Dear Reader,

The first words of Roy H. Williams that I ever heard were “The risk of insult is the price of clarity.”

Now I heard those words, but sadly I did not hear them from Roy’s mouth or read them in one of his books. I heard them as borrowed wisdom from someone who did not quite understand the real and significant meaning of those 9 simple words. This person took Roy’s words and used them to his own purpose, instead of using them in the manner in which Roy intended.

This is an all too common problem for wise men who share a powerful message.
There is always someone willing to manipulate a good message for ill will.
Of course, there is the less nefarious misunderstanding of a message that leads to a miscommunication of the message. This is not ill will, but it can actually be more destructive. (“Why?” you ask. Because the person misquoting is doing so with genuine sincerity.)

In today’s episode, I will personally unpack with Roy the real meaning behind the words, “The risk of insult is the price of clarity.” You will understand what Roy actually meant by those 9 words, and you will see how the power of this understanding can change your business.

Watch / listen above or read below.

Announcer : Advertising is a tax you pay for not being remarkable. Welcome to Todd Liles and The Wizard of Ads, a podcast for business owners who want to become remarkable. Too Tall Todd Liles is going to take you deep into the mind of Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads, to unleash the timeless truths and secret strategies that have helped him build dozens of America’s most successful businesses. Do you want to build a brand that wins the heart, captures the mind, and creates lasting relationships? Take a deep breath and buckle up. It’s time to fly.

Todd Liles: Roy, super excited to have you here. I’ve been looking forward to learning from you in this matter for a very long time, so thank you for being here.

Roy Williams: Well, I’ll tell you what, you didn’t have to build this amazing studio just to sit and talk, but I’m glad you did.

Todd Liles: Well, I’m excited. I’ve been a fan of your content for so long and I feel like over the last year and a half, it’s gone from being someone that’s a fan of yours at a distance to really getting to know you as a human and the opportunity to share some of the stories and some of the insights that I’ve received in one on one conversations with the world and let them know a side of you. And I think there’s many sides of you. There is the side that everyone gets to read in the books, which is amazing and deep. And then there’s the personal side of you, which is so touching and vulnerable. So I hope that we get to explore this in our show.

Roy Williams: I kind of want to meet this guy you’re talking about. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered him.

Todd Liles: I’ve met him a time or two. But what we’re also going to do in this show is we’re going to lay down a super strong foundation for anyone that is thinking to themselves. What is branding? What is advertising? What is marketing? You don’t think traditionally. You have a quote about traditional thinking. Would you mind sharing that with us?

Roy Williams: Actually, it’s traditional wisdom.

Todd Liles: Traditional wisdom, yes. Yes.

Roy Williams: The problem with traditional wisdom, it’s usually more tradition than wisdom.

Todd Liles: Usually more tradition than wisdom.

Roy Williams: And I don’t know if it could be said for traditional thinking. But yeah, it might be more tradition than thinking because if you were thinking, you’d realize, yeah, this is dumb. But because it’s always been done that way, everybody go, well, if you’re not doing it the traditional way, they tell you you’re not doing it, right. And it’s like, well, thank God.

Todd Liles: Well, I’m really excited about this. So we will guarantee that, that every episode will hit on one of your teachings. We’ll explore deep into that and it’ll be super informative. And my desire and hope for the listener is that they’re going to get a great education and they’re going to understand what they need to do when it comes to advertising, marketing and branding their business. They’re going to understand when they’re sitting across from a marketer, is this person shooting them straight? Are they giving a bunch of crap?

And the first thing that I want to start with is nine of your most famous words. The risk of insult is the price of clarity. It’s one of your most well known principles and I want to explore that with you to start off. So my first question to you is, what was it that inspired that statement? Why did you sit down and write those nine words?

Roy Williams: Todd, too often you see people who won’t just say the thing. Instead of just saying it, they dance around it and expect the other people to figure out, kind of reading between the lines, what they’re trying to say. And you watch these gigantic misunderstandings happen, and people take off thinking that they agreed on something, and they weren’t even having the same conversation.

