Dear Reader,

It’s 11:49 a.m. on a Tuesday in May in Austin. The day is humid and clear. It stormed last night, and it was breathtaking.

Austin is known for football, BBQ, and being weird. Any tourist can tell you that. What only the locals know is this… About twice a year, God puts on a fantastic light show above Austin. Silver rays dance from cloud to cloud. Leaping and twirling,  painting pictures of brightly lit winter trees. It plays. It seduces. It awes. It fills the heavens and earth with energy..

Texas lightning isn’t young. It’s in no rush to bury itself in the ground.

God names each of His beautiful Texas lightning bolts. “You are Rico. You are Annita. You are Juan Julio. Go dance!”

Rico dances! He comes out and stays strong.

Annita joins in and turns it into the flamenco. She stomps her heel, and a roar of thunder applauds.

Juan Julio joins her. He is the lover. They sway together and all look on.

The locals know the dancers and cheer “Olé!” and “Yee-haw!”

On a rare occasion, a blessed traveler gets to peek at the dance.

These storms free the inhibited spirit and wash away insecurities.

Keep that in mind for what comes next.

It’s 11:49 a.m. in Austin. I’m driving. In the car are Roy, Mike (one of our great coaches), and Shane (a Service Excellence client). We are on our way to a feast.

Shane owns an electrical business in Las Vegas. Over the last 3 years, his company has experienced radical growth. He sees an end to what he can do with digital and wants to visit Roy to discuss how Relational Branding could benefit his business. The morning has been fine, but the conversation in the truck gets vulnerable, really fast. (The power is still in the air.)

Shane starts talking about his daughter, Luna; She is 20 months old, beautiful, and the apple of his eye. “A father’s job is to protect his daughter. This job never ends.” Shane tells us his father never thought this way.

Shane is baring his soul. With a glance, at first. We see him. He sees us. He shows us more.

“Going to prison when I was 20 years old is the best thing that ever happened to me. All of the old-timers in prison said, ‘What are you doing here? You don’t belong here.’ They gave me good advice about going to college and starting a family. I’m grateful to those old-timers, and I’ll never forget them.”

Over the next two hours, Shane did the hard work of getting honest and being vulnerable. We did the good work of withholding judgment and being curious.

He told us about growing up in Las Vegas, his rough teenage years, and how a few wise men in an unlikely place changed his life forever.

Most business owners would never tell these stories. They fear that in the wrong hands, these stories would become a storm that would tear through their life and leave a wake of destruction. It’s a valid fear.

Most writers would never tell these stories.

It’s why most owners will never realize the full power of their storm. It’s why transformative life journeys are replaced with plastic bios..

Most writers lack the talent or the guts to tell the truth.

In the right hands, the storm of a person’s life can be a beautiful dance.

It can intrigue and delight, holding your attention and leaving you transformed.

The catch is that you just have to be willing to be vulnerable and share it with the right storyteller.

 

 

 

Watch / listen above or read below.

Todd Liles: All right. Welcome to yet another episode. And today we’re going to talk about winning the heart. But the angle that we’re going to take today is the power of emotionally vulnerable ads. Roy, we know that vulnerability is so powerful. When we can show someone our relative weaknesses or our soft spots, that it allows people to connect with us. It allows customers to connect with us. And it becomes more than just about transactions because if you’re being vulnerable, you can’t be the tough guy. This helps us win loyalty.

So I want to jump into why being emotionally vulnerable works so amazingly well. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to jump straight into it. I’m going to talk about why, first of all, does it capture attention? And then number two, about crafting emotionally powerful ads. So let’s go to attention first. And here’s my question. Why do audiences respond to brands that just show their struggles, their flaws? They’re just real honest about who they are.

Roy Williams: Okay. So the question that you’re answering with vulnerability, can I trust these people? Can I believe what they say? Okay? Now let’s talk about vulnerability for a second. You talked about emotional vulnerability.

There’s actually three different types of vulnerability, all of which work wonderfully. Emotional vulnerability is one of them. Relational vulnerability is another one. In other words, the relationship you have with different people, the relationship you have with the world around you is all about status. It’s all about what you think of me, the relationship we have together, who do you think I am? When you make yourself relationally vulnerable so that it’s possible a person might feel — you might drop in their estimation. And if you know you’re risking that and you risk it, what kind of a person would risk that? A person who trusts you and a person who tells the truth.

