Watch above or read below.

Matthew Burns:
So we’re back for another sticky sales stories. I’m here with Stephen Semple as always. And Steve reached out to me a couple of weeks ago and said, “Hey Matt, we’ve got to do Raid, their entire campaign,” but I’m going to let him tell you why he wanted to talk about Raid.

Stephen Semple:
What’s remarkable is how long that campaign ran for.

Matthew Burns:
In 1955, it started.

Stephen Semple:
I didn’t even realize it was that early.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah, 1955. I’m going to join to play an ad.

Stephen Semple:
Sure. Yeah. Because I’m sure it’s a little bit on the hokey side as well, but let’s see it.

Matthew Burns:
It’s pretty good. Watch. Here we go.

Adult Mosquito:
There. That’s your final lesson. Now for your first meal. Get them behind the knee, boy. They hate that. On the earlobe, it’s tender there. Oh, that’s my boy.

Child Mosquito:
That’s fun, unc. But he said a bad word.

Adult Mosquito:
What’s that?

Child Mosquito:
Raid.

Adult Mosquito:
Raid!??

Announcer:
Yes, Raid House and Garden Bug Killer for both indoors and outdoors. Raid hunts bugs down like radar. Sweeps flies and mosquitoes from the air. Attacks roaches and ants as they crawl and kills them dead. Kills all kinds of bugs indoors. Outdoors, Raid House and Garden Bug Killer wipes out insects that attack your flowering plants, even protects evergreens. So get Raid. It smells good, but it really kills them dead. Created by Johnson’s Wax.

Matthew Burns:
So kill them dead, right? Kills them dead. Johnson’s Wax was the name of the company. Johnson’s Wax. And if you know it’s like SC Johnson now, and it went through many, many, many iterations of Johnson. In doing the research to find the right commercial, to me, that was brilliant, because it changed so often.

Stephen Semple:
When you take a look at that campaign, and you say, okay, it started in 1955. And basically, it’s not being run exactly the way it is being run today, but it probably ran for 60 years, not very changed. You are hard-pressed to find a campaign that goes six decades with very little variation. And the fun thing is, we all remember them.

Matthew Burns:
But see, that’s it. They started with the yelling of Raid right away. One of the very first things they did, this is I think ad number two that they put out. Ad number one was a little long and stodgy, so I wanted to give us something a little more interesting. But they started right in ad one with yelling Raid and Kills Them Dead. It evolved to Kills Bugs Dead.

Stephen Semple:
Which is much better than them. Yeah.

Matthew Burns:
Oh, absolutely. Right. I mean, and they did a whole bunch of… I mean, guys, honestly, I have a video that’s an hour long of just Raid commercials that I did a lot of research on. So I’m going to put the link into the script. They went from saying, “Kills them dead” to “kills ants” or “kills roaches” or “kills mice” or “kills rats.” They did every single version of that. But the best thing they ever did was just say, “Kills bugs dead.” And it’s a weird way to say that because isn’t kills and dead the same thing?

Stephen Semple:
The part of the campaign that to me is interesting is that unusual phraseology because one could say, “Well, it’s redundant.” You could say it just kills bugs. But kills bugs dead actually makes it sticky because it’s a little bit of an unusual phraseology.

In fact, it’s really good. It’s really good. That’s actually really good branding because of that unusual phraseology, and it’s really very sticky. And in fact, you could picture yourself picking up a can of Raid in your brain, going it kills bugs dead.

Matthew Burns:
Oh, but when you were married, and you were in a really long-term committed relationship, was it you or your wife who was afraid of spiders or bugs or ants or whatever?

Stephen Semple:
Neither one of us, but it doesn’t mean that-

Matthew Burns:
My wife will burn the house down if she sees a spider, the whole house. So that kills bugs dead. The finality of dead is what would interest her. She’s like, “Okay, I want the one that kills them.” Not kills them, kills them dead. And so the fact that-

Stephen Semple:
Interesting.

Matthew Burns:
When you hate bugs, you hate bugs. So when I asked you, you’re like, “Well, neither one of us was… ” It was kind of a thing. I’m like, no, no, I’ve lived with a woman who … We’ve moved because she saw big spiders since we moved out to Nova Scotia. We moved houses specifically because we lived too close to the water, which had big wharf spiders, and she lost it.

