Dear Reader,

You can close your eyes, but you can’t close your ears.

That truth has kept us alive for thousands of years.

It’s why a mother hears a whimper from the next room.

It’s why we jolt awake in the night without knowing why.

It’s why your brain can remember a song lyric from 1997 but forget what you read this morning.

♪ Today is the greatest ♪ …  (If you sang the next line, then you are part of my tribe.)

Sound is primal.

It bypasses logic.

It anchors memory.

And if you’re a business owner, it might be the most underused tool you have.

In today’s episode, Roy H. Williams walks us straight into the brain — literally.

You’ll hear him talk about Wernicke’s area, Broca’s area, and the arcuate fasciculus, the high-speed neural highway that connects thought and language.

But this isn’t a science lecture. This is a masterclass in persuasion.

You’ll discover why great ads don’t start with data — they start with strategy.

Why repetition in sound isn’t annoying — it’s effective.

Why the best marketers are poets, not analysts.

And why culture, not SOPs, is what survives the punch in the mouth.

We’ll also revisit the Goettl case study — a campaign built on story, sound, and belief. A campaign that took a $441 cost-per-lead and drove it under $50, not with better click targeting, but with better branding.

There’s a quote Roy shares near the top of the show. He says,

“An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.”

You can close your eyes, but you can’t close your ears.

So, PRESS PLAY and let’s begin.

 

Watch / listen above or read below

Todd Liles: Today we’re going to get right to the heart of the subject matter, which is radio versus digital. Where should we be spending our money and why? And if the listener is interested, I went into a really deep dive in Monday Morning Memos. Mostly I’ve been taking content from your books, but I wanted to go to some of the most recent research and most recent articles that you’ve written.

I want to give a quick reference. This is from No One Listens To Radio Anymore. Branded versus unbranded keywords, radio versus pay-per-click, and the radio success formula. We’re going to jump straight into this. I’m going to go to the immediate question first. Why do so many people believe that, “no one is listening to radio anymore?”

Roy Williams: I’m not sure. It’s mostly because most people don’t realize how much they listen to the radio.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: I have a client, it’s a big law firm in California, San Jose and San Francisco and all of Northern California. And they have just exploded. I mean, it’s a very old firm, very big firm. And then started working with them about two and a half years ago and they’ve more than doubled. I mean, just, they’re just really happy about it.

And they said, you know, the funniest thing is something that you told us. And I said, well, I told you a lot of things. What was it? This is a very recent call. And they said, you know, you told us that. We said, you know, we don’t listen to the radio. We don’t know anybody that listens to the radio. I said, oh, okay. I said, I hear that all the time.

And I said, within six months, you’re going to have people coming at you. You can’t go anywhere without somebody who knows you walking over and say, hey, man, hadn’t seen you in a long, long time. But I hear your ads all the time. But I never listen to radio. I never listen to radio. I never listen to radio, but I hear your ads all the time.

And I’m saying, after a while, people telling you this, it’s going to crack you up. Because all these people genuinely believe they never listen to radio, but they hear your ads all the time. And your ads only play on the radio.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: And then they said, the judges, the other lawyers, I mean, the insurance companies, everybody’s going, oh, my God, you guys have totally… They’re saying, you’ve brought dignity back to the profession of personal injury law. You’ve brought in, blah, blah, blah. I’m going, yeah. It’s just you can’t bore people to death.

The point is, me and all my friends don’t listen to the radio. You know, a real fact, I haven’t actually intentionally listened to the radio in over 25 years. I hate radio. The ads piss me off. The ads make me throw up in my mouth a little. And I just hate it. And I never, never, never listen to it. So why do we spend many hundreds of millions of dollars on the radio every year? Because we know exactly how many people are listening.

We know more about them than Google can tell you about their audience or that Facebook can tell you about their audience. The stuff that’s known about the radio audience, precisely who they are, precisely how many there are at every moment of the day, 365 days a year. We know this.

Todd Liles: Yeah. You know, I’ll tell you what, and I didn’t know any of this information until I started hanging out with you. That if we look at the devices that measure attention when it comes to radio, Portable People Meter. Nielsen data, all this information…

Roy Williams: Portable People Meter. I always say personal, but it’s portable.

