How To Make Your TV & Radio Ads Stand Out

Brandon Welch 0:00
We don’t make neurological connections to names and graphics and logos near the way we do naturally, just with eyes and shapes of faces and body language and voices. The best writers and the best communicators know that human beings like to connect to human beings, right? You?

Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. This is the place where we answer your real life marketing questions to help you eliminate waste in advertising, grow your business and achieve the big dream. I’m your host, Brandon, Welch and Caleb, you look different today.

Carter Breaux 0:39
I sure do. Yes,

Brandon Welch 0:41
we have a new sub co host, the one and only, Carter braux, my bro fo sho, the master of video and radio scripts here at Frank and Maven. Well, thank you. Why is it timely today? Carter, what is our topic? It

Carter Breaux 0:57
is timely because our topic is how to make your TV and radio ads stand out.

Brandon Welch 1:01
And could you explain to the folks what you do around here? I make TV

Carter Breaux 1:05
and radio ads stand out. Look at that. It was meant.

Brandon Welch 1:09
It is so true. We get questions about ads and ad performance and creative. That is really the heart of what we do on a weekly basis. It’s probably the most important thing we do as an agency. This thing, we can do that. Not very many people put a lot of time or focus in. And so Caleb and I, or sorry, Carter and I, Caleb, Old habits die hard. Everyone’s harder. And I, yeah, yeah, you look good. Caleb, so Carter and I have been writing together for almost a decade. That’s crazy. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s been nuts. Carter is an OG at Frank and Maven. He is the heart of our talent behind anything that’s makes people laugh, cry or get angry in our TV campaigns or radio campaigns, and if you’re a client list and you know about Carter’s hard work, and so he’s behind a lot of the stuff you would see at a product level from Frank and Maven. So we’re grouping a lot of questions we’ve had building up in at least one episode today. I actually think this episode, I think we’ll have, like, part 68 on this episode. It might be, yeah, we could go on on this topic forever, but the whole point is, how do you make your ads stand out in a crowded world? There’s a famous study done by Yankel Vick and sons, we’re the average American. Nate the camera guy, do you know this? The average American sees how many ads per day on average, something like 5000 now, 5000 ads, and that was done in like 2009

Carter Breaux 2:33
or something that studied which now it could it’s probably double or more.

Brandon Welch 2:36
So, no, yeah, the amount of the amount of marketing message we’re exposed to, is just outrageous. And of course, if you’re somebody spending harder money on marketing, you’re wondering, how do I make my ad? One of the 5000 that doesn’t get forgotten, right? One of

Carter Breaux 2:51
the two out of the 5000 probably two or three. Yeah. So

Brandon Welch 2:55
this is all about making your marketing dollars work better. This is all about making you famous making people like you long before the sale. We didn’t put this in the show notes, but this is really about tomorrow marketing today. And if you’re familiar at all with the Maven marketer, we’re gonna take some of the principles that are in the tomorrow marketing chapter, which I happen to believe is the most important chapter of the book, and we’re gonna put them in real life. We are packed full of examples, probably more than any other episode we’ve ever had. So since Carter is the master of all this, and Carter often gets ugly ducklings

Carter Breaux 3:35
handed to him, I do. I’ve gotten a few ugly ducklings over the years. Yeah, it’s

Brandon Welch 3:40
either, you know, somebody’s existing campaign that’s coming to us to make it better, or just something that is, we’re taking a brand from where they are to where it needs to be, and Carter gets a front row seat as as to what people are doing wrong. We’ll say wrong. We’ll say the biggest opportunities for improvement in advertising copy. So we are going to get to four solid tactics and maybe a bonus tactic, if we have time, if Nate the camera guy has loaded us with enough tape, maybe one bonus tactic. But we’re going to get to at least four solid tactics, things you can take away and put in your ads today, but first, Carter, start us off. What are the businesses of small business America missing when it comes to writing ads?

Carter Breaux 4:26
Yeah, so the biggest thing we see is this myth that that we always try to combat, which is that a lot of business owners think that they have to one talk about themselves, but they have to make all their points in one ad, which we call porcupining. You’re making too many points. So maybe a business owner has four or five or more different points that they want people to hear about them, but they put all of those in one ad instead of making that a campaign.

Brandon Welch 4:54
How many years we’ve been in business? Yes, how many locations we have all of our products we do, we’re. Detailing and auto body repair and frame repair, yeah, and don’t forget windshield repair, right? Yeah. So they’re

Carter Breaux 5:07
doing five or six things in one ad, and they’re not doing any of them with enough impact to be heard. And

Brandon Welch 5:14
oftentimes, when you’re in a TV and radio format, and by the way, since you’ve listened this far, the joke is on the digital people who looked at this title episode and said, I don’t do TV or radio, this works for everything. This works for everything human communication principles. This is how to earn attention and make your product, your business, interesting. But everybody, when we’re in a traditional world, we’re often harnessed to either a 30 or 62nd creative and so the having come to the media world, I can tell you that most small businesses don’t get a production department. They get a guy who is way over taxed, and the poor guy in the production department, or maybe in a really big TV station, you have two and he’s got to crank out like five ads a day, so he’s way, way, way better than the time is allowing him to be, but he’s probably just being forced to crank out ads and not make you put a whole lot of thought into them. And so the salesperson says, Hey, what’s all the things you want to put in your ad? And they say your ad like it’s the only ad you’re going to have, or you’re the only ad you’re gonna have this year, or maybe two ads. And so the business owner, without even realizing it, has to throw a bunch of stuff, and they’re trying to cram 90 to 120 words in a 32nd ad. And it ends up sounding like trying to be everything to everybody, instead of something to one really important customer, yeah,

Carter Breaux 6:40
in a way that matters, talking to them in a way that actually connects. Yeah,

Brandon Welch 6:43
right. And so for most services and for most small businesses that have something really, some really proprietary way that they have to do their service that ends up selling it short. So porcupines, we borrow that term, I believe, from The Wizard of ads or the wizard Academy, but that’s they waddle along and make too many points, right? Yes, what you want instead is a you

Carter Breaux 7:07
want a rhinoceros, rhinoceros, one point that’s made with incredible impact.

