Watch the video above or read below.

Matthew Burns:
Welcome to Dave Young from the Empire Builders Podcast, who also gets to talk to Stephen Semple, which is awesome. Yes. You’re on Sticky Sales Stories, sucker.

Dave Young:
Well, you’re part of the Empire Builders.

Matthew Burns:
Listen, I am a little bit part of the Empire Builders. I’ve done an episode or two. So you had an idea, which I thought was actually kind of neat. There’s another partner of ours, Mick Torbay, who is brilliant at putting together the thing we want to talk about today. And this may not be the most recognized thing today. You can’t do what we’re going to talk about today on television or radio.

Dave Young:
You can.

Matthew Burns:
Oh?

Dave Young:
Sure. You can. Oh, well, you can’t advertise this product.

Matthew Burns:
That’s what I’m talking about. We can’t advertise this product. It may not be the most favorable product, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s good marketing. It’s good advertising. It’s a good piece. So let’s just play something and then you’re going to talk about why it’s so awesome.

Vintage Ad:
Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. Winston gives you real flavor. Full rich tobacco flavor. Winston’s easy drawing through the filter lets the flavor through. Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.

Matthew Burns:
So can you explain to me a little bit about Winston cigarettes?

Dave Young:
R.J. Reynolds tobacco company. This is big tobacco and gosh, the story I found out about was during The Depression, the ad agencies in New York City kind of did this almost antitrust, monopolistic sort of thing. They made an agreement amongst themselves to not steal each other’s clients in the midst of this economic lapse.

Matthew Burns:
Okay, that’s cool.

Dave Young:
Right? But a guy named William Esty decided to leave J. Walter Thompson go out on his own in 1932. And so the Esty agency, his very first client was R.J. Reynolds Tobacco company. And my guess is that that wasn’t an accident. I don’t know for sure.

Matthew Burns:
Probably not an accident.

Dave Young:
I’m guessing he took them with him.

Matthew Burns:
It’s corporate America.

Dave Young:
Not an accident. They were a J. Walter Thompson client.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah, yeah.

Dave Young:
Now this is way before radio and television, but people were trying to create brands out of things like cigarette brands. And so it’s the Esty company that came up with this slogan for Winston brand cigarettes. And it was, Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.

Matthew Burns:
No, wait. I love the *click* *click*

Dave Young:
Wait, that doesn’t even come in yet. So they did a decade’s worth of print ads before they ever sang the jingle. There was controversy, even with the slogan as it’s written out because it’s “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” And man did the grammar police get all over ’em. Grammatically, it should be Winston tastes good as a cigarette should – not like a cigarette should. So people were losing their minds because the cigarette ad was grammatically incorrect.

Matthew Burns:
It broke the Oxford Dictionary rules.

Dave Young:
It had actually stood out because it was different.

Matthew Burns:
Absolutely.

Dave Young:
It stood out because it was a little wrong and smoking a cigarette’s a little wrong. So it got attention. We know that even if it’s negative attention, it’s negative attention for something an ad guy did, not for the product. So that just is attention.

Matthew Burns:
That’s right.

Dave Young:
So that’s fine. But it has alliteration, it has meter. Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.

Matthew Burns:
Yes.

Dave Young:
Even on a written ad, on a magazine ad, or a newspaper ad, it has this element of echoic retention as opposed to iconic retention. So iconic retention is when we see something and we try to remember what we saw.

Matthew Burns:
That’s right.

Dave Young:
Echoic retention is we heard something and we remember what we heard.

Matthew Burns:
Well, I think what I like about that a lot is that even if you don’t say it out loud, if you just do it in your mind, you’re still going to get… I just did it in my head. I had to, but I get the cadence and the rhythm of those words

Dave Young:
And this even goes back to science. Your brain. My brain. The human brain is way better at remembering sound than it is at remembering sight.

Matthew Burns:
Absolutely.