Todd Liles: It’s Portable People Meter. Gotcha. And we’ve mentioned that in previous episodes before. And I don’t want to try to listen, but the fact is that at one recent study, still 50% of Americans are listening to the radio each week. Not 10%, not 5%. A strong 50% of Americans are still listening to the radio this week. And for me, that says it is a powerful medium. And I think there’s another statistic that we could look at that’s just sort of like an in your face statistic, which is radio stations haven’t gone out of business en masse like newspapers have.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: People are still getting in their car. Even though you got your iPhone, you can plug in your music, listen to what you want when you want. People still enjoy turning on the local news, very much like the local TV news, and seeing what’s going on, local.

Roy Williams: Traffic reports, weather reports, etcetera. Right.

Todd Liles: So, I think I’m just going to sort of put a pin in it and say people are listening to radio, end of story. Not going to prove that here. You can prove that. Look it up, just find that out. There is something that radio does that I don’t think a lot of people understand, which is this thing called echoic retention, which is one of the reasons why it’s incredibly powerful. Would you just touch on that for a moment?

Roy Williams: Okay. So echoic retention is basically the memory of sound. Professor Steven Pinker was the chair of the department of Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT for like a dozen years. And he left there about 20 years ago to take that same position at Harvard. Harvard Medical School. Professor Steven Pinker, four years ago, five years ago, was one of Time magazine’s one of the 100 most influential people in America.

He’s writing a whole bunch of books about persuasion. And he’s a scientist, a cognitive neuroscientist. How do people make decisions? That’s cognitive neuroscience. And it’s not philosophy, it’s not psychology. And he basically says the reason that human beings rule the earth, it’s not the opposable thumb. I mean, monkeys have those, right? But a lot of people say it’s the opposable thumb we can grasp when lots of things can grasp.

It’s our ability to attach complex meanings to sounds. It takes the average reader approximately 38% longer to understand the written word than to understand the same word when spoken. Babies do not learn to read first and then learn how to speak. They learn how to speak by listening and imitating the sounds.

We are born with patches and lobes in our brains that the animals don’t have. Specifically Wernicke’s area, Broca’s area and the of arcuate fasciculus. The arcuate fasciculus is a high bandwidth bundle of nerves like Google Fiber that connects Wernicke’s area to Broca’s area from behind your left ear to forward of your left ear in the dorsolateral prefrontal association area is the center of working memory, which is conscious awareness. The thought you’re thinking now and then just forward of that is the prefrontal cortex, where decisions are made.

All yes answers, all plans, all judgments, and all decisions are made right behind your forehead. Your brains are tied by the optic nerves between the two hemispheres of your brain to a place just above your skull. I mean, just above your spine at the base of your skull. Reach back there and feel it just above your spine at the base of your skull. That’s what your eyes are connected to. Now the visual cortex is at the back of your skull. The decision making part is at the front. It’s a long and winding road from visual capture to decisions. And there’s literally 10,000 billion synapses that it has to pass through to get there.

Whereas auditory members, the entire temporal lobe is this. Then all the other parts of the brain fan out from in the human being like the tail feathers of a peacock. And so we are creatures of sound, right? And the written word has no meaning until it has been translated into the spoken word it represents. And this is known. And so when you use unusual, unexpected words, you get attention. And when you can describe things vividly, people see them in their mind. And this is one of the things that happens in working memory, in the dorsolateral prefrontal association area.

And you can read a 1986 book by Alan Bawdeley. It’s hard to say. Alan Bawdeley B-A-W-D-E-L-E-Y. And it’s called Working Memory. And he talks about this entire process. It’s a scientist. These are cognitive neuroscientists. They’re not salespeople, they’re not philosophers, they’re not psychologists. They’re none of that. They’re just like actual biochemical data, right? And they’re saying, this is how it all works. Now keep eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, five separate organs, the skin being the largest organ of your body. But the information is gathered, processed, and retrieved from memory in five separate and largely unrelated parts of the brain.

The largest by far of those is the memory of sound. And whenever you look at how sound informs all the other areas, and an echoic memory, the thing you’re talking about is this. Anything that comes through our ears, you can close your eyes, but you can’t close your ears. How else would you know there’s a burglar in the house when you’re fully asleep. The point is, you hear even when you’re not listening, but you do not see unless you’re looking.