Brandon Welch 7:11
Tip of the hat to Roy Williams, as I think we’ve done pretty much in every web episode. Thank you, Roy. You want to hit hard. One big point so yeah, just know that that’s happening and know that you probably have 100 ads worth making in your company on the various ways you do things a certain way, on the various products you do. And go deep instead of wide, right? Yes, go deep. Save the everything for your website. Save the everything for the sales presentations. When you get that, you know longer than that, 30 or 60 seconds, definitely? Yeah, that’s the biggest thing. It’s the biggest problem. We’re missing, right? So talking about TV and radio, radio today, creative. I have not been watching much TV lately. Really, my five year old lost the controller. He wasn’t even remotely sorry about he’s

Carter Breaux 8:02
really pushing your buttons. He’s pushing

Brandon Welch 8:04
my buttons. Yeah, so, all right, changing the channel over. What should you do with your TV and radio ads? Yeah, we’re bringing this down to four points. We have a bag of tricks at least 20 deep, that if we’re on the front end of a campaign and building something that we’ll reach into. And probably off of those 20, there’s another, you know, 50 or 60 that are just, yeah, just tactics and stuff. Um, but that’s the nerd work. That’s the behind the scenes work. What we want for you guys today is to walk away going, hey, the next ad that I write, I’m going to use one of these tactics, yeah. And the the goal is for you to be remembered. The goal is for your ad campaign to get better and better over time, meaning more people recall it. It works more the longer that you do it. The goal is for you to stand out among your competitors. The goal is for people to feel good and just think, wow, I want to do business with that company because I already like and trust them. Yeah, right. Typically,

Carter Breaux 9:00
that comes because they feel understood. It’s not because they understand you, it’s because they feel understood.

Brandon Welch 9:06
Deep validation. Yeah, validation. So the four tactics we’re gonna bring to you today and just break into here in a minute. One is called creating a character for your brand. Two is using active second person voice. Three, unpredictable word combinations. Huge, huge. That’s Carter’s favorite thing to do. Four, we’re we’re calling making a signature sound. And then five, if we have time, if we don’t cross the 30 minute mark, I’m going to talk a little bit about repetition and frequency? Well, that’s a media tactic technique. So let’s talk about creating a character. So you’re thinking, Okay, wow, I’m a local business. I don’t have millions of dollars to hire actors. I don’t have, you know, millions of dollars to make animated lizards and geckos. You know, Hollywood characters. How in the world would I create a character? Chair. And the truth is, what Hollywood does, or what really, really big time you know, ad agencies do, is they are looking to create a persona for a brand or persona for a movie or persona for a sitcom or a or drama or anything, because the best writers and the best communicators know that human beings like to connect to human beings, right? Definitely. And if you are a brand that has human beings interacting with your brand, which is basically the definition of a company, right, you are so much farther ahead to create a character that people can bond with and attach all of these wonderful things about your company to versus being this ambiguous, ad speak, voice over, graphic driven, PowerPoint type, brand, yeah,

Carter Breaux 10:52
if people don’t feel like, if they’re not sure, is this like some corporation? Who am I dealing with here? Who is this? It’s not a good thing. You want to feel you want people to feel like they’ve got a point person, someone that they know.

Brandon Welch 11:05
We don’t make neurological connections to names and graphics and logos near the way we do naturally, just with eyes and shapes of faces and body language and voices and all the collective things that can be translated with a person. So when we’re talking about creating a character for your brand, it’s not necessarily that we go out and hire some big, fancy actor or maybe some big, fancy Writing Studio. We do that for a handful of our clients, that is called for at some points. But more than that, you can take you as the owner, as the spokesperson, and just put some parameters around what you allow to be seen on TV or heard on radio, versus just random lines. Yeah,

Carter Breaux 11:51
being intentional about how you present yourself, what kind of traits you want to portray, yeah.

Brandon Welch 11:57
What quirks, quirks Do you have? Accents? Do you have 10 gallon cowboy hat that you wear? Do you look formal? Do you look like a good old boy? Do you look like an approachable person? All kind of those kind of words do you use? You know? Yeah, what kind of words? Where are you from? What are your values? What is the way you carry yourself, and the things you choose, and more importantly, choose not to put in your TV ads or your radio scripts, what does that say about you? And so sometimes the CEO or otherwise, the owner, operator or the spokesperson is, in of themselves an interesting, magnetic personality. Sometimes they’re not. And what I want you to hear is, it doesn’t matter where you are on that spectrum, because you can design and pick three to four characteristics you want to be synonymous with your personality, just like and therefore your brand personality, just like a good TV character. Think Tim the tool man Taylor, think, yeah, which we typically

Speaker 1 12:58
talk about, like Walter White or Buzz Lightyear, just Captain Jack Sparrow,

Brandon Welch 13:06
timeless, timeless characters, right? And they have there’s this, there’s this process we use called character diamonds. And what we do is we pick the interesting thing that we want to stand out, and we turn everything else down, and we just don’t put it in the scripts. So I am way more interesting as a character that I design on Maven Marketing Podcast than I am in real life. And that’s what we try to do, even for this podcast. But you can do the same thing. And so what does that look like? So just who are we talking about? National examples that everybody would know, mayhem from Allstate, yeah, Captain Obvious from hotels.com. I’m Tom bodett. Tom bodett from hotels, timeless advertising characters of all time. Just think, just with those three examples. Two are funny. One is just extremely relatable, right? Mayhem from Allstate, he’s personifying chaos. Yeah, he’s personifying the silly things we do to get ourselves in trouble and burn our houses down, right? It’s