And I realized, when you say something plainly, some people are really put off by that. They’re offended. They’re like, oh, that’s coming on a little strong. And I’m thinking, it’s like this. If you get a vaccine, the needle hurts for a second, but the reason you did that is because the needle hurts less than the disease. And so, I’m not trying to rile anti-vaxxers, but the point is, I’d much rather have the needle than the problem. And it’s always like that. So, whenever you just come to the conclusion in advertising, say, what is the plainest and most straightforward possible way to say this with the fewest words and with the most impact?

Example, I wrote an ad yesterday, and it’s a very weird ad. It opens talking about Sicily, is an island just in front of the boot of Italy. And the little city looking at the toe of that boot on the seashore of Sicily is called Catania. And in Catania is this jewelry designer. And Jay, one of the owners, traveled to Catania to meet with this most exciting up-and-coming jewelry designer in all of Italy. And then they say, Jay, what was it like? And Jay says, when I saw what he was working on, I hyperventilated. And so most people would not dare to say hyperventilate. But yet, you can’t ignore that word. Now all of a sudden you go, I want to see the jewelry. You really want to see the jewelry.

And so anybody that knows anything about being professional and classy and all this stuff, and jewelry is classy and you don’t want to say hyperventilated, they’re going to get the wrong idea. And I’m going you can’t bore people into giving their attention. And so when you do something new, surprising or different, when you do something that most people wouldn’t dare do, you’re going to get a lot of pushback. And people are going to tell you that you’ve gone too far and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so I just say the risk of insult is the price of clarity. I made it clear with one word, this guy was really excited about the jewelry. One word, hyperventilated, will do that. And so that’s what I’m talking about whenever I say, just say the thing and say it with the most impact and in the fewest words. And so think about this for a second. How often does somebody who wants to sell jewelry start talking about an island off the coast of Italy and describing the shape of Italy? And it’s like, it has nothing to do with, oh, you love her and she loves you and this is a symbol of your love. And I’m going, that is the standard jewelry ad.

And if you want people to literally pay no attention whatsoever, say what they expected you to say, and they will be sufficiently bored to instantly disconnect from what you’re saying. If you do what people expect you to do, you’re boring. And if you say what people expect you to say, you’re even more boring. And if you’re going to be good at advertising, you have to say, yeah, if it sounds like an ad, it’s bad.

Todd Liles: So having had some of those risk-of-insult conversations with you before, where especially early in our potential professional and partnership, it’s like, okay, Roy just came across real hot. You’ve never been scared to get up to a line and just say exactly what you’re thinking, do it in a manner that might feel a little aggressive. And that’s just part of who you are.

And I’ll be frank from the receiving side of that, I have found myself reflecting on some of the best client relationships that I have. And in those great client relationships that I have, a great example is Jack Arnold’s next door. And this is a guy that was considering pumping gas in Chicago O’Hare and airplanes as opposed to running his electrical business. There’s always been a moment when I’ve been bold enough to say to someone, you shouldn’t do that. Let me tell you why.

And realize that this is probably going to be the thing that’s going to prevent me from getting their business, but that’s okay because I don’t want their business if it comes with them having these false ideas. So I know that, especially what we do as Wizards, is we always want to have those really tough conversations. And I think a lot of marketing companies wouldn’t do that because they just want the money. Tough conversations can come later. You have a philosophy of having them up front.

Roy Williams: Yeah, it’s a core value. And I tell all the partners, I said, look, if you wait until after you take the money before you really prepare them for exactly what’s going to happen and what’s not going to happen and how long it’s going to take… I said, if you don’t onboard them until after they’ve paid you, you’re going to lose the client and you’re going to erode our reputation. You have to do the hard thing. And the hard thing is face-to-face, voice-to-voice, and make sure you say it with such clarity and such impact that they remember it forever. This is a big moment. You can’t like soft soap it. You can’t kind of water it down so it’s not offensive.

And nobody wants to do that. If they want to make the sale, if they want to get the money, they don’t want to risk the deal. I’m going, you have to, because the only time you have credibility, the only time you can speak and have absolute certainty that they’re going to believe you is when the money’s on the line and you’re risking them saying, hey, I’m out of here. I’m not doing that. I’m not moving forward with that.

And I said, tell them the truth. Tell them how bad it’s going to hurt. Tell them how long it’s going to take. And so I have a lot of partners incredibly good at that. And other ones that are still trying to find the courage to just really say the thing that has to be said, because when you’re doing it right, it hurts at first. It doesn’t work right away. And people need to know that. And they need to know how long it’s going to take and how upside down they’re going to get, how much money they’re going to get invested in this before they see any kind of return.

