Dear Reader,

Are your ads like a porcupine or a rhinoceros?

A porcupine waddles along and makes lots of points.

A rhinoceros makes one point very powerfully.

When you make lots of little points in one ad, none of them go very deep.

When you say one thing very powerfully, it goes straight to the heart.

Grab a hot cup of coffee and sit with us, and we’ll teach you to say more with less.

Watch / listen above or read below.

Todd Liles: Welcome to another episode of Todd Liles and the Wizard of Ads. And today’s episode is what to include is simple, but what to leave out is powerful. So, Roy, we’re going to jump into this and I want us to imagine a stage in a business to where they’re making a little bit more money. They’re past the $3 million mark, they’re maybe at five, they’re even working towards 10. And at this stage, what happens is people start coming out of the woodworks. Everyone’s trying to give them marketing advice, they’re trying to get some of that money, and they’ve got some money.

So marketing can start getting really loud. Too many voices, too many people, and it can get a little bit too complicated. And when it gets too loud and it gets too complicated and things aren’t working, it can get a little desperate. So I want to talk about that, because when you try to say everything, you end up saying nothing at all. So today we’re going to talk about the discipline of a mission and why a good copywriter and a good brand strategist knows what to say, but they also know that what you leave out may be the most powerful thing you do.

So let’s talk about trimming the fat, Roy. Let’s talk about how we can stop trying to say everything to everyone and have the courage to cut.

Roy Williams: Okay, here’s the simplest possible shortcut, okay? An ad will either be a porcupine or a rhinoceros.

Todd Liles: I have not heard this analogy.

Roy Williams: Okay. Now, a porcupine waddles along and it makes lots and lots and lots of points, but a rhinoceros makes one point very powerfully. And you want to write rhinoceros ads. An ad should say one thing, and you have way more than one thing to say. Great. You need to write more than one ad then, because most of the time when people want to include this and this and this and this and this and this, now you’ve got a porcupine and nobody remembers anything because that ad sounds like an ad because it’s all about you.

But when you make one point, just one point, that’s an unforgettable point. That’s just a rhino with that one horn going, bam. And that has huge impact. And people remember that point. And now you’re going to write lots more ads, and every ad should make one point you never forget, and quit writing porcupine ads.

Todd Liles: I love that, Roy. I love that for more reasons than what you realize. One, it’s powerful and it’s poignant. But two, the last couple of episodes that we’ve been recording, you have been saying punchy things that I’m going, yeah, that’s definitely going to go in the short. We’re going to cut that out. We got about a 15-second powerful clip that’s going to get thousands of views. So sorry, I’m talking about us, but…

Roy Williams: You’re thinking about the future.

Todd Liles: That was good. That was really good. I like that. I like that. So a porcupine’s trying to make many points and a rhino is making one very powerful point. I adore that. I love that. So let’s talk about the danger of overriding. And specifically, this is what’s going on in my brain. If I take it back to… I’m going to think of, like, Kessler’s Jewelers. We’ve spoken about them before. And inside of that jewelry store, what, 10,000 options?

Roy Williams: Oh, sure, yeah.

Todd Liles: Easy, right? Hundreds of different pendants, hundreds of different rings, all types of shapes, all types of occasions, engagement, birthday, Valentine’s. If I try to talk about all of those things in one singular ad, unless the ad is about being funny and a million things, which is really still about being one thing, but if I’m actually trying to make an impact on all those things, it seems to me like no one’s going to hear anything I’m saying.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: So, but if I pick one item and go, “No, I’m gonna talk about this.” And going back to as a company gets bigger, right? Especially when they add multiple trades, which one are you gonna talk about? You gonna talk about all three of them? You gonna pick one? You gonna talk about all your services, or are you gonna pick one?

Roy Williams: I want to begin this by saying I’m gonna talk about a choice people make, and I do not have firm guidance on the subject.

Todd Liles: Okay.

Roy Williams: In other words, whichever of these two are chosen, I can make it work. So I’m not saying this one’s a mistake and this one’s always right. Let me make that clear up front. Now, at Kessler’s, we do diamonds better because diamonds are all we do. They only sell diamond jewelry. And so colored stones like sapphires, rubies, and emeralds and all these other birthstones and stuff, yeah, we don’t do that. Diamonds and diamond jewelry. And so they dominate diamond, diamond jewelry. That’s their category. That’s also the vast majority of sales in the jewelry business. But it’s a very focused specialty.