Carter Breaux 14:04
devious, and it takes kind of a really scary unknown and makes it a very funny thing that you can kind of put your finger on. It’s unpredictable

Brandon Welch 14:10
because he’s in a suit. He otherwise looks well put together. He’s a professional mayhem, right? Captain Obvious from hotels.com that’s just total magical thinking. That’s just total fictitious entertainment. Yeah, and he’s dressed in like some

Carter Breaux 14:26
really Captain suit, very boisterous, hard not to pay

Brandon Welch 14:29
attention to, right? And going back to we’re trying to be memorable, right? So tombodette Motel Six, Mike from Dollar Shave club.com just incredibly smooth, cunning, convincing, smooth talk. That was a design character about Colonel Sanders.

Carter Breaux 14:45
Great one. Been the face of a brand for 70 years. Who?

Brandon Welch 14:49
Yeah, who knows how long, right? Yeah. Uh, he’s reminding us he’s personifying that down home cooking, grandpa. Great. Grandpa, relatable, hopefully for most people, right? Yeah,

Carter Breaux 15:03
ties their magic recipe into a person, a specific person absolutely takes it away from this corporation, brings it down to nobody

Brandon Welch 15:10
wants a corporation selling them fast food, right? Yeah. Do you buy it from Colonel Sanders? Because it’s finger licking good, right? So Mr. Whipple, the guy that was so iconic in the 60s and 70s for Sharman, right? Protecting the shaman. Don’t squeeze the shaman. He was a he personified over caring and being like protective of this soft, delicate thing that we all know what we do with that product. And it just was interesting, because who cares about toilet paper? It drew attention to the delicacy of that product, right? And everyone

Carter Breaux 15:46
goes, I haven’t squeezed, squeezed the Charmin. I want to go squeeze the Sharman. What’s going on? Yeah,

Brandon Welch 15:50
exactly. And so when you’re you have this moment where you’re going down the aisle and you’re like, everybody’s looking for Mr. Whipple, can I squeeze the Sharman? Right? Yeah. This is interesting. This is memorable. People are talking about that guy 50 years after that was an ad that some genius created right Ronald McDonald, Jake from State Farm, and they’re just personifying these different things. Yes, they’re entertaining. Yes, in some cases, the national ones have dialog, and they exist as like an acted character. Let’s bring it down to some local examples. This is one of our favorite things to do with our companies that we serve here, and it has made them very, very successful. If you can imagine what most people think in modern day marketing is, I’m going to go, I want to be number one on search engines, or I want to be the best at lead generation, or I want to get somebody who’s out searching and magically and digitally attract them to me, and I get them in front of me, and then I can sell them, because I’m a good salesperson, right? That’s what, that’s what a lot of company growth has talked is focused on right now. But what if, long before that, because you are Randy Milby or D millby, or you are Bev and rd Schmidt, or you are Corey Bunger, or you are Pearl and Maxine from the Ozark seller law campaign. What if people already go I know that person. They might also be on the search engine list with five other people who are just names and websites. But I know that person even though I’ve never met them. And the magic of TV and radio, still in this day, still in 2023 is for the dollar, we can reach five to 20 times more people for the money you spend. Usually it’s more like 10 to 20 times more people. And so 10s of 1000s of people per day are getting these little micro impressions of your character, of this person who’s holding your values, and this interesting thing about you

Carter Breaux 17:44
making them laugh, winning anything, winning them over, yeah, yeah.

Brandon Welch 17:47
So we’re trying to either make them laugh, cry or get angry about something that ought to be better, that your company solves. Right? So what you do there to build a local character, you need to have some catch phrases. Brandon D give me some of their catch phrases. Carter, beautiful windows that won’t break the bank. But it’s not just beautiful windows won’t break the bank. It’s beautiful windows won’t break the bank, right? We haven’t say it a certain way, and he looks like a goober, and he feels like a goober, trust me, at least he did the first couple times. And now people come up with the grocery store and they say, beautiful windows that won’t break the bank. Yeah, that’s a D guarantee. He has the big ones, a D guarantee. That’s a character thing for her, right? We’ve built these little sayings that they have, and usually a character, you know, in this case, Randy and d is the the excited, replace your windows, remodel your home. Tim, the tool man type guy. And D is the conservative. I’m going to make sure it’s just perfect for you and you don’t have to worry about a thing. And I’m going to call you just because, just to tell you I appreciate your type, and she has a guarantee. And we’ve built this whole thing out those are characters right now. They hold those values in real life, but they also do all the boring things that everybody else does in real life that doesn’t make them interesting. When it comes time for the camera,

Carter Breaux 18:59
we choose those specifics, and we try to magnify them, we try to show them to the world as much as we can. So what does

Brandon Welch 19:05
your company stand for? What are you kind of sort of excited about, or what kind of sort of can you embody, maybe, as the as the owner operator, and when you go, when you go to write your scripts or stand for something or make eye contact or smile or talk. What things can you turn up that are more interesting? Yeah, we’ve got, we’ve got a guy in Texas who’s actually from Australia, and, like, we didn’t have to trial that hard to make him interesting, because think about a Texan with an Australian accent who was, like, the biggest patriotic dude you’ve ever met in your life. He’s crazy about this country. He’s crazy about freedom, and he’s in the real estate business, and so we just went all Aussie on him and turned up his Aussie phrases. But he’s saying American things in an Australian accent, and people just are instantly dropped to him and they trust him, yeah, and