And so if you prepare them for that, and then when it’s happening, you know what they always tell you? I am so glad you had that conversation with me because right now I would definitely be hitting that chickening-out period where I just say, no, no, this didn’t work and I’m going to do something different. And so the reason I’ve had clients for decades is because you always initiate the relationship by telling the truth before the money changes hands.

And so, like I said, it works for me. A lot of people are put off by it. A lot of people — I had a guy one time, he was in Mossad in the Israeli secret service. And his family was in the diamond business and had been for many generations. And this is like 25 years ago, almost 30 years ago now. And they’re still clients. And he said, look… We spent a day together. And he says, I’m going to get back to you. I’m going to get back to you. I really like what we like our conversation today.

And so it’s like three months later, he called. He said, I owe you an apology. I said, no, you don’t. Why do you think you owe me an apology? He says, I told you I was going to get back to you and I didn’t. I said, I hadn’t given a thought. I didn’t want to offend him, but it’s like, I hadn’t thought about it since he left the office. And then he said, here’s what I did. He said, if we work together, you will be the first person that’s ever worked in our company whose father didn’t know my father before you and me were born. And he goes, this is like, unless our families have known each other for generations, you don’t work in our company.

And so not only was I the first gentile, I was the first person that wasn’t part of the family for a previous generation. And he said, so I really had to get to the bottom of who you really are. And he said, you know what I found out? He says, there’s a whole lot of people that don’t like you. He said, but there’s nobody that doesn’t trust you. And I’ve never forgotten that. You know what?

I thought that was the greatest compliment I’ve ever been paid. He said, even the people that don’t like you, trust you. They said, oh yeah, he’ll do what he said, but I don’t like him. And so whenever I say the risk of insult is the price of clarity, and I choose above all to be clear because that is where integrity, in my opinion, comes from.

Todd Liles: In our sales classes, I always ask the people, what are the two things that are nice to have in the process? Some people would say they’re necessary, but I don’t think that they are necessary. And then I bring it to like and trust. And I said, it’s really nice if they like you, but how many of you think that’s more important than trust? And they think about it and half of them will say, well, I think that’s more important because people go off their feelings. And I say to some people, it probably is. There’s certain personality types.

I said, but here’s a problem. There’s a lot of people that are really good at making you like them, and then they con you out of everything. I would much rather be proven trustworthy, and they know exactly what I’m going to do, exactly what we’re going to say, and exactly how it’s going to be done, because I want people to like me too. I don’t think I suffer from that disease of having to be liked, because it is a disease.

So you talk about truth in advertising, which brings up perfectly my next topic, which is clarity and trust in the advertising business. And you’re unpacking that a little bit. I want to go a little bit further into that, specifically for founders who are really struggling. They’re trying to find clarity in their message. They’re trying to find someone that they can trust, and they just don’t even know where to start.

From your perspective, where do you think, if you’re sitting in the shoes of an air conditioning owner or jewelry store, maybe even a lawyer who is always struggling with this concept of clarity, trust, risk of insult, what’s the first step for those people?

Roy Williams: Okay, so we’re talking about trust, and who are they? Are they trying to become trusted, or are they trying to figure out how to trust other people?

Todd Liles: I think that’s a really good question. We could explore both, but specifically what I was thinking about is how do I find a marketer that I can trust, and then how do I transition that to the public?

Roy Williams: Okay, I’m going to give you the basic principle, okay? This is true in ads, and it’s also true in relationships. And so you know you can trust a person when they’re willing to tell you the downside to your face. And here’s why that’s important. No one ever believes the upside unless you admit the downside, because they’re going to try to figure out the downside. And if you’re not telling them, and they have to figure it out on their own, they kind of mistrust you.

I was watching a video this morning, I mean this, an hour and a half ago, and it’s Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger when Charlie was still alive, and they were talking about fraud. And they were talking to a group of people, and it was interesting because they were talking about how they detect people that cannot be trusted, and they said it’s most people. And so their businesses have succeeded because they won’t buy a business unless they really, really, really, really trust the people running it. And so if they don’t trust the people running it, they don’t buy it.