Now, here’s what’s interesting. And I’ve done both of these. Let’s say you have a master brand and you’re a plumbing company that’s an extremely well-known plumbing company, you’re an extremely successful plumbing company, and you decide to add air conditioning.

Todd Liles: Right. Very common, especially as you grow.

Roy Williams: And then you decide to add electrical. Okay. Now, because everybody loves Todd’s Plumbing Company, they will also love Todd’s Air Conditioning Company and Todd’s Electrical. Now, I’ve done this a million times. We can always make it work. But here’s the question. Todd used to mean plumbing.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: Now what does Todd mean? And so it’s called line extension. And line extension, you’re just piling more and more and more and more things for the name Todd to stand for. It can be done, but, boy, you have to be careful. Let’s go back to plumbing. If you own a plumbing company and it’s called Todd’s, and you’re gonna have a companion company that’s an air conditioning company, is there any wisdom in naming it something besides Todd’s? The answer is yes. There’s a very strong argument to be made for it. And then if you add an electrical company, is there a strong reason to have a third brand in the family? And so this is a family of companies, but every one of them has a somewhat more distinct position if it has its own name.

Todd Liles: Oh, boy.

Roy Williams: Now, historically… Stay with me, ’cause I understand both sides of the argument, and it sounds like I’m steering you. I’m not. But I know that everybody says, “Oh, no, just stay with the one company name and add on the services.” So here’s the thing. Historically, okay? Tires are like batteries. Automotive tires and automotive batteries. There’s only like three manufacturing companies that manufacture all the tires for all the different brands. There’s only like three manufacturers of car batteries that manufacture all the batteries for all the different brands of batteries. And so J.C. Penney had the J.C. Penney battery because people trust J.C. Penney. Well, Sears didn’t fall for that. They didn’t have the Sears battery. They had the DieHard.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: So, oh, guess what? Guess who sold the most batteries. The DieHard outsold the J.C. Penney premium battery by infinite amounts in those years when Sears was still a force and J.C. Penney was still a big force in those days. But even more importantly, if you go back to the two big competitors in bathroom stuff, house stuff, Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive. Those are the two big companies. The really big ones. So Colgate-Palmolive has like 62 different products either called Colgate or Palmolive or Colgate-Palmolive, okay?

And so there’s everything from shaving cream to shampoo to hand cream to denture cream to just like. It’s an infinite number of things either named Colgate or Palmolive or Colgate-Palmolive. It’s called line extension. We’ve talked about it. Whereas Procter & Gamble invented Ivory soap by accident. And what they did is they were mixing up some soap and they left it in the mixer too long and it accidentally whipped air into the batter. And that’s why Ivory soap floats. It floats because it’s got air in it. And that means there’s actually less soap in the bar by volume. But it floats. 99 and 44/100% pure. Well, then all of a sudden it’s a huge selling soap. It floats, it floats, it’s pure, it’s snow white. And Ivory soap became the number one soap in America a hundred years ago.

Now suddenly washing machines were invented. Now, if Colgate-Palmolive would have owned that brand, they would have had Ivory soap flakes, Ivory soap clothes washing flakes. And then they had delicate fabrics that were invented. And if Colgate-Palmolive would have had it, it would have been Ivory soap cold water flakes. Ivory soap, Ivory soap flakes, Ivory soap cold water flakes.

No. Procter & Gamble had Ivory, Tide, and Cheer. All-Temperature Cheer. And so they didn’t name everything Ivory. They let Tide be the number one selling laundry detergent and Cheer be the number one selling… And did you know, in every category where Procter & Gamble competes with Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble owns them, destroys them in all but like one or two categories.

Todd Liles: Procter & Gamble is a branding machine.

Roy Williams: Well, here’s the deal. They have taken the position that every brand, even though they’re intrinsically linked together and they’re very… They have common parentage and common DNA, they deserve their own name and their own brand identity. So there’s a really strong offer to be made both ways. I’ve done it both ways. I’ve done it successfully both ways. There’s no one right answer. But I do want people to know there’s no one right answer. And don’t ever let anybody tell you you have to do it this way or you’re screwing up. I’m going, nope, you can do it either way and it’ll work. Just make a conscious choice.