Carter Breaux 19:55
you’ll notice that there’s divergent traits, you know, in America. Akin Texas guy who’s Australian, things that seem to contradict one another are incredibly powerful. You’ll see that in any TV characters that you love, they all have some pair of traits that seem not like they would never fit together. Yes, and if

Brandon Welch 20:14
you think about your product, virtually any one of your competitors could change their business to start claiming what you claim, and have a feature that you have, but nobody can take your character away from you. Yeah? State Farm could not steal flow. State Farm could not steal mayhem. Allstate could not steal Jake from State Farm, right? Yeah, they have these characters, and it’s the biggest way to stand out that can’t be stolen from you. And if somebody tried to do that, it would be instantly recognized, and they’d be called phonies, and the whole point of building trust and likeness would be lost, right? Yeah, so I don’t care how average you think you are, I don’t care how uninteresting you think you are, find somebody with a little bit of writing skill, or spend some time yourself building your own character and start showing up in a consistent way. We talked about catch phrases. Good characters stand for something. We know what strong characters and TV and books and movies, we know what they stand for we know what they believe. So your subject matter, your vernacular, should revolve around three to five values like you know, a common one is stand for America. I stand for treating people fairly. I stand for Dad gum. It Coke, not Pepsi, yeah or dad gum. It muscle cars, not electric cars. Brandon D, you should never be uncomfortable in your own home. Oh, they stand so much against the Slick Willy salespeople. Yeah, and they stand against overpaying for something, and they talk a lot about that, definitely. So your character should stand for something lean into an accent or a dialect, or your local hometown way of saying things, or, on the opposite end, a really buttoned up, pristine way of saying things, right? Depending on your trade, depending on your customer, depending on whom you want to appeal to the most, whom you most want to appeal to, should say, lean into some quirks. I don’t care if you got a weird hat or we have some attorneys. And they’re they’re Quirk. They wear stark white suits.

Carter Breaux 22:22
And because of the ads they run, everyone who comes in says, we’re looking for the Ladies in White. They’re always asking about

Brandon Welch 22:29
that. Yep, they know you want it done, right? Call the Ladies in White, right? Yep. And these things sound small, and they will produce very small results at first. But when you do them over and over and over and over, just like a good character, which leads to my next thing, give them an outfit. Character has an outfit. Do they wear jeans or suits? Pick one. Do they wear overalls or Hawaiian shirts? Right? Pick one. You never see a cartoon character that looks different, right? You can draw Fred Flintstone a million times over, and he’s always gonna have the same thing on, right? Yeah, definitely. And then give them an energy. Is it soft? Is it comforting, because the matter of your product is delicate? Is it boisterous and exciting, because you’re selling ATVs or Jeeps or big old pickup trucks. Yeah. Is it expert? Driven? Is it knowledgeable? Because you have a really complex thing. Give them an energy, and give them a an aura, that when you look at this character, you go, That guy knows about that thing. And when I go to need that thing, I need to know the guy that knows about that thing, right? You want it to inspire confidence? Exactly, yeah. And sometimes, sometimes the sale is something is a commoditized thing. We don’t need confidence. Sometimes we’re selling outdoor furniture, stuff that, yeah, it’s a matter of my opinion, right? But at that point, I want the guy that makes me feel good? Yeah, I want the guy that knows how to lead me to the experience in just think about what your customers are doing when they’re actually using the product, and how they’re imagining their life changed. And that key emotion is what you want your character make happen? Definitely it’s gonna fall in the category of laughing, crying or get angry, right? Makes sense? Anything you would add to making characters.

Carter Breaux 24:21
I think you nailed it. I think, you know, the divergent traits is big. Yeah, I think it’s, it’s an enormous thing, like you said, that would, over time, will make you legendary. Yep, that’s

Brandon Welch 24:31
the goal. Ooh, legendary. We wrote a book about being a legendary business. You should get a copy of it on Amazon, bestseller. Audiobook coming soon in September, we’re gonna put some links to campaigns of like you all know the national ones, but we’re gonna put the links to some local campaigns of people that are like you would look at them, maybe before them being in these campaigns, or if you’re not in their town, and they’re they’re just like you and I, they’re. Average Joes, right? And we’ve made them into consistently remarkable for memorable characters. So if they can do it, you can do it, taking nothing away from them. Love you guys, love you Randy and D love you Bevan rd, love you, Corey, love you, James, all those people, but

Carter Breaux 25:15
it’s possible. It’s possible for anyone, yep,

Brandon Welch 25:19
just call your bro or Show All right. Second tactic using active second person voice. Now, this is probably the easiest thing to pull off on the list for anybody, and it applies to anything and everything, if you just try so often, what happens in the ad writing process is that somebody who’s somebody who has zero stake in the ad working, such as the poor guy who’s overworked at the TV radio station, or such as maybe a business owner has a, you know, college student that’s in, you know, that’s want to learn advertising, and they think, Oh, well, I’ll just let them have fun with it, because that’s what they’re trying to do, or whatever. Nothing against that. That’s how we all learned. But nobody’s job is to purposely align that ad for profitability and transfer of confidence and persuasion. Yeah, usually when the creatives go in the ad space, they’re going, how can I be creative? Nothing against creatives. Love you. Creative. Love you. Creatives love you. Nathan, camera guy, love you, Carter. But unless there’s a business goal, combined with that creative and the creative aids clarity, you’re actually wasting the time. You’re wasting the money, and one of the fastest ways to dissolve that waste is to use active second person voice and force yourself to be talking directly to the person on the other side of the speaker or the screen as if they were right in front of you? Yes, definitely. The opposite of that is either third person passive, which is the worst type of voice to use, and I’m going to give examples in a second or first person company centric, which is bad, but not as bad like I said, you can give examples in just a second, but those two things equal ad speak, and those two things equal our brain in its subconscious realizing that is just noise that is not something directed at me or any human being. And one of the things we researched and did, did a couple chapters on this book. Was the eavesdropper effect, and it’s when you’re talking to someone, everyone will listen, but when you’re talking to everyone, no one will listen. Yeah, imagine sitting in a coffee shop and Carter’s PHONE RINGS three tables away, and I and Carter’s talking loud, and he’s talking to somebody that in the phone he didn’t know he did what? Yeah, what’s going on? Huh? What? You’re kidding me, right? Everybody in that coffee shop knows that that call wasn’t for them, but nobody can stop paying attention until they close that loop in their brain. It fires a curiosity, and in the same way, we are looking for things that either help us thrive or survive or otherwise entertain us or offer us an interesting thought.