He said we’ve probably missed a lot of good deals that way, but that’s the thing that we always, always, always, always look for more than anything. And they just kind of go, well, how do you do that? And he was explaining. And I’m going, wow, that’s exactly what I’ve always told people, and I didn’t know Warren Buffett agreed with me.

Todd Liles: What did he say?

Roy Williams: Yeah. He says whenever a person is just telling you all these shiny things, and there’s no downside, and they sound like it’s easy, and there’s no way it can fail, he goes, yeah, they’re hiding something. I don’t want to work with them. And he goes, the person that’ll look you in the face and tell you the real truth, and this is where the struggles are, and here’s where the problems are, and this is what we’re always up against.

And in other words, if you’re not doing a little bit to unsell somebody, they don’t really believe the upside. They’re not believing all the wonderful, happy things you’re saying if you don’t give them a little bit of the downside. Now, the extension of that idea, okay, is even more interesting. Vulnerability is the only currency that will purchase trust. And if you don’t say something that isn’t in your best interest, if you don’t say something that just reveals that you are going to open up and make yourself vulnerable and maybe lose the sale, maybe not have the relationship that you’re hoping for, but you go ahead and tell them the truth, you go, wow, most people would never have said that.

Most people would never have admitted that. Most people would never have confessed that. And so when a person tells you something that doesn’t make them look better, but makes them look a little bit broken, you know what I mean? Then you go, okay, this guy’s willing to tell me the truth. So vulnerability, most people have too much pride to let you see their flaws. And so whenever I say, nobody believes the upside, all these grand and wonderful things you can do, until you tell them the downside. And if you admit the downside and if you volunteer it, then boom, you can probably trust this person.

And what happens is, that’s how Warren Buffett says, whenever they just have this glowing, glowing, glowing thing, they gave examples and examples are really, really funny. And one of the examples was, he says, there’s this guy and he had this insurance business. He wanted to get Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger to invest in this. And he says, we only sell fire insurance to concrete bridges over spans of water.

Todd Liles: Oh, wow.

Roy Williams: And so, and he said, we’re going, we don’t, we didn’t trust another word that man said. He’s acting like… It’s like, well, nobody would buy… They’re thinking nobody buys fire insurance on a concrete bridge built over water. And they’re just thinking, this guy’s a con man, get him out of the room.

Todd Liles: It’s crazy.

Roy Williams: And so this idea, when everything is just grand and glorious and wonderful, he says, yeah, always be suspicious. Always try to figure out what they’re hiding. And when a person goes ahead and tells you what most people would hide, that’s probably a person you can trust.

Todd Liles: Yeah. One of the things that really made a big impact on me when I first started listening to how the Wizards present the clients, and it made me go back and say, we’re definitely going to change some of the things that we say. And I’ll explain that. You guys are very clear that in the world of branding, this is not direct call to action advertising. And we’re going to unpack this. We’ve got 52 lessons already mapped out for the whole year.

So I don’t want to unpack that now, but what I do want to stress is that when you’re actually building a brand, this is something that takes time to take hold in the mind. Six months, bare minimum, typically 12 – 18 is more realistic, which means you are in on an investment on the front side. To me, that was one of those… It’s not even necessarily a risk of insult, but it is the price of clarity. You have to know that it’s going to take a while to build something that will continue to work forever, as opposed to direct action, which just responds now. So, A, I just want to comment that to me, that time part feels like part of that.

It’s like when someone says, hey, this is realistically what you should expect. Oh, that sounds realistic. Now, just to close the loop, the way that we have altered it is that there are levers in our company that we do know that we can pretty instantly go in and go, oh, we can adjust this. We can adjust that. And boom, they’re going to have paid for it. And then some. The problem that we find with that approach, though, is that it’s almost like crack.

You give them the instant fix and you don’t talk about the future. Janet Jackson starts singing in their head, what have you done for me lately? And they’re not patient to wait for the real effects that are going to take place 12 to 18 months. So did you learn that lesson the hard way? Did you make a lot of mistakes before you started teaching people that?

Roy Williams: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So remember, I started writing ads when I was 19. And by the time I was 22, I was very, very well known. And a lot of people wanted to work for me. But since every business owner was looking for instant gratification, I was the guy that could talk loud and draw a crowd. I’m just like Coca-Cola, baby, I’m everywhere. And I’m not making this up.