And the idea that your ears are always on and they always interpret what you’re hearing, anything that’s new, surprising, or different, and it will turn your attention to the thing that is new, surprising, or different. Your eyes aren’t quite like that. And what comes through your eyes, it disappears in less than 8/10 of a second, it’s gone. Which is why eyewitnesses can never agree on what they saw. Tons of studies have been done about this, but they all agree to a high degree of specific detail about what they heard. Because what comes through your ears is there for about four and a half seconds, then it begins to fade slowly. And so, even if you’re not listening, even if you weren’t paying attention to it, what you hear goes into echoic retention, and it stays there.

And with enough repetition, you’re driving that nail through the board and then clenching it on the other side, the nail being your message, the board being the mind, and repetition being the strokes of the hammer. And I’m going. Sound is a marvelous selling tool. In fact, it’s the only selling tool. When you use written words, those written words become sound in the mind of the reader.

And the sound of the words in the mind, even when a person’s reading silently, the sound of those words, the meter, the interesting, vivid qualities of the descriptions that you write, and the sense of emotional relatedness where you identify. I have felt that before. I have experienced that before. I’m engaged by this. If you know how to write that way, guess what? Your ads work.

Todd Liles: Yeah. I love the study of the brain. And I just recently finished Peter Attia’s book Outlive. And in the section of Outlive, he goes into a deep, deep dive into why sleep is so critical. And he began to unpack what was happening from a real in the brain perspective when we fall asleep. And one of the things that I didn’t realize is that the neurons literally have the power to retreat, right? And he said that when we lay down that we, our brain, as long as we’re healthy, has this moment to where spinal fluid comes into our brain. The neurons retreat off their connections, and it gives it a chance to go through there and begin to flush.

And it’s flushing out lots of things. It’s flushing out essentially waste. And it’s given the brain a chance to restructure, and then the neurons reconnect. So when he’s talking about all these things, he’s going over the power of sleep. But then he makes a very specific point. It goes all the way back essentially to the fundamental concept of what Darwin came up with, is that as we were developing as a species, we first had sleep at cycles with earth and natural rhythms.

But when you said, hey, you still hear when you’re sleeping, and I’m taking a little bit of a detour here, but when we are asleep, our hearing is the only thing that we have that is a protective source. It’s also one of the reasons why you will occasionally wake up in your sleep and you’ll look around, but then you go back down because something, whether at the end of a sleep cycle or a noise, something has triggered you.

But that hearing never turns off because it is the only constant defense mechanism that we have. So it is extraordinarily, extraordinarily powerful to the point that I don’t think people really understand how deep and how just biologically ingrained it is in us.

Roy Williams: Another thing that Steven Pinker said is the reason we rule the planet is we are able to attach specific meanings to sounds. And the animals, like a dog or even a horse, simple, simple commands, with enough repetition, simple word, they can understand what that word means. So they have the ability to interpret sounds to a very, very limited degree, but they can’t speak, they can’t create sounds that have highly specific meanings. And I don’t want to hear about whale song and all that stuff. I promise it’s not as specific, detailed, and robust as the sentences that human beings can put together to describe highly specific, extremely detailed things.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: And so one of the things Bill Bernbach said, and I was ranting about him in our previous – actually raving rather than ranting in a previous episode. He said an idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it. The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas. You have to jump from facts into imagination. And that’s what a poet does. And every great ad writer is a poet.

The same idea, the same data, the same information, the same possible story right in the heads of the wrong person turns to dust. But if talent rubs up against it, if a poet rubs up against it, then you can turn it into magic. And so what you extract from the client doesn’t matter as much as knowing the angle of approach that you should use to introduce that into the public consciousness.

Todd Liles: I’ll tell you, we are both obviously reading things that we’re greatly influenced by right now. And I’m going to make one more reference to Attia, and then I’m going to get to this question that’s written down here is in his book. He refers to it as the science and the art. And he unpacks that. He goes, because the science is the data, he said, but the art part of medicine is the fact that the data is only true across a certain set of information. It’s not necessarily individual.

A really quality doctor is going to understand that the art is in the practice. And what that brings me to is that you often refer to people who think that the data is superior above all as digital weasels. Yeah, digital weasel, right. Because they’re only looking at one piece of the information, but they’re not necessarily asking the question of what influenced it. At least that’s the way I interpret it. I want to get your perspective.