And so you never, ever, ever want to claim to be honest. If you want to be perceived as an honest person, just say something that only an honest person would say. Now remember, there’s emotional vulnerability, okay? It’s costing me to tell you this. You know what I mean? I am embarrassing myself. It’s hard for me to talk about this. Emotional vulnerability is letting people see you real as you really are. That means you can be trusted. That means you can, in fact, be trusted to tell the truth because you’re telling a very difficult truth to tell.

Todd Liles: Yes.

Roy Williams: Do you know what I mean?

Todd Liles: Absolutely.

Roy Williams: Now, I don’t want people to think this is about, see, if you get creepy with it, if you overshare. 

Todd Liles: Don’t share too much. 

Roy Williams: If you go too far, it’s like now you’re just being creepy and weird. Nobody likes you. So it’s like you’re just being weird.

Todd Liles: This is the art part of it.

Roy Williams: This is the art part of it. And so something that’s significant, something that’s meaningful, but doesn’t make anybody feel creepy or awkward. Number two was the relational vulnerability. You’re willing to give up potential status or potential perception of ability or power or success or whatever. Number three, financial vulnerability.

Todd Liles: Okay.

Roy Williams: You made yourself financially vulnerable and you won the confidence. They rewarded you with their confidence when you told all those people in the last session. You tell all these technicians, look, to increase your close rate, you need to buy from your company at full price for yourself. You can do it. You know how to do it. Why wouldn’t you just do it for yourself? Because you’re trying to convince other people to pay this price. You have to pay it first.

And so, if you have a monthly maintenance club at your company, you need to pay full price every month to be part of that club. So that whenever one of the other guys comes over to do the work at your house, you just get to prop your feet up and enjoy it and you don’t have to do the work that you do all day when you get home because you’re paying the company the same price everybody else pays them. Okay.

You made yourself financially vulnerable when you told the people that you were training, Todd, in the last broadcast we did. You said, look, if you do what I’m telling you and your sales don’t increase and you don’t start making way more money and have a much higher close rate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, I’m going to pay you back all of the money. You just call me up. I will write you a cheque for the money that I cost you.

And I know that you would do it. You always have done those things and lived up to your word. Not one person ever called you, because it always works. But you made yourself financially vulnerable to communicate to them the depth of your confidence and your belief. And you’re basically saying, trust me, I’m going to take a way bigger chance than I’m asking you to take. And so by doing that, by making yourself financially vulnerable, they all believed you and they all took the action they needed to take. And you helped all these people increase their close rate. You helped all these people make way more money and become way more successful. And I’m going, yes, financial vulnerability is how you did that.

Emotional, relational or financial vulnerability. It causes people to say, wow, I feel like I know this person. And that, my friend, is relational marketing.

Todd Liles: I like that. Roy, I think all the way back in the early season, episode three or so, we showed an ad. It was Avis, where they very much knew they weren’t in first place. So they went with We Try Harder, which to me feels a little bit like being relationally vulnerable. It’s like, hey, we know we’re not number one.

Roy Williams: Exactly.

Todd Liles: Has there ever been a company or an example where you’ve worked with someone where they went from just absolutely banging their chest, we’re perfect, to, oh, no, actually, we’ve made some mistakes. Here’s what we’ve learned. And this is what we’re doing different. And I don’t know that there actually is. I’m just curious if you’ve ever worked with anyone where they’ve had to step into that vulnerability role and admit some sort of, maybe not even a mistake. Maybe that’s not the right thing, but whether it’s emotionally, relationally, or financially say, yeah, this is who we are, and you’ve used that appropriately in an ad.

Roy Williams: The biggest example I have of that, masterfully done and very sincerely done, but nobody ever decided to try to commercialize it. Nobody ever… I didn’t write an ad about it, never even considered writing an ad about it, but it made a gigantic, gigantic, gigantic difference. And this was maybe four years ago, four and a half. Ken Goodrich described it as the perfect storm. And this is when he still owned Goettl and I was still writing his ads.

And one day he said, you know, I was at the Mayo Clinic, my phone is off, and he says, I’m there for like four days. And it was a family thing, and this is like, just had his undivided attention. And during this window of time, he said, due to unavoidable things, it was just like a series of like three or four things in a row that happened. There was an older couple, a lot of money, big house, big house, and they were having some special event. I don’t remember what it was, family reunion or something. They needed a new air conditioning system. And they were only going to call Goettl, and they called Goettl, and we believe in you guys.

