Dear Reader,

If people don’t remember you, you didn’t win.

They may have understood you.

They may have agreed with you.

They may have said, “That makes sense.”

And then they forgot you.

Businesses easily confuse clarity with effectiveness.

They explain more. They add more. They try harder to be understood.

And every time they do, they become easier to ignore.

These aren’t theories. They’re patterns.

The human mind doesn’t store information.

It stores impressions.

It remembers what created an image.

What stirred emotion.

What left a mark strong enough to resurface later.

That’s why explanation feels responsible but fails. That’s why features feel safe but disappear.

That’s why the messages that work are often the ones that say less, not more.

The real limit on your business isn’t how clear your message is.

It’s whether your message is remembered when the decision gets made.

 

Watch/listen above or read below.

Todd Liles: There’s this line that always makes me smile, and it’s this, the mind can absorb what the butt can’t endure. It’s funny, but it’s true. The longer or the more complicated a message gets, the faster people will tune you out. And in a world full of noise, the brands that win are the ones that say something clear, emotional, and easy to remember.

Today, Roy and I are going to be talking about why simplicity isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength. The simpler the message, the greater the impact. Roy, before we jump into the message today, which is, the simpler the message, the greater the impact, I want to share with you one of the reasons why I’ve sort of switched the tone a little bit of the show, ’cause I have been super prepared to the nth degree, and I’m still very prepared to assemble my show notes and all these things.

But one of the things that we have discovered that the audience really enjoys a whole lot more than every time I have every single word polished, or not just me, but Chris and everyone else, is those moments of simple authenticity that didn’t sound like I was reading a script because I was reading a script, ’cause it just happened.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: And when I’m looking at what they’re watching and what they’re paying attention to, it’s moments from you, it’s moments from guys like Chris Elmore where he actually stutters, and moments from Elmer Zubiate. And I find myself going, “Oh, that’s fascinating.” I’m not good enough of an actor to do the script and the message be good. So since I’m not, I’m actually gonna simplify my approach, tone it down a little bit, and just let all of my warts and flaws be revealed. And I think it’s making for better shows, and we’ll let the audience tell us what they think.

But today’s topic is all about that. It’s about, hey, the simpler the message, the greater the impact. And sometimes a simple message is one that isn’t over-polished or over-shined, and it just gets to the nature. Like, some of my favorite ads are the ones where you have Elmer Zubiate and you leave in the mistakes. I know you were prompting or writing, but you left in all the mistakes.

Roy Williams: No, no, no. Here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. Okay, Elmer is unique among all my clients and all my friends is that he’s extremely intelligent, he reads extremely well, but deep in his soul, no matter how much he agrees with the script and that it’s perfect, he’ll kind of look at it, familiarize himself with basically what he’s supposed to say, and then just make it up on the fly. And it’s always like, it’s only about 60% of what was written actually got in there, and the rest of it was him just spontaneously coming up with his own way of saying it. And sometimes his way of saying it doesn’t really make very much sense. But it’s just Elmer being Elmer.

And so that raging sense of… It comes across as a lack of preparedness, a lack of polish. And I’ve had people go, “Man, the script was way better than what you did.” But the same thing that you’ve noticed is his superpower, is he will say and he’ll add stuff, and then it works. And you’re going, “You know what? That actually… That’s okay.” And so people go, “This guy doesn’t belong on the radio ’cause he’s not very good at it.” And I’m going, “That’s why people love his ads, ’cause he doesn’t pretend to be good at it.” And so I always know when I’m writing for Elmer, he’s not gonna do this, but he’ll do something close enough to it, but people will know that’s just the raw, unvarnished Elmer. That’s who he really is.

And I’m going, “Okay.” So because he is a very, very likable person and he is very just kind of casual in his speaking, alright, let him be that guy. And so you’re right. Whenever you find out what you’re working with, you can nudge it a little bit, you can encourage it, but you can’t change it.

Todd Liles: Yeah, I think that authenticity is always good. Let’s jump into something I want to talk about now as well, which is; the simpler the message, the greater the impact. And part of what I want to talk about is what the mind can absorb. And you have a quote which I really like, which is; a confused mind always says no. And I like that quote because for years, and I probably picked it up from you subconsciously from reading your books 20 years ago, but I would tell our technicians, and I still do, our technicians, our salespeople, whomever, I said, “When we communicate, we want to communicate very clearly and make sure it’s understood.”

