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Ryan: On today’s episode of Advertising in America, we want to know how you heard about us. Will asking this question help fine-tune your marketing mix, or are you just getting sold a bill of goods that will never pay off? Mick, I’d really like to know how you heard about us. What do you have to say?

Mick: Okay, sit back because how did you hear about us is something that triggers me. Ever call a company and the first question they ask is, “How did you hear about us?” You know why they’re doing this, right? They want to know which of their advertising efforts resulted in this call.

They’re hoping that you say, I heard your commercial on 104.5 Duck FM. Or maybe you’ll say, I see your billboard every day on the way to work. Or perhaps you’ll respond, I saw your TV commercial on my favourite show. Here’s the part that bothers me. The reason the business person is asking this question is because they don’t know the answer.

Think about this. A company spending literally thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing doesn’t know what works. How dare you? How dare you not know? What’s the matter with you? You’re doing all this marketing stuff and then wondering if it’s all a waste of money. What kind of amateur shit is this? You know who doesn’t ever ask, how did you hear about us? Home Depot. They never ask this question, you know why? Because they already know the answer. Because they’re f****** professionals. And most importantly, they know the answer a customer gives when you put them on the spot won’t actually help them anyway. Home Depot has more than one path to connecting a customer with a purchase. You can go to the website, maybe listen to a radio commercial, or see an ad on TV. Perhaps you’re just driving by and see a giant orange store. Asking, how did you hear about us doesn’t give you a useful answer because you can only give one.

Maybe you’ve seen Home Depot ads on TV for years, saw their trucks on the road, heard radio commercials, got their flyer in your mailbox, and they’re asking, how did you hear about us? Well, which one of those is correct? I mean, if you’re holding the flyer in your hand, I guess it’s the flyer that worked. All that other stuff was a waste of money, right?

Only, maybe the TV commercial was really great and that’s why you bothered to read the flyer in the first place. Oh, and your business has multiple paths to a sale too, doesn’t it? Did they see a truck wrap, hear a commercial, visit you online, maybe spot you on Google Maps? Probably all of the above and more.

The answer is never just one thing. So the question is meaningless and you’re wasting your customer’s valuable time asking it. Shame on you. But my best / worst example of how did you hear about us came from a real client of mine. He’d been working with me for about five years and business was up by a lot. His competitors were struggling, but his business was thriving in the same market. So imagine my surprise when the client calls me up and says, we’re canceling the radio campaign.

Well, that’s odd. It’s been running for years. What’s the problem? Well, none of our sales are coming from the radio commercials. So I asked him, how do you know where the calls are coming from? Well, because we ask every single caller as soon as they call, how did you hear about us? And pretty much we, they never say, we heard your radio commercial, so obviously the radio doesn’t work.

They all say they got a referral or word of mouth or the website. Never the radio ads. Well, this makes me furious, but not for the reason you think. I mean, yes, I wrote the radio commercials, but that’s not why I’m pissed. I’m pissed because asking the question is rude. Asking that question to your customer is rude. You’re changing the subject from what your customer wants to talk about to what you want to talk about. And how dare you do that, ever! A customer calls with something specific on her mind and you’re all, well, first things first, I want to know if I’m spending my marketing dollars correctly. So hold on to your problem for a while and help me more help me with get more efficient with my spending. No, stop that. Stop it.

When a customer calls you, you solve their problem and then you let them go on with their day. You never change the subject from what matters to them, to what matters to you, ever. They didn’t call to help you with your marketing. Don’t ever make your problem the customer’s problem, ever.

And it doesn’t matter what category you’re in. It’s never okay to ask the customer to become an unpaid marketing focus group of one. Oh, and just to hammer home my point, the client who called me wanting to cancel the radio campaign, you’re gonna think I’m making this up, but I’m not. I’m going to name names. That client, John T. Donahue Funeral Home. Let that sink in. Somebody picks up the phone because they need funeral services. And the first thing they hear is, how did you hear about us? I know you’ve had a death in the family, but before we go into that, can you help me with my advertising? I think I might be wasting my money on the radio or another medium. Did you hear our commercials? No. What about our billboards? Did you see those?