Roy Williams: No, I’m agreeing with you. I’m absolutely agreeing with you. I actually am halfway through a Monday memo right now that I’m working on. My belief is this. I was asking the same question. Yes, there’s science in advertising. There’s also art. Then I ask myself, what’s the difference between science and art? Okay. Science is objective, and it is always repeatably true and measurably true. And whether you accept it or not, it still remains true. It is an objective thing.

Todd Liles: Absolutely.

Roy Williams: Now, art cannot be objective. Art is always subjective. And what you said about the writer that you’re reading, he was basically saying, yeah, the subjective part is it doesn’t always affect everyone the same way. And so the data hasn’t changed, but your presentation of the data will influence this person one way and influence a different person a different way.

Some are attracted to you, some are repelled from you. But the art is the subjective part. The application of the science is the art. And so you have to have information, you have to have data, you have to know the facts, but yet how those are presented is the talent that either makes it dust or magic.

Todd Liles: So that’s the Monday Morning Memo that you’re working on right now?

Roy Williams: Yeah, I’m like two thirds through it.

Todd Liles: How are we always like…

Roy Williams: You and I have that connection.

Todd Liles: We are always so in sync.

Roy Williams: We have that connection. It’s weird. We’ve barely known each other a year. I can’t explain it.

Todd Liles: I think it’s a spiritual thing, and it’s also the way that we are wired. So it’s really fascinating.

Roy Williams: Same brand of crazy.

Todd Liles: Same brand of crazy. Right? No randos in the canoe. So the essence of the digital weasel, and I like this animal equation now, is because you know, the weasel is kind of smart. Like, I worked in a pet store.

Roy Williams: Extremely.

Todd Liles: Yeah, they can. They can get through a maze, they can go for the object. They know where the cheese or the food is. They’ll get there. But ask them to think originally. They have a hard time with it.

Roy Williams: And so I wrote a thing recently that I don’t think anybody understood. Details first, and then building something, principle by principle, line upon line, brick by brick, step by step. That’s called structural thinking. And you have to be able to do that. It’s absolutely essential that you be able to do that when that’s what needs to be done.

The opposite of structural, which is details first, step by step, is gestalt. Gestalt thinking is essentially right brain thinking. If you want to think about it loosely, left brain is structural, right brain is gestalt. Dr. Roger Sperry, 1981 Nobel Prize.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: So in the right hemisphere, whenever you think of something and you see the finished thing, you see it in its completeness, in its glory, in the most infinite detail, and you don’t even know where to start, but you’re saying, okay, I see this finished thing, and if I can create this, it would be amazing. That’s what the world needs right now, is to create this. Steve Jobs did that.

I can name all the people who think gestalt, and then they say, okay, now if we’re going to reverse engineer this thing, I see in my mind, how would you construct that? And so the behavior when you’re thinking gestalt, the behavior of the components is determined by the nature of the finished product. The nature of the finished product, which we know from the beginning. This is the nature of the finished product.

This is its personality, its oeuvre, its essence. All right, the component. What would be the nature of the component that would… How would this company call a person? How would such a company greet a person? How would such a company reach out to a person for the first time? What kind of a warranty would such a company offer?

So whenever you know the nature of the finished thing, then you ask, how would that thing do this? How would that thing do this? And once you know the personality of this thing, okay, now we have to say, well, how would a company that believed these things and valued these things and cherish these things and never compromise these things, how would it. And then no matter what you ask, you know exactly how they would do it. Then you say, okay, now how can we create that? And so the picture of the finished thing dictates the process of creating it.

Todd Liles: Yeah. So when I think about that from an operational standpoint, this is the way that I see it. Gestalt is the big picture. Like you said, structure is the detail. If we were to take that and say, how does that apply operationally? I would say culture is the Gestalt.

Roy Williams: Yes. Absolutely.

Todd Liles: And the SOPs are the details.

Roy Williams: Yes.

Todd Liles: And I will often say to potential clients that culture eats strategy for lunch or for breakfast, and they go, I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense to me. So here’s a short answer of it is, if you believe that you must systematize and procedure everything to the Nth degree, it means you have no culture. Because if you have a culture, a big vision where we’re going, and a way of believing and a way of behaving and a way of thinking, you actually don’t need an SOP for every little detail.

