Dear Reader,

Most ads don’t fail because they’re wrong.

They fail because they’re forgettable.

They explain.
They justify.
They make sense.

And nobody feels a thing.

In this episode, Roy and I talk about a truth that separates ads that work from ads that disappear:

People don’t buy because you’re logical. They buy because something moved them.

Emotion isn’t the enemy of good advertising.

It’s the engine.

Logic can support a decision, but it never creates one. Feeling does.

That’s why the ads that win aren’t the ones with the best arguments.

They’re the ones that make people feel understood, remembered, or brave enough to choose.

We unpack why emotional ads outperform rational ones, why authenticity beats polish every time, and why the job of advertising isn’t to convince — it’s to connect.

If you’ve ever wondered why an ad that “should work” doesn’t…or why a simple message sticks while a perfect explanation fades…

This conversation will change how you see it.

Not because it gives you tricks.

But because it reminds you who you’re really talking to.

 

Watch/listen above or read below.

Todd Liles: Every few months, I meet a business owner who says, “We don’t want emotional ads. We want something logical that shows why we’re better.” Now, on the surface, it sounds smart, but it is a mistake. Logic makes people nod, and emotions make them act. Now, Roy has said this for years, that humans are creatures of emotion who justify their decisions with logic after the fact. So today, let’s talk about the truth. Let’s talk about why emotional ads outperform rational ones, not sometimes, but almost every single time. Roy, today, the episode that we’re gonna cover is why emotional ads work. And I’m gonna do something slightly different. Normally, we end our show with an ad segment. I’m gonna begin the show with the ad segment.

Roy Williams: All right.

Todd Liles: And so if you are listening, I’ll describe to you what happens when the ad is over. Roy, the reason I want to kick off with this ad is that for me, when the reveal happened, I literally started crying. It hit me really hard, and I found myself going… It’s relatively long, but it’s an actual ad. It actually aired, and I think it does a lot of things really, really well. So for today’s episode, we’re gonna start with the ad, and then we’re gonna unpack it.

Roy Williams: Cool.

Todd Liles: All right.

 

Roy Williams: All right, so here’s the deal. So this is too freaky.

Todd Liles: Gets me every time.

Roy Williams: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you know what? I’m hearing what I’m about to say, and I’m going, I don’t want to say it ’cause it’s gonna sound like a setup. It’s gonna sound like it was staged, right? Okay. Four days ago, okay, I wrote and produced a song that explains that whole thing. I’ve never seen that. Never seen it. You know what the song is actually called? ‘Joy Begins in Gratitude.’ Without gratitude, you can’t find it. Without gratitude, you cannot experience joy.

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: And whenever you say, now… Well, it’s a four-minute song and it goes layer after layer after layer after layer, and then you’re going, “Huh.” And then I go… And I’m basically leaving it with the listener so that they have to try to find a hole in it, and they can’t. Does that make sense to you?

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: And I’m saying, so if you learn to celebrate the ordinary and you feel gratitude… Like you said in the previous episode, going on a walk with Shannon, your wife, in the evening, and sometimes you just feel all overwhelmed with the sunset and the evening and just being together and you just tell her how much you love her, right? And I’m going, she’s there every day. This is ordinary. There’s nothing about the moment that is exceptional. You’re not in Paris. You’re walking around the block that you know every square inch of the block, right? When you learn to celebrate the ordinary, then you feel gratitude, and gratitude is the only thing that brings joy.

Todd Liles: It is.

Roy Williams: And so when you’re filled full of wonder and you’re filled full of appreciation for something and you know that you have chosen to be grateful, that sense of gratefulness is the essence of what joy is. It’s just to be grateful for this moment, this place, this time, this person. And so that guy is looking at that girl whose name he doesn’t even know, but he knows that she’s now in school and is no longer a homeless little girl, the daughter of a beggar woman. And I’m going, so he’s feeling the joy, okay, of the fact that she has been changed, and he is thankful that he was able to do that. “I am so happy that I was able to do this.” And is it a big thing? As they pointed out, yeah, he’s not gonna get famous. He’s gonna get no reward whatsoever other than what? Emotions. Gratitude is an emotion, and without gratitude, you’ll never feel joy. And so that whole idea, I’m looking at that and I’m going, yeah, that’s a real thing, right? And when you point out to people that happiness is an emotion and everybody’s looking for happiness, and there’s an old joke, people that think money can’t buy happiness just don’t know where to shop. Right?

