Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

Every terrible ad that's ever hit the airwaves was approved by someone.

Think about that. The HVAC commercial with the handsome technician and the voice-over about years of experience. The radio spot that lists quality, service, and low prices and nothing else. Every stinker. Every tune-out moment. Every ad that sounds exactly like every other ad in the category. Someone reviewed it, said yes, and unleashed it on the world.

That person might be you. Not because you're bad at your job because nobody ever taught you how to do this one.

In this episode of Advertising in America, Chris, Mick, and Ryan dismantle the most overlooked skill in marketing: the approval. Chris makes the case for hiring great people and getting completely out of the way, and what it actually means to be the person who says yes to the brave idea. Mick follows with four concrete questions that separate great advertising from forgettable garbage. And the discussion goes deep on the forces working against you: the built-in psychological bias against creative ideas, the committee effect that only knows one word, and why your gut reaction to something scary is almost never the right guide.

If you've ever stared at a script and felt completely unqualified to judge whether it would work, you weren't wrong. But you don't have to guess anymore.

Episode Highlights:

• The Approval Paradox: Why the person who says yes to the brave idea gets credit for everything and why the ones who said no are never remembered at all.
• The Get Out of the Chair Rule: What hiring Ridley Scott to direct a commercial actually teaches you about restraint as a professional skill.
• The Four-Step Filter: Mick's framework for knowing exactly what to reject, what to approve, and how to explain why to the team.
• The Bias Built Into Your Brain: Research shows that people who say they value creativity unconsciously associate it with vomit, poison, and agony before they've read a single line of the script.
• The Committee Trap: Every person added to an approval committee is structurally incentivized to say no. Here's why they can't help it.
• The Apple 1984 Lesson: The board voted to kill it. One executive overruled them. The rest is the most famous ad in advertising history.
• The Rick Rubin Model: The most successful music producer of the last 20 years doesn't play an instrument or write a single note, and what that teaches you about enabling greatness without authoring it.
• The Approver's Real Job: You are not the co-writer. You are the person who creates the conditions for a great ad to exist. That distinction is everything.

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🎧 Hit play to learn why the approval is the most powerful and most misunderstood job in the entire marketing operation.

👉 When was the last time you approved something that actually scared you?

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On this episode of Advertising in America, we’re talking about how to approve great ads. 

Knowing how to approve ads is not something that is taught. I mean, other than at the course that I teach at Wizard Academy. For the most part, clients are not well trained at providing useful feedback. They typically just tell us if they like it or not.

Here’s the most powerful thing you can do to approve great work. Hire people who are really good at what they do. Get the heck out of the way. Let them do, what they do. 

I can’t help but notice but you fellas are always saying the same thing from like two different doors. Chris says, “Hire well and get out of the way.”  And Mick says, “Know how to reject the right stuff.” I’m starting to question if you two lied on your resumes about being master debaters. 

I’m going to give you some ways you can guide your ad people to greatness. Step one…

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RYAN: On this episode of Advertising in America, we're talking about how to approve great ads. I'm gonna be honest — I let these two pick this week's topic, and I'm a little concerned. I always thought approving an ad was pretty easy. Somebody else does the work, they show it to you, you say Micks’ favorite word "approved," and you go home. Done. Turns out, no. Apparently, the approving part is the hard part. Evidently, there's a whole skill set involved. Seemingly, I've been doing it wrong for all of these years myself. Up first, Chris is here to explain why if you ever hire  Ridley Scott you’re not allowed to talk to Ridley Scott. 

CHRIS: When something great is created, there's plenty of glory to go around to everyone involved. Some of that glory can go to you.

Everyone knows that Craig Allen and Eric Coleman, the two guys at Wieden+Kennedy who wrote "The Man Your Man Can Smell Like" for Old Spice, are the two guys who wrote "The Man Your Man Can Smell Like" for Old Spice. But when that ad became a runaway success and changed the fortunes of the brand and cleaned up at all the award shows, you can bet there were dozens of people who took credit for their part in getting it made. The creative director, the executive creative director, the head of the agency, the brand manager at Procter & Gamble, the director of marketing, the VP of marketing, the CEO of P&G, all kinds of people probably went on to stellar careers because they got to tell the story this way: "I'm the guy who approved that."