And they said, here’s going to be the price. And it was like close to 40 grand. And it’s multiple units. And it was, they said, okay, and you’ll have this done by a certain date. We’ll absolutely have it done by that date. They didn’t. And it was like, I forget the different things that happened, but they weren’t things that were controllable. And so Ken comes back into town and he has a call from these people that want to talk to him. And they felt personally betrayed. They said, hey, we believed in you and we trusted you and you let us down. And Ken said, are you home right now? And they said, yes.

And he said, okay, I’m coming over right now. He went to the house and he found out exactly how much they had paid and he handed them a check for all of the money back. Every bit of it. Close to 40 grand. And he said, we’re going to come in and we’re going to redo all of this, and we’re going to get it absolutely perfect. My gift to you. And I’m just so, so sorry that we didn’t have it done in time. And he said, I’m not even going to tell you how it happened, but I wasn’t in town. And they started crying. They absolutely started crying. Now, why did that boost his company exponentially?

Todd Liles: Well, it’s a powerful story that I believe you said you did not leverage it in ad.

Roy Williams: No, never told anybody.

Todd Liles: But what it does is it tells everyone internally inside of the business, this is who we are.

Roy Williams: Bingo. And so everybody in the company, it was a big company. And everybody in the company heard what Ken had done and they went, wow. It wasn’t our fault. He didn’t even try to explain what happened. He didn’t try to reason with them. He just said, we let you down, and that’s not who we are. And I’m so, so sorry. Please forgive us. And he gave them back all their money. And he said, we’re going to come in here. We’re going to get this so perfect as a gift to you. And it’s not enough, I know, but I’m doing everything I can to try to make this up to you.

And they said, well, that’s the kind of guy we thought you were. And they understood that he was out of town and that all these things couldn’t be helped. But first he gave them back their money before he even tried to explain it. And so everybody in the company heard that. Everybody in the company heard what had happened. And they go, God, this is a company to work for. This is the place to be. This is the place where the boss doesn’t come in and scream at you.

He realizes it was just weird. He told me, he said, it was just the most extraordinary perfect storm of all of these things happened. He says, none of which we could have controlled. You get the first one solved and this other thing. It’s like, oh, my gosh. And it’s like all of a sudden, boom, we’re out of time. And so, yeah, culture. Culture is what your employees know about the company. What they actually know to be a fact about the company.

Okay, Dewey Jenkins did something very, very, very similar. You know how Dewey Jenkins built his company? He had like 3,000 people that were members of the monthly maintenance thing. It’s called Priority Advantage in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was Dewey’s thing at Morris Jenkins. And he told me the day we met, he said, we’re going to measure the growth of the Priority Advantage program. And I said, why? And he said, because when we have 42,879 members, he’s a CPA, and he said… For real. And he said, we’ll break $100,000. That year, we’ll do $100,000 because I’ve calculated the benefit of somebody being bonded to your company by paying you $20 a month for a special relationship.

And he goes, do you know why nobody sells as many memberships as they should? And I said, why? He goes, that’s a lie. He said, they’re supposed to get the next available truck, but man, during the busy season, and somebody calls and it’s broken down and it’s an old system, guess what happens?

Todd Liles: Yeah, that’s right.

Roy Williams: They get the next available truck. And he said, my technicians will never be able to sell this. They will never be able to sell it until they see me pay the price to live up to what we promise. And he said, we are going to live up to what we promise. We’re not going to mislead people. And he says, they’re not going to believe me when I tell them we’re going to start never rescheduling. We’re not going to reschedule. If we’ve committed to somebody that we’re going to come out and do their maintenance, and all of a sudden we’re getting all these demand calls from all these old systems, and we don’t have the trucks to send out there, and the competitor’s going to get it because we couldn’t get to it. He said, yep, not going to reschedule it.

And he says, I believe the technicians will see that and they will go, oh, this is real. Now we’re back to the waterless cookware. Now we’re back to what we talked about in the last broadcast, is when you demonstrate to yourself and you demonstrate to your people who we really are. And he said, those people began selling just astounding, astounding numbers of priority advantage programs as technicians. 

You don’t advertise it, and then the people call up and go, I heard this on TV, I heard this on radio, I want to buy that thing you’re talking about. This doesn’t happen. But when the technician’s in the home and says, hey, look, this is the invoice for today. Now listen, if you’re a priority advantage member, then it would be reduced by this amount. And he goes, that’s more than it costs to pay for a whole year. I can go ahead and make you a member now, today, and your savings will pay for it for more than a year.