Now, because this is a two-way conversation, we have the luxury of stopping and asking questions and checking in and not moving forward until we know that they know. But I’ll say to them, I say, “Hey, look, a confused mind becomes an angry mind. And an angry mind never says yes, not when they’re angry at you.” So confusion leads to anger. Anger does not lead to someone saying yes. So a clear mind that understands the message is a comforted mind. And a comforted mind is one that can make a decision. And they go, “Oh, that makes total sense.”

So the idea is that a mind, it can absorb complex things, but it doesn’t need to have complex things confuse the mind. So like, there’s been messages that we’ve watched with very few words and you go, “Man, there’s a million things going on there,” but the idea is still very simple. And I’ve seen ads where you go, “This is so complicated.” And I think that sometimes they do it because a marketer that’s maybe inexperienced is confusing the complicated for credibility. I want to see what you think about that.

Roy Williams: Okay, I want to replace the word simple with the word clear or focused.

Todd Liles: Okay.

Roy Williams: So when the message is clear, when the message is focused, when you’re only saying one thing, but you’re saying it in a very powerful way, that’s what we call the rhinoceros ad. A rhinoceros ad makes one point very powerfully. Bam! And what the guy who thinks he’s being all creative and it’s confusing, that’s a porcupine ad. They’re trying to make too many points, and it waddles along making a thousand little points, but there’s no impact. And everybody’s irritated by this little waddling needle creature.

Todd Liles: Just so you know, that’s my new favorite Roy quote. I say it all the time.

Roy Williams: What is it?

Todd Liles: Be a rhino, not a porcupine, and I explain it.

Roy Williams: Yeah, yeah. Well, what I’m saying is, so I’m only… I’m not debating what you said, I’m challenging the use of the word simple.

Todd Liles: No, I can appreciate that.

Roy Williams: I’m saying clear, focused. It feels simple because it’s very clear and it’s very focused. It feels simple. It’s not actually simple, but it is high impact, very clear, very focused, unforgettable.

Todd Liles: Well, even as I was saying it, I knew it wasn’t… Even though I wrote this, as I was saying it, I knew it wasn’t exactly correct because I was imagining some of the most beautiful scenes in TV and cinema where there can be amazingly complicated things going on, but no words being said, but you understand with great clarity what’s taking place.

Roy Williams: What was the one unedited single camera footage in Saving Private Ryan? It’s like four or five minutes.

Todd Liles: The opening scene where they’re coming off the ship and everyone’s just being blown to bits?

Roy Williams: No, no, no, no. I think it’s one of them. They were going… Anyway, there’s one in Saving Private Ryan, I’ll tell you what the other one is, it’s called Walking Man, and it is Johnnie Walker. It’s a YouTube video for Johnnie Walker called Walking Man. And this guy is walking down this trail on this mountainside, and it is a single camera shot, no editing. And so the camera is moving as this guy’s walking toward the camera, the camera’s moving behind him, and it is literally an unbroken single shot that’s like a minute and a half or two minutes or three minutes. And it’s called Walking Man. It’s a Johnnie Walker video, and it’s magical, it’s addictive, it’s so cool because he does all these things. He’s walking by and just throws his hat and it lands on this coat rack alongside the trail, and he just does all these things. But you know what? They had to shoot that thing countless times till they finally got one take where it actually worked.

Todd Liles: Have you seen the scene in the original Sam Raimi Spider-Man where he… So, Spider-Man, played by Tobey Maguire, just gets his power. And I think this movie came out in like ’96 or ’98, something like that. I was either in high school or early in college. I went and saw it when it came out. I don’t remember how old I was. But there’s this scene that’s amazing. And Mary Jane, his girl that he really likes, she slips. And when she slips, her tray of food goes up. And he has his tray, and he reaches out like this and he catches all the things on the tray, and he also caught her. And when you watch the scene, you go, “That’s amazing.” And today they would have cheated. They would have done that with CGI. In 1998, they did 508 takes to get that scene captured.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: Extraordinarily complicated, amazing detail. That scene is still shown all the time as an example of what real sci-fi and real effects looks like that’s just practical. 508 takes…

Roy Williams: So remember, and here’s the thing.

Todd Liles: They nailed it.