And to be fair, they're not wrong. Good on you.

We've talked before about what it's like to stare down a truly innovative idea and actually say yes. The men and women who do say yes deserve some credit. You don't have to be the person who comes up with the great idea. You just have to be the person who says, "Yeah, I'm in."

Everybody thinks George Lucas is a genius who made Star Wars, but somewhere there's an executive at 20th Century Fox who said, "Alright, I'll pay for it," even though everyone else thought it was going to be a turkey. So how can you be that guy? How can you set yourself up for success by saying yes to the right thing?

Here's the most powerful thing you can do to approve great work: hire people who are really good at what they do. Then get the heck out of the way. Let them do what they do. Resist the temptation to always think the idea needs your brain power to make it work.

When I worked on the Gatorade business a million years ago, we hired Ridley Scott to direct some commercials with Michael Jordan. And when you work with Ridley Scott, you're allowed to come to the shoot, but you have to sit over there, eat M&Ms from the craft service table, and not talk to Ridley Scott. Because you hired him to be Ridley Scott. Don't try to teach him how to be Ridley Scott.

Nobody hired Andy Warhol to do a painting and then said, "I don't know, man, do you think Campbell's Soup cans are the right subject? What about bowls of fruit like all the old masters used to do?"

If you sell diamonds for a living, you know the worst customer is the one who thinks he knows more about diamonds than you, even though you have a gemologist certificate on the wall. If you sell air conditioners, the best customers are the ones who listen to your explanation of what's required to get the airflow and cooling capacity right for the house, and take your advice from years of experience. The ones who say, "I don't know, I think we can just do it this other way" don't hire me!

Hire someone you think is great at this, and let them do their thing. Sure, ask questions. You don't have to roll over and approve everything they put in front of you without explanation. But start with the assumption that this weird new idea wouldn't be in front of you if the experts in this area didn't think it was great.

Ask yourself what it says about your brand. Ask yourself if it's inimitable and distinct from all the middle-ground competitors' messages. Ask yourself if you'd rather be the person who took a leap on something that might change the world, or the person who played it safe and never made a mistake, other than never making a difference.

RYAN: Chris said, "Everyone knows Craig Allen and Eric Coleman, everyone knows." Nobody knows these guys. Their kids barely recognize them. I have not heard of either of those names in my life. If Craig and Eric walked into the studio right now, I'd assume they were looking for the bathroom. But sure, everyone knows. Mick, mail us you.

MICK: Okay. My brother Chris makes some pretty good points. If you're going to hire someone like Ridley Scott, he's probably going to make some pretty good choices as a director. But let's face it, you probably don't have a Gatorade budget. So how are you going to get good work if you can't afford to literally hire the best people on the planet?

Luckily, I will be more helpful than Chris.

Knowing how to approve ads is not something that's taught. Other than through a course I teach at the Wizard Academy, for the most part, clients are not well-trained at providing useful feedback. They typically just tell us if they like it or not. Sadly, that's not actually relevant. We don't write for the client. We write for the consumer. And "I don't like this one" doesn't get us any closer to a solution. So I'm going to give you some ways you can guide your ad people to greatness.