Carter Breaux 28:06
If you’re if you’re writing in third person or first person, if you’re saying we do this or this company does that, everyone wants to be the hero of their own story. Everyone’s so they’ve got so much going on, they don’t have time to think about your company, they only really have time, or they will only give you time of day if you’re helping them succeed in some way. Yes.

Brandon Welch 28:27
So we picked a company, and this is an ad I heard earlier this week, and I changed the name and all this stuff, but you’ll recognize ads that sound like this. This is passive third person. This is what not to do, passive third person. We’re talking about, they, he, she, it’s like a third party spokesperson talking about a company that you weren’t even thinking about. So it would go something like Cornerstone carpet cleaners is your premier carpet cleaning service with four convenient locations. Cornerstone carpet cleaners has crews for every occasion they specialize. They talking about they not something that’s directly at me, right? They’re telling a story nobody has to listen to, right? They specialize in commercial and residential, carpet, hardwoods, tile and vinyl restoration, keeping homes and businesses looking and smelling their best. So for all carpe carpet and flooring cleaning needs, remember coroner stone carpet cleaners call 882 wash, that’s 882 wash, 882 9274 find them on Facebook now, that is the equivalent of just nothing about that ever triggered that this was about me. My life is a story about a company I’m not even considering using right? Here’s what most that that’s really, really bad. That’s like if you’re just asleep at the wheel. That happens? Yeah,

Carter Breaux 29:50
you’ll also notice, if I may, some of these things at four convenient locations. We specialize in residential and commercial. You know, find us on Facebook. You’re making all sorts of points there as well. You’re porcupining too. Oh yeah,

Brandon Welch 30:01
they porcupine. They did third person. Voice, right. Let’s talk about first person. This is what most companies actually do. We offer. We are Cornerstone carpet cleaning we offer premier Carpet Cleaning Services with our four convenient locations. We have a crew for every occasion. We specialize in commercial and residential carpet. It’s all about, I, mean, so when you need carpet cleaning, remember me. Remember us, right? Okay, we’ve all seen that ad. That’s one of the that’s probably more like the 4999 they get forgotten, unless, if the stars align and you happen to reach somebody while they’re literally, actually thinking about carpet cleaning, that would be a very poor direct response ad, because it didn’t take me from an emotional need to a solution, but I happened to be needing it, and I heard that whatever you’ve

Carter Breaux 30:47
just got to acknowledge that most people don’t need their carpets cleaned today. It’s going to be eight months from now, or two years from now.

Brandon Welch 30:53
Good key point. This is a sub thing, sub topic, and probably a whole nother episode. But realize, if you were talking in mass media, you were literally talking to 10s of 1000s of 1000s of people at once. And statistically, if your if your population, let’s just take something like roofing. Your population, like, 5% of homes need the roof replaced every year, right? One out of every 20 years a roof gets replaced, right? So 5% per year, divide that out by the months, and like, literally less than one quarter of 1% of the audience at any given ad time is even remotely considering a roof. So if you go our roofs, you need roofs. Click, click, click, click, you rendered your ad use list to 99.75% of people. The only time ads like that work is when you’re talking about a commoditized product like hamburgers or water or something I’m gonna buy today, right? Yeah. Okay. So what do we do instead? You want to use second person active voice. Now I’m gonna use a couple of tactics here in addition to second person passive. Because why not? We decided to have a little fun. But the biggest thing I want you to hear here is you, and I’m talking to you, and it doesn’t matter if 10,000 people are listening to this or one single person. Every person listening feels like I’m talking to them exactly. You. Carter, does your carpet pass the doorbell test? What’s the first thing someone smells after they walk inside? Dust, dirt. Doo. Doo. You’ve worked hard. You’ve worked too hard to have funky floors. So master that musk, erase that aroma, and wipe out that stiff width that’s nagging every nostril in your entryway. All you need to do right now is dial 882 wash and Cornerstone carpet will overcome that odor in a matter of hours. 882 wash for the delightful doorbell smell you deserve, right? You, you, you Yes, beginning to end. It. Don’t even matter if I own a home or have carpet or floors. I heard that ad right now. There’s a couple things we did to make it more interesting. But point is, anytime you get handed a piece of ad copy to approve, and it’s about talking about you as a third party, or you talking about yourself. Switch those words and switch the sentence form to be saying, Do you? Are you? Would you like something to be better? Don’t you? Kind of wish you deserve more than that, don’t you? Take a stand, yes, and you cause people, literally, with a change of a couple words, to contemplate their own reality that you want to be a part of, versus some figment reality that they won’t ask them to be a part of. Yeah, this

Carter Breaux 33:33
is an ad about your life. It’s about things you want to do. You want to have people over. You want to have a beautiful home that smells good, and you can be better in this way. Yes. How do you get there? Well, we’ve got the missing piece, which is clean carpets. Yes,

