Watch the video above or read below.

Matthew Burns:
Thank you for coming back and hanging out with the bouncing bobblehead. Steve and I, we’re marketers. We work for the Wizard of Ads. We’re independents, we’re partners of the Wizard of Ads Group. We love what we do and that’s why we do this channel. And Steve does the Empire Builders Channel, which talks about how small businesses became massive empires, and we love to highlight awesome things. We really, really do. The problem is that not everything is awesome. And so we’ve got to acknowledge that.

Stephen Semple:
Sometimes in the world of advertising, it gets a little thin on trying to find awesome. Let’s face it. Most suck.

Matthew Burns:
Right? But here’s the thing. So Steve, we’ve talked about this stuff before we, We’ve got clients who are doing business kind of like everybody else in their category. They’re pretty much doing the same thing.

Stephen Semple:
They’re selling the same product, the same service, the same as everybody else. I’m going to say that’s the vast majority of our customers. The vast majority of our customers really do not have a differentiator. They’re a plumber. They’re heating and air conditioning. They sell jewelry, they’re selling the same stuff as the guy down the road. And then you see a video like this.

 

Announcer: When you stay at a VRBO, you always get the whole home. Not part of it, but the whole upstairs, the whole downstairs, the whole fridge, and the whole secret nap room. Because is it really a vacation home if you have to share the house with the host? Only with VRBO. 

Matthew Burns:
I have a problem.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. There’s a couple of problems on this. One is that there’s two things that they’re pretending. So the first thing that they’re pretending is that they are different than Airbnb.

Matthew Burns:
Right? Exactly.

Stephen Semple:
The second thing that they’re pretending that none of us know that at Airbnb you can rent the whole home. And so what they really think is that there’s a significant part of the marketplace out there that has no idea that with Airbnb, you can rent the entire home.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly.

Stephen Semple:
Here’s where they got stuck. We’re doing television ads. And guess what? The television company comes in and says, well, what’s your offer? Well, our offer is this. If you’re going to do something like this. See, here’s where the trap is. There’s times where it has worked. People have run something where it’s not a differentiator and owned it. It only works, first of all, when you’re the first to do it, and secondly, it only works if people don’t realize it.

There was a really famous Schlitz ad that happened back in the 1930s where they advertised how they cleaned the bottles and how it made their products so much better, and it catapulted Schlitz into the top beer. And look, everybody was cleaning their bottles that way. But the reason why it worked is no one knew it and no one was going to step in and go, whoa, we do that as well. Now you’re the second mover. This won’t work. Airbnb had already been well established before VRBO came along and before VRBO ran these ads. And everyone knows, you can tell Airbnb isn’t even responding to it going, everyone knows you can get the whole home at Airbnb. We all know that.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. I think the problem that I have with it is I’m going to be a little more critical and I’m usually happy go-lucky. Everything’s fine. It was a really boring goddamn ad. It was boring. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We’re not saying anything different than anybody else can say. And come on, VRBO. You think that’s entertaining? You think there’s a story there? You think it’s interesting you said that the secret nap room?

Stephen Semple:
Which actually wasn’t that secret.

Matthew Burns:
Right? It was a nook off to the side of the stairs. Here’s the problem. It was a crappy ad and your message was not unique. What did you think was going to happen? You thought all of a sudden the website was just going to go, oh, guys, get the IT department on there, our website’s shutting down. We have so many people rushing to us because we’re saying that… it was so slow. And the same message. Could you imagine if it was just entertaining talking about how you get the whole home, if they actually did something that was stood out and was a little bit magical and said things in a magical way or in an interesting at all way?

Stephen Semple:
Airbnb has managed to tell the whole home story in an interesting way where they’ve pivoted it against when you go to a hotel, the four of you are in different rooms. You don’t get to hang out together. You do an Airbnb.

Matthew Burns:
That’s right.

Stephen Semple:
And guess what? Embedded in that message is whole home. And we didn’t have to say it because our customer’s not stupid, right?