• ‍Step one. Be ready to reject stuff. But it's really important what you reject. What you're rejecting is boilerplate. Table stakes. If you're an HVAC company and your ad guy suggests a TV commercial where a truck pulls up to a beautifully landscaped house, the incredibly handsome technician walks up to the door, the attractive homeowner answers, close-up on him slipping on the booties, and there's a voice-over going on the whole time about their years of experience and quality of workmanship, and we watch as he turns a wrench and polishes the condenser unit before shaking hands with the homeowner and waving goodbye. Yeah, reject that. We've seen it before. Explain why you're rejecting it.
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• ‍Step two. Ask yourself: could this ad be for any other company in my category? Yes? Into the binit goes. Explain why you're rejecting it.
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• ‍Step three. What about this ad is entertaining? Remember, no one is listening to radio or watching TV to experience your commercials. What are you doing to entertain your audience? Is it all about you? That's no good. And crowbarring a joke into an ad filled with "quality, service, selection, price" does not count. I mean actual entertainment. The audience should want to turn the volume up, not down,  when your ad comes on. Have you achieved that goal? No? Keep working on it.
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• ‍Step four. What about your ad is part of a series? Is it clear that this is the next segment of an ongoing campaign? That's how you get the volume turned up, they liked the last one, they want to hear the next one. But that means it can't be a standalone. "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" was a great ad, but it wasn't part of a campaign. You want people to react to the next one. It has to be clear that there's another one coming, and it's even better than the last one. You need to think three or four steps ahead. Are you doing that? Where does this one fit in?

Providing good feedback to your ad people is one of the most difficult skills in the world. But when you know the path to greatness, you can be part of the team that helps achieve it. If you're not part of the solution, then you're just the person who yells and swears all the time.

RYAN: Mick gave us four steps. Numbered. In order. With instructions on each one. Mick is a creative. Creatives do not number steps. He drives a self-driving car, for goodness' sake. He literally wears two wristwatches. Creatives navigate by feelings and the moon's gravitational pull. That's his entire system. We'll be right back after this commercial break.

RYAN: Okay, we're back. So I can't help but notice that you fellows are always saying the same thing from two different doors. Chris says "hire well and get out of the way," and Mick says "know what to reject, and reject the right stuff." I'm starting to question if you two lied on your résumés about being masterful debaters. Typo, I suppose. Let's pull this all apart, shall we? There are three things I want to dig into here with the lads. Mick, you said approving is a skill that most folks are very bad at. You're really not out here making friends in this area.

MICK: I never am. That's not why I'm here ever, under any circumstances. I think probably the first time a business owner is asked to approve an ad, there's likely a bit of a shock, "Oh crap, I have to approve this." There might even be some imposter syndrome kicking in, “I'm the one who has to make the final call on this”. And with no preparation and no training on how to actually do that, you're stuck with one of a couple of possible ways of doing it. One is to say "sounds okay to me, I guess I like it, it's fine." Another is that they might compare the script to the brief. Did the ad match what I asked for? If it checks the boxes — quality, service, life, price, community, just like a pre-barking checklist, then I guess this must be approved. But that doesn't mean it's a good ad.

I agonized over that enough that, with two other Wizard of Ads partners, we created a course, it was basically an academy that helps teach you how to approve good ads. Not a course on how to write, it's a course on how to say "this will succeed, this one will not," and how to know in advance. Most people, they don’t teach you that in business school, they don’t teach you how to listen.

CHRIS: Until that moment when they're charged with approving their first ad, the only was to evaluate ads was one way: as an audience member going "that was good" or "that sucked." Entirely superficial. Emotional. Based on your taste, based on what you think is a good ad as a viewer. Because you've just seen ads on TV or heard them on the radio and liked them or not as a person. As opposed to now, you have to decide is this the right thing for our brand to be doing.

MICK: And neither of those things, “I think it's great” or “I think it's rubbish,” neither of those things are helpful. 

CHRIS: That's the only criteria you've ever had, and now it's the one criteria that doesn't matter.

RYAN: Well, and like you said, none of this is taught in business school. I think we've run into a few natural cognitive biases that humans have, innate desire to edit. They want to put their stamp on it.

MICK: Justify their own existence, 

RYAN: Bring their own layers of flavor. Or ego. There's also the other side of the fence. Ryan's fun fact: Kumar and Goncalo, Psychological Science, 2012, the bias against creativity. People who explicitly say they value creative ideas unconsciously associate the word "creative" with: vomit, poison, and agony. I mean it, these are literal words that came out of the research, on an implicit association test. So they associate "creative" with those feelings before they've even read the page.

