Watch the video above or read below.

Matthew Burns:
So I’m back with Stephen Semple here on Sticky Sales Stories, and last week I told everybody we’re going to do something a little different. And so we are, we’re going to do something silly. We’re not going to be showing an ad; we’re not talking about anything like that. What I wanted to lean into Steve, is we just onboarded a new client recently, and we were going to do a billboard campaign for them, and you had a really awesome idea of what you had in mind, and we don’t have permission to talk about the specifics.

I’m going to be a little bit aloof, but it’s going to get me to my point. You had a very specific idea of what you wanted the visual to look like for the campaign. Jay Mistry and I were sort of banging our heads against the wall. Then when we got our creative juices flowing, we went to work and we came up with something that we thought was really–

Stephen Semple:
Kicking and cursing me.

Matthew Burns:
We’ve got a chat thread where you’re the only one not on it, just talking shit about you. We finally came up with an idea, and we presented it to you. And in that presentation, you brought up context. So context is the key thing that Jay and I were able to do, but you brought it up where you were like, oh man, I’m so glad you showed me in that way so that you could see whether something worked, and we made a slight change based on context. So let’s talk about the whole message of this one, which is that context is key. So the way you see things, where they’re being heard, is really super important when you’re deciding what kind of messaging you’re putting into the world or what the final creative is going to look like. So let’s go.

Stephen Semple:
Okay, so my two favorite examples I can give on this are how people review. Let’s first of all talk about how people review visuals, and my favorite example is trade show booths and truck wraps. The person does the design, they show it to you, you’re looking at it on your computer, and there’s lots of white space around it. You’re looking at that and you’re focusing on that and there are no people in the way and no distractions. And you pick your trade show booth.

Meanwhile, look, I was at a trade show recently where all the print was at knee level, so they had two people in front of their fricking trade show booth, you couldn’t read it. Truck wraps. How often do you see truck wraps where the most important thing, your URL, is low and small? As soon as there’s a vehicle in front of it, you’re not going to see it. This is context. Where is that going to live in the world? You and I on a trade show booth, I remember one of the first projects I did with you, we created a trade show booth that was boring, it was dark, but it worked because–

Matthew Burns:
I fought you on that trade show booth. Sorry

Stephen Semple:
You fought me. But what I knew was that you were going to a big splashy trade show booth in Vegas, and so what was everybody going to be? Right? Bold. And not only that. Huge. And you had a little 10 by 10. How do you stand out in that?

Matthew Burns:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
You stand out by recognizing that if everything is really bright and colorful, black stands out. If everything is noisy, quiet stands out. Correct, right context. But until you understand that context, radio ads, when our clients review radio ads, here’s what they do. They sit down in their office, they put their headphones on, they get a good quality speaker, and they play it. I’m like, that’s not how it’s heard ever. They listen to it in the car. And not only that, it’s sandwiched between two ads, right?

We have one, Seaside Plumbing. If you just listen to the ad, it sounds one way. If you listen to the ad in the ad block, it totally stands out. They always start with, “Meanwhile at Seaside Plumbing.” Now imagine that, “Hurry in this weekend, supplies are limited, 50% off.”

Plumbing Radio Ad

Narrator:
Meanwhile, at Seaside Plumbing, Josh answers a call from Lauren?!

Josh:
Thanks for choosing Seaside Plumbing. How can we help?

Lauren:
Well, I have this really annoying leak that keeps stripping in my bathtub. It’s keeping me up at night. And I’ve asked my–

Josh:
Lauren, is that you?

Lauren:
As I was saying, I’ve asked my husband a whole bunch of times to take a look at it.

Josh:
Okay, Lauren, very funny. You know I will get to it.

Lauren:
But he just keeps telling me that he’ll get to it. Anyway, I was wondering if you have any plumbers available.

Josh:
Lauren, honey, I am a plumber.

Lauren:
Any plumbers at all? Anyone that can come out today.

Josh:
You know we have plumbers standing by for same-day service, but I’ll be home.

Lauren:
Oh, perfect. That would be great.