Just hold on a minute. We’ll get to your dead mother in a second. I haven’t solved my ad budget problems yet. Yes. Asking the question is rude. It’s always rude. It’s particularly rude in this case, but it doesn’t matter what business you’re in. It’s never the customer’s job to track your marketing of effectiveness.

Stop asking customers. How did you hear about us? Stop that. Stop it right now.

Ryan: Now, Mick, I know you’re triggered right now, and I want you to know that this is not a safe space. We’re going to be absolutely horrible to you right now. Now, we didn’t actually get a panic room in here, but we do have a pancake room. We’ve called it the Waffle House for you, buddy. Chris. How did you hear about us? Just curious.

Chris: I say, go ahead. What’s the downside? Mick’s going to tell you it’s rude. People call their dentist because they have a toothache and you interrupt them to ask about your marketing. Okay, so, it’s America. Rude is our God-given right. It’s in the Constitution. You Tesla-driven liberals can whine all you want about politeness.

I’m driving a diesel-powered Ford F-150 with a big ol’ pair of balls hanging off the trailer hitch because I think it’s rude. You don’t like it? Suck my tailpipe. And seriously, what’s the downside? Somebody just spent 20 minutes on Google trying to find a dentist, visited a bunch of websites, read some reviews, and finally called you.

Now you inconvenience them a little with a quick marketing question. Do you think they’re gonna hang up in a huff and go back to the internet and find the second-best dentist? No. So worst case, you tick someone off a little bit before they hire you anyway. Best case, you get some intel on your marketing. Which brings me to the second thing that Mick’s going to tell you, that it’s bad data.

Back in the old days, if you asked that question, there were decent odds that the caller would literally be holding the Yellow Pages, so they’d probably just say the Yellow Pages to get you to move on. These days there’s pretty decent odds that they are literally in front of a computer having just googled you so they’re probably going to say that. Bad data, which doesn’t account for all the other places that marketing has shared your brand with this caller. So, okay, I got a better idea. Ask him a couple more questions. There’s a weird psychological phenomenon that says if someone doesn’t like you very much, you ask them to do you a favor. Seems counterintuitive. You’d think if they don’t like you that you should do them a favor. But, no. You ask them to do you a favor. No one’s quite sure how this works, but it could be that asking someone to do a favor makes them think, Wow, that’s the kind of thing that they would ask their friend to do, so maybe we’re actually friends. Or, maybe it’s a mental scorecard. If you do them a favor, they think, Great. I hate this guy’s guts, and now I owe him one. But if you ask them to do you a favor, well, now they think that you owe them. They think they’re ahead. So, go ahead. Ask your caller to do you a favor. Sure, she’s a little ticked off that you haven’t started talking about her toothache yet, but now she’s doing you a favor, so maybe you’re friends after all.

And hey, you want better data? Ask more questions. When the caller says yeah, I guess I found out about you on Google, get the CSRs to say, well, sure Mrs. Jenkins, but when you saw that whole list come up on Google, how did you pick us from that list? And that’s when she’s going to say, I recognized your name from that awesome radio campaign that Chris Torbay wrote, and that’s why I called you.

Then ask them to tell you maybe which spots they remember, or which lines, or which offers, and there’s your good data. And now, she’s done you a favor. Instant friendship. So, in conclusion, yeah. Ask them how they heard about you.

Ryan: No, because it’s got layers. It’s like an onion, though. Oh, and it’s also because of his crazy defence about the thing that really kind of stinks a little bit. Yeah. It stinks like an onion. Yeah. I seriously did like the Yellow Pages.

Mick: Let me get this straight. You think we’re not wasting enough of our customer’s time.

Chris: A better idea. I got an even better idea. Which is you ask them the question. You ask them the follow-up question so you get good data.

And then you say, Mrs. Jenkins, thank you very much for helping me out. You know what? I’m going to give you 100 off your bill. Now! That’s value stacking. That’s classic Ryan Chute right there. Now you’ve asked.

Mick: She wants her f****** problems solved. She doesn’t want to talk about you and your commercial.

Chris: You’ve just surprised her with an extra hundred bucks.