Dave Young:
So if you memorize a passage from Shakespeare, it’s not the words on the page that you’re memorizing. It’s what those words sound like and what they mean.

Matthew Burns:
I know this is way off topic, but do you have a passage from Shakespeare that you know still?

Dave Young:
To be or not to be?

Matthew Burns:
Oh my gosh. I know Shylock’s speech.

Dave Young:
It’s also got a nice meter to it.

Matthew Burns:
I remember the entire Shylock speech from the Merchant of Venice…

Dave Young:
I went to school in the Nebraska so we didn’t…

Matthew Burns:
Okay. Well, Canadian school system forced us to memorize that stuff. Anyway, okay, go ahead. That’s off topic.

Dave Young:
In essence, you’re British. I’ve seen the Queen on your money before. We’ve taught this in our Wizard of Ads group for decades, right? Echoic Retention. This goes back to Maslow and training dogs to drool at the sound of a bell.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
He taught dogs to drool when they heard a bell because it was easier than teaching dogs to drool when they saw a bell. And we know this to be true, right? You’re reading a book, you’re sitting up at night and you’re reading a book, and all of a sudden you can’t remember the last few lines that you read. And you have to backtrack. It’s because your iconic retention has shut down because your brain is tired.

Matthew Burns:
No, that makes perfect sense. Absolutely.

Dave Young:
You’re sitting in a classroom and staring out the window or daydreaming and your teacher says something and says, Matthew, you can actually remember about five seconds back and realize what the question was?

Matthew Burns:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
Because that’s true. Echoic retention rattles around in your head for a few seconds before iconic retention.

Matthew Burns:
That’s a great example. I like that example.

Dave Young:
And it’s just because the human brain is… I don’t know, dogs can smell stuff better than we can, but we can attach meaning to sounds. And so when we read the Winston logo or the Winston slogan, Winston tastes good like a cigarette should, we hear – even before the jingle was ever put out – we hear the tempo and the rhythm to it.

Matthew Burns:
Poems were written long before advertising was, and there was a reason for that because it was easier to tell the story that way. It was remembered faster and longer, right?

Dave Young:
Yeah, absolutely.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
So when they decided to put it to music, they just wrote some notes around it and they inserted this weird little syncopated clap near the end of the core of the jingle. Winston tastes good like a cigarette should – like two little pop pop. And most of the TV ads, it was literally people clapping their hands. But we’ve got some other examples where they do a few other things.

Matthew Burns:
Well, here, let’s play one where I hope everybody remembers these characters, but I’m going to play one. It’s a cartoon version, which I think is awesome that they did celebrity endorsement. But they did use cartoon characters. Let’s watch this one.

Dave Young:
They got into heat for this too.

Matthew Burns:
Oh, guaranteed. They did. Kids were watching television, right?

Dave Young:
Well, remember Flintstones was primetime television.

Matthew Burns:
Yes, exactly.

Dave Young:
This was not a Saturday morning show.

Matthew Burns:
Alright, you gave out the goods here. But I’m going to play the video. Okay, watch this.

Vintage Ad:
The Flintstones has been brought to you by Winston, America’s bestselling, best tasting, filter cigarette.

Matthew Burns:
But what I liked that you said earlier was the clap, clap changed into the sparking of the lighter twice. The clap-clap or the plop or the spark-spark. Or there’s another one where, and I did the voice version of it, which was the where and I’ll play right at the end. But it was from Beverly Hillbillies, which one of my favorite shows growing up was the Beverly Hillbillies in the cement pond.

Jed: What you doing granny?
Granny: Making myself a new pipe.
Jed: Oh, I got something here. You’re going to like too. That banker fella give ’em to me.
Granny: What’s that?
Jed: Winston Cigarettes. Try one granny.
Granny: If you say they’re good…
Jed: Really good. Best smoking you ever had
Granny: My thunder, Jed! That is good smoking.
Jed: Now try it this way, Granny
Granny: Tastes even better.
Jed: They tell me these Winston’s is the best tasting cigarette you can get.
Granny: I may put away my corn top – that’s saying a heap for ’em.
Jed: You know, granny, there just ain’t no way of saying how good a Winston is. You got to smoke one to find out.
Granny: Well, I can say this, Winston tastes mighty good!
Jed: Like a *click-click*cigarette should.