Brandon Welch 33:47
that follows the Maven method, which is, Who are you talking to? What are their needs, pains, hopes and fears? How can your product satisfy them and what’s the reasonable next step? I know you. I know you’re home. I know your needs, pains, hopes and fears. I can do something for you. Here’s what you need to do, right? So unpredictable word combinations is the third. And this is a little bit more art than science, but using your own experience as a consumer, as a human being in this country, you can look at any set of words and go, does that sound like something I’ve heard before, or is that something I’ve never heard before? Yeah, and the goal is to say things in a way that your competitors didn’t take the effort to say, say things in a way that make people just go, What in the world? They just say, like, that’s the first step, and then by the time they’ve heard it a couple times, they’re going, that’s kind of funny, or That’s odd, or that’s interesting, and it produces a curiosity like magnet to you and your subject matter, right? Note

Carter Breaux 34:53
that you know, anytime you’re advertising, it is a break from this person’s entertainment, whether it’s. A radio or a TV show, whatever it is, or even Facebook or YouTube, right? Yeah, exactly. So if you can add an entertainment factor that does a lot to get attention, because that’s what they’re trying to do, absolutely.

Brandon Welch 35:11
So one of the fastest ways to do that is to mash words together that they’ve never heard together. Yeah?

Carter Breaux 35:17
So it also shows, and you’ll see some of these examples here that you’re thinking about this in a way that everyone else isn’t. You know, yes. Instead of saying, if I may, with these examples, do you have a roof that needs replaced? You say you’ve got a 15 year old pile of shingles on your roof asking for

Brandon Welch 35:34
trouble. Love it. You know, it’s Carter bro line. Instead of saying, Would you like Windows and Siding with maximum efficiency. You say, when your air is on, your money’s gone, yeah.

Carter Breaux 35:46
You don’t say the temperature is dropping and winter is on its way. You say it’s about to get colder than a Wells Day well diggers butt in Alaska,

Brandon Welch 35:52
it’s about to get colder than a well diggers butt in Alaska, yeah. And everybody goes, am I offended by him just saying that? Yeah. Now that comes from an ad that actually turns that back around. And being offensive and profane is never the goal, but disrupting attention is the goal. And you can do that in a lot of ways. These are just interesting words crammed together. We’re gonna talk about a couple other tactics in a second. Give us the last one that we brought on here,

Carter Breaux 36:19
old man Winter will be sticking you with utility bills so high they’d make a preacher cuss. They’d make

Brandon Welch 36:24
a preacher cuss. I never heard of a preacher cuss. That just that just is weird, right?

Carter Breaux 36:28
These also have the the added effect of, when you’re building a character, you can use these unpredictable words to kind of build a

Brandon Welch 36:36
personality. That’s how Tyler Smith would talk in his character, maybe not in real life, but that’s the character we built for him, right? Yeah. So alliteration. So that was just interesting, words being crammed together. Sometimes you use common words, but you use what’s called alliteration. We’re stacking syllables on top of each other, or phonemes, right? Yeah, sounds that letters and words make, right? A bargain better than you can buy them from your brother in law. We’re not saying you’re going to get a good deal guaranteed. We’re saying we’ve got them at a bargain better. And you can buy it from your brother in

Carter Breaux 37:07
law. And everyone sitting home going, bargain, man, you can buy from you know, they’re repeating it, seeing if they can do it. I guarantee

Brandon Welch 37:11
you that ad gets rewound. That particular kind of thing. Alliteration is what we get clients sending us letters that people from the public like strangers, are like, I just love your ads. Which the highest compliment just somebody was watching something they didn’t want to watch in the first place, and by the end of the 30 seconds, they go, I want to watch that again. Yeah? Our buddy, Cordy Corey the car cowboy, putting dreams in driveways and selling cars like candy bars. Yeah? Dreams, driveways, cars, candy bars, that stack and that repetition of those phonemes and those sounds is, for whatever reason, just memorable and satisfying, right? Definitely.

Carter Breaux 37:52
Here’s one that was in a roofing ad that we did about a leaky roof. And it’s this British man with a large voice, and he says, ah, your roof is leaking. Do you sit there soaking on a soggy, soaked couch, or do you call Mike at absolute roofing?

Brandon Welch 38:06
Hmm, soggy, soaking couch. Sit

Carter Breaux 38:09
there, soaked. Sit there, soaking on your soggy, soaked couch. Love it. It’s an ad you can listen to over and over and you still in and of itself. Joy. It’s almost

Brandon Welch 38:18
musical, right? Yeah. How about Goodness gracious? So she’ll be gushing and grinning. Goodness gracious, she’ll be gushing and grinning. It’s a tongue twister. You’ll be grinning with all that green you’ll be grabbing. You’ll be grinning with all that green you’ll be grabbing. Talking about the wife being cold in the home. And our client’s product was more efficient. And so just slam words together. I’ll just give you my hack for this. I go find the word that I will be natural to write, and then I go, can I replace that with something that means the same thing? And I go to Power thesaurus.com and I type in the word, and then I look for a word on the list that starts with a different letter. Yeah?

Carter Breaux 38:52
Anytime I Google a word, it automatically fills in synonym, because I look up synonyms all the time,

Brandon Welch 38:57
exactly, you can just throw it into Google. Yeah, so that’s alliteration. We talked about just interesting angles of words and alliteration. Now we’re going to talk about verbs, and packing your copy with verbs, regardless of whether you’re TV or radio, just makes people think and feel. It fires a different area of the brain, and it just it puts us in the scene, versus describing a scene. Yes. So for using a lot of adjectives to describe your thing, like beautiful and ornate and high quality, right? What you want to do instead is you want to say, tell them what that’s going to do to them. Go one step further and say, Oh yes, it’s beautiful, but it’s going to make the eyebrows jump four inches off your forehead, right? You’ll be gushing and grinning. You’ll be gushing and grinning. Oh yeah, we got some soaking on a soggy couch, right? Those are dreams and driveways. Here’s a couple other phrases. How about hickory fired pepper brats? I don’t even know what that means, but I heard five. Fired hickory fired right. Used an adverb. It’s hickory fired right, or sugar, sugar, smoked salmon, right. Slap them on the grill. Yeah, slap them on the grill. I can hear that sound effect. I can imagine myself doing that. You can lift these windows. They’re so smooth and easy. You could open them with a feather. And I’m like, What in the world does that even mean? But I can imagine trying, right? Yeah.