And they said, can you do that? Even though I wasn’t a member when you got here? He said, yeah, I’m allowed to do that. He said, yeah, just sign us up. And so everybody signed up because I’m telling you what, I’m a member, everybody’s a member, all my friends are members. This is really, really, really a good deal. They couldn’t say that before. You know why? Because they knew you don’t get what we’re promising. We’ve got you in the bag. We don’t have to worry about you going somewhere else. I’m going… Everybody does this, Todd. Here’s my point. Everybody does this.

Todd Liles: They do.

Roy Williams: And the reason Dewey realized, yeah, I don’t like the results we’re getting. What’s the real problem here? And he goes, my people don’t believe it. Now, Ken Goodrich changed what his people believed about the company. That wasn’t his goal, but that was the outcome by accident. Dewey goes, nope, his goal was, I need my people to really value this membership and know that it’s really, really, really worth having. I’m going to have to prove it. And so he made himself financially vulnerable. Ken made himself financially vulnerable and paid the price for it.

Dewey paid the price for it and missed sales he could have made for replacement systems to prove to his people this program is worth having. Now, that was a bad decision in the short term. It built the company to $115 million before I left. And the last time I talked to Dewey, it’s like at $145 million in Charlotte. And that was just like three years after I left. They’ve jumped from $115 million to $145 million. But the team that I was working with is all still there.

Todd Liles: So I’ve got a couple things that’s going through my mind here, and I’d like to try to unpack several of them. One, culture is what your employees know about your company. You have shifted the way I’m thinking about these events. The event with Dewey, the event with Ken. I very much remember a similar event with Mr. Abrams where he brought a lady in, gave her all her money back, and had her have a chance to present her side of the story to the crew in Las Vegas. And what I’m realizing here is that these moments actually are extraordinarily powerful relational marketing. They’re just internal. They’re internal relational marketing. 

Roy Williams: Exactly, because the relationship we have with each other, to build that bond, to build that trust, to build that confidence, requires evidence.

Todd Liles: Yes. And what’s going through my mind here is that we have a line item, and I’m thinking differently about the line item now. Everyone’s got a line item. It says something like warranties, 1%. Wouldn’t it be so much cooler if we thought of that line item not as a warranty? Because people see that as a waste, and we saw that line item and said, that’s internal marketing. Every time we get a chance to do something the right way, it’s a form of advertising, form of marketing, form of relationship building.

So I think I know the answer because you’ve made it clear. But I’m going to tell you what I was thinking, which is sometimes people tell these stories, but sometimes they don’t. And most of the time, I think the reason why people don’t tell those stories is because there’s a very serious risk. When you recreate this in an ad, that it feels staged. It feels fake. 

Roy Williams: Right. See, none of those stories do we ever advertise.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: Whenever you’re doing something to change the confidence and the culture and the sense of belief… And whenever people really love the company they work for and they’re proud of it, it’s hard to recruit them away. And so it’s an amazing investment to let your people see you do things that you don’t advertise. But they watch you pay the price to live up to what you promised. Now, that is a powerful thing to do. I forgot your question. Say the question again.

Todd Liles: Oh, you’re on top of it. You’re in line. The question in essence is this. Has anyone ever been able to do it well? Take one of these real-life experiences and actually turn it into external relational marketing without it feeling fake?

Roy Williams: Yeah, yeah, no, it’s a real thing because it really happened. See, here’s what most people don’t realize. Really, really, really good ad writers have to have a needle into your veins. They have to be able to get real true stories out of you, because for them to say, well, that’s what you do, just go be clever and come up with something clever that makes people buy from me. And it’s like, yeah, it doesn’t work that way at all.

And so I would always, at least every week or 10 days, Ken and I would spend like an hour together on the phone. And Dewey and I spent an hour together every week. It was Friday morning at 9 o’clock every week. And when you hear stories about what happened this week, and one day Ken said, you know what? He said, I had the weirdest thing happen last week. He said, I was in this little cafe I eat at all the time. And he said, I kept hearing this noise outside. And it bothered me so much, I got up and went outside, and it was their air conditioner, you know, at this little cafe he’s at. And he said, it was annoying me so bad, I just got the tools and went back there and fixed it. They didn’t even know. They didn’t even know. And he just said, I had to. It was just driving me crazy.

I went back there and fixed it. And then he says, when I went back in, my food was cold, and they says, hey, where did you go? You obviously hadn’t finished. And he goes, well, the air conditioner was driving me crazy. And it’s like, I just went out and fixed it. And they said, really? And I said, we noticed it got a lot cooler in here. And so he goes, all right. So anyway, they gave him a different meal. And I just thought, that’s the funniest thing in the world.

