no, with Guinness, I mean, you got the Irish thing and you got the hair. It's like, so you mean that it's not just price.
00:59:31
Speaker
There can be other, well, yeah. yeah. Yeah. it's like, yeah, that's what I can do, pal. That's what I do is figure that shit out. Okay. Give me this price bullshit. Right.
00:59:43
Speaker
Um, and, and, and that's, so that to me is like that, that's the kind of thing. It's like you figuring out like what is, um you go into the store and you talk to people and you find out what the actual insight is and then you figure out how to make that resonate and not just default to the thing that's like, well, it's price. Okay, well, then we'll knock a dollar off the price, right? And I think through in a sense, that's what that McDonald's store is sort of doing. It's like we could have very easily just said, well, we'll just, yeah, ah we'll just sell more shakes, know?
01:00:13
Speaker
Okay. And well maybe we'll maybe we knock 10 cents off the price, right? Make our shakes 10 cents less than the and the Wendy's shakes or 10 cents less than the Burger King shakes, which we know isn't then going to make somebody, if the only reason they're stopping at McDonald's it is because you they're on you're on their way, 10 cents off the price isn't going to make them go out of their way right but if they felt that the shake somehow was lasting longer and they did go out of there one time and they tried the burger one it's like Jesus don't know this shake must be smaller or something because I'm like done with it already you know
01:00:54
Speaker
you know Now you're thinking about the customer and that's about the relationship, right? And that's the kind of thing that great salesmen, as I said before, know about relationships and thinking about what the person really needs and thinking about their head and all that um my good stuff. So that's why this stuff is fascinating me. That's why I can talk about it. I mean, we could do a 14-hour podcast. I'd still be talking about this shit because i just think it's just fascinating, which is also amazing because i as a human being, I don't care about humans at all.
01:01:17
Speaker
Like I do not. I just don i don't give a fuck about people at all. So, you know, the fact that I spend my time thinking about well is this what's the nuance here? What's a little something that I'm not getting about why this person is doing this? Just makes everybody who knows me go, I can't believe this is your job.
01:01:34
Speaker
I can't believe you're thinking you about these things. So the whole jobs to be done theory and whatnot is attributed to... Tony Ulwick and his firm Stratogen, if I recall correctly, and he tells a story about they were working with a power tools manufacturer. I think it was DeWalt, but I can't really remember.
01:01:55
Speaker
And one of the things, this is like a very sort of Henry Ford, faster horse story. Which unfortunately is apocryphal, but I'm determined to make it not apocryphal. Exactly.
01:02:06
Speaker
So, you know, one of the things that they found or one of their projects was that a lot of general contractors or carpenters or whatever were saying the thing that they wanted on their circular saws was a cord that you couldn't cut through.
01:02:26
Speaker
And, well, you have a circular saw, it's spinning at 1,000 RPM or whatever it is, it's A lot of money was going to have to go into a cord that you couldn't cut through because all the time um the time they're cutting these sheets of plywood or whatever, climbing up on rafters, who knows what, trying to cut up there.
01:02:47
Speaker
And now all of a sudden you have this circular saw that's not usable anymore because even if you patch the cord, it's about a foot long. And... so that either you have a bunch of money that goes into something that is not super heavy and you know it's metal clad or whatever now you cut you go to cut through that metal clad cord and you have to you just ruin the motor or you have to replace the blade well that's another thing now now can you make blades that don't get damaged when they run into other metal who knows why
01:03:22
Speaker
And he tells a story about they decided something like, well, why does the circular saw need ah a cord at all?
01:03:33
Speaker
Why don't we just plug the extension cord? This is before, you know, a lot of batteries and all it Why don't you just plug the extension cord straight into the ah circular saw?
01:03:43
Speaker
So when you cut through the cord, you're just replacing a cheaper. Exactly. like And so again, probably obvious now how it's similar to the faster horse story but I remember ah bunch of these things it and are all tied together and nonetheless the you know where Where I think the last point, though, that you were making about not being interested in in people and all that is so that I find it interesting when people say advertising doesn't work on me, which is something we talked about earlier, because...
01:04:29
Speaker
I think you gave some examples and you you've talked about, you know, right there with the, well, knock a buck off the price or whatever, and that'll change. I think when all you do is social media or direct response or you're hyper specialized, then...