Todd Liles: Let me point something out to your example. Each of those items are distinct in a very powerful way, which is they engage the sense of smell, and they all smell dramatically different. I’m gonna take a little quick side journey here. You know that Procter & Gamble purchased Chanel No. 5? 

Roy Williams: Did not know that.

Todd Liles: Yeah. I think they paid four or five billion dollars for it. And when they had purchased it, there was a huge sort of internal beef, like, why in the world would you pay four or five billion for one fragrance? And the CEO, which there’s a great book called Playing to Win, sort of like, you guys don’t get it. That’s Chanel No. 5. But if you look at their category of fragrances, they have like 10,000 unique fragrances that they own the patents on. They bought ’em probably two decades ago, they’ve owned ’em for a very long time.

But if you look at all or if you smell all of the Febreze scents, just about everything that you can think of has come out of that category. So they didn’t pay four or five billion for Chanel No. 5. They paid four or five billion for the fact that they knew that they were going to be able to engage that massive catalog of scents into their products. Here’s why I bring it up. We like Mandola’s. Mandola’s is an Italian restaurant in town. You like it, I like it, my family likes it.

Roy Williams: Yeah.

Todd Liles: And inside of that company, they have Mandola’s Italian Kitchen, they have Trattoria Lisina, I think I’m saying that correctly, and they have Carrabba’s. I’ve been to all three. And it wasn’t until you pointed it out that they were owned by the same company that I realized that. And the reason I didn’t realize it, Roy, is because the taste profiles are so dramatically different between those three restaurants. You would never confuse them. The atmospheres are so dramatically different. The level of service, while good at all three, is so dramatically different. There is no part of the mind that would put those three in the same family.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: They’re totally separate, and they’re each at a higher class as you move up.

Roy Williams: Damian Mandola invented all three of those, and then he sold Carrabba’s for infinite amounts of money, and he started Trattoria Lisina and Mandola’s Kitchen. And I said, yeah, they’re all three great restaurants. They occupy three totally different places. And it was the exact same chef that started all three of those and gave them their own identity and set them adrift in the world to see what would happen. One of the things I wanted to point out, Chanel No. 5 is not a fragrance. Chanel No. 5 is an icon.

Todd Liles: Yeah, it is.

Roy Williams: And it’s been an icon since the day when Marilyn Monroe was alive and young and was the female sex symbol icon in the United States. A reporter said, “What do you wear to bed every night?” And she said, “Chanel No. 5.”

Todd Liles: What a great story.

Roy Williams: And so, yeah. And so you’re all imagining that’s all she wears, and all of a sudden, boom, in your imagination, you’re picturing her naked. That was her intention. And so speaking of what to leave out, well, what do you wear to bed? Chanel No. 5. And so the idea is Chanel No. 5 is an iconic brand. It stands for lots of things.

Remember what I said a couple episodes ago? I said an icon is an artifact that stands for something bigger than itself. Chanel No. 5 isn’t a fragrance. It is femininity. It is sexuality. It is a luxury. It’s the greatest of all time. It is the master scent of femininity. It is the essence of having arrived and being able to afford that and to use that is the sign of extraordinary taste and refinement. It’s like all of these things, this huge, huge, huge idea is wrapped up in that one Chanel No. 5.

And it goes back to Coco Chanel, who was a legend in herself. And so these icons and myths become the brand. The brand isn’t the smell. The brand is all the things that that name represents that’s associated. It’s the luggage that that name carries with it. It’s all of these treasures that that name embodies. And so that’s what you’re trying to do when you create a brand. You want all of the associations with that brand to be the power of the brand. The associations, the things that cling to it, that the customer brings to the brand. Their perception of that brand includes this huge, huge, huge bunch of beliefs that it’s not the scent.

So here’s my point. Chanel No. 5, iconic brand. And to own that makes you important. To own Ferrari makes you important. And there are certain brands like that that have stood the test of time. There’s always the hot brand of the moment, and sometimes they have a shelf life of two or three years and then they kind of disappear. And we could name lots of those brands that were super hot and then they just kind of fell off the edge of the world. But whenever something has stood the test of time and it’s been through a couple of generations, you’re going, “Oh, no, no, no. This is a world brand. This is an iconic brand. And owning it is owning gold.” And this is what people need to understand, that a brand is what people believe about you.