Carter Breaux 40:23
Instead of saying lower your bills, you can say, kiss your high utility bills, goodbye, kiss them goodbye. Write some goodbye. Yeah, verbs

Brandon Welch 40:30
or get your butt on down to wherever you wherever you are, ditch that old, whatever you’ve got, and, you know, lock in this new, awesome thing, right? Yeah. So immerse yourself in verbs when you’re trying to write your copy, or when, when somebody gives you something, you’re like, yeah, it’s boring to be like, Hey, throw some more verbs in that for me, and you can send them a link to this podcast, and they’ll know what you mean. So so far, we have gone through second person, active voice, creating characters and using unpredictable, unpredictable word combinations, any one of those things would make your ads phenomenally more memorable. Do all three, and you’ll really have something. And this is like three out of like 20 plus tricks we have, yeah, fourth one is called having a signature sound. This will tie basically anything you do together, we talked, I think, in our very first episode, we talked about having a consistent style. We talked about not letting your production team just change whatever they’re feeling like you need to set a template. Set a pace for how often you’re giving new shots, setting a pace for really how many words you have per 30 seconds, you’re setting a tone you’re setting is it loud? Is it quiet? Is it bouncy? Is it soft? Is it major or minor in tonality? These are other tricks, but your signature sound is really the audio signature. And by the way, audio things we hear are just way more intrusive than things we see. Yeah, we can close our eyes, but we cannot close our ears. So now what everybody’s probably thinking is, oh, I’ve got to have a jingle, and I’m going to do an entire episode on jingles and and most, most jingles go up in smoke because people use them the wrong way. It can be a jingle. We write lots of jingles. We write lots of little earwormy like signature sound things we’re going to talk about. But it literally could be anything. It could be the way you say, Boy, howdy. It could be beautiful. Windows, beautiful. Yeah, it could be.

Carter Breaux 42:35
We have those, those roofing ads that we have with the the loud British guy. He starts by going, gah, gah, yeah, everyone can have one of those ads. Let’s see what it is. It could

Brandon Welch 42:43
be just a sheer pattern disruptor. We’ve got a mechanic that at the end of his ads would go round. It’s like the little air ratchet. Think about some national examples, HB, HBO, TV, fuzz, right? The the fuzz thing we know that just ties together all of these emotions and like experiences we’ve had with their content. And so it’s almost a, it’s almost a feel good, confidence. Oh, this is going to be good. Then there’s somebody to spend a lot of time on. HBO as a phenomenal, you know, entertainment company. How about Coca Cola? Just the crack open, just the bubbles hitting the glass. Right? About Intel, done, done, done,

Carter Breaux 43:28
yeah, just the same for so long, you know exactly, because it works,

Brandon Welch 43:31
or AT T whether you’re calling them for support or whether you’re seeing their ad in the Super Bowl, it’s done, done, done, done, right? I did that, I practiced, I did my bubble exercises. Or we are farmers, right? Bum Bum Bum Bum bum. Not really a jingle in the way we would think about a full sing out jingle, but it’s their thing. Nobody could steal that from Yeah, we’re talking about being memorable, right? And

Carter Breaux 43:56
these aren’t always, you know, jingles, like we said, sometimes it’s the music you use in your ads, the way it ends. Sometimes it’s, we have little blings or things this pop in and out at different times. Think

Brandon Welch 44:07
about the calm app. Their ads are just literally nature for 30 seconds. Yeah, it reminds you of something you’d like to be feeling right so, or there’s that, there’s an ad I keep seeing for this back proper thing, and it just literally, the the sound, the gentle sound of your back just kind of popping and getting in alignment. Ooh, that’s what I need. Yeah, I’d like to yeah, yes, you got me. So have a signature sound. This is probably easier to pull off if you literally just hire a musician or a really good engineer or some sort of producer to help you with or maybe you’re musical and you can do it. I don’t care if it’s the sound of a nail tapping, if it’s the sound of ice hitting a glass, if it’s the sound of just some wacky kid screaming, doing something, anything. Thing that is a pattern disruptor that will tie your things together.

Carter Breaux 45:05
That comes to mind is yoga studio we did. You are going to feel awesome? Yeah? Remember that? Yeah. We took

Brandon Welch 45:10
these two yoga girls. They couldn’t, we didn’t have time. They didn’t, you know, have 10 grand to produce a jingle, or they wouldn’t have spent it if, if they did. And we just, we took them saying something together, and we threw it in this little pitch, correct thing, and we just turned them up loud, saying this word awesome together, right? And it ties all their ads together, yeah? And people repeat that stuff, right? So, um, it could be as simple as you going absolute roofing, yeah. Just, stretch out the Just Say your name in a fun way, right? Outdoor

Carter Breaux 45:42
home, just the way you say, yep, just off South Campbell track record,

Brandon Welch 45:47
right? So, or even download a really cheesy sound effect you just put at an odd time, but at the same time you say it, you put it right before your name. Or you say shine, bling, solar, yeah,