Because what you’re doing is you’re just wasting ink and paper and time and energy because the energy is invested – it’s in the people. They get it. Now, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t key aspects that we want to document for repetition. Of course there are. It just means that if you get to, like you say, digital weasel, to me, it’s SOP weasel.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: When they need a book this thick because they want to document how to put a paperclip on a stack of papers, that to me says, you are just don’t have a culture. You’ve got a control freak scenario. You’re out of control.

Roy Williams: Let me add to that for a second because I agree with you. 100%. Mike Tyson. Okay. You’re talking about how culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Todd Liles: Yes.

Roy Williams: Okay. Strategy has a plan. Mike Tyson said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

Todd Liles: That’s right.

Roy Williams: Now culture knows how to respond to a punch in the mouth.

Todd Liles: Yep.

Roy Williams: The plan doesn’t know how to respond to a punch in the mouth, but culture knows how. And so culture can take a punch in the mouth and know exactly how to respond. You will not find it in the SOP because the punch in the mouth was not planned for. It was never expected. But culture still knows how to deal with it.

Todd Liles: Jesus turns the other cheek. Peter chops off the ear.

Roy Williams: Right? Exactly. Or tries to.

Todd Liles: Or tries to. But he got the ear.. And culture puts the ear back on and goes, we’re not going to…

Roy Williams: We’re not doing that. Exactly. That’s a good metaphor.

Todd Liles: So let’s jump over because we’re anti digital weasels. We’re not anti digital. We know there’s a space for that.

Roy Williams: And listen, I have among the partners, as you know, some astoundingly talented and intelligent digital marketers, and that’s why we made them partners. But they will tell you that in the grand scheme, nationally, it’s maybe 10% of all online marketers, all digital marketers really know what they’re doing and know how to do it right and do it with the right reasons, the right motive, and the right principles.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: And they said, but the other 90%, there’s kind of a culture that it’s the outliers that do it right for the right reasons and just have the integrity that you value. And so when I say digital weasel, I’m not talking about all digital marketers. I’m talking about the ones that are deceptive and they believe. Well, they don’t mind. They use data like a lamp, like a drunk man uses a lamppost.

Mark Twain. Yeah, I believe it’s Mark Twain. He said, you can use information or data. Most people use it the way a drunk man uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination. And so if you gather data, looking for what does this data tell me and how many different ways can this be interpreted and what might each of these different things it could be telling me, what might those be?

Because data never says just one thing, ever, ever. When you look at data, it can always be interpreted more than one way. You find what you’re looking for. You find in the data the thing that supports your premise or your prejudice or your assumption or your hope. And I’m going, and when people start doing that, it doesn’t matter what the data says, it’s going to reinforce exactly what they were hoping it would say.

And this is what the really weak digital people do, that they will look at the wrong data, data that actually has no benefit, and they’ll figure out how to spend that to prove what they’ve been telling you. And that is just not helpful.

Todd Liles: Well, it’s when they have their own preservation and interest in mind.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: And by the way, I believe that that sort of thing could happen across any platform. It could happen in the radio…

Roy Williams: Absolutely. It happens in radio, it happens in television, happens everywhere. It just tends to happen with a little bit more enthusiasm and science behind it, the objective science that’s been used subjectively. And so in the online world, the reason people are attracted to online marketing is because it’s so easily measured.

They don’t understand. Yes, it’s easily measured, but the presentation of the measurements can be wildly distorted and you won’t realize it because it will all make perfect sense. And so like I said, this is the thing right now, just so you’ll know, I had a long conversation with one of our partners yesterday. And I said we have to devise a way for media buying in the digital space that is actually intelligent, comprehensive, easily understood and absolutely true without spin.

And I said, how can we do that? And after a series of very long conversations yesterday, we realized exactly how we plan to do this. It’ll be another few months, maybe six months before we have it all figured out, but the need for it is desperate and I’ve had it on my mind for years. And so the conversation we’re having right now, you didn’t know any of this and you’re a partner because I’m only just now finally found the information I needed.

I don’t know how to do it, but I do know how it needs to be done and the people who can do it. And we’re going to solve this once and for all. And like I said, that’s how big of a thing it is. This is my least favorite thing to talk about is digital, right? And it’s my least favorite thing because it’s so wildly screwed up right now.