Calling back from a couple of episodes ago, the bias is built in. If a brave idea is in front of you, your brain is already gagging before you read it on the page.  It's absolutely astounding how we have this visceral reaction from the approving side that has to be recognized when we're thinking about what we're asking our clients to do when we ask them to approve an ad. And it gets worse in groups. Anyone who's sat through a marketing committee knows this. The committee has only got one job, and Mick, you've said this better than anyone.

MICK: The job of the committee is to make itself look good to the rest of the committee. The committee is there to prevent you from doing yourself harm. So if someone on the committee thinks there might be something wrong with this ad, that person is going to stand up and say "I think you should not approve this." 

CHRIS: They've been brought in to be helpful, 

MICK: But in being helpful, all they can do is say no. The only thing a committee member can say is no. That's the trouble. The committee never says "here's the way to make it better." What they'll say is "you shouldn't run this ad because X." That's the inherent problem with the committee. But even if you've got just one person making the decision, the first time you approve an ad, what is the basis of that decision? Maybe you'd think, "Well, I've heard a lot of ads in my category, so... that sounds kind of like an ad in my category. I guess I should approve it." Well,  we've discussed that's not a good reason. That's actually a reason to send it back: "This sounds like an ad in my category."

There's no training for business owners to guide their ad people to greatness. And especially when you start advertising, there usually isn't an ad guy,  you're talking directly to the radio station, the TV station, or your digital ad person, who will simply do what you ask them to do. There's nothing evil there either, they're trying to keep you happy. They ask what you want and they do it. And what you want and what your competitor wants is the same thing. That's why all ads look the same, sound the same, and are almost interchangeable.

So you start doing it wrong, you spend most of your career doing it wrong, then you start working with good creative people, and you've spent your whole life just saying "well, I'll just approve what I think is good because I have no actual criteria on how to do it." And you perpetuate mediocrity.

RYAN: And the only reference you have without training is the authority figures around you. The people you defer to, the people you trust.

Ryan's fun fact: Solomon Asch, 1951, followed by Irving Janis in 1972 — groupthink and the conformity experiments run around committee-type thinking. If even one person says "I don't think so," they can get conformity from the rest of the group because they are following the leader; in spots where there is no leader, up to 35 percent of a room going one direction will bring the rest of the room along because they're not sure, so they follow the majority.

CHRIS: As a big agency guy, who spent way too much time in focus groups behind the glass, this is the problem with focus groups. You just need one guy in the room, you've got 12 people on a Thursday night, nothing better to do for 35 bucks than evaluate your ad ideas, and you just need one person to go, "Oh no, I think this is a little stupid," and then suddenly there are other people: "Well, if he thinks it's stupid, then..." The groupthink starts to really play.

"I thought it was fine, but if he thinks it's stupid, maybe I should agree it's stupid. And I'm also offended now, because I wasn't, but when he said it's offensive maybe I should vote..." 

MICK: And remember, the easiest thing to say is no. Saying yes is hard. If I say yes, I'm putting my name on the line: "Torbay said yes." So when this thing crashes and burns, it's his fault. As soon as you say no, you're safe. "Hey, I didn't even want to run that." 

CHRIS: No one will know whether you were right or wrong, it never got made. It never succeeded or failed. 

MICK: And if it succeeds, no one will remember that you didn't want to run it. Nobody talks about the stupid board of directors at Apple who turned it down. 

CHRIS: You talked about one aspect of it is that they instinctively go toward caution on everyone's behalf so they can be seen as contributing. The other thing is that people try to contribute to make a better idea: "What if you did this to it? What if you did that?" It really feels natural, especially when something's looking like a great idea, or starts to look really exciting  "Well, you know what else we could do? We could put a penguin in there." They all want to contribute; they all want to put their stamp on it, say they were part of the team, that they contributed.