Todd Liles: Yes, right.

Roy Williams: And I’m going, well, money can buy the opportunity to have the experiences that could lead some people to happiness, but they won’t necessarily lead you to happiness. First you have to have gratitude. You have to have gratitude for that moment. You have to have gratitude, you have to experience genuine gratitude. And I’m just sitting here going, I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, right? And so the fact that you showed that to me, I’m going, I don’t know exactly what the deal is. They’re saying emotions, and I’m going, nope, the emotion is joy, and the joy is intrinsically linked to gratitude. Without gratitude, you cannot find joy.

Todd Liles: Yeah. In that… It was an ad for an insurance company. It’s about three minutes long, which is long for an ad, but if you started watching that, you probably finished it all the way from the beginning I mean, it grabs you immediately. Yeah, yeah. There’s a Thai man who is doing selfless things, right? He’s moving a plant to where water is falling. He’s giving a piece of his lunch to a dog that lives on the street. He’s giving most of the money in his wallet to a little girl where her mother holds a sign says “for education.” He’s helping a lady put her cart up on the curb where it’s stuck, and he’s delivering bananas to a woman that lives in his apartment. And all along the way, you get these little moments to where the guy that cooked his lunch is judging him. The guy that runs the newspaper shop is judging him. These people are judging him for his gifts of just what brings him joy.

They’re going, “What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing?” So the initial act of doing something beneficial is judgment and no reward. And then over time, you see that this plant goes from having no leaves on it to it’s beautiful and it’s supporting life. The dog ends up following home and living with him, is now his little boy. The woman that pushes the cart who’s initially mean-spirited is now giving extra to people. The little old lady gives him a hug. And the thing that makes me cry every time is when the girl isn’t on the street, you don’t know what happened to her, you’re thinking, “Is she okay?” She comes out in her school uniform. And as you said, he’s not gonna get rich. He’s not gonna be put on TV. What’s he get for this? He gets emotions, he gets joy, and he gets to have those life experiences. And by the way, it’d probably be no surprise to you that this ad was produced by Ogilvy & Mather of Bangkok. It just has Ogilvy’s thumbprint all over it.

Roy Williams: Yeah, absolutely.

Todd Liles: You know, extraordinarily good ad people.

Roy Williams: DDB, you mentioned in a previous episode, the B was Bernbach. You know, Bill Bernbach. So Bill Bernbach was the David Ogilvy of DDB, Doyle Dane Bernbach, DDB. Yeah. Anyway, they all got bought up, I think, by one world… You know, it’s been big conglomerate thing now. Yeah. But they maintained the different brands because the different brands all have DNA. But the guys who built those brands all had a superpower, and there was always something to be learned from each of them, that they had a special lens through which they looked at the world. And you’re right, that has David Ogilvy all over it.

Todd Liles: It does.

Roy Williams: Yeah.

Todd Liles: So we’re gonna… The short version of what I want to make here, I mean, that’s insurance, right? It’s an insurance company. They just have a terribly unsexy product. And all over the world, in all languages, they figure out how to connect, whether it’s through pulling on your heartstrings or whether it’s through humor. They’re just great at selling on emotional connections. And I think you did a nice job in the previous episode where you were going through the six categories of business, and we are selling business to consumer. And when we’re selling business to consumer, and not just business-to-consumer, but in their most important area of their life, which is their home, it houses everything critical that happens. Their kids grow up in that home. They bring their babies home in a bassinet, and that baby will get its marks on the wall until it graduates and moves off, and then the grandkids come back in. The home is like a critical, critical sanctuary.

So all of these things naturally have deep emotional connections. And I think the thing that the average contractor in our space that maybe doesn’t listen to us, if I’m a plumber, electrician, or air conditioning person, is thinking is that that stuff’s not important. They are problem solvers. They’re there to fix problems. Let’s focus our ads on the fact that we can get there fast, we can do it quick, we can solve problems. But as you’ve mentioned in the last episode, if you haven’t seen it, go check it out, that’s important to business-to-business. We gotta think like the consumer thinks, or at least our marketers do, at least, because… And if we want to just bring it down to just like a real base reason as to why, it is because everyone is making decisions with their emotional brain and then they’re justifying it by the logic. They’re coming up with the excuses to do what they’ve already emotionally decided to do. And I think there’s ways that we can do that and we can do that well, and probably not in three minutes, right?