And so Pennie and I were married. She married me anyway, right? But I was required to wear a sport coat and a tie, but they didn’t say you had to tie it. And so I would have a tie draped around my neck, like a scarf, just draped around my neck like a scarf. And I would never tie my shoes. And so I’d walk around with my shoes untied, just basically letting people know there’s a renegade in the house and prepare because he’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

Todd Liles: That was on purpose.

Roy Williams: Oh, I did that on purpose. Absolutely. And so remember, I’m a kid. Nobody takes a 22 year old kid seriously unless they think maybe he’s got something going on. And so the first thing is they notice. And he goes, he’s either a nut or he’s eccentric. And I’m just gambling that they’ll give me the opportunity to prove I’m eccentric, not nuts. And so, first thing that happens is people are going, your shoes are untied. I go, yeah, I know. And so then they’re going, okay, they’re not sure what to do with that.

And what I did is, hey, man, you want a crowd? Crowds cost money. How big a crowd do you want? And this was the conversation. And so I wrote direct response ads. I could put together many, many hundreds of people in a day, just boom, make it happen. It all had to do with the impact of the message. You let me create the message, I’ll draw you a big crowd. I make it up, you swear to it. And so what happens is every… I call them twitchy little bastards, every twitchy little bastard advertiser in the world would hire me to write these ads and show them a big crowd.

And I didn’t realize that was the wrong thing to do. It’s the worst possible thing you can do. But I didn’t know that at the time. And so I began to realize I hate the people I work with because no matter what kind of a rabbit you pull out of the hat, no matter what miracle you make happened, they go, oh yeah, yeah, do that again next week, but bigger. And it’s kind of like, well, this is not sustainable. I said, I show you what’s possible, but it’s not a sustainable thing. We can’t do it every week. The longer we do it, it will quit working very, very quickly. It’ll quit working.

And so then, as you said, the cocaine, the addiction, oh, no, once they taste that, once they get that, you can never, ever back them off of it. Ever. And I finally said, okay, new plan. Never doing that again. It’s a fast track to nowhere. And I said, I’ve got to figure out something that works better and better and better the longer you do it instead of worse and worse and worse the longer you do it. And so I learned that lesson the hard way. I spent two or three years as Captain Flash and made a big name and then said, okay, starting all over from scratch. None of those people. All new people, all new plan. And that’s the long and the short of it.

Todd Liles: As you know, I’m really into fitness. It’s very important to me. And I believe I do fitness and business the right way, which is realizing that it’s just a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of consistency. It’s a lot of just getting up and being habitual about going to the gym and not thinking that you’re going to work out today and tomorrow you’re going to wake up, you’re going to look Arnold Schwarzenegger. Look how ripped I am. You’re not going to go from 300 pounds to 180 pounds overnight.

Unfortunately, in today’s place of business that we’re in with social media and all of these immense fake gurus that are saying whether it’s business or it’s health or whatever the case may be, here’s this pill. And about the only thing that that actually does work on is Viagra. That’ll get you up and going quickly. But for everything else, pretty much, you have to put in the hard work. And there’s just lots and lots of noise, lots and lots of fake gurus in both of our space.

And my question to you is, in today’s marketplace, not just with those fake gurus, but now I’m just going to go to the people that are owning a business and there’s so many things going on social media. Some people are using radio. Some people are not. Most people, in fact, are not. But what it really boils down to is if someone was launching a brand today, what would be the thing that you would tell them would be most critical to cut through all of that noise. Get rid of all of the temptations to talk about the overnight successes and just really get centered in and go, okay, I know what I’m going to do to cut through the noise, which is a big ask. But what would be your one or two things to say?

Roy Williams: I’m going to qualify the question for a second. When you say start a business, okay.

Todd Liles: Let’s say they have a business. Let me be clear. They’ve got a business. Let’s say it’s been in business for 15 years, 30 years.

Roy Williams: I’m still going to clarify this a tiny bit because business to consumer, I can answer the question. Now, B2B, business to business, is a different set of rules.

Todd Liles: Let’s go business to consumer.

Roy Williams: Okay, good, because I want to exclude business to business advertising from what I’m about to say.

Todd Liles: Yes.