And so I wrote the ad. And so it was a real true story, and it let you know. No, he really is really sincerely all about trying to do really good work for people, and it drives him nuts. Do it the right way, not the easy way. And he’s just like, they didn’t pay him for that. He wasn’t even supposed to be doing it. He says, I can’t let this happen, this is my cafe, and this is something I can fix. And so yeah, that was a time when I said, okay, that’s the kind of story you can tell. And people go, wow, he’s a heck of a guy. The guy owns this big company, the air conditioner at this cafe he’s at all the time is screwed up, so he quits eating and goes out and fixes it, and doesn’t even tell anybody. That’s awesome.

Todd Liles: I love that.

Roy Williams: Does that make sense to you?

Todd Liles: Does it make sense to me? Roy, two weeks ago, I was at the gym and I broke a piece of equipment, and I got my tools out and I fixed it. The guy’s like, no, you can’t do that. We’ve got people to do that. And I’m like, you got to call them?

Roy Williams: They didn’t break it.

Todd Liles: No, no, no, I must fix it. It’s not a hard repair. And I did, I fixed it. Thank you for sharing that. All right, I want to show you an ad now. It’s Google’s Parisian Love. One of the things that I liked about this ad is it’s an ad with zero words. It aired in the Super Bowl, I want to think, geez, Louise, shame on me for forgetting, maybe like 2016 or so. And it generated lots and lots of results. So if you’re listening, I’ll describe it at the end, but if you’re watching, then you just read the screen.

 

Roy Williams: Wow.

Todd Liles: Have you seen that?

Roy Williams: Never saw it.

Todd Liles: So the entire ad is someone that we don’t see, but what we do see is a cursor on the screen in the Google bar. And he goes through a series of restaurants in Paris, flights to Paris, how to talk to a girl in Paris, how to say this or this. And the very last one is he’s typing in how to… And then the words are popping below how to tie a tie, how to do this. You don’t know exactly what it says. 

Roy Williams: It’s happening very quickly. 

Todd Liles: It’s happening very quickly. It says how to assemble a crib.

Roy Williams: He types in how to assemble a crib, yeah.

Todd Liles: And then you hear a little baby laugh. 

Roy Williams: Right. And so this is an incredibly good example, okay, of we, the viewers, since there’s no dialogue, there’s no words, and the pace of how quickly they’re typing and what’s popping up on the screen, it’s appearing on the screen at about the limits of our ability to read quickly. And so the average person can just barely read that before it goes away and he starts typing something else.

So it’s taking our full attention. Our mind cannot wander, okay? And so there’s never a moment when you can look away because there’s a mystery. There’s a mystery and you want to solve the mystery. It’s what I call the hovering question mark. There’s this question mark. You’re not sure what’s happening, but you know something’s happening, okay? And so you pay strict attention because you can smell a payoff coming. And this is a moment you have lived. You can relate to this moment. You’re typing something in and it wants to finish. Down below the search bar, all these different, you know, is one of these questions the one you’re getting ready to ask? And sometimes, yeah, it was. It’s like the third one down is the question he was asking.

So, boom, it just pops up. And so as you’re doing this going, no, I’ve done this. I’ve done this hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of times I’ve had this moment. You’re typing these things. These possible answers pop up and you finish the deal and then boom, boom. Same thing happens with TiVo. If you have a TiVo system on your DVR, it’s like, yeah, it anticipates maybe what you’re looking for. And I’m going, yeah, we’ve all done that. We’ve done this. I’ve lived this moment.

And you’re trying to figure out what do all these questions have in common. And then you realize, oh, I see what he’s doing. But why? Why? Somebody’s on their way to Paris. Okay, it’s with jobs in Paris, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then you finally realize, oh, they’re going to have a baby together and they’ve been doing long distance relationship. And now he’s thinking he might move to Paris. Okay. And you’re just going, wow. And not a word of that was ever said.

You have to fill in what they left out. You have to fill in what they left out. You have to fill in what they left out. And that’s called engagement. Reader engagement, viewer engagement, listener engagement. Whenever you are required to participate in the ad, to understand what’s happening, you have to bring to the ad what they left out. And that is called participation. And it is the mark of extraordinary ad writers.