01:04:51
Speaker
It's really easy to think, or you have no really conception of what advertising or marketing is, you know, because you're, i don't know what, you're a doctor or something and you just haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it.
01:05:05
Speaker
I think you miss out on the idea of, you know, in an academic sense, marketing is creating a market for a product and and aspects of creating a market important.
01:05:20
Speaker
getting people interested in your thing. Now, how do we go about that? And we could describe this in so many ways, but there are, there are very good reasons for why, you know, i'm I'm going to blank on the name, but there was a book written in, you know, like the 1910s or 20s or something.
01:05:42
Speaker
I think it was called Propaganda. Edward Bernays. and That's it. Yes. Yep. And, you know, like we can draw lines in different places, you know, depending on how far we want to stretch this or not. But the thing is that if you don't watch commercials or you're not on social media or whatever, you are affected by all of the new standards of behavior and the fact that like my kids, we used to homeschool our kids.
01:06:11
Speaker
And my, I remember my mom, when our kids were very young, I mean, our kids are still young, but very young. She said to my oldest daughter, what do you want for your birthday?
01:06:24
Speaker
And when she was four or five or something like that, she couldn't even answer the question. Because she just wasn't around other kids. She wasn't watching TV. It's not like we sheltered her. She just wasn't seeing commercials or ads or or whatever it is.
Influence of Advertising and Podcasting Format
01:06:40
Speaker
But then as soon as we go around other kids, of course, they're talking about their toys and the games that they play and so on. And that's when they would want the thing. And now is that other kid doing marketing on behalf of Lego or something?
01:06:56
Speaker
Perhaps not. But my point is, you're still influenced by it. It still works, even if you think, well, the commercial didn't work on me. Yeah, I think that, again, to me, the way I sort of expand all this and and as part of communication is like, you know, semiotics, right, is a to sort of theory thinking that like there are symbols that we use to communicate beyond the language, right?
01:07:23
Speaker
And so, you know, even if you say advertising doesn't work on me, well, why are you dressing the way you're dressing? Why aren't you wearing dashiki or something? Why aren't you wearing a burt news? Why aren't you wearing a dress? Well, because there are certain things that I want to communicate about myself to other people and that i know that because I know basically the people that I'm talking, I'm going to be around how they will interpret that.
01:07:47
Speaker
Right. Right. And that one of the challenges in a country like America, I think, has traditionally been you have so many different cultures crashing into each other that by definition, those symbols, they might mean one thing within your culture, but you're pressed up against different culture in ah in America traditionally in a way that you weren't in Europe or yeah where um Japan or something.
01:08:13
Speaker
Yeah. So the the the language ah of those symbols um is up for grabs. But I but i think that but that's that's what the again becomes interesting to You know, you see um you'll see it on social media again, right, where those things are crashing up against people, where people like wearing a certain shirt, they're wearing their hair a certain way, they're wearing a makeup a certain way, or they're doing, you know, whatever, or they're or they're engaging a thing, and it's like,
01:08:41
Speaker
Those are all symbols that mean one thing to them and that mean a thing to the people that are in their sort of community. But taken out of that community might not mean anything or might mean something bad.
01:08:55
Speaker
Right. And so I think that to me, um, it you know in a way that's um part of what advertising, that's part of how we function as humans is communicating through these symbols, whether we recognize it or not.
01:09:13
Speaker
um And advertising is another way that we do that. We just take it and apply it to products and stuff like that. see what mean? I do. and We don't have a ton of time left to record, so I want to make sure to get to this.
01:09:30
Speaker
It's not communicating through symbols, but it is communicating. You have a podcast called You're on Mute. Yes. And one of the things that I like the most about it, despite the fact that I would like to hear you more, you have a format where, you know...
01:09:51
Speaker
How did you decide on a podcast where the listener almost never hears you speak? I wanted to do a podcast that ah featured the person that I was talking to more than me.
01:10:07
Speaker
I felt that there were a lot of podcasts where, that are very flabby, right? That are just, you know, three hours of two bros just sitting there talking about shit and you could probably, you know, you didn't need all that, right?