Todd Liles: Yeah. You know what stands out to me about… We’re talking about Procter & Gamble, and they have this amazing ability to keep it simple. When they come up with something that they think is just like a hit product. And they work very hard on these things. But when they come up with a hit product or something that they think could be a hit product, they’re very intentional about going, “Okay, that’s gonna be a product line.” Like you said, let’s not make that this soap. Let’s make it this soap. Let’s make it a totally different product line. It’s distinct enough, and let’s go out there and do that.

So it brings it back to your original point of going, “Hey, there is a grounds for not doing everything under the same name.” Because the way that we kicked this off, we might need to bring the listener back full circle, is I was asking the question like what happens when we grow and we start adding so many more services? And my original thought was saying, “What about inside of ads?” And you took it even further and said, “No, no, no. What about just inside of business in general?” Because there’s things that you can do here, right? You can be distinct.

I’m gonna give you one more real-life example of Procter & Gamble leaving something out to make it more powerful. When they wanted to take over the razor market in India, they thought that the razors in the US would be the same ones that people would want in India. And at the time, real popular razors was three blades and more. And I think the brand that they fly, that they own, is Gillette. I think they bought the Gillette brand. If it’s not Gillette, someone will correct me, but listener, the story is true even if that’s not the brand.

Well, they sent a chief executive over there to live in India. They brought the three-blade plus four, five-blade razors, and they weren’t selling. And what they began to do was to begin to research why isn’t it selling. And what they found very simply is that if you have multiple blades, you have to have constant running hot water so that you can rinse it out because it gets stuck in between the blades. It makes for a great shave, but it also makes for a razor that gets clogged up.

When he began to look at what the locals used, they used traditional old-fashioned blades where you put the razor in, single razor, and you shave with it, and they flip it over and they do the other side, non-disposable. When seeking why, it wasn’t because it was classic, it wasn’t because it was old-school. It was because they could put a single cup of cold water and they could shake the whiskers out. So he’s like, “Huh.” But it still had all the same problems that that traditional blade did. When that blade was worn out, you needed to replace it, it was inconvenient.

And he just asked the simple question, “What if we made a convenient single-blade razor option that was less than their replacements? They could buy a pack, they could still keep inside of their traditions of using a single cup of water. Would that work?” He rolled it out. They own the Indian market now. They didn’t make it more complicated, they simplified. So they’re very smart about leaving things out.

Roy Williams: And a couple episodes ago, we had a whole episode about thinking like the customer. And so the genius in that instance of Procter & Gamble was, “Let’s go figure out how the customer thinks. How are they making their decisions?” And so you always make assumptions, but then you must test those assumptions. And a lot of times in what we call the uncovery, when we’re trying to uncover the truth about a business, we will make the statement, “Hey, look, I’ve done a lot of study. I’ve read a lot about you. I’ve read the notes that you sent. I have made some assumptions. What we’re going to do is I’m going to test those assumptions today in our conversation, and I will either firm up and you’re going to reinforce my assumptions, or I’m going to modify my assumptions.” And so just be aware. Let me begin with one of the things I think I know about you and tell me if I’m on the mark or if I’ve somehow missed it. And now that’s a dialogue.

This is when you’re getting more and more advanced into developing a strategy to acknowledge you think you know something, but you want to make sure that the thing you think you know is correct. And so they had all this data from the US and they assumed it would be just like that in India. Well, it’s not. And so thinking like the customer, let’s go find out what’s actually in the heart and mind of that customer. And to think that all people who shave are gonna make the same decisions for the same reasons, it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They don’t all have the same circumstances.

And when circumstances change, decisions change. And so India is a much bigger market than the US. It’s three times the size of the US. And it’s like, huh, so single-blade disposable is the answer. Who knew? But then they own the market, and that’s why they’re one of the richest companies in the world.

Todd Liles: One of the things that I’m really enjoying about our episode today is that we’re getting into strategies and tactics that are actually bigger than just a branding message. We’re going deeper than that. We’re getting into the things that are gonna affect the branding message. We’re finding the brass tacks as to what the customer wants, what we can actually provide, what will work, and then go, “Now we can develop a message around that.” And I think that’s a huge part of… There’s just example after example. I’ll give you one more for Procter & Gamble, and maybe we should rename this episode The Wisdom of Procter & Gamble.

