Below is a collection of interviews done this year with marketers from two continents. Each have shown how entertainment and emotion aren’t just nice to have… it’s something you must have in order for your ads to work harder.

Watch the video above or read the transcript below.

With commentary from:

Roy H. Williams/Wizard of Ads
Orlando Wood/System 1 Group
Harry Beckwith/Author
Matt Owens/System 1 Group
R.C. Oates/System 1 Group
Zach Atherton/Harmon Brothers

Johnny:

Are creative ads there to just be entertaining or do they serve some purpose? They serve some purpose.

In the late 1900s, which sounds absolutely stupid to say, I was a good ad writer, creative even, but being creative isn’t the same as being effective. This is about the time that the Wizard of Ads trilogy came out and Roy H. Williams closed the gap between creative and effective.

Roy Williams:

The most powerful of all words, is “you”. “You” engages the imagination of the listener. It puts the action of your spot in present tense, active. Skillful use of the word you makes the listener a participant in your ad.

Johnny:

Of course, the customer is the star. The story draws them in. Emotion leads before logic. This is something all the great postmodern advertisers know.

Roy Williams:

That’s our job. Our job is not to give people the facts. Our job is to romance the shit out of what we’re selling.

Johnny:

But isn’t that what you’d expect the creative person to say?

“Don’t lessen respect for yourself by any attempt at frivolity. People do not patronize a clown. An eccentric picture may do you serious damage. One may gain attention by wearing a fool’s cap, but he would ruin his selling prospects.”

That 1923 quote from Claude C. Hopkins not only made him the life of the party, but his book, Scientific Advertising spawned generations of ad people to be dull. And dull is deadly. But I didn’t answer the question, what does emotion have to do with making money? Quite a bit it seems. Let’s dive in first with Orlando Wood, author of Lemon and Look Out and Chief Innovation Officer at System One. This is a company that tests ads for their emotional appeal and they have hard data showing how using emotion theater, entertainment that turns into real business growth.

Orlando Wood:

That notion of emotion and action, they go together. It’s at the root of the word emotion is motion and movement. And what we’re trying to do, I think in advertising is create that psychological transformation through a shift in emotive state, one that will leave us feeling better disposed towards the advertiser. That makes us want really, I suppose that creates a preference and that makes us want to spend more time with them or buy them because we don’t buy from people we don’t like.

Johnny:

Paul Feldwick was the head of planning at DDB Worldwide and has authored The Anatomy of Humbug and the most recent, Why Does the Peddler Sing: What Creativity Really Means in Advertising. Feldwick’s book offers the choice between showmanship and salesmanship, and if future growth is your goal, showmanship is the choice.

Paul Feldwick:

Again, we’ve inherited all this baggage that there’s something called brand advertising or emotional advertising is somehow sort of less immediate in its effects. These are business issues. These are not advertising issues, like if you’re running a business, are you seeking to maximize your profits this quarter or are you looking to be in business for the next five years, 10 years and grow this business? And I think depending on how you genuinely answer that question, you will do things accordingly.

Matt Owens:

We only have one three-star ad, and this isn’t even a three-star ad, but it was from a local, I think he’s a pest control company in Missouri, and it was like…

Johnny:

Matt Owens is a VP of agency and media partnerships at System One.

Matt Owens:

We test a bunch of P & G ads. They don’t do as well as little Steve, so the little guys can still punch above their weight. So don’t be scared off by the big fellas out there.

R.C. Oates:

I think the philosophical underpinning of this also is interesting for local advertisers. Sometimes the big guys can’t accept the idea of the timeless importance of the show that even though you are trying to speak to this small subset the way in is universal truths. So I think that kind of exposes the opportunity.

Johnny:

Legendary marketer Harry Beckwith, whose book Selling the Invisible was named one of the top 10 business and management books of all time. It challenges — even debunks — this idea of logical persuasion. We don’t buy products, we buy services. It’s the promise of the product and that Harry says is invisible.

Harry Beckwith:

Well, I think if we begin with the assumption that we’re logical people that have emotions, I think that’s the wrong assumption. I think we’re emotional people that are capable of thinking logically. One of the ways that I put it in one of my later books was that our hearts make our decisions and then they draft the brain to draft the rationale. And you look around again and again and there’s so little logic for so many of our decisions. I mean, why did so many people own American Express cards rather than Visa cards? Visa cards are less expensive. They’re honored at more locations, they’re status, and then you say, what’s the logic of status? Well, that’s a tricky one to deal with.

Zach Atherton:

They really want to feel a connection. Lume, for example,

Johnny:

Zach Atherton is the head writer at Harmon Brothers, an ad firm known for creating ads that go viral like Poo-Pourri, Purple Mattress, and Lume deodorant.

Zach Atherton:

And so she’s posting like a hundred pieces of content. Some of it’s higher production and cool, but a lot of it’s just like, I’m a doctor. I’m an OB GYN, I’m really passionate about my patients and this is why I did it.

Johnny:

It’s like she single-handedly invented the full body deodorant industry because the copycats that are coming are mind boggling.