01:10:21
Speaker
um And I wanted to sort of focus it more. I wanted it to be short. You know, I wanted to be under 15 minutes and they generally are. And I said, I wanted to feature the person was talking to because,
01:10:34
Speaker
One the things that I recognized when I would hire people is that I was less interested. mean, once it sort reached a, a passive threshold in terms of talent that I saw in their book, you know, and that they could talk about their work was, you know, so clearly they'd done it and they talked about it way that I thought was useful.
01:10:51
Speaker
Um, I was more interested in knowing about them, how they thought about things, people, life, universe, all that kind of stuff, because that was going to be more informative than oh ah relationship and how we can be able to work together stuff like that, then just more talk about, about work.
01:11:09
Speaker
So I felt, and, and at the time that I started the podcast or recording the podcast, you know, agencies were sending all the people go and I was like, if I could do these podcast episodes, that would, Feature friends of mine who were out looking for work, they would, you know, and it was talking about themselves or talking about things that they thought about and the way their minds worked.
01:11:26
Speaker
um That that would be help them get a job, right? You could send it out to people. Hey, I just, you know, I know I applied for such and such a job, but I was on this podcast, take a list of all of Because I'm a big believer, which is something I learned from salesmen, of always trying to figure out.
01:11:41
Speaker
new news to be able to go talk to people about. Right. So I wanted to focus on them. I want to keep it short and I didn't want it to just be another pro-y random conversation. So I cut myself out of all it, you know, um, I tried to come up with a comp with a topic that they could talk about And I think that even, you know, even even when some of them are repetitive, you know, so that's how people think about things. Like they sometimes say, you know, it's not just hopping from this stone to this stone to this stone to this stone to this stone. and Sometimes it's like,
01:12:16
Speaker
think about it this way or have to think about talk about it again this way I think about it again this way oh now I can go a step further like so that's how that's how some people think about stuff some people just nope they just have one way of thinking about shit they're going to cut it around and that's the same okay well that's fine um so that was the idea and then obviously the name the title is You're On Mute um which was suggested by my friend Shane Briald who's president of the agency up in Minneapolis and you know, seemed culturally relevant, but then also because of the nature of the
01:12:57
Speaker
monologue relevant. um So that was sort of the the idea and theoretically I should be starting up the third season and interviews now but with the house and everything have have enough on my plate right now to do that. but But if anybody wants to be on it an artist in Europe just contacted me a little while ago about wanting to be on it and I was like cool I'd love to.
01:13:23
Speaker
I just don't have time right this second but But that's the idea. Is that a legitimate response? I believe so. I find it really interesting. And think, am I recalling correctly that in the first season, we don't hear you at all, but the second season, I think you started recording introductions.
01:13:45
Speaker
No, there are introductions in both. ah The introductions in the second season are a little bit more robust because one of the things at the end of the first season, I asked everybody in the first season, you know, what do you think I should do differently or blah, blah, blah. And um one of them was sort of give more context, you know, to like why you're asking this person this question and and that would be, you know, a little a little helpful.
01:14:06
Speaker
um One of the things that I thought was, ah that I was very proud of in the second season then hopefully, you know, also, in the podcast I want to see if I can do it just it's an exercise can I do this can I do these interviews can I do all the editing can i figure out a way to sort of package it together that doesn't suck and I think second season is better than the first season hopefully the third season will be better in the second season and but I'm um In the second season, there's an interview with my old friend, Ginny Fisher, who's an artist.
01:14:33
Speaker
And um she talks about um talks about creativity, and and it's really interesting. But one of the things that she said to me afterwards, and after I posted them, because i also I post all the seasons, all the episodes of a season all at once. like I don't do the smart thing like you do, which in week's episode is such and such. It's like, here you are.
01:14:55
Speaker
it was season two, knock yourself out. Binge listen if you want. But she said when she listened to it, she said she'd never heard her tell her own story before. And I thought that was really an interesting, thought that was really interesting, that it was but allowed for that to happen. So my hope is that in this third season, if I get to it, that I'll be able to do some more of that.
01:15:19
Speaker
ah Just as a sort of, also a truly a bit of, I didn't tell people in the first season that I was going to cut myself out. um and And then in the second season, I could tell ah who had listened to the first season and who had not because of the way their answers were and also because who was surprised at the when they heard their episodes, who wasn't surprised. and they're like where'd you go? to And also, as I said to Ginny when she asked, was like, there's...