Roy Williams: Good.

Todd Liles: But the scientist that was working on the original Febreze product, he developed it by accident because he was a smoker. And when he went home, he didn’t even realize what he had created because his wife said, “Did you quit smoking? Did you not smoke today?” He’s like, “Of course I smoked. Smoked on the way home.” She’s like, “I don’t smell it. In fact, I don’t smell anything.” The original product was unscented and it absorbed all of the odors. And he was like, “You don’t smell anything?” Smokers have a lesser sense of smell. So he goes back and starts looking at what he was working on, and lo and behold, he’s got the chemical that ends up becoming Febreze.

They didn’t call it that. It’s got a very long, scientific chemical name. So he goes, “I think this can work.” He brings it to product division heads and they go, “Well, let’s start testing this thing.” And they roll it out. They add some fragrance in there, as you thought that they would, and they’re like, “Everybody that doesn’t like odors, they’re definitely gonna use this product.” They advertised it that way. And guess what? No one that had bad odors used the product. Because, like the guy that’s smoking the cigarette, you get used to bad odors.

They went and visited this one woman. They said as they walked up to the house, they were overwhelmed by the odor of cat urine. It was just beating them across the face. It’s like their eyes are watering. And they’re interviewing her and asking about the Febreze. She’s like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got it. It’s over here in the cabinet.” And they go, “Do you ever use it?” And she goes, “Only when the odors get bad.” And they’re like, “Do you smell anything now?” She’s like, “No.”

Roy Williams: She’s acclimated.

Todd Liles: She’s acclimated to it, right? So what they end up finding is they start finding the people that are using it. And the ones that are using it are the people that… Most of the time, it’s ladies. It’s moms that are home that are cleaning their house. And when everything is perfect and when everything is spotless and when the beds are made and when the laundry is folded, they give it one spritz of Febreze. They don’t even use it to get rid of the odor. Their houses are spotless. It’s a finisher. When they realize this… And by the way, when they interviewed a lady that said, “Can you talk us through the day?” they had cameras set up in her house, and they were watching her face. And as she’s describing it, as she’s spritzing the bed, this glowing smile pops up. And what they realize is, in the mind of the customer, Febreze is a finishing touch reward to their hard work.

Roy Williams: Wow.

Todd Liles: They switched the campaigns. And what they showed was they started showing in marketing and advertising that woman, but a model of that woman, finishing her day, making her home the finishing touch. Because what they realized is that the people that they thought would use it, which would be the people that were sort of slobby and had odors, they don’t. It’s the people that are already concerned about their home that just want it that much  more special .

Roy Williams: Okay, it sounds like… This is what’s crazy. This is gonna sound like we planned to do this. We didn’t.

Todd Liles: No.

Roy Williams: But I have… Maybe I’ve told it to you before, but not to this audience. I have another Febreze story. And this goes back about seven years, roughly. And Marc Pritchard, CEO of Procter & Gamble, went to this big convention where all of the people that sell online marketing platforms and everybody does stuff. And he said, “Look…” And one thing people don’t know about Procter & Gamble, the very first time I spoke at Procter & Gamble, I was told by my host, who brought me in, in Cincinnati, they have a big, beautiful auditorium at headquarters. And he said, “Look, Roy, keep in mind, the unofficial slogan here at Procter & Gamble is, ‘In God we trust, all others bring data.'”

And so I backed up everything I was saying to make sure that the crowd would accept it. And it was a great day. And then knowing that, when I saw that Marc Pritchard had gone to this convention and spoken to all these people, and he says, “You know, you keep telling us that online is different. You have to measure it differently and all these things. We keep believing you. And last year, we spent $6 billion with you guys, and we’ve learned some things.” And he says, “All these years, we’ve been doing this for several years with you guys, and we’ve learned some things. Let me tell you what we’ve learned.”