Mick: You referenced that I was going to talk about bad data. By the way, the data is bad. It’s absolute shit. And that’s because people will say anything to get you to stop talking about the bullshit they don’t care about and get them back to their thing. So they will tell you whatever’s at the top of their head.

I saw f****** skywriting. Can we talk about my problem? My dead water heater. My f****** whatever it is I need. The idea that you think you’re going to get good data when you put someone on the spot when they don’t want to talk about this thing, they actually have a thing that they really want to talk about. They made a phone call about it. And now you’re going to derail that whole thing in order to get them to talk about something stupid. They will very quickly derail your problem and get them, get it back on track to it. And they’ll say anything and I can prove it.

Ryan: That’s true and look, I can prove it because in Scotland we had a mailer that we were sending out for an event. I was live at that event. 1500 mailers did not arrive. The Royal Post let us down, sadly, they very rarely do that.

However, it never arrived. So there was this committee that started buzzing around, thinking we should change the scripts of how we’re gonna call out and see if they got their mailer and stuff. And I said, no, we’re not changing anything. We’re absolutely going to say the exact same thing because I was kind of curious about what was going to happen here. And I tracked the results. So we literally had tracking sheets. 22% of people said that they had received the mailer that was never sent. 33% of us saw us on TV that never ran. 7% of us heard us on the radio that never ran. Never existed.

Mick: It’s not just bad data. Bad data in and of itself is already kind of stupid and wasteful. The worst thing is you’re going to take bad data and then you’re going to act on it. Oh my God, you’re going to do something based on this really, really shitty data. There is no worse idea that’s ever been invented for business than to gather shitty data and then fricking act on it.

Ryan: So true. So it’s a complete red herring.

Mick: And the results of that, you just said from your Scottish example, don’t surprise me in the least. Roy Williams did exactly the same thing when they launched Benjamin Franklin, the Punctual Plumber. They ran radio commercials for six months before they opened the company. And then they tracked how people heard about them radio was like number six on the list of the previous five things. There was no word of mouth. There was no company. There was no website. There was no billboard.

Chris: My Dad’s been using that for years.

Mick:  None of that shit. A friend recommended me. No, they didn’t. Your friend didn’t hire us because we don’t exist there. It’s shitty data and then we act on it. So we’re wasting people’s time rudely making them solve our problems instead of us solving their problems. And then the data we get is shit.

Ryan: 31% heard about them from the newspaper. They didn’t run in the newspaper. This is Benjamin Franklin. 24% saw the TV ad, no TV ad. 19% say said a referral. Nope. There was no company. It didn’t exist at that time. 17% had no idea. Not surprising. That’s actually probably the most accurate data there. 4% heard it on the radio.

Mick: 4%. Literally 100% of the people heard it on the radio, otherwise, they wouldn’t be there. It was the only thing that they had.

Ryan: Great literally. And 5% said other. They weren’t 100% sure about it. Put that beat on there. When we’ve run the data, this has been this has happened, more over and over and over again. We did a similar thing in Detroit not long ago. And look, every time it comes up with the most ridiculous concept combination of numbers that prove our point every single time, you’re wasting your time, you’re wasting your energy, and you’re chasing a red herring, you’re chasing a ghost that’s never actually going to serve you the way that it needs to serve you.

And that’s all we’re trying to get at here, is that it’s important that we pay attention to the things that matter, not the things that don’t.

Chris: The interesting part, and I mean, the truth is I agree 100% with what Mick said but it has to be a good debate.

Mick: It has to, yes. But I do like to yell about things.

Chris: And it’s good fun. But what I loved is that discussion about how it’s almost always a bunch of things. I mean, it’s interesting, the Benjamin Franklin thing, they just ran a radio campaign, and they came out of nowhere. But as he said with Home Depot, there’s the building, there’s the trucks, there’s the outdoor, there’s several different media, there’s word of mouth, there’s referrals, there’s all kinds of different things. And the fact is almost anything that you buy or use, you have heard about it in a couple of different places. You know, when you finally get yourself an iPhone, is it the TV ad? Is it the Apple store? Is it that your buddy’s got an iPhone? Is it the TV ads from 10 years ago when the guy said, I’m a Mac, I’m a PC. It’s all of those things.