Roy Williams: So the high impact thing, that is unbelievably clever. Like we were talking about the video for… The very first video for Dollar Shave Club. And we’re talking about for Johnnie Walker whiskey, the Walking Man video with this one actor, I forget his name, but you recognize him instantly when you see him. He’s funny, it’s charming, it’s delightful. You can watch it 100 times and never get tired of it. And that’s a YouTube video. And then the same thing with the movie scenes that you’re talking about. Those things are high impact, very straightforward, easy to understand, and very captivating, but they’re the opposite of simple.

It’s very, very, very hard to do something that straightforward and it’s not… It is unbelievably complicated for a thing to look effortless, when it looks effortless, see what I mean? It’s just you’re just very effortlessly doing something, it looks simple. But to make something look effortless is unbelievably hard. As you said, 500 and something takes…

Todd Liles: 508 takes.

Roy Williams: 508 takes. And so what I’m saying is I 1000% agree with what you said, if we can just change the word simple, right?

Todd Liles: Clear and focused and maybe sometimes even effortless.

Roy Williams: Yes. Well, it appears to be effortless.

Todd Liles: Appears to be effortless.

Roy Williams: It appears to be effortless. That’s why we use the word simple. It appears to be effortless. It appears to be so casual and effortless, that they go, “Oh, look at that. That guy is so talented.” It’s like, no, it takes 508 tries to get that.

Todd Liles: I’ve not seen that Johnnie Walker video, but I will watch it. But I think the thing that I’m imagining in my head, it’s the same thing that happens with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, where there’s these… The hat’s being thrown, it hangs on the hook. There are all these things that goes back to something that you say all the time, which is when Broca’s area encounters something predictable, it ignores it. But when it encounters the unexpected, it wakes up.

And it sounds like what you’re saying is that in the visual world, it’s easy to do these amazing visual things. And I do think, on a side note, people are looking for practical. They want beautiful, they want practical. I think there is a layer of authenticity that goes into someone going, “That took a lot of hard work.” They appreciate that.

Roy Williams: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Todd Liles: They really appreciate that. They like it when magic happens. If we go into the world of advertisement that we’re in, and that could be radio, it could be television, whatever the case may be, that still applies and is still true. I just think of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Right? The surprise is when Brian pulls out his banana and he talks to anybody he wants to at any time on the planet, and no one knows he’s talking on a banana. So that sort of makes me go, “What’s going on there? What just happened?” I’m surprised. I’m paying attention now.

And one of the things that I’m curious about, and I don’t know the answer to this, but I want to ask you because you probably know, you probably instinctively know this. It feels like there is a moment of when Broca gets surprised, that perhaps I’m subconsciously or maybe even now consciously processing what just occurred. And the next beat could potentially get lost if I don’t time it well. It’s almost like in a live performance when something funny happens, you know you better wait. Can’t wait forever, there’s a timing to it. You gotta wait until the laughter starts to die. If you wait until the laughter is gone, you’ve ruined the momentum. But if you go when the laughter is at its peak, they lose the message.

So talk to me about how you figured out what the natural rhythm of that is. Like, “Oh, I surprised them,” but now they need a beat so that they don’t miss something important.

Roy Williams: Okay. All right. I don’t often… There’s only one way to answer the question.

Todd Liles: Okay.

Roy Williams: It’s called a DVR. And so anytime something rocks my world, okay, I just hit pause and rewind it and watch it again and rewind it and watch it again and rewind it and watch it again. And so, “How did they do that to me?” And then rewind it and watch it again. You can’t do that in the live performance. If you’re an actor or in the audience, you can’t do it in the live performance. But and then I will transcribe it. I will actually… I don’t type very fast, but I will type, and then I’ll play it back and I’ll type a few more words and I’ll rewind. And so I have transcribed over the past 25 years over 8,000 different things in the random quotes database on my website.

And so most of the time, when I’m writing and I remember a thing I would like to use for an example, I just go into the admin section of my website and under the random quotes database, I’ll just type in some keywords and it’ll pop up. And this was the person, this is when they said it, this is the book it came… Either I was reading a book, watching a TV show, watching a movie, and this is just such an incredible thing and I will capture it and I’ll put it in there. So people, when they go to mondaymorningmemo.com, on the right-hand column, the random quotes pop up on the bottom down at the side. If you’re not looking for it, you’ll miss it. It’s not really there for you. But every time you refresh that page, you get a new random quote. And a lot of them, you go, “What’s that doing there?” Okay, “What’s that doing there?” Do you want me to share one? I have one with me.