Josh:
Fine, you win. As soon as I get home, I will fix the leak.

Lauren:
See, Josh, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

Josh:
You’re right. It needs to get done. Consider it my New Year’s resolution.

Lauren:
Wait, wasn’t it last year’s resolution too?

Josh:
Got to go. Another call coming in.

Narrator:
In a sea of ordinary, choose extraordinary. Visit seasideplumbers.com licensed in Delaware and Maryland.

Stephen Semple:
It would be this weird pattern interrupt that you cannot ignore because of context. Far too often, when we’re thinking about our advertising campaigns and reviewing them, we will think about is this reaching our audience? Okay, fine. But what is the mindset, and what is going on and what are the other things happening in their world at the time that that ad is hitting, that very much impacts how you want to present that ad.

Matthew Burns:
We feel very passionately about specific things in marketing and listen. We go toe to toe with some of our clients. They really need to understand why we stand apart and the way we do marketing versus the next guy. But I remember when I first was a Wizard of Ads Partner, I started working for an account that we weren’t doing any of the visual creatives for. We were just writing radio and television commercials. But we were doing all the offline media, and so they were getting their trucks rewrapped and updating their logo. One of my partners said, Hey, Matthew came into the Wizard of Ads as a graphic artist. That’s how he started in his career. So he can help guide some of that stuff from the perspective of how we look at marketing, which I thought was one of my favorite projects to work on.

I got to challenge kind of some, I mean, we were working with a very big, I’m not going to talk name, but a very big graphic arts company that they do a lot within the home services world and rebranding and truck wraps, that sort of thing. And I had to challenge them on their thought process because they kept fighting against, and this is the terminology I’ll use, the white truck syndrome. So they didn’t care about perspective and context; they just cared that it was going to be against white trucks. Well, sorry, in 2018, 2019, the white truck syndrome doesn’t exist unless you’re a truck and a truck.

Every brand has a wrap truck, every brand has a wrap truck, and every wrap truck is colorful and has 15 different layers. It’s got a character on it, and it’s just a beautiful design. Arguably, we could say one or two things, but it’s a beautiful design, lots of work going into making it look beautiful, except for now you’ve got five of those in the market that have five or six or eight colors, so you can’t avoid having a couple of colors that are the same.

They put phone number, website, slogan, license number, all sorts of data on it, and then how big can you make that happen? So just these big massive blurs as far as I was concerned. And the only thing I asked them to do with my client was, do me a favor and have the truck be one color. I don’t care what the color is, the brand color that they choose, that’s fine. I’m going to lean into one, the brand color, and don’t put a gimmicky character on it. That’s it. There were only two things I said, and then you can go nuts. That was my type of thing because for them to stand out in their market, they needed to be simpler.

Stephen Semple:
Because the character and the coloring things used to stand out. And then suddenly, when everybody’s got character and color, it doesn’t stand out anymore. You now have to go a different direction.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly. And we fight for one customer in any market, we fight for one, and I’m going to make sure mine is standing out above everybody else. So that’s the way that works.

Stephen Semple:
But it’s that idea of context, like a billboard: I’m driving in my car. Radio ad: I’m listening to it inside a radio block, probably when I’m commuting.

Matthew Burns:
Kids are in the car.

Stephen Semple:
A trade show booth. There’s going to be lots of other things around me. Is it a one-day trade show or is it a four-day trade show? I would design the booth differently on those two things. The interaction with the booth is different. I’ve done ones where we’ve known it’s a four-day trade show booth. We’ve designed the booth in such a manner.

I’ve told the customer, you’re not going to get traffic day one. The longer this trade show goes, the more traffic you’re going to get, because we built heavy curiosity into it, and eventually that curiosity gets broken down, and the person’s like, I got to come.

Matthew Burns:
Well, quite literally, we can talk about this. So, quite literally, that’s what happened with our stuff. So you had asked me, I had hired the Wizard of Ads before I was a Wizard of Ads Partner and I had hired you guys and you said, Hey listen, this year when you’re at the trade show down in Vegas, do me a favor, take a picture of the aisle you’re in, of the position that you’re in and everything around you. I want to see it all. You didn’t just say, I’ve got an idea because I think that’s what you said. What does the competition look like? And let me see the venue, and let me see what the big guys look like. And so we took all those pictures and video and showed you where we were going to be. And then you said, great for the next show, this is what I want to do because of this, this, and this, very much strategically decided.