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: There’s ways to do it in 30 seconds or in 60 seconds. But for you, what is your go-to emotion? And here’s the reason why I ask, because I have a background in theater, there are certain things that we learn about theatrics. And one of the things that we learn about theatrics is the hardest emotion to be a master of. It’s truly the most difficult one. By the way, you probably know what it is, but I’ll quiz you just in case. This, above all other emotions, is the most challenging to persuade well and actually to invoke in people. Do you know what it is?

Roy Williams: No.

Todd Liles: It’s the emotion of delighted humor. To be funny and to be an actor is the pinnacle of success. A lot of people think it must be to make someone cry or to make someone fall in love with you, and it’s not. If you can be funny, you can do all the other things. To make someone laugh is the highest command of emotion. It is incredibly hard. A real genuine laugh. Not a slapstick, stupid body fall, but a genuine laugh is incredibly hard.

Roy Williams: It has to be something unexpected that makes perfect sense, but you didn’t see coming.

Todd Liles: Timing, writing, everything, it’s just hard, hard, hard, hard. There are a range of emotions in between. Anger, actually not that hard. Pretty easy to display anger. Probably right below that is that feeling that we just had where someone really reaches in and it pulls the tears out of you. So it’s usually followed… That’s usually the way it goes, right? It’s like, can you make me laugh? Can you make me cry? Can you do things in the middle, make me feel gratitude and all this? But at the bottom, it’s can you make me angry? And by the way, I think that’s one of the reasons why not-very-good politicians will default to anger above all things, because it’s easy to manipulate. It doesn’t take a lot of skill.

Roy Williams: So, laugh, cry, or get angry. Okay. But you ask me, what’s my go-to emotion?

Todd Liles: Yeah, what’s your go-to?

Roy Williams: Okay, trust. And I’m saying if you’re wanting people to remember you, think of you, and call you, or Google your name is what they’re actually gonna do.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: They’re gonna type your name into the search bar, they have to think of you because they feel like they know you and they trust you. So you know what it takes to make people trust you?

Todd Liles: That’s the question.

Roy Williams: It’s real simple. I was asked this yesterday. Three people came down, spent a day with me. You’ve done this before. And he had had a kind of a crisis in the company, and it was a direct result of the economy that’s undergoing kind of a change right now. And the price of gold’s over $4,000 an ounce and a bunch of other things that are kind of little indicators. And so he’s in a financially related business and had three big boom, boom, boom crises. And he was talking to me and his wife, and I said something about… And they said, “Well, tell us the story about this person” that I’d mentioned from earlier in my life that is gone now. And they said, “You said that when you met him, and after you spent a little bit of time with him, just less than an hour, you really, really liked him, and you decided you wanted to work with him for free and help him get on his feet.” And they said, “What in the world? What was it? What was it that made you like him so quickly?”

And I had an answer, because I do this very consciously in my writing, I do it throughout the day to the best I can. Being unguarded enough that you will share things that the average person would not share. And I said, whenever you meet a person and they tell you things and you’re a complete stranger, and the average person would not have shared that. Now, that creeps some people out. They call it oversharing.

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: But there are others of us that appreciate it. And we’re going, “You know what? This guy is not trying to put out a facade. This person is not trying to project onto me some image of how they want to be perceived. He’s letting me see him real.” And when a person lets you see them real, you kind of like them and you trust them. And it’s kind of like you might object to a whole lot of things they do, but down deep, you’re kind of determined to like them because they just actually let you see who they really, truly are and they’re not trying to fool you. And I’m going, when you meet somebody and you just realize, “This is one of the most authentic people I’ve ever met,” I’m always attracted to that person. And that’s what I try to do in ad writing. I say, I can’t create a character for you to play. All I have to do is I have to get to know you well enough to find out who you are going to keep being whenever I turn my back, and then promise people that.

Todd Liles: Yeah. Authentically vulnerable.

Roy Williams: Yup, yup, yup.

Todd Liles: That’s very powerful. Well, Roy, that’s what I wanted to hit on for today’s segment, which is the power of emotion. And thank you for clarifying that trust is the one that is most critical to you. And…

Roy Williams: And interestingly enough, it’s the easiest one to trigger.

Todd Liles: Is it? For you? For you, it’s the easiest one to trigger.