Roy Williams: Okay. The goal to building a brand is to become the company they think of first and feel the best about. Now, them thinking of you first has less to do with your ad budget. It has less to do with which media you use. It has almost everything to do with what it is that you say. Messages either work or don’t.

Most people are looking for, well, I’m in the furniture business. What should I buy? TV, radio, billboards, newspaper, direct mail, magazines? What’s the right way for me to advertise? I go the media doesn’t make the message successful. The message makes the media successful. The right message will work in any media. Tell me what you’re going to say, and I’ll tell you whether or not you’re going to succeed.

I had this happen just two weeks ago. A 36-year client, he’s become a very, very, very big company in those years, and he did a direct mail thing. He didn’t tell me about it, and he sent out 20,000 postcards. And so when he came down for his annual marketing retreat with his two adult sons that I remember when they were born. And so I said why don’t we do a direct mailer and we’ll send some postcards with this offer on it. He goes, no, no, I’ve tried that. That doesn’t work.

I said, really? I didn’t know you had tried this. What did the postcard say? Because he obviously left me out of it, and now I know why. And when he told me what the offer was, I said, dude, direct mail didn’t fail. Your message failed. I said, you have a surplus of something you’re trying to get rid of. And I said, a dog is a dog at any price. I said, nobody’s ever going to want that. I’m sorry that you have a surplus of it, but advertising isn’t going to solve the fact that no one wants it.

And I said, if we have a different message on the postcard, I promise you a wildly different result. Mail to the same houses. And so this is what most people don’t understand. It’s like, no, no, your message makes you succeed or not. It’s not your choice of media. Well, I’m in the right media. It’s like, nope, wrong message works in all the medias. Wrong message fails in all the medias. Right message works in all medias. And that’s what everybody needs to understand. Message first, media second.

Todd Liles: Love it. Well, with that being said, what we’re going to do is we’re going to do a segment here where we take a look at a nationally famous campaign ad. We’re going to look at some throughout the series that are old. We’re going to look at some that are new. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go back to one of the most famous of all ads. Stood out in a huge way. Very avant-garde. It’s Apple’s 1984 Think Different ad.

So for the listener, I want you to know that there’s also a video version of this if you’d like to see this. But for everyone else, Roy, I know you know the ad. We’re going to get it up here. We’re going to watch it in just a second. But would you just briefly describe the visual tones of that ad for folks? Because I know you know it and then we’ll play it here for everyone to hear.

Roy Williams: Here’s what’s funny. Now, Todd, I’m going to send people on a rabbit hole chase.

Todd Liles: Okay.

Roy Williams: There is a video. It was part of an award ceremony 10 or 12 years ago, 15 years ago. And what happens is they actually showed there was a compilation of three different focus groups. I’ll tell you when it was. It was 2004. So it’s been 20 years ago. And the 1984 ad that you’re getting ready to play only showed one time. No, that only showed once. It showed during the Super Bowl and it only showed once.

And it’s the most famous advertising in the history of television ads in America. And it basically launched Apple computers, the Macintosh. And so it’s full of all kinds of powerful symbols. And it doesn’t look or feel like an ad at all. And so it’s new, it’s surprising, it’s different. And that’s how you purchase attention. Okay, now holding attention is different than getting attention, but it not only gets your attention, it holds your attention.

And so they had this focus group. And they said they found all these people that had never seen the ad, never heard of the ad. And they sit down and they explained it to them and then they showed them the ad. Except instead of at the end, instead of… The closing line says, so that 1984 won’t be like 1984. And so 1984 I think was the name of a book by George Orwell. And he wrote it like 30 or 40 years earlier, I don’t know, back in the ’50s. And it was about Big Brother and all of this, how society was going to be. And it was dystopian.

And so what happens is all of these people are watching this ad and they changed it. And so the ending was about 2004. And so that’s when they did the focus groups. And all these focus groups, all these people explaining what needed to be changed. And when you watch this, it is the funniest thing you’ve ever seen. Because every one of these people is speaking from the heart and it’s stuff that most people would probably say, oh, it’s never going to work, here’s why it’s not going to work.

He says, well, what would you do differently? And they’re taking these notes in this focus group. And when you realize, yeah, these people, everybody walking the earth, everybody who breathes through their nose believes they know what would work. And so you have to find this on YouTube. You really do.