Todd Liles: Yeah, please.

Roy Williams: You know why? Because I decided… I’ve got it on my phone. I was reading it to Penny, my wife, just before we had lunch together, and I said I was playing around and I remember this quote from a book called Another Roadside Attraction, written by Tom Robbins in 1971. And I read it in maybe 1987, 1989. The book was already old by then, but I discovered Tom Robbins. He died about a year and a half ago, but he’s like one of my very favorite writers because everything he writes is in rhythm. He writes in meter. And this is a good example of his writing. And he’s also just… He’s my exact brand of completely crazy. So I love this guy. Shouldn’t take more than a minute for me to find it because I just read it to my wife and I said, here it is.

“And it rained a sickness, and it rained a fear, and it rained an odor, and it rained a murder, and it rained pale eggs of the beast. Rain fell on the towns and the fields. It fell on the tractor sheds and the labyrinth of sloes. Rain fell on the toadstools and ferns and bridges. It fell on the head of John Paul Ziller. Rain poured for days unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles, the basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the raven. Ancient shamans rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old war paths, spilled the huckleberries, ran in the ditches, soaking, spreading, penetrating. And it rained an omen, and it rained a poison, and it rained a pigment, and it rained a seizure. And it rained a seizure.”

Now, that’s just describing a rainy day. But the strange images he puts together and the rapid succession with which he strings these strange images, it’s hard to look away. He’s got your attention. He’s introducing something new and you can see it, and it doesn’t necessarily fit with what he’s been describing, but it makes sense in a weird way and you feel a bit overwhelmed. It’s like an avalanche. If you’re on a mountainside, there’s an avalanche coming toward you, boulders are coming at you, and you dodge one boulder and there’s another one upon you, you have to dodge again. By the time you miss that one, there’s another one about to get you and you’re just scrambling for your life. When you’re reading Tom Robbins, that’s how you feel. He keeps these very vivid images coming at you so fast. Bam, bam, bam. It’s like an avalanche of verbs.

Todd Liles: So I want to unpack a couple things for the listener because I want to unpack what you said here with what you said earlier. You didn’t actually say it here, you just verbally gave it back to us, but I’m gonna unpack it. With the DVR, you said you hit pause. You said number two, you transcribe it. And then you didn’t say this, I wrote this down, which is boil it down to practical actions. When you just read that from Tom Robbins, you begin to describe it in analogy so that we can make a connection what it does for you. One of the things that I appreciate about Alex Hormozi, we talk about him, he’s a real good friend with Ryan Deiss, our partner.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: And I’ve just learned to appreciate him more and more because he’s just very insightful. This is something that he said and I found myself going, that’s really smart. He’ll often talk about things that impress him, whether it’s ads, whether it’s people, whether it’s systems. And he goes, like, you’ll know when you’re impressed, like you know when you feel something. But the part of our brain that’s processing emotions like being impressed or emotion isn’t necessarily the thinking part of the brain. So he goes back and he gave an example of like when he watched someone on a TED Talk and he just walked away going, oh my God, that guy was amazing.

He asked himself, why was he amazing? And then he rewatched this TED Talk like 50 times. He took out his pen and said, what were the things that he was doing with his body? And he wrote down how he walked. He wrote down that his hands weren’t in his pocket except for occasionally when they were when he was hitting a major point, not a minor point, but a major point, he’d put his hand in his pocket. So he broke down this guy, and then he’d break down all these other people that do this and he goes, “Oh, well, I have the most practical 10 things that you can do if you want to have an amazing speech. These are 10 practical things that you can do.” So he teaches the practical.

Roy Williams: Wow.

Todd Liles: And it’s… And I adopted that philosophy about a year ago when I’m working with my leaders and with my team members. I’ve stopped using terms like, I’d like you to do better at this. I never use an adjective to describe what I want them to do anymore.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: I will now instead say, hey, when you do this, I’d like you to try these three or four things and be very specific about why. And then once I’ve told them what those three or four things are, of course I’ve led into this with the reason why, but then I’ll reinforce the reason why and say, hey, let’s put it to practice. And instead of saying, you need to be better at it and ending it there, because no one can do anything with that. You’ve told me I need to feel not mad, and you’ve not given me any ways to feel any way different. Instead, I give them an action. And that is what you just said essentially you’re doing. I mean, you took the time to write out, you typed that out.