And so I took all of that in way back when, and I fought you, and I didn’t want to do it. And I was like, this is going to be boring. And I’m a graphic artist, and I want to put my skills to use. How dare you not let me make things curvy and have depth and gradients? I want to do gradients, let me do gradients. And then we do this very simple black background with a question on it. And that was it. And it was high curiosity. The show sucked for day one. Sucked. It was terrible. And I was like, and my boss was there.

He’s like, what did you let the Wizards do? This is terrible. I said, hold please. And then we know they warned us. Day one would be terrible. They warned us. And on day two, we saw people start to walk twice or three times around the booth. And eventually, people got curious enough to ask the question that was actually posed to them, “What’s wrong with this shingle?” A metal roofing company. And people started asking the question. Then they got in. Now we were engaging. Well, that engagement brought more people who saw that this booth was full.

And so it took a little while. But the curiosity of that first couple, Brian Brushwood talks about this a lot, where he talks about gifting and harvesting. So, giving a gift of curiosity to then harvest by asking people, Hey, listen, can we give you more data? And so he does this with his magic act. And you guys did, I mean, I had never talked to Brian Brushwood at that point. I don’t even know if you guys met him by that point or knew that story about how he draws people in on a street show. So it’s a brilliant use of how do you own the mind before they know what you’re about? And I loved all of that anyway. So context is massive.

Stephen Semple:
But that’s another part of the context. Do I have a high repetition ad? Do I have a low repetition ad? Is it a one-day show? Is it a four-day show? All of those things should have an impact. Now here’s the big problem. When people are approving it and looking at it, they’re not looking at it in context. So here’s a great thing. Here’s just one example of what you can do.

So when I’m approving truck wraps, what’s one of the first things I do? I’ll look out my window and I’ll look at approximately. I’ll go, okay, on the street from my window, a truck is this size, so I’m going to print it out to this size and look at it. That’s how I’m going to see it on the road. I get you guys to do things where you’ll put it on a street. Right? Again, there are all sorts of crap in the background. So I’ve had Jay do, it was like, let’s find a street scape, put it on the street.

Matthew Burns:
Well, that’s what we did. How I started this thing was, what we did was we created a billboard. So it’s the same idea. We created a billboard and we put it on three different billboard mockups. One that would’ve been right by the street, one that would’ve been a high far back off the highway, and one kind of medium and on an angle so that we could see if we’re looking at it from these three different perspectives, does the message work?

Stephen Semple:
And from that, we actually repositioned a few things.

Matthew Burns:
We changed things, absolutely.

Stephen Semple:
Especially the one that was high. Remember the one was high. It’s like, ooh, okay, we got to, we’re going to miss that thing that we want. We got to move this around a little bit.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly. So yeah, I would just make sure you’re not just doing things that are… Listen, you’re probably coming up with some really creative things, or you’ve asked for stuff and you’ve gotten back some really creative things. Creativity on its own is fine. Creativity in context is brilliant. Where is it going to be seen? Where is it going to be heard? How is it going to be seen? How is it going to be heard?

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. And my complaint to the industry is that the industry does not present things that way to its customers. And it is a disservice.

Matthew Burns:
A hundred percent disservice. We agree.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Matthew Burns:
We agree. Okay, so context. You think we’ve got context there?

Stephen Semple:
I think we do. I hope so.

Matthew Burns:
Did we put context into context, something like that? Okay, guys, we will come back with another ad for the next one, so we don’t get too far off our topic. But if you guys like this kind of stuff, you want to learn more about just the little things that we as marketers and advertisers use so that we get really good stuff out in the world and we do great things for our clients, ask us, and we will come up with some more topics like this. Thanks, everybody.

Stephen Semple:
Alright, thanks, Matthew.

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