Roy Williams: Well…

Todd Liles: Because let me tell you why I put it that way.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: I think for most people, it’s probably not the easiest to trigger. And here’s the reason why. I think the moment someone is trying to make you trust them, you are instantaneously curious about what their objective is. It’s almost like the only person that’s running around going, “I’m going to make you trust me” is the con artist. But you’re not trying to make someone trust. You’re presenting things that allow it to happen naturally.

Roy Williams: Here’s the… I’ve always… You mentioned earlier our mutual friend Ken Goodrich.

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: I’ve always liked and trusted Ken from the day I met him. Do you know why?

Todd Liles: No, I don’t.

Roy Williams: I’ve told him this lots and lots of times, and I mean it as a compliment, not as a disrespectful thing. And he knows that, ’cause he’s 12. Ken has the spontaneity and the optimism and the mischievousness and the unguarded… He’ll just blurt things out that if he was thinking ahead, he wouldn’t have said that. And it’s kind of like, no, you meet the real Ken Goodrich when you hang out with him just a little bit, and you realize, nope, he really is exactly what he appears to be and he will always be that. And so you know exactly… It’s like, I’ve never heard Ken trash anybody. I’ve heard him say the craziest things and he can laugh at himself.

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: And I just sit back and I’m going, I don’t know, always did like him because he has… I say, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and Ken Goodrich. That’s the trio.

Todd Liles: That is a superpower that you have, that very few people do have, which is you can very accurately understand someone in a short period of time. And I do think it’s a benefit to you. I understand people at a certain level in a short period of time, and usually it takes me weeks or months to understand the alternative version of them. And then I get to decide what part of this… Like, I’ll know pretty quickly if I like you or not, and I’ll know pretty quickly if I trust you or not. What I don’t necessarily know is to what level of advice of this person will I take, because we are all human. And I think that for me personally, what I have to do is I have to live a little bit with someone to get to a place to where I go, oh, I like them and trust them. I don’t think they’d ever cause me any harm.

But it’s getting to a ciphering point of understanding. It’s like, okay, well, this person doesn’t know themselves well enough to know that they’re making recommendations or they’re having thoughts that are outside of their league. I can’t get to that instantly. I feel like you get to that very quickly. Like, you know that really, really, really fast. It takes me time to know that.

Roy Williams: Maybe. Maybe. I tell you how I’d like to wrap this up. All the people I love best in the world have things about them that I am happy to tolerate because I love so much else about them. And there’s nobody in my life, or I don’t think it’s possible for a person not to have some things that you would change about them if you could. And I know there’s thousands of things people would change about me if they could. But this is my point, every person deserves to be remembered by their best moment.

Todd Liles: Yeah, that’s true.

Roy Williams: And if you just decide, if you just decide, “What do I appreciate most about this person?” And if you look for it and you celebrate that, you celebrate that thing about them that you like the best, and you know what? You build your ad campaign on the two or three things about that person that are real that you like. And you know what you ignore? All the broken places and all the screwed up places and all the scars and wounds. It’s like, no, no, no, no. We’re just going to talk about the things that you will see if you’re looking for them, and you’ll go, “Oh, yeah, he really is 12.” You know what I mean? And it’s like, that’s where… I could always count on Ken being 12. So I wrote ads for a 12-year-old. He would do them, and he’d do them very great because that’s his natural condition. And I’m going to just find out what you’ve got and present that in a way that everybody else can see what you see, because that’s who that person really is. And when you amplify that in the script, you just give them the opportunity to be their best self. Does that make sense?

Todd Liles: Okay, I know you said you’re gonna wrap it up on that…

Roy Williams: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Todd Liles: But the entire listening audience that we have, and Alex, of course, our producer, wants to know, what is it about me that you tolerate?

Roy Williams: No. I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you later. I’ll tell you privately.

Todd Liles: Yeah, yeah, that’s fine. I’m not gonna put you on the spot. I just wanted to do that as a joke more than anything else. All right, he’ll tell me later and then I’ll tell all of you, never.

Logic explains and emotions decide. The heart makes the choice and the head just signs the paperwork. If you want people to remember your company, connect to their heart. When you make them feel, then you give them a story that they will retell. That’s how emotional advertising outperforms rational. It outlasts it. If you liked what you heard today, then subscribe to Todd Liles and The Wizard of Ads. Share this episode with a partner or your marketing lead. And before your next campaign, ask yourself one big question: Does this make someone feel something real?

 

Latest posts by Todd Liles and The Wizard of Ads (see all)