Roy Williams: In the book, it hit me so hard in the book. I said, I’m gonna stop. I’m gonna circle this in the book. I’m gonna turn the corner of the page up, not at the top of the book, but at the bottom of the book. So when I want to find things that I know I marked in the book, look at the bottom of the book and all the page corners are turned up. I go to that page, something will be circled, and I type it. So I will transcribe all the passages that I circled and turned up the bottom corners of the pages, and then that goes in the random quotes. And so a database of over 8,000 things I thought had such high impact that I wanted to archive it where I could find it. And so people will go to the random quotes and just hit the refresh button and watch them and they go, this is interesting because it basically just lets you know these things all share certain common characteristics. One of these days we’ll ask AI, what do these 8,000 things have in common? Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Todd Liles: It’ll be able to tell you. I want to share something with you that happened earlier this week.

Roy Williams: Okay.

Todd Liles: I was showing one of my team members how to use certain prompts inside of ChatGPT. And this all started from things that I went to a whiteboard and I took the time and thought deeply about it and I wrote down all of what I wanted to see happen on the whiteboard in prompts. And then from the whiteboard in prompts, I took that and then I transitioned and I wrote it all out in traditional type. And then from traditional type, I then go, okay, now let’s put it over. And when I’m showing my team member this process, my team member said, hey, do you ever just hit the transcribe button and just dictate it in there instead of typing it or writing it all out?

And this is… It was just a moment. We were just talking. There was no emotional feeling there. I just told him my truth. And I said, “Yes, sometimes, but only if I’m asking it a general query question, like, who’s the Queen of England in 1868? Or was it a king?” I said, “But I might talk to it like that.” I said, “But no, if I’m doing my deepest thinking, there is something that is still dramatically more powerful about physically writing, whether it’s on a whiteboard or whether it’s pen to pad.” I said, “But at my deepest thinking, I have to bring it into the physical world.” And I said, “I fundamentally believe there is something that happens when that pen is connected to the hand.” I said, “Once I’ve done that, I can take my secondary thinking to the keyboard.”

And there are plenty of times where I don’t need to do my deepest thinking. I can do it at the keyboard. But when I’m talking my deepest problem-solving, creative thinking, that pen’s gotta be in my hand. And then it goes to the keyboard. And once I’ve gone to the keyboard, I can flush things out. I said, “And then, and only then, after I’ve thought deeply, will I ever use it to prompt ChatGPT or anybody else.” I don’t let it do my thinking for me. I do my own thinking.

Roy Williams: So you’re doing it the hard way instead of the easy way.

Todd Liles: Yeah, maybe so, but it works for me.

Roy Williams: No, no, I’ll tell you why. This is the thing that I think a lot of people have heard before, but we always forget it. We forget it. The word passion, do you know what that actually means?

Todd Liles: No, I do not.

Roy Williams: The root word; suffering. What are you willing to suffer for? At Easter, what do they call it? The Passion of the Christ. And it’s all about suffering. So the actual word passion, my friend Manley Miller told me the original root word, something, pas-something. And he said the word passion means what are you willing to suffer for? And when it comes to capturing a piece of information that you want to… Not absorb, you want to actually digest this information, you want it to become part of you, you have to spend time with it. And to type it out one letter at a time, and the rewind and type and rewind and type and rewind and type, and to spend the time so that you’re earning that, and the time you spend with it and the amount of trouble you go to, the amount that you suffer to capture that actually gives you more ownership of it.

And so when things are important to me, I take zero shortcuts. And people are always teasing me about that because they go, “You are such a Luddite. You’re such a low-tech, old-school. Is it because you’re an old man?” I go, “Possibly.” But my very best friends recognize, like Jeffrey. We both know Jeffrey really well. And Jeffrey realizes, “No, no, he just loves that. He loves the old-school process of no shortcuts and agonizing over something.” And I just enjoy the hell out of that. And so what am I willing to suffer for? The suffering is actually joy.

Todd Liles: It is.