Todd Liles: One of the things that I’m thinking about in that ad, and the things that you said, and I think I’ve just come to realize something else is that this whole episode has been about vulnerability. And I think I’ve come to realize, maybe you can tell me if what I’m thinking here is on a path. It seems like there are two paths to this.

One path of vulnerability is first person. I am telling you what’s occurred. I’m in the group. I’m saying it aloud and we hear it. What we just saw in that ad is you get to look over my shoulder. You are realizing my life and it’s even more intimate because in this sort of imaginary world, I don’t even know you’re there. And I think it’s hitting on me. That’s one of the reasons why I almost get emotional at the end of that ad because we’re peering in to the world. We’re watching the world and it gives this impression of it must be true because they’re not even telling us. They’re just letting us see the life.

Roy Williams: You know, Dave Nevland and Jacob Harrison have both been with me for… Well, Dave Nevland has been the audio producer for radio ads and for the Monday Morning Memo for I think 24 years. And Jacob Harrison has been there now for about 15 years. And a few years ago, I wanted to do what’s called a Crazy Ivan where you put an ad into a campaign that is not part of the campaign.

And we called these the two dudes ads, because what happens is — I’ve done it for several different clients over the years. If you just want to stir things up a little bit because it’s two people they’ve never heard on the radio before, and they’re talking to each other. These are just two guys literally walking down a sidewalk talking the way that friends talk. And the one thing is, here’s what’s really shocking, it doesn’t sound like an ad. It literally sounds like you’re just eavesdropping on two random guys walking down the sidewalk that are buddies. Okay? And then you’re not sure what they’re talking about. And it’s like this, but where this was all screen text with somebody typing into the Google search bar. 

These guys are talking about— and we’ll play one. I’ve got it on my compute,r and you’ll get an idea of what it is. But it’s exactly what you were describing, Todd. It’s exactly what you were describing is you don’t know what this is, but it doesn’t sound like any ad you’ve ever heard. And you’ve never heard these two voices before. And you’re not sure what they’re talking about or why exactly. But then you’re going, huh, wow, that was clever because you are eavesdropping.

When you’re looking over somebody’s shoulder as they’re doing this and they don’t know you’re there, you’re a voyeur. You’re watching and they don’t know you’re watching or you feel like they don’t know you’re watching. And whenever you’re listening to strangers, so like in a restaurant where you’re hearing what they’re saying at the next table. Okay? I’ll never forget this. This is about maybe six, seven months ago. You’ve met, occasionally met with us on a Friday lunch. A bunch of old men I sit down and we have lunch together.

Todd Liles: Some of my favorite times.

Roy Williams: They always look forward to seeing you. You bring so much to the table. And we were there, and there were six of us at this round table at The League Kitchen. And I didn’t even notice there’s like four women at this table over there. And they walked up and they’re staying next to our table. We were all alarmed. What the hell’s going on, because we looked and these ladies are standing there, and we had been having a very… We were talking about personal things. That’s what you do on Friday afternoon. You talk about things that you can only talk to your close friends about. And they said, we just wanted you to know that someday we wish we have friends like you guys have each other. They said, we have been listening to you guys for a while. And we were going, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have friends like that? And says, women have friends like that all the time, but guys never do. 

And we just wanted you to know we thought that was remarkable. And thank you very much. I was embarrassed. And frankly, I was a little bit offended they were listening, you know. But the point is, whenever you’re listening to other people, strangers, you’re listening to strangers talk and you can figure out what’s going on, even if you don’t know them, and you can read between the lines and you can figure out what’s happening here, and it’s really fascinating.

And so we sometimes will create an ad like that for a client just as a little bit of surprise and delight for the radio audience. And we do it. It’s the same thing in that ad that you just showed us from the Google ad where they were talking about these couples getting together in Paris. And the truth is you can also do on the radio.

Todd Liles: I love it. Roy, that’s great. What’s your final thought for today?

Roy Williams: Take chances. It’s like, if you think ads should be poised, polished, and professional, then your ads sound like ads, they feel like ads, they smell like ads, and they’re not going to work very well. And if you take chances, like Procter & Gamble did with the Old Spice Man, and like the people did with the ads that we saw that I’d never seen before, and like we do with these two dudes ads, when you do things that are offbeat and crazy and surprising and unexpected, and it’s a rogue, misfit, kind of a maverick, crazy ad, yeah, it takes courage. But they work exponentially better. And because you break through the clutter, and you get attention, and you win trust, and so have courage, have courage, have courage. That’s my thought for the day.

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