Matthew Burns:
I liked that. So as a creative, as a writer, I love finding those little interesting ways to make it the same but different so that we don’t bore our audience with the exact same thing over and over again. But we still need them to remember that it’s us. And so I loved that little syncopated change that they had, which was incredible. To go from a cloud clap to the spark spark.

Dave Young:
Yeah, absolutely. Now, here’s the really weird part about this particular sticky sales story. 1971, January 1st, 1971, 10:50 PM on the Tonight Show, the last tobacco advertisement played in America,

Matthew Burns:
Which is what I referenced at the beginning. This is not allowed anymore.

Dave Young:
So 1971, 54 years ago, was the last time anybody heard this plane on the radio or television.

Matthew Burns:
You know that the scary part about all that is that was a year before I was born.

Dave Young:
I was seven, six or seven. But dude, I remember hearing that jingle.

Matthew Burns:
Well, that’s what, when you first brought this to my attention, that’s what you said. You said, Hey Matt, I want to talk about jingles or you want to talk about a very specific one because you were very young. So now everybody knows that we’re in our fifties, closer to sixties and we now we’re talking… And you have recall on something from when you were seven and eight years old.

Dave Young:
In fact you can go up to anybody, I would say 60 plus years old. So they were six years old. They might’ve heard it, but anybody in their seventies, anybody in their eighties. And if you say Winston tastes good, they will tell you like a cigarette should, they may not get the clap in or the noise, but they’ll remember that jingle. And it’s really no different than because the tobacco companies, just like they carpet-bombed the airways with these ads. Right? You couldn’t avoid cigarette ads. In fact, they were in product placement. They were in the show themselves with the characters from the shows doing the ads.

Matthew Burns:
Product placement was way more prevalent back then than it is even today. And so much more subtle.

Dave Young:
It ended like hitting a brick wall in 1971.

Matthew Burns:
Overnight.

Dave Young:
And so the thing about it is, you’re never going to find somebody my age or older or younger that could tell you what the slogan is that they replaced “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” with. They’ve had a couple dozen slogans in the course of history since that.

Matthew Burns:
But because we can’t hear it, it’s not sticky.

Dave Young:
So what we like to point out is Congress didn’t outlaw, they outlawed tobacco advertising on radio and television because they could, radio and television are regulated media,

Matthew Burns:
Highly regulated.

Dave Young:
So they couldn’t outlaw it on newspapers or magazines or billboards. So that’s where all the money ended up going was to other media. Our point is, yeah, it was outlawed on television and radio, but what really hurt them was it was outlawed in sound, right? It was the echoic nature of the jingle and the message that was taken off the airwaves. So the next slogan that they had, nobody knows it because nobody ever heard anyone say it. Do you know what it is?

Matthew Burns:
I don’t.

Dave Young:
I smoke for the taste of it.

Matthew Burns:
I smoke for the taste of it.

Dave Young:
And dozens of others after that.

Matthew Burns:
Which is not even as good anyway as a slogan.

Dave Young:
But it is just the fact that it was, it was stuck in our head like the lyrics to all the hits songs from the sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties that you remember. We remember the lyrics to a couple of thousand songs that we never set out to memorize because we’ve heard them so often and we can just hear, they get stuck in our heads. In fact, that’s one of my wife’s and I favorite things is what songs stuck in your head this morning?

Matthew Burns:
Well, and it’s not a choice. I mean, we think about the fact that you can be sitting in a room and somebody has a radio playing over in the corner. We’re still hearing that whether we want to or we don’t. This is actually very interesting. I was talking to an Uber driver. So I get into an Uber – an East Indian Uber driver, a really nice guy, and he started talking and he said, Hey, what do you do for a living? He was really chatty. We were talking about marketing and advertising and it was a long drive.

I was probably about 30 minutes in the car with him, and by the time we were done, he couldn’t believe how many ads he actually knew that we produced in the city that we were in because he said, he doesn’t ever listen to radio. And I said, but the only place you’re going to hear those ads is on the radio. And by the time we were done, he said, oh, but wait a second. I turned the radio on for the clients. They don’t want to listen to my East Indian music. I just put on the local radio. He says, I never even thought about that. And I said, and all those brands, the companies that we write for. And he’s like, damn, he had no choice. No choice whatsoever. Oh my gosh, that’s so good.

Dave Young:
And so this stuff still works. The reason Winston’s a good example is that it’s an example where 54 years ago, they had to cut it off and the people that haven’t heard it in 54 years will still recall it if they were old enough to have been influenced by it.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly.

Dave Young:
They’ll still remember after 54 years now an example of a company that’s been using echoic memory in their ads, in their jingles, in their TV, radio. You don’t even need to see their name or logo anymore. All you need to hear is “ba da ba pa pa…”

Matthew Burns:
I’m lovin it. Right?

Matthew Burns:
Exactly.

Dave Young:
Because we know that tune. We know that tune and we know what company it conjures up in our heads. That’s the power of echoic memory. We remember how things sounded way better than we remember what they looked like.

Matthew Burns:
Things that we take away from this, right? Yes, we’re not trying to talk cigarettes. That’s not the point of this whole thing. It is just using audible cues, using jingles in your messaging, having something that people get used to and love and can sing along to and their brains bounce to make them feel happy, echoically is going to last a lot longer than anything iconically. And Dave, you proved it out in this awesome video. So guys, if you are interested in learning more about this stuff, please reach out to us. We love talking to companies and business owners and anybody who wants to talk to us, we’ll talk about this stuff all the time. Reach out to us through the comments below. Dave, thanks so much for dropping in, man.

Dave Young:
Can I put in a shameless plug?

Matthew Burns:
Yes, please do it. Go ahead.

Dave Young:
I teach this stuff at Wizard Academy. A class called Portals is coming up in October and it’s two days of diving into how the brain works and how meter affects our memory, and then just loads of other things. It’s a fun class, but it’s two days.

Matthew Burns:
I will then double down on that and say, anybody who tells me that they’re going to sign up to do Portals, I will go to the Portals class and take it with you because I’ve not taken Portals yet, because I’d learned it through Dave because he’s constantly talking about this stuff. But I’m going to go take the Portals class with anybody that takes it and just let me know in the comments that you’re going and I will show up.

Dave Young:
Can I make a special offer to your listener or your viewers? If you sign up for Portals and put in the shopping cart that you heard it on the sticky sales notes thing, I’ll let you have the alumni discount. Alright? And that’s just, you type the word “alumni” into the little coupon code. It’s half price, it gets, knocks the price down to half price.

Matthew Burns:
It does, check it out. One of my favorite things after going to my first course, gosh, a decade ago, was that every other course I’ve taken has been 50% off. So guys, take it off. This is a great, we don’t offer this to anybody just because. So Dave, thank you so much. This is very generous of you guys. Take Portals. Remember echoic listening, it’s going to keep things sticky, and that’s the whole reason why we do this channel is trying to teach you guys things that’ll make your message more sticky. And the reason why there’s commercials, even though you hate them, you can’t forget them. It’s because of all the things we teach here. So thank you, Dave. I appreciate it. Go to Portals that the Wizard Academy, so that’s WizardAcademy.org and sign up, let me know in the comments and type in “alumni” and the coupon code area. I appreciate you, man.

Dave Young:
I’ve got to go have a cigarette now.

Matthew Burns:
I don’t. See ya guys.

Dave Young:
I don’t either.

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