Stephen Semple:
But here’s the other part, a very simple campaign, kills bugs dead, very simple messaging, very easy to create variety because you could just do bugs in different situations and run for 60 years.

Matthew Burns:
I think what I’d liked about the campaign when going through it is that they progressively got more concise. I believe that when writing anything, you’re done when you can’t eliminate any more words, like when you can get really, really quick to the point. Now, don’t get me wrong, if you’re writing a novel or something like that, and you want to embellish, you want to build the whole universe and the scene and everything else.

But when you’re doing advertising, the quicker you can get to that really, really core message, I think it’s better. And I think they did a really good job over the course of time, going from 60-second ads to 30-second ads, and those 30-second ads being much more punchy. And we talked about this with previous campaigns as well. What I like is that it always starts with bugs thinking they’re getting away with something, then going, “Oh crap, we’re in trouble.” And then screaming Raid.

And then the final thing, which is Kills Bugs Dead. It always started pretty much the same, always ended pretty much the same. And this campaign has been running since 1955 to the present. I mean, it’s slightly changed. I don’t like their new tag, their new slogan. I think it’s good to be tough.

Stephen Semple:
Good to be tough. I think it doesn’t have the emotion to it.

Matthew Burns:
I wonder if there’s a censor thing like kills bugs that it’s too aggressive-sounding for television now.

Stephen Semple:
No, I bet you it came out of a focus group interview where people were like, probably something. I don’t like the word dead and it’s too aggressive and whatnot. And what we know is that focus group interviews, for the most part, kill great advertising.

Matthew Burns:
But it’s that ability to realize that if something’s working, don’t change it.

Stephen Semple:
Keep running it.

Matthew Burns:
Right? Like, go nuts. We build out campaigns. Our plan is to have them run for at least five years. We’ve done the research, we’ve thought through, and we want a campaign that’s going to run at least five years. That’s our goal. That’s our hope.

Stephen Semple:
And forever is even better. Forever’s way better. Our roadmap is way out there. We’re not trying to do a one-off ad or one-off campaign. No, when you said it, it immediately brought me back to the 1980s, all these cartoon versions of the ad. It started as a cartoon. It stayed cartoon right to the end. It went into computer graphics, computer animation took over, and they stayed with the same trope for so long.

And it’s hard not to really kind of like bow down to them and say, “Good for you guys,” because that’s hard to do. It is. It’s really, really hard to do. I mean, McDonald’s changed enough times. No, they run some really big-

Stephen Semple:
And McDonald’s is better than most because most of their campaigns will run for five or 10 years before they change them. Most companies change them way too frequently. And I think one of the issues that creates that change is inside the four walls, it feels like it’s been running forever because you listen to the campaigns, you create the campaigns, you build them, you’re very focused on them, but to the consumer?

Matthew Burns:
Exactly.

Stephen Semple:
It’s not part of their everyday life. They don’t see it all the time. They don’t care about it the same way. It’s just this thing that goes swing and by.

Matthew Burns:
It’s not on the wall in the boardroom every time you walk in.

Stephen Semple:
Right.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. When you live within the brand, it could become very stodgy and boring.

Stephen Semple:
Oh my God. Sometimes, by the time the campaign launches, the people inside the four walls are tired of it.

Matthew Burns:
Congratulations. Good job, guys. I mean, you guys are brilliant. I mean, you’ve got lots of brands. You’ve been doing this for a while, but no, I thought this one was a really good one. I want to leave you with a 19… I think it’s a 1980s version of the ad. So take a look at this. Leave a like, a comment, something in the bottom. Tell us if there’s another brand that we just haven’t recollected that we can talk to you guys about.

Mosquito 1:
Hope there’s no people to spoil our picnic.

Mosquito 2:
Oops. We forgot the salt.

Mosquito 3:
I’ll get it.

Announcer:
You’re really going to get it, Bug. Raid House and Garden kills bugs on contact. From the house. And in the garden.

Mosquito 1:
It sounds like it’s going to — Raid!!!?

Announcer:
Raid House and Garden kills bugs dead. In the house and in the garden.

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