Carter Breaux 46:01
or shine solar, bling.com, right? So put

Brandon Welch 46:05
a signature sound and over time, kind of like that Pavlov’s dog thing. It’s just they’re gonna hear the sound and remember all the things that you’re tying together with your company over time. Okay? Nate the camera guy, how much tape do we have left? We got as much as we need. This is a long episode, folks. Yeah, we probably, if we were being responsible at all, and this is what happens with Caleb. Leaves nobody, nobody played by the rules. We should have ended this and done two parts, but I’m going to give you a bonus tactic. And if you’re, if you are listening and following this stuff, I want you to know. We would love to hear your ads. We would love to help you pour some awesome sauce on your ads. We’re linking to 15 other tactics that we use inside our own studio here, like go to really easy things to understand, and we’re gonna link to some other examples, but this fifth one really has nothing to do with the creative at all. And I’m not usually the guy that puts media ahead of message, but if you’ve got even some sort of balance or consistency to the way you’re doing these things, the thing that will amplify your recall level, probably higher than anything is if you were talking to the same audience over and over and over and TV and radio is magic, is that it reaches the same audience inherently. Because if you’re thinking TV, most Americans are creatures of habit, at least the ones that spend money and aren’t sitting at home playing video games all day, and they get up about the same time. They drive the same route to work. They see the same billboards. They thumb through the same couple of magazines, they brush their teeth, they take their kids to school, and they sit down on the couch and probably watch the same three to five programs

Carter Breaux 47:52
in a week, Wheel of Fortune every night, wheel of for the news, whatever it may be, yeah, or if

Brandon Welch 47:57
they’re driving to work, they probably have either the same podcast they listen to, and that is a way you can reach people, or most of us still have the same two or three stations on the dial we’ll fire in, yeah. And so that is the magic of broad cast media that has a habitual audience. And so when you’re buying your media, one of the worst things you can do, especially if you’re not established. And I’m talking like in most towns, unless you’ve spent upwards of a million dollars, you’re not as established as you probably think you are. But especially if you’re not established, one of the worst things you can do is let somebody just randomly place your ads, even though they will, quote, give you a better deal that’s called Run up station, or run of schedule. And you think, it’s cool, the way it’s pitched typically is that you get a bunch of spots that cost less because you’re letting them put you in different places. And you think, Oh, I’m in all these places. But what happens is the human beings, especially in a world where we see 5000 ads or more a day, we need repetition, even if the impact of the ad is high, right? Even if you did all these things extremely well, the more I see that ad, or the more I become familiar with your campaign and your style and your inflections and these little quirky things we’re doing, the longer and the faster I will recall them. And what that means for TV. I’m just going to give you a really down and dirty formula. Do not add a program to your TV schedule unless you are in a program at least four times a week. So before I ever start adding extra programs, I go to one program, 12pm news, Wheel of Fortune, or 5:30am news, I don’t care what it is, as long as there’s an audience coming back, and I think it’s a good audience for the buy and it’s a good program. I fill that program up with one ad per day before I go buy another program. So if I’ve got $50,000 to spend, and it cost me five. $50,000 to be in one program. I’m in one program. You’re in one program. If I get if I grow the client, and I have $65,000 the next year to spend on that media. I’m staying in that one program, but then I’m starting to build into another so buy in programs on TV that repeat every day. Slight exception for cable. We’ll get to that someday, but most people are buying broadcast TV. If it’s radio, you treat the radio station as if it’s one big, giant TV program, because most people, while they might switch around a little bit, they’re gonna they’re gonna be loyal to one or two different stations. And so to achieve the same effect in radio, we’re buying 35 to 40 spots per week between the hours of 6am and 7pm if you do that, the average listener will tend to hear your ads three to four times in a week. So those 40 spots across the board end up hitting the average listener three to four times, and that’s your minimum. So just like TV, we don’t add programs, we do not add stations. We do not let some fancy radio person come and say, Ooh, you’re going to be a little sample on all my four stations. That’s good for them. That’s bad for you. That’s great for their sales managers. That’s really bad for you. And I love you radio people. I love you TV people. They know better than try to sell us that. And I’m telling you, go back to the human being. It’s not about some magic media that you’re just out there and people automatically want to do business with you. This takes repetition. This takes hard work. This takes commitment. This takes courage. This takes you standing for all of these things that your company is beautiful and wonderful for, and then putting them in a media form that can be easily recalled. Otherwise, you’ll never get enough critical mass and momentum for people to actually believe, feel good, recall, want to do business with you in any noticeable manner. Yeah. So repetition,

Carter Breaux 51:59
and the lack of repetition, or the lack of belief that that they can achieve that repetition is typically seems to be the reason why people are trying to fit all their points into one ad. They think I’ve got one chance with this person, when, in reality, you want to give each message time because you know that you’re going to be reaching the same person three to four times a

Brandon Welch 52:16
week. Absolutely final hack, every time you put a piece of copy down on paper, and you go, I’m going to go spend the money to put this in the world, reverse that around and say, Is there somebody out there that has been waiting to hear this line? Oh gosh, if I only knew there was a carpet cleaning service with four convenient locations, I’d have called weeks ago. Oh gosh, if I only knew that they did residential and commercial, they’d have already been in my checkbook, right? Yeah. And so just read that back and go. Does it even make sense? Is somebody out there begging to hear that message, we’re gonna keep doing this. We’re gonna keep adding tactics. These are my four favorite I really, I really like, I think if you’ve looked at any of our campaigns, you’d find, if not all four, at least three of the four,

Carter Breaux 53:04
right? Yeah, these are the ones that make the biggest impact, I think, and that need to be in everything.

Brandon Welch 53:10
Have the courage to be different. Have the courage to stick with it. Have the courage to give your ad guy permission to have some fun. We’ll be back here every Monday answering your real life marketing questions, because marketers who can’t teach you why

Carter Breaux 53:28
are just a fancy lie. Thank you, Carter,

Brandon Welch 53:31
thank you very much, guys. Very soon