Finally, all those ways that you have heard about that brand have finally sort of culminated in you making a choice. And so if you were to ask that person a question, as you say, you’ve got to pick one and it’s never one, even when we do the big campaign and there are just a few other things, like the fact that your trucks are wrapped or the fact that you’ve got a prominent location, it’s three things then. It’s the fact that when you hear that radio ad, you go, the guy whose truck I’ve seen with the, you know, Wizard on the top.

Mick: But you used the example of big companies, but I believe in medium-sized companies, which is generally the clients we’re talking about. They also have multiple paths of finding out about a particular brand. And the most ridiculous thing you can do is get so bogged down in the tracking of how did this lead come in. I literally know people who are so ridiculous that they put a different phone number on their truck as compared to the phone number that’s on the website, as compared to the phone number that’s on the TV commercial, as compared to, because they want to try and sort, oh, and they do an outdoor campaign. They put a different phone number on that because they want to know, well, was it the outdoor? Was it the truck, like how did this thing come in? And again it doesn’t tell you why the customer called, it tells you the last thing they did just before they

Chris: And even that might be inaccurate, right? Because they may see that billboard, they’re not going to pull over to the side of the road, get a pen out. Write it down, and get back on the highway. They’re gonna get home and say, I saw a billboard for mixed discount dynamite and they’re gonna Google it and find the phone number. Now they’re gonna get the Google, the one that comes up on Google and it’s gonna be attributed to being the one that’s the links when what it was actually the billboard.

Mick: In Latin, it’s post hoc ergo proctor hoc. By the way, that’s a sentence that’s supposed to remind you that it’s f****** stupid and it’s not true. It happened because of what happened just before. That’s not a, that’s a fallacy. That’s why it was such a popular phrase that they translated it into Latin.

Chris: What it goes to show you people have been making mixed arguments since Roman times.

Mick: Since the freaking Roman times.

Chris: Stop calling, stop asking the Toga purchasers where they heard of your toga shop.

Mick: And the idea of wrapping your trucks is not so that people will see your truck wrap and stand outside next to your truck and dial the phone. That’s not actually going to happen. And even if zero people call the number that’s on that truck, it doesn’t mean the truck wrap was not useful. And ditto for all of the other things in almost every case, a client in a medium-sized business has a wrapped truck, has a website, has some sort of an outdoor thing might have a high visibility location and an offline campaign and an online campaign, and all of these things work together. And if you don’t understand that you have no business being in the marketing world, you should have somebody else do it.

If you really don’t know the answer to that question, how dare you? You’re a f****** amateur and that’s bullshit, and you need to stop it.

Chris: Well, or, does it even matter? Because, one of the things we say to our clients a lot is, you know, here’s the campaign. It’s going to be a really strong campaign. Lots of people are going to see it. We know the reach and frequency and all those sorts of things. But then when we find it, when we get the billboards to align and we get the website to align and we get the, you know when they do a booth at the local fair, it looks the same.

What it does is it makes the brand look big and consistent and well thought out and solid and you know, that builds trust. It doesn’t actually matter, it, like, what is important is, is what all of that cumulatively conveys as opposed to whether right? So, you do all of those things. They all contribute a little. Doesn’t matter how much each one contributes. The fact is the totality is what’s meaningful. And so you do all of them so that you continue to look like that big market-leading, trustworthy brand.

Mick: And that’s why Dunkin Donuts doesn’t ask you how they’re heard about you when you walk in and get yourself a cup of coffee.

Ryan: Yeah. Now a lot of this data is covered in a video that you can find on YouTube by Les Binet called The Short Of It, and it really does kind of capture the holistic nature of, marketing. Now this is over a decade’s worth of research and collected data. So we’re talking about sizable sample sizes well researched, well-documented proof that in fact, it is a cumulative effect. It is a compounding effect that matters more than the last touch attribution that we’re giving whatever place they came from last.

Mick: Even Google will tell you that the best SEO you can possibly do is to have an offline campaign.

Ryan: That’s right.