Matthew Burns:
Yes.

Stephen Semple:
So a much more interesting way to tell that story. But here’s the problem. VRBO was stuck in this scenario of, okay, we do exactly the same as our competitor. We don’t want to say we’re a cheaper price. We have no features or benefits that they don’t have. We’re selling the same thing. So I guess what we’re going to have to do is talk about this one thing. I guess it is a bit of a differentiator because Airbnb has whole home and shared, we’re not doing any shared, we’re only whole home. So therefore we’re going to talk about this thing that no one cares about.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly.

Stephen Semple:
Because you’re not going to accidentally book a shared accommodation on Airbnb.

Matthew Burns:
You can’t. Listen. I ran for years an Airbnb, a cottage down on the ocean, and it makes me go through so many hoops and nobody can rent it by accident. So nobody’s misled in any way, shape or form. Trust me, it’s never going to happen. Listen, I’ve used VRBO. My wife’s from Portugal. When we go back to Portugal, she uses VRBO. At the time Airbnb wasn’t there, so there was no comparison. We used their VRBO. It was a good experience. The website worked well. The hosts did everything they’re supposed to. They got the job done. So you have a product and you can sell it, but you’re boring and you lost my attention and you didn’t say anything validatingly interesting.

Stephen Semple:
To give people a bit of an idea here, because today the vast majority of businesses out there are stuck in this scenario where they’re selling the same thing as somebody else. In so many businesses, you really don’t have a big differentiator or the differentiator you have is way too complicated to explain. So basically we’re in this situation of we’re selling the same stuff. So what do you end up doing? How do you advertise? Just make people like you.

Matthew Burns:
That’s it.

Stephen Semple:
And that may seem insane, but we’ve done it over and over and over again. Jewelry, businesses, plumbers, heating and air conditioning companies, they’re all selling the same thing. Yet we’ve grown the massively many 10 times growth just by doing the strategy of “like them more.” Tell stories that make people like you and then they want to work with you.

Matthew Burns:
This is a national advertising campaign. This is a lot of money people. So when we’re talking about this and we’re saying these things, we’re not taking it lightly. When I’m being critical, trust me, I’m the happy go lucky feeling partner of the entire group because I love everybody all the time. And this campaign is just so boring… it does not move the who-gives-a-shit meter, as we like to say. We want people to feel something so that they are connected to us so that they’re sticky. This is not sticky, right?

Stephen Semple:
No, it really isn’t.

Matthew Burns:
And I’m Canadian too, so I’m sorry that I was so bold. But the truth of the matter is if you don’t have anything unique to say, or if you don’t have a unique selling point, then be interesting. Be funny, be emotional. Grab my attention. Don’t let it be common that you talk. Be uncommon. What do we like to say? Winning is weird. So if you’re going to win, you have to be weird. Do something more than what your competitor could do. You know what Airbnb could have? They really wanted to come right back and hit with, Hey, by the way, you can rent a whole home here too. And if you’re saying the exact same thing that your competitors, if all they had to do is change the logo on your ad and the ad still works, it’s not a good ad. And that’s what they did here. They just made an ad that Airbnb could have put their thing on it, except for the only a VRBO which again is B.S.

Let us know your thoughts. Are we just crapping on them for no reason? Do you think that there was something amazing here? I’d love to hear some commentary on whether or not we’re just being stupid Canadians at this point. Steve, when you brought this one up, I thought it was worth talking about and I felt immediately how you felt, which is, it was a miss.

Stephen Semple:
It was a miss. Now it is one of those things where they probably got some ROI on it because VRBO would at least raise being known a little bit. But I mean, it could be so much better.

Matthew Burns:
Okay, well, there we go guys. Bad news. We finally did a bad news bear here. And again, I’m sorry, not sorry. And we will see you guys next time. I’m not going to make you sit through me apologizing anymore. Thanks, Steve. I appreciate you, man.

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