01:15:50
Speaker
There's enough of me out on the internet. You don't need to, we need to hear more of my voice as I'm sure anybody who's been listening to this for the last, whatever, will attest. so But thanks for thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about it. I haven't and really talked about that podcast with so many people.
01:16:06
Speaker
Well, thank you. i appreciate that. And I enjoy it. It's really interesting to come into an episode and, you know, other than the title i I still don't really know what to expect.
01:16:23
Speaker
when like your introductions really help a lot for me but then hearing somebody just talking on their own without having a prepared script more or less you know it's it's really interesting it's just such a different format and i I can well imagine that for some people it doesn't work for them but for me I i do find it It's not engaging. I don't know. I don't have a better word for it. Here's the thing about it, though, that may be relevant to what you're saying. you know, my feeling is that um one one of the things that I complain about when i to people on podcasts is ah when they so their intro, they say, hey, everybody, um because it's not a mass medium.
01:17:09
Speaker
I mean, it is mass in the sense of, of you know, yes, a million people listen to Mark Merritt. But they're listening one at a time. Like, nobody's listening to podcast in an amphitheater with a bunch of other people.
01:17:23
Speaker
ah it's a fair It's like radio in that respect. It's very intimate. And so what I was thinking as I was working on it was to not have the interruption of a second voice. To have just one person's voice in your head for 15 minutes would probably be a very different kind of experience than however your brain was parsing out that you were um eavesdropping on a conversation between two people.
01:17:53
Speaker
this This doesn't feel this way. This feels like it's just, you know, you're driving in your car, you're sitting at your laptop or whatever, and one person's voice trying to sort of figure this shit out um in real time um would be a different sort of experience so like yeah you're right some people are just like nope but um that's uh i've had a lot of experience with that in my life so i'm not worried about it that much so a minute ago you said something about you know people hear more than enough from you or whatever it was but
01:18:27
Speaker
You weren't listening. You don't care. yeah You said something. i don't know what it was. Exactly. Yes. That's how it works. I've checked out. I've heard so much it from you today. i can't even bother. it Yeah. Okay. Go on. If people do want to hear more from you, so to speak, connect, you know, as people say, or read an essay or something, i will have link to the podcast, a link to your essay that we've talked about, you know, thinking and doing and all that.
01:18:57
Speaker
But Where should people go or, you know, what should they do to connect with you, follow you, whatever. And then before we finish as well, do you have any final words of wisdom or things you would want to hit on or leave people with?
01:19:11
Speaker
Let's start with socials. I'm not, I stopped using Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. So if they want to find me on socials, I'm on Blue Sky, Mastodon, Twixle Fed, Spottable.
01:19:28
Speaker
LinkedIn, still on LinkedIn. That is what do you do? Um, go to the right site, martinbeal.com where, uh, the essay that, that, that Eric is going to post and a zillion others are there as well. Um,
01:19:45
Speaker
So you can see that. um Theagencyreview.com, the-agency-review.com, a site I've been running for over a decade reviewing books relevant to advertising, which started out being...
01:20:00
Speaker
you know, the usual suspects, um, confessions of an advertising man, stuff like that, but rapidly evolved into any book because I believe advertising is about culture and commerce. And so basically everything's fair game.
01:20:16
Speaker
Um, then you can check that stuff out. And then, um, then you're on mute, uh, is on Apple and Spotify, uh, podcast.
01:20:27
Speaker
So those are places to... And then various other... I've written stuff for Adweek, I've written stuff for AdAge, I've written stuff for... I've been on podcasts and stuff like that.
01:20:39
Speaker
um I also used to cover Major League Soccer. and So there's a zillion things I've written about soccer out there as well, which... If you thought the football talk was boring, well, you check out the soccer talk.
01:20:50
Speaker
um So that's where you can get in touch with me on most things. Well, Martin, I appreciate you being here. I really enjoyed the conversation and I'm sure that everyone that listened to it will enjoy it much more than you have have said they they, well, I'm sure they've made it through. So thank you very much.
01:21:10
Speaker
Well, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. And and yeah, give me a holler. People can give me holler on LinkedIn or at the sites. Good talking to man. Thank you.