Todd Liles: I’ll tell you what we’ll do is we’ll find it and we’ll put it at the very end of the show for those that watch.

Roy Williams: It’s like a seven-minute thing, but it’s amazing. So the deal is Steve Jobs had advertising instincts like few people in the world. And most people don’t know. It’s not that he just hired people that were courageous. Oh, no, he told them what he wanted. And so he always pushed the boundaries. He always did things wildly different than anybody else was doing. But he had an instinctive understanding. I mean, he could have been one of the greatest ad writers in the world if he wasn’t one of the great technology leaders of the world, product leaders. And so I’ve always admired Steve Jobs and the way that his mind worked when it came to marketing.

Todd Liles: One of the stories that… Everybody knows that Steve Jobs had a really rough family life with his own family. His relationship with his daughter wasn’t that great. But if you rewind and you look at the relationship he had with his parents who adopted him, totally different story. And his dad was a blue-collar worker, I believe a mechanic if I recall correctly. His mom and dad loved him to death. His biological parents were both grad students at Stanford. He found this out later. Steve was always really smart. He was gifted with that genetically.

And Steve is enrolled in Stanford and his parents are paying the bills. And at one point he said to himself that I can’t do this to my parents. They don’t have the money for this. So he dropped out of Stanford, but he built relationships with professors and he went to professors and said, I know I won’t get a degree, but can I audit? And the type of classes that he sat in were classes on things like type font, copywriting, marketing, in addition to computers. So a lot of people don’t know that, but he really dove deep.

Roy Williams: I didn’t know any of that.

Todd Liles: Oh, my gosh. Yes. He loved his parents deeply to the point that he couldn’t see them going into debt for him, but he still, despite, I’m not going to get the degree, but I’m going to get the education. So his professors were fine with it because they really admired him. So let’s watch the ad.

Roy Williams: Alright.

 

Roy Williams: Referring to a book written by, I think, George Orwell, in 1984 was this dystopian future, and it was like that. Now keep in mind, these were the days of MS-DOS. I mean, there was no Windows. Computers were the definitive outlet of the establishment. You had to be a real pencil beak to use a computer. You had to be a mega spreadsheet nerd to even use a computer in 1984.

And so this was… There was only one computer company, and it was basically IBM and all the little IBM clones, and then they all ran on DOS, MS-DOS, and it was a Microsoft product. And so Apple was the outlier. Apple was barely a pimple on the butt of Microsoft. I mean, it was just nothing. And they had this radical, crazy, insane idea. Now, you jump forward 25 years, and Apple was the first company with a $1 trillion stock valuation. And there was a window of time when it was the largest corporation in America. It was number one. It was literally number one of the Fortune 500.

And you go, huh, how did that happen? And it’s because everything that Steve Jobs ever did was consistent. He never blinked, he never wavered, and I know all of his ad campaigns, and I can tell you exactly what he was doing in each one of those and why it was effective. And this was the one that put Apple on the map. It ran one time.

Todd Liles: What was, in your opinion, the biggest risk he took with that ad?

Roy Williams: Where do you want me to start? He’s basically insulting everybody that has a PC. If you had an IBM or an IBM clone, then you were just a drone and all these people just going through the drudgery and they’re all in lockstep and you were part of traditional thinking, you were part of traditional wisdom, and you’re just a lemming following the other lemmings, and you have no color, you have no pizzazz, you have no sparkle, you have no personality, you’re just in black and white and you should be dead. That’s basically…

Todd Liles: He’s talking smack.

Roy Williams: Exactly. And so he did it. You know, I’m a Mac, I’m a PC. And so he just kept hammering that. And so he made Apple the product for the cool kids. So the cool kids, the artistic people, the people who fought for themselves and took risks and had fun, they’re Mac people. And then if you’re a nerd for a spreadsheet weasel, then you’re just a… Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re just a black and white little Nazi drone that just follows the leader and doesn’t ever question authority.

And so he just made that his tribe. And the people at a very unconscious level go, I kind of want to be part of the cool tribe. And so was it a better product? Maybe. But it didn’t have to be a better product. It just had to be the one that more people identified with and just said, I’m kind of more comfortable with this ethos. I’m kind of more comfortable with this belief system and these values and this way of looking at the world.