Mick: If people will then do a direct search, rather than by intent search or organic search or category search they will even acknowledge and they will show you their data that shows that an offline campaign will accomplish that. Even though nobody will call you up and say, you know, Hello, I heard your radio commercial and I’d like to purchase some products and services. If anybody ever calls you up and says, hello, I heard your radio commercials and I’d like to purchase some products or services. You can say hello, Mrs. Torbay, because that’s my mom. She’s the only one who does that.

Ryan: The only one who does that.

Mick: Literally the only person who does that.

Ryan: She does it a lot actually.

Mick: Well, I mean, she’s a team player and we appreciate her.

In fact, I had a client in Edmonton who had someone call up literally and say hi there. I heard your radio commercials and I’d like to spend $35,000 on one of the products they sell and of course, he’d heard me say this before except that my mom doesn’t live in Edmonton. He was trying to figure out why she wanted to go like four time zones away to buy a you know a really expensive product which she didn’t.

Ryan: Tell me about the Yellow Pages Story.

Mick: Well, so how did you hear about us was invented by The Yellow Pages and that’s because back in the good old days before Google, the Yellow Pages was Google. And, and so that allowed people to search by category. That’s what I mean, we we search by category. Yeah, Yeah you’d look it up, in the Yellow Pages, under T, instead of Dave’s Tow Truck. So, they would have the Yellow Pages, and the Yellow Pages had the phone number. Of course, that was the only way to get a phone number back then.

We didn’t have every freaking phone number on the planet in our pocket back in those days. The phone was here, and the phone book was right underneath it. And so if you needed a phone number, you’d do that. And so you’d have a business that would have a TV campaign or a radio campaign or a newspaper campaign.

But then when you actually need the product or service that they provide, well, you have to call them. Well, if you know that they’re a jeweler, then you go to Jay and you look it up and there’s a, there’s the ad and You go good and you dial them up and they’d say, cool, how did you hear about us? And so the Yellow Pages would say, make sure you ask your customers when they call you. How did they hear about us? They would literally be holding the Yellow Pages in their hand. That was good for the Yellow Pages.

That’s why they invented it. That’s why no other people did that. Cause there was nobody else who was holding the freaking thing when they called. So Yellow Pages invented this self-serving thing so that they could prove that purchasing the Yellow Pages was a good idea and it was a good idea. It was absolutely essential. It was as essential as having a Google presence is today, but it wasn’t the only thing that mattered. The thing that’s wrong, is that we don’t have ten boxes to check, and if we do have ten boxes to check what’s the f****** point? Are you checking all ten boxes? The data becomes shittier again.

Chris: But that is why I like my three-question idea because it’s good for my business, not good for your business, which is if you ask them three questions, then they are going to say, yeah, okay, well, before I Googled you, yeah, I guess I’d heard you on the radio and then I’m going to get credit and now my

Mick: I think they are gonna be even more annoyed with you. And they’re going to just say, I don’t know. My f****** uncle told me we can, can we please stop with my broken water heater?

Ryan: So certainly creates a friction point also,

Mick: Also you’re wrong.

Chris: I am. I am. You know what? I will give you, I’m 100% wrong on this one, but it’s a good conversation.

Ryan: It doesn’t make for good commentary.

Mick: He does like riling up his brother I’ve been doing it since I was 11.

Chris: Whatever you do, don’t ask people how you heard of us.

Ryan: Yeah.

Mick: I mean, I know I make a good case.

Chris: I’m the more compelling of the two brothers, but don’t do it.

Mick: He’s the better-looking of the two. But he’s wrong about this.

Chris: I am wrong.

Ryan: They come for the conflict. That’s what makes this fun.

Mick: And stay for the cursing.

Ryan: Right, the cursing and the jokes. In conclusion, to wrap things up, stop asking, how did you hear about us? It’s flawed data and red herrings. Measure what needs to be measured, but don’t subscribe to this notion that all things must be measured to be effective.

Plan out your marketing budget to address the short-term and long-term goals in your marketing. Binet and Field suggest that a home service company, for example, should get a mix of about 60 percent of the budget to the brand presence and that 40 percent of the budget should be put towards sales activation.

When you’re just starting out, it’ll be the other way around, but your goal should be to reverse that over time.

Thank you for tuning in to Advertising in America, and remember, you’re an American, not an American’t. Get out there and be awesome today. You can do it. Till next time.

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