What is very interesting about successful things is that it is not a zero-sum game. It’s not when it got super successful, for the five people who are in charge divide it up to 20% each, and decide who gets credit for making this thing awesome. When something great hits the market, everybody who touched it gets love for it. There's a million percent more credit to go around. The camera operator gets to take credit. Everybody who's attached to it, you don't have to put your fingerprints on it in order to say, "I was in the room when we made that." So maybe that's a piece of advice on approving: you don't have to change it and then say yes in order to take credit for the success. You can just say "I think it's great, let's go for it." And there will be love that comes to you when it succeeds.

RYAN: And ultimately, that's where the ultimate courage is: being vulnerable enough to take the risk. The people who say no aren't necessarily operating from a place of courage. They're operating from a place of fear, defensiveness, and insecurity, we have to recognize that. 

Now, if you're handed rubbish and expected to run it, that's one thing. There are certainly advertising agencies out there handing you a big pile of steaming crap and calling it magical. That's a risk you have to navigate by working with  people who aren’t going to be handing you shit.

This goes back to the 1984 Apple reference. Around the Super Bowl ad in December 1983, the majority of the board said no. They went into groupthink; they voted against it. The idea would be terrible,

CHRIS: Why are there not shots of the computer? 

RYAN: Exactly. Nobody saw the computer, we didn’t describe 100 features about the motherboard. They all voted to kill the ad. It was Steve Jobs and a small handful of executives who overturned the decision and ran it anyway, making it quite literally the most famous ad in the history of advertising.

MICK: On the topic of risk, though — if it had tanked… They would all have been on top of it.

CHRIS: Yeah, interestingly enough. Remember that? When I say hire somebody really good and let them do their thing, what's interesting is you will learn one thing for sure: whether that person is good at their job. The problem is when you hire somebody to write a good ad, then you change the script, then you make the ad. Now, if that ad performs at a mediocre level,  was that a great idea that you wrecked? Or was that a crappy idea, and thank God you made that little change that made it mediocre? You don't know.

Whereas if you say to Ridley Scott, "Make this ad — off you go, do your thing." If it tanks, you know what to do, which is never hire Ridley Scott again. And that's true with us. If we come in and say we have a campaign idea and it's going to scare the bejeebers out of you,  if it doesn't work, you can solve that problem. You just have to fire us and hire somebody you think is better. Whereas if you change it and you end up somewhere in the middle, you haven't learned anything. You don't know if I'm good and you ruined it, or if I'm mediocre and you saved it.

MICK: Well, and our jobs are always on the chopping block. Whenever we start working for a client, we know that if we don't deliver what we say we're going to do in year one, we will absolutely get fired. 

CHRIS: But also, you see this with big agencies all the time, they pander more and more to what the client's asking for. Two or three years go by, nothing really happens. And then the agency review comes in. And no one says, "No, no, don't do a review — you gave me good ideas. I always bought the mediocre one from your presentation because it felt safe, and you kept buying it." It's the client's fault,  but they always take it out on the agency.

So if you're going to make the agency the scapegoat anyway, at least let them do what they do. And if it's a brilliant idea,  the one Steve Jobs forced down your throat,  and it ends up being the greatest thing ever, you win. If not, you can fire them,

RYAN: I think that in itself is the fault of the agency. If you didn't hire a top-tier agency that gave you a safe option, that by default becomes mediocrity. So your agency also has to be courageous and step up to the line of vulnerability. Both for the writers themselves, who are dancing on the edge of creativity's knife's edge anyway because we're playing with emotions and people's feelings.

CHRIS: And there’s where smart agencies will not bring the safe idea. There was a tradition where you'd also always bring the "straw dog" the first ad you present, just to get the presentation going and the ego fed. And then you go, “If you like that, here's some really interesting ads.”  A saying evolved: "Don't bring anything to the meeting that you're not prepared to sell." Because