And he said, “Targeting online is overrated and priced too high.” And those were not his exact words, but it was the point he was making. And here’s what he said. He goes, “Let me give you an example.” He said, “We originally thought that we needed to target Febreze to big households that have a lot of people or and/or households with pets.” To your point, big households, households with pets, and we could target to them and we would sell more Febreze. He goes, “Didn’t work. We didn’t see the lift we expected to see. And so we decided, what the heck, instead of paying all this additional money for the targeting, let’s just say anyone that has a nose is an influencer, and we’re just gonna buy unfiltered, untargeted, general, just put it out there way more times for the money. But untargeted, just whoever the audience is, we don’t care.”

Huge growth. Huge growth. And he goes, “So, yeah, we’re less about targeting. We did have this one product, though, this one product at Procter & Gamble where targeting pays off, and it’s Pampers, disposable diapers. When you target Pampers to mothers who just had a child, it works.”

And so I just… My head almost exploded when I heard that because I’m going, there’s so much wisdom in that. He said, “Basically, we’re now using online marketing as mass media. We’re not using it for targeting. We’re just using it to reach a huge number of people for the least amount of money.” And we tested and proved that targeting was not worth the additional money it cost. And of course, nobody wants to ever hear that. Nobody wants to believe that.

But I’m going, the person with the largest ad budget on the face of the earth has always been Procter & Gamble. They spend more money on advertising than number two and number three put together. The last time I checked, it’s only been a few years ago. The point is, they are all about data. They’re all about research and product development and detailed data into their advertising performance. And whenever they say, “Yeah, guess what? Targeting’s overrated,” and they did it, and the Febreze was the example he used, and I’m going, I’ve never forgotten that.

Todd Liles: I hear what you’re saying. I’ve been with you long enough to pick it up. I want to do a little bit of translation for the listener because this is what I’m thinking, right? Like I wrote this title, “Write for Jennifer, Not the Jury.” Write for a specific person, not the jury. That’s different than target for a specific person in your ad spend. So what we are saying is that you know who you’re talking to, but we use a media that says it is more effective and cheaper to use a mass media because it will hit Jennifer’s ears and you don’t have to worry about the jury. That makes this work.

Roy Williams: So what happens is, no, you do want to write for a specific person. But it’s not actually… Okay, that’s a writer’s trick. When you’re writing, and I mean, every great writer does, Hemingway does it, Steinbeck did it, every writer does this, and they will tell you. When you write to a single individual that you actually know, you never, never, never tell them, and you never tell anybody, you never tell anybody who you were writing that to.

But if I was going to write something and I’m writing it as I’m writing it to you and to you only, it gives your writing a great deal of specificity. And I make the assumption that I can use this phrase because Todd will understand this. I can use this phrase, and Todd will perceive this. And so when you limit who you’re writing to to this one specific person you have in your mind, it makes your writing infinitely more interesting because what you’re doing, the assumptions that you’re making based upon who it is you’re writing to, even if another person, even if the person reading it or listening to it or watching it, even if they don’t have your background and you’re the person I was writing to, and even if they don’t understand that subtle reference that you would understand, it still makes the ad more interesting.

And so let me put it this way. A couple episodes ago, I mentioned when we were talking about storytelling, and I said Allan Gurganus wrote, “Stories only happen to people who can tell them.” You know what the actual line is? “You know what, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.” It’s actually a more interesting line. Do you know what?

Todd Liles: Because you imagine a story being told to someone.

Roy Williams: You don’t know who sugar is. He’s obviously talking to someone who he’s calling sugar. We don’t know who that person is. But the actual quote is, “You know what, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.” And so he’s speaking to one person that he calls sugar, and it makes it more interesting even if you don’t know who sugar is.

Todd Liles: Roy, we had a video that’s almost at a million views that was from my other podcast, The $100 Million Mindset, which you can also find on toddliles.com. But it’s Elmer. And Elmer kicks off this story, goes, “My favorite quote in air conditioning was, ‘An air conditioner is either doing something it’s not supposed to do or it’s not doing something it’s supposed to do.'” And it blew up like crazy. And I found myself going, “Why?” I can show you my handwritten notes. I sat down, I wrote out every single word.

Roy Williams: Now, you sent them to me.

Todd Liles: I sent you my handwritten notes?

Roy Williams: No, you just sent me a text with all the details.