Roy Williams: And so I’m going, so that’s another thing that whenever you say you have a passion, you say you have a passion for something, alright, what are you willing to give up for that? What suffering will you endure to have that? And the more you describe the things you’re willing to endure so you can have this thing, that’s called passion.

Todd Liles: I have a deep belief on something.

Roy Williams: All right.

Todd Liles: And I believe that the things that we suffer for rewrite the way we think.

Roy Williams: Yeah.

Todd Liles: This is gonna be a little bit of a stretch, but go with me here. When a lady gets pregnant with her baby, the process of the hormone change and the caring for the baby and all these things that happen, it actually begins to literally restructure the brain. There’s lots of studies on this. This is not Todd’s opinion. You can look this up. But a woman’s mind is substantially different before she was pregnant and then after she was pregnant. There’s also lots of evidence that pregnancy changes a woman’s mind in many amazing ways. It prepares it for longevity. I think it’s not too dissimilar when anyone gets pregnant with something that they’re truly passionate about, something that they actually spend a good amount of time…

Roy Williams: Good metaphor. I’m following there.

Todd Liles: Yes.

Roy Williams: That’s really good.

Todd Liles: Ample amount of time really caring for something and suffering for something and coddling something. I do not think it’s a stretch to say that the mind has to rewrite itself. It has to become something deeper and better in order to care for this new thing.

Roy Williams: All right, let me summarize what I think I heard you just say. When you are pregnant with an idea, it will change you.

Todd Liles: It will.

Roy Williams: That’s what I heard you say. When you are pregnant with an idea, it will change you. Now, forgive me for this. I’m not gonna take the time to write it down. I’ll transcribe it later. Take a note. What do you want it to say? When you are pregnant with an idea, comma, it will change you. Period. Todd Liles.

Todd Liles: Hey, I haven’t been added to the random quote list in a while. I’m excited.

Roy Williams: It’s a new one.

Todd Liles: That’s exciting.

Siri: [automated voice] Okay. I’ve added your note. It calls, “When you are pregnant with an idea, it will change you. Todd Liles.”

Todd Liles: I love it.

Roy Williams: All right.

Todd Liles: Okay, now, interestingly enough, Roy, what you just did is you brought me to segment three. This is your superpower. You heard me say it in a big way. You know what segment three is?

Roy Williams: No.

Todd Liles: Say less, mean more. Which is what you just did.

Roy Williams: Yeah, wow.

Todd Liles: You have a superpower of boiling down…

Roy Williams: I do it all day, every day for 40 years. Well, actually 49 years. But the point is, I don’t want to say 49 because it makes me as old as I actually am.

Todd Liles: So because we’re right here in this moment, I’m gonna make it on the topic. Say less, mean more. I took this idea and you gave me the time to unpack it, and I appreciate it. And then you boiled it down to that. And here’s the real genuine question that I have. Say less, mean more, we could almost attach it to also to kill your darlings.

Roy Williams: Yeah.

Todd Liles: Because you boiled down very succinctly what I said. And I go, “I see the power in it.” And yet at the same token, I’m imagining two or three years from now, I believe you will have the ability to retain that analogy. I don’t think it’s in my superpower to retain it unless I went back and watched this. And here is what I think a writer can suffer from. Me, as the writer of that idea, might be suffering from the idea that Roy just edited away some of my thoughts. And I think you did it well and you did it right. But I’m asking this now for the young copywriter that just witnessed in real time an author get edited to something better. Talk about how to…

Roy Williams: Simplest thing in the world. Simplest thing in the world. When somebody says something, I’m gonna use the only word that works for me. When someone says something evocative… To be evocative, it has to evoke something. And to evoke something, you have to make me see something in my mind. Now, because I know you’re a studious reader, I know you’re very, very diligent in gathering information. That’s one of the things I appreciate most about you. You have extraordinary discipline in a lot of ways.

This is the one… One of the things where we have similar discipline when we’re gathering information. And so whenever you start saying, “Here’s what I have studied and learned,” I’m all ears because I know that you study and learn at a very high level. And so I’m always open to hear what you say. And then I’m listening to what you’re saying. I haven’t heard any of this before in my life. It’s all brand new to me.