Todd Liles: It is. Normally at this time we may transition over to an ad, but I don’t want to do that today. I actually want to dive going back. Remember the content today, listeners, is taken from several articles that were written in the Monday Morning Memos. And in one of the articles, with permission, you unpacked what was true at that time with Goettl. And I’ll just give you a little reminder. Let me read this here. I’m giving you the abbreviated short notes.

Goettl had cut its digital budget by half and started investing in a 52 week radio campaign. This led to dramatic increases in brand recognition. But for those that want data, the real essence of it comes down to this. The cost that was attributed to Ken per reaching a lead went from $441 to under $50. And this did not occur until we had invested in radio. And radio drove traffic in all other formats. So what I want to do is just talk about that case study. And by the way, that case study was a snapshot of that moment in time at Goettl. When they were doing all those things at that moment in time.

So take us back there and if you don’t mind, can you tell us why they went from when they were digital only, $441 for a lead. And then when they started adding radio, by the way, they tracked, it dropped down to $50. That’s a massive decrease. Can you unpack that a little bit?

Roy Williams: Oh, yeah, real simple. Remember this whole thing, it didn’t surprise me, but it was two pivotal moments. Two very, very, very pivotal moments when Ken and I very first started working together. And by the way, after we’re done recording, I’ll play you the new auditory signature I created for his new company.

Todd Liles: Okay.

Roy Williams: It’s a gift. He doesn’t even know I did it, but he bought me a $5,000 toilet one time as a joke and my wife loves it. And so I said, okay, he needs an audio signature for his new company, so I’m going to have him one created. I had it in my mind, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I hired Michael Torbay to create it in his studio and he did.

Todd Liles: That’s awesome.

Roy Williams: I’ll play it for you. I love it. Anyway, the point is Ken remains a close friend and when we very first started working together, I said, Ken, listen to me. I said, here’s the thing I’m the most worried about. We hadn’t even started running the radio ad yet. Hadn’t even started them. I had showed him the script. This is what we’re getting ready to do. 10 year old boy holding a flashlight for his dad. And I said, this is the ad we’re going to start the company with.

And he goes, okay, I like that. And I said, it’s a game changer, Ken. He goes, you think it’s a game changer? I promise it is. I absolutely promise it. And I told him why. And he goes, yeah, that makes sense to me. I believe it. I’m excited. And I said, cool. And I said, now here’s the thing I want to tell you now so that I have credibility. He said, what is it? And I said, right now, how much are you spending on digital marketing for Goettl? 2 million a year. 2 million. So okay, what’s your average cost per sale or lead or whatever?

I said, what’s your average? You know, how much. Tell me how it’s structured and how that’s paying off for you. And he named a number and it was a lot. It was hundreds of dollars. And then I said, is there anything that’s going to change? No, no, it’s not going to change. As a matter of fact, don’t worry about that number. Don’t worry, it’s everybody. That’s average for, it’s average for the category, everybody pays about that same amount.

I said, okay, okay. And so everybody’s happy with paying this much. He goes, yeah, it’s a level playing field. Everybody pays about that much. And this is why companies believe, well, I’m just going to outspend everybody and get all the business.

Okay. That’s how you go broke, by the way.

Todd Liles: Absolutely.

Roy Williams: And so what happens is, I get why people believe that because it’s so easily measured, and so it’s not effective, it’s horribly ineffective, but it’s easily measured. And people, look, I can show you.

Todd Liles: How I’m going out of business.

Roy Williams: Exactly. People love measuring things. And so I said, so listen, is there any reason that number is going to start going down? He goes, no. And I said, so it ain’t going to happen for a few months, but about six months from now, you’re going to start noticing that number really begin to come down rapidly. I said, a year from now, that number is going to be way lower than it is right now. And guess who’s going to be taking credit for it?

And he said, who? And I said, your digital people. And he says, why would they take credit for it? I say all the leads are still going to be coming through the website. Google’s the new phone book. And I say, you have to start measuring branded keywords. He said, what’s that? I said, it’s basically the name of your company. And the recurrent phrases that we use called brandable chunks, these little chunks of sentences, these little phrases that we’re going to use unique to your company. And we’re going to have to tell them how to spell Goettl. G-O-E-T-T-L. It’ll keep you cool, but it’s hard to spell.