Todd Liles: Yeah. So what I walked away from it realizing, and I sent this immediately to Joshua, who oversees some of the edits, I said, “Joshua, the way he kicks it off, he brings us immediately into a story.” “One of my favorite quotes I was ever told about air conditioning.” Immediately into a story on a subject for a group of listeners that know who they’re talking about. He didn’t have to say who told it. He didn’t have to say where he learned it. He just gave it to us. And it just, bam, it takes you right into the story.

Roy Williams: What Elmer was leaving out whenever he told that story, because we talked about the importance of leaving things out, right? He was in high school. He took a class on air conditioning repair in high school, and his instructor was Bill Whitlock. And Bill Whitlock, Mr. Whitlock, is the one who told him, “Elmer, there’s only two things that can be wrong with an air conditioner. Either it’s doing something it’s not supposed to do, or it’s not doing something it’s supposed to do.” And Elmer never forgot that. And it is such a succinct and comical and clever and insightful way to just sum up, “There’s only two things that can be wrong.” And then people go, “Gee, that is so simple and so memorable and so delightful and so obvious, but it is so well said.”

Todd Liles: So well said.

Roy Williams: And so that’s why people go, “This is clever. I want to share this.” Why? It’s entertaining. It is entertaining because it is poignant, insightful, obviously right, and you’ve never heard it before.

Todd Liles: In preparing for the notes here, one of the things that I’d prepared in thinking about this was that if the client just remembers one thing from your ad, just one powerful thing, then you win. And it is literally the difference, going back to that Elmer ad, of our views getting 2,000 views, which I’m going, “Hey, I’m proud. 2,000 people took the time to watch this,” to almost a million.

And now in my mind, I’m thinking to myself for the future, because for us, that’s a form of copywriting, right? We hit the masses with a million, and we didn’t have to spend a penny in advertisement. Imagine if you are investing in advertisement and you are reaching a million, but no one heard it because your copy sucked. So what’s going in my brain now is going, “How can I look for moments and look for content and edit in such a way that it stays true, but that it’s cut and it’s powerful and it’s punchy?”

Roy Williams: Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. I’ve got an idea. Our partner, Brian Brushwood, knows more about this subject than anybody I’ve ever met or even heard of. Now, about six weeks ago, he produced a little short that got 17 million views in the first 10 days.

Todd Liles: Come on, now. I thought I was doing good.

Roy Williams: And about three weeks after that, he has another little short. Now, remember, he does one every day, every day, every day, every day. And so even though if you know how to do it, it doesn’t mean every time you do one, it knocks the ball out of the park. But a few weeks after the first one, a few weeks ago, he did a second one, got to 14 and a half million views in the first 10 days. Now, here’s my point. Let’s get Brushwood on this show as a guest and pick his brain.

Todd Liles: Let’s do it. We will. I’m glad you’re thinking about this because I literally was thinking before today, how would Roy feel if I brought in a guest? I wasn’t thinking Brian.

Roy Williams: I’m all up in it.

Todd Liles: All right, we’re gonna bring some wizard partners in, but we’re gonna start with Brian.

Roy Williams: Cool.

Todd Liles: So that’ll be great. All right, so I had an ad segment pulled up, and guess what? I’m not gonna go over it because this has been chock-full of what Procter & Gamble is doing at a genius level. And I love what we’ve done here today. So we’re gonna land the plane here. Roy, give us one takeaway that the listener should have from this episode.

Roy Williams: Of all the things we’ve talked about, the opposite of a profound truth is often another profound truth. And I began by saying there’s line extension, and then there is a different name for each division of your company instead of having it all under one name. And I said I’m not recommending either of those. I’m saying both can be made to work. Just make a conscious choice.

And so both of those are profound ideas. And the opposite of a profound truth is usually another profound truth. And most people can’t live, Todd, in the tension between those two things. They think, no, one of ’em has to be right and the other one has to be wrong. I said, “Actually, that’s not how it works. They can both be right, but you need to recognize I can choose between these two, and what I choose is okay because it has its advantages and they’re equal.”

Todd Liles: I love it. All right, Roy. Listeners, thank you so much for today. I hope you enjoyed today’s lesson. I know that I got smarter today, and I bet you did as well. If you find yourself at the end of these episodes going, “I’m really enjoying this,” then subscribe. Until next time, be well. Think about what’s the stuff you can cut out, ’cause you’re probably saying too much.

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