And you’re saying, “When a woman is pregnant, blah, blah, blah, longevity, blah, blah, blah.” She’s saying these things, but then you said, “And when she’s pregnant, it changes her.” And then suddenly you said, “And when we get pregnant,” and I’m going, “Oh, well, now he said we get pregnant too.” And I’m going, “Okay, so if we get pregnant like the women he’s describing and they get changed, what are we pregnant with?” Obviously, it’s a revelation, it’s an idea, it’s something. And the next step is it changes us. And so I’m going, so you started…

See, what you gave was a metaphor. And the metaphor was; woman, hormones, hormones prepare her to be different, she’s changed in a fundamental way, she… And the longevity… I ignored the longevity thing ’cause it didn’t translate in the metaphor. But then, and she is changed and she remains changed. Oh, and then that’s… That’s interesting. But that’s just interesting. But then you went one step further. This is why I credit you with saying it, because I didn’t make the leap until you triggered it. You said, “And when we are pregnant,” and I’m going, “Oh, bam! We are pregnant. We’re dudes. We can’t be pregnant with things.” And I understood exactly where you were headed and it hit me. Okay, so when we are pregnant with an idea, we are changed. It changes us. And I’m saying, so that’s what you said. You’re saying when she is pregnant with a baby, it changes her, and when we are pregnant, I’m going, “It changes us.” Does that make sense?

And so I’m just looking… It’s called paired opposites. She is pregnant with a baby, we are pregnant with an idea. Of course it’s an idea. And I’m going, so I didn’t have the leap until the moment you said, “She gets pregnant and is changed, and when we get pregnant,” I’m going, “Then we are changed.” But what are we pregnant with? Has to be an idea. Boom! And I’m just going, so you’re giving me the pictures. You’re giving me… You’re giving me pictures in my head. I’m watching this movie and I’ve got these two vivid pictures; woman, baby, she is changed. Then you’re saying, “We are pregnant,” I’m going, “Oh, we’re pregnant, not with a baby, but with what? An idea or vision or a plan.” And it changes us. Bam. Done.

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: See what I mean?

Todd Liles: And I’ll tell you, just so you know from my standpoint, is that I have, even as I was looking up into the future and imagining this, if you know anything about eye position and body language, I trust you with it because I’ve been in your presence long enough to know that if that story is ever brought up into the equation, you will tell how it happened.

Roy Williams: Of course.

Todd Liles: So it lives on. And I think that’s really cool. I think that’s really cool indeed.

Roy Williams: Well, thank you.

Todd Liles: Well, Roy, I’ve got one last ad for us to watch here on this day of wonderful recording. It’s one from 1997, McCann Erickson. It’s the original MasterCard Priceless campaign.

Roy Williams: Hmm. The original.

Todd Liles: The original. I believe it’s the original. If it’s not, I may be misquoted, but I think it’s the original one.

Roy Williams: Cool.

 

Todd Liles: Now, that may not be the original ad, but for the…

Roy Williams: Could easily be, yeah. I don’t know.

Todd Liles: I’m not sure. The original was in ’97, so I’m expecting… Now that I watch it again, that that’s not the original, but it still hits on the point.

Roy Williams: Absolutely.

Todd Liles: The idea is that there are people in an airport and they’re showing the ticket prices, how much it cost in pounds. And then at the end, there’s a family brought together. It’s Christmas time. It says, “Priceless.” So when I watched that ad, I had two thoughts that went to my brain, which is, man, they’re getting people to spend money they ain’t got. But then that was just sort of me being funny with myself. But it is a powerful ad, and it’s making the point that all of these things in life have dollar signs attached to them, but that’s not what you’re really spending the money on. You’re spending the money on the experience.

Roy Williams: So we’ve been talking about off and on, boiling a thing down to its essence, its real essence.

Todd Liles: Its real essence.

Roy Williams: Okay. What that ad just showed us, real simple; people are more important than things.

Todd Liles: My son says that all the time.

Roy Williams: Of course, because it’s wise. Now, the thing is, that was the essence of the ad, because we see money. And what does money usually buy?

Todd Liles: Stuff.

Roy Williams: Things.

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: And then when you see the really high-impact things, the best possible use of money is on connections with people. And remember what I said about generosity and joy and the celebration of the ordinary and gratitude? Gratitude is joy. And you spend the money on the ticket and you see your friend, and this moment is, as you say, emotion is way more powerful than objects. And I’m going, why? Because people are always more important than things.