And that’s what a brand is. Todd, a brand is a way of seeing the world. And whenever you see a reflection of yourself in a brand, whenever you see a reflection of, I believe those same things. I have those same values. You and I are alike. Then you will choose that brand. And if you win the heart, the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided. Win the heart and the mind will follow.

Todd Liles: So I want to give you an interesting perspective on that ad just because of my age. I was five when that ad came out. And I don’t know if I saw it when I was five, but I feel like I did. Maybe I’m just filtering it through my mind of that period of time. But for me, that was the period of Rambo, Schwarzenegger, the movie Red Dawn, which scared the crap out of me, the Russians.

And my impression was, what’s all this environment of suppression? When you see the people sitting in the chairs and they’re all grayed out, and it’s a very stylized look. And then you see the beautiful, buxom, short-haired blonde, almost looks like she is an athlete for a Russian team, carrying a sledgehammer, slinging it up to the machine. It explodes. There’s a bright light. And as a child, when I saw that, and I wasn’t thinking about computers, I wasn’t into computers, right? In my mind, I’m going, I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but something big and massive and scary is happening. And I don’t know what she’s doing, but she felt like some sort of representation of Russia destroying something.

Roy Williams: Wow.

Todd Liles: And not necessarily that Russia, because I thought it, and he made her shorts orange. And I’ve always found myself going, I think he did that on purpose. I think he knew if he made them red, it would have been too close. But I’ve always felt like he intentionally put this undertones of this is scary. It’s downright nuclear war level scary. And if you’re paying attention, you’re going to feel it. And I’ve always felt it every time I’ve watched that ad. Is that just my age and my influence or do you think that was intentional?

Roy Williams: Here’s a strange thing. Did you know that the average person, their favorite music for all their life will be whatever they loved when they were about 13 or 14 years old. There’s a window just after puberty when your musical taste is formed. Now anything that frightened you when you were five years old will frighten you for the rest of your life.

Todd Liles: There you go.

Roy Williams: And so remember, I was 26 when that ad came out. And so a five-year-old has no context. A five-year-old has not used computers. A five-year-old was not outraged and frustrated by how clinical and weird. It’s like alt, delete, semicolon. I never got further than that. And I’m going, that is the craziest thing. I’m supposed to memorize all these combination of keys to tell this computer what to do? This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Alt, delete, semicolon. I’m out, Cub Scout. I’m done here. I’m not doing this. And so I was ripe for the picking.

And so as a 26-year-old who had tried to use computers and literally could not learn to do it, I had a mental block about it. And so I was looking at this. I’m going, oh, that’s my computer right there. The one that just says, hey, this is way too uptight. This is way too weird. And I didn’t see a Russian girl at all. I just saw a blonde, I think an Olympic athlete, throwing a hammer. There’s a such thing as a hammer thrower used to be. I don’t know if there is anymore. But she’s throwing the hammer, and she destroys the evil bastard. And so I’m going, yes, Microsoft is an evil bastard that needs to be destroyed.

And so the reason I wanted to say, yeah, what scared me when I was five was the movie Phantom of the Opera. It’s an old, old, old movie. I’m still scared by that movie. It’s like, you know what, when you’re five and you’re seeing Phantom of the Opera and I’m just going, I can’t watch this. I’ve never finished the movie. I have no idea what happens after the guy has the mask covering one half of. I’m going, oh, no, no, no. I got to go to bed.

And so though I think she’s wearing the orange shorts because everybody that understands color theory knows it’s the color of energy. Orange means energy, vitality. That’s what orange means, especially that particular shade of orange that has a lot of yellow in it. Different colors have different… Not exact meanings, but they send signals, you know what I mean? And so the white with the orange shorts, and she is going in there, she’s invading the space, and she’s doing something that’s an act of just outright rebellion. But remember, you feel like it’s a system that needs to be overthrown, and so that’s what adults saw. I mean, at 26, you would have seen it too. If you had been 26 in 1984…

Todd Liles: That’s what I was seeing.

Roy Williams: You would have seen exactly what I saw.

Todd Liles: Roy, here’s the last question, and I want to end every show with this question. If there’s one thing that the listener, or if you’re watching on YouTube, the watcher, should take away from today’s episode, what would it be?

Roy Williams: If you win, the heart, the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided. And if that is your guiding idea, you’ll succeed.

Todd Liles: Thank you.

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