And so I had to have a rhythm and a meter and a rhyme to make that G-O-E-T-T-L. People didn’t even know how to pronounce the word. And I said, so I have to say this, and I have to make it meaningful. I have to make it emotional. I have to make people connect to it. And I say, when that happens, they will start typing your name into Google. They will not type it into the URL. They will type it into Google, and then Google will let them click to your website. No matter how much we want people to navigate there directly, very few will ever do it. They’ll still type it into Google.

So it’ll look like your digital team is just doing a miraculous job. And they’re going to say, look, we have all these new things we’re doing, your costs are way down. Aren’t you happy? And I said, so when they say that, remember they didn’t do it. I did. I said, will you please remember that? He goes, yeah, that makes sense to me. I’ll remember that. And I said, cool. Now, a year later, Ken happened to be…

This is the other moment that I remember. I brought together a couple of dozen clients, pretty much all the clients that I had. It wasn’t even a couple of dozen. And Brian Scudamore was there from 1800GOTJUNK. Michael Gerber had come in to speak to us about the E Myth. And then I had the owners of all… Dewey was there with his key people, and Ken was there, and they had never met. And I had all these other people there from all these other companies we work with, and the lawyers and the diamond people, the jewelry people, the Rolex people.

And I had Scudamore make a really amazing presentation. And then Gerber spoke for a few minutes, and then I talked a little bit. And then I just started having different people in the room stand up and tell stories and answer questions. And so Ken popped up and he said, you know, we were paying this much per lead or per sale or whatever, this many months ago. And I said, how much is it now? I didn’t actually know. I hadn’t even asked. I remember telling him to keep his eye on it a year earlier, and we’d been 12, 13, 14 months together.

And he named the new number, and I started laughing, and he goes, yeah. I’m saying, why you’re laughing? Because you told me this was going to happen. I said, are the digital guys trying to take credit for it? He goes, yeah. And I said, so we were spending about $700,000 a year on the radio, okay? He had been spending 2 million on digital. Now he had to keep doing that till the radio took over, right? That’s painful. So on top of the 2 million, he had to add the $700,000. That hurts like hell.

But he kept it up. But at the end of that many months, you know how much? He had shrunk the digital down to half a million. And so by spending 700,000 a year later, 14 months maybe, we had shrunk a $2 million digital budget to a $500,000 digital budget plus a $700,000 radio budget. So now we’re spending 1.2 million, as opposed to 2 million.

Todd Liles: Yeah, that’s enough savings.

Roy Williams: And he goes, hey, you want to go into a second town. And I said, what town do you have in mind? And he named it. And he said, do you have any clients there in this category? And I said, no. He said, can I go there? And I said, yes, let’s go there together. So we did, and then we exploded in that town. Boom. And we’re off to the races. But what we had to do first was cause Goettl to be the name that people think of first and feel the best about.

And it took a story about a little boy with a flashlight and a bunch of other stories about his dog that he trusts and his wife that he loves and his dad that he misses and a woman that you love. And a dog that you think has good judgment, a dog that you think is a really good judge of people. And all these other ads most people aren’t familiar with that followed a little boy with a flashlight.

You’re never talking about the product. You’re just getting to know the person and you like the person. You trust the person. That’s the person that you think of first and feel the best about.

Roy Williams: When that category is named, what do most private equity guys do when they take over a company?

Todd Liles: The first – very quickly they get rid of all the things that can’t be measured.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: In their way of measuring.

Roy Williams: Exactly. And so what happens is, no matter how much you educate them, no matter how much you tell them, no matter how much you say, please protect this at all cost. This is what built the company. And if you don’t keep this alive, the company will implode. They never believe you when you say that. And so I always just say, you know what, everybody’s getting rich. Everybody’s walking away with tons of money. It’s just sad that the thing that built the company suddenly disappears.

Todd Liles: Well, Roy, this is a statement for the listeners and watchers in the next episode. We’re actually going to go really deep and really wide on this topic. So if you’re getting to the end here, episode 17 is going to be the truth of Google and search advertising. And just consider this teeing it up. So, Roy, in closing here, what’s the one thing people should take from today’s episode?

Roy Williams: The thing that is the most persuasive, the thing that has the highest impact is not the easiest thing to measure.

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