And so anytime you figure out a way to demonstrate a timeless truth, you don’t have to use the words. But the person who’s trying to orchestrate this feeling has to understand what the root, root, root thing is you’re trying to demonstrate. You’re trying to demonstrate people are more important than things. How can we do that? Right there is one of the 10,000 ways you can do it.

And I’m saying, but as a writer, as a, if you will, a director of the movie in your mind, because you played a movie in my mind whenever you’re talking about the pregnant woman and she’s pregnant and the hormones and she has changed. And when we are pregnant, I’m going, boom! That’s when you just killed me. I’m going, oh, man. When we are pregnant, we are changed. What are we pregnant with? An idea, a plan, a vision, a hope, something.

And I’m going, so, right there, the nugget of the idea, to figure out what that nugget is and crystallize it into the fewest possible words. And then now that you have it and you have clarity, you can expand it and you can tell it in this beautiful vignette. But what I’m saying is you’ve gotta never lose sight of the thing that’s at the heart of what you’re trying to do.

So consistency in the campaign, the thing at the center of it never changes. Just think of 10,000 ways to demonstrate that one thing that never changes. And so that’s what it’s about. And so I look at this, and as a lifetime doing what I do, writer, strategist, you have to be able to spot, what did they do? And how did they… What’s hitting me so hard? They’re just demonstrating that people are more important than things. People are more important than money. And so money is just the metaphor for, money can buy this, or it can buy you a new suit. Money can buy this moment, or it can buy you a new motorcycle helmet. And it’s like…

Todd Liles: What an amazing way to in this podcast where I’ve already changed… The title started off incorrectly; The simpler the message, the greater the impact. It’s now: The clearer the message, the greater the impact.

Roy Williams: Yes. I like it better.

Todd Liles: Well, it’s clearly the right title. The clearer the message, the greater the impact. And you just nailed it, right? And if you own a home services company, I mean, that’s the story, right? Don’t run ads about fixing widgets. Run clear messages about how this impacts people. And I think that’s to no fault of the average plumber, air conditioning or electrical contractor or roofer. They think in terms of how to fix things, and they’re amazing at it. They don’t think in terms of how to communicate messages that connect with people. And I’m not judging them…

Roy Williams: No, no, no, no.

Todd Liles: Because I’m terrible at doing it for Service Excellence.

Roy Williams: Nobody can do it for themselves. And the simple truth is that anytime you do something constantly, you become very, very, very good at it and you take it for granted, which is why I’m bad at explaining it. When I’m talking to you, I can explain it better because you make me explain it better. Because here’s the problem, it’s the same way with a plumber or an HVAC tech. They will talk about a capacitor, and it’s called the curse of knowledge. They can’t imagine anyone not knowing what a capacitor is or what a capacitor does. And it’s kind of like, no, very few people know. Very, very, very few. But you don’t know anybody that doesn’t know. You can’t remember not knowing what a capacitor was.

And I’m going, so the idea is you have to stop, slow yourself down, and have somebody like you make you simplify it and explain it. Because I never stop to simplify and explain things because, of course, people know these things. And I’m going, of course they don’t, in the same way they don’t know what a capacitor is. But every electrician and every HVAC tech thinks everybody knows what a capacitor is.

Todd Liles: Well, here’s the good news, Roy. Because I will never have your skill set or half the skill set of the partners, I’m just gonna keep asking the same question over and over again. Eventually, it’s gonna stick.

Roy Williams: No, no. Here’s my point is whenever I agreed to do this, I said, “Dude, it’s your show. I’m just the wingman.” Because I, unguided, am a terrible teacher because I talk over everybody’s heads and I don’t give them enough examples. And my wife does this for me in real life when I’m not here. But you do a marvelous job, and I’m glad we decided to do this.

Todd Liles: Well, thank you very much, Roy. Appreciate that. The more complicated the message, the less believable it becomes. Simplicity is the language and truth in every trade, every business, and every message. Simplicity wins. It’s what makes people stop, feel, and remember. If your message has to be explained, then it should be able to be done so in one sentence. If it can’t be, then it’s not ready for airtime. If you like what you’ve heard today, then subscribe to Todd Liles and The Wizard of Ads, and share this episode with your partner or someone on your marketing team. And then look at your next campaign and ask yourself this question; can I say this simpler, and can I make it hit harder?

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