Zach Atherton:

Yeah, yeah. I saw Dove do it, and I’m like, that’s interesting.

Johnny:

I read a quote from you that I thought was so interesting where you say you just need to put on a show that keeps people in their seats and puts them in a good mood. They’ll like you better and then they’ll buy more of your stuff, which I fundamentally agree with, but it also, it almost sounds too simple.

Paul Feldwick:

All successful advertising has been developed and practiced actually by simple people who basically wanted to sell stuff. It was not invented by scientists and philosophers. It was invented by traveling peddlers and salesmen and showmen who knew that if they didn’t attract that crowd and end up selling them some stuff they weren’t going to eat. So that for me is we need to remember that those are the origins, and actually throughout the history of advertising, all the real power of it has come I think from that.

Johnny:

Roy Williams, author and founder of Wizard of Ads.

Roy Williams:

And I told stories that really actually were true. That’s our job. Our job is not to give people the facts. Our job is to romance the shit out of what we’re selling. Emotional connection, and it doesn’t have shit to do with the delivery channel. And so this idea of how should I deliver my message, what’s the right way to deliver my message? Message isn’t a problem. I’m going, nope. We’re message-first and the message has to be something that connects to the human heart and something that moves people.

Orlando Wood:

What you’re trying to do is create this change, this psychological change and great narratives, great advertising can do that and the viewer feels it. And so you end up hopefully with an audience that feels good about you. And what we’ve found is that generally speaking, if you can leave someone feeling good about you, you are creating this thing called the affect heuristic, which is a sort of mental shortcut that we use. Rather than asking ourselves a difficult question as Daniel Kahneman might have put it, great psychologist, what do I think about this? Or which of these two options is better? You ask yourself an easier question to answer, which is one of these, do I feel better about? Which one do I feel good about?

Matt Owens:

But I think from our perspective is you have to go in there trying to entertain everybody and knowing that how many people are going to get off? Hopefully a couple are going to get off that ad and go buy your product. Probably not many, but how many hopefully in the next couple of months are going to remember that and say, I need to go buy that shirt, that cologne, whatever it is, that bread.

R.C. Oates:

My advice would be don’t fall victim to short-termism of needing to just think about hitting a number today, driving sales today, but really think about how you can tap into the demand that does exist tomorrow, because that is what big brands do. And even if you are operating in a small town of 30,000, those same principles apply, right? Not everyone is going to be buying today, tomorrow, but they will be in a year, two years, three years, some like heating and air, right? How can you embed yourself into their memory so when it comes time they can.

Johnny:

Now, don’t get fooled by this word emotion. It doesn’t mean drama or sappy poems. It means finding either the emotional motivation for a person to want your product or an emotional association you’d like people to have with your product.

Harry Beckwith:

I think more and more, I think marketers are recognizing, again, we’re emotional beings that are sometimes capable of rational thought. I wouldn’t be critical of advertising or marketers for failing to recognize that there certainly may be some that do. In the area of business to business, you often wonder what is the role of marketing or in emotion and business to business at all? And it’s not always easy to find.

Johnny:

But would you argue that it’s there nonetheless? I think it’s still an emotional transaction.

Harry Beckwith:

Because yeah, you have to find what’s the emotional trigger in that business to business buyer. I was in pacemakers and defibrillators originally because I was, Carmichael Lynch drafted me to handle that job because I was a medical malpractice and personal injury attorney, so I had some background in it. But we didn’t sell the features of defibrillators. So we ran an ad and had to introduce it and said, this year over 25,000 Americans could die and live to tell about it. Well, there’s both fact and emotional resonance it that.

Johnny:

That is such a great headline.

Harry Beckwith:

I thought so too. I don’t know if I ever wrote a better one. I wrote a lot of worse ones.

Roy Williams:

You connect with people not because of information. You use the information to justify what the heart has already decided. Win the heart and the mind will follow, the mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided. Everybody, please take that more seriously. That is the business we’re in.

Paul Feldwick:

And you cannot really talk about rational decisions versus emotional decisions because all decisions are fundamental emotional. The guy who probably over the longest period of time built Coca-Cola from American dominance to worldwide dominance, Robert Woodruff, he repeatedly told his people the purpose of Coca-Cola advertising is to be liked. It’s not complicated, very simple, and he is saying it not for any whimsical or otherworldly reasons. He’s saying it because he understands that the more you are liked, the more you are talked about, the more attractive you are to people, the more distinctive you are. All those things follow.

Roy Williams:

That’s our job. Our job is not to give people the facts. Our job is to romance the shit out of what we’re selling.

Johnny:

For the past couple of years, I’ve been writing ads intending to entertain, not to entertain myself, but to help businesses grow in the future. It’s something you should be asking your ad person to be doing. If you feel stuck in stats, you probably need more silly. If you feel overprocessed, you probably need more poetry. If you’re drowning in numbers, you probably need more nonsense.

Gene Wilder:

A little nonsense known is relished by the men.

Johnny:

A little less rote, a lot more romance.

Latest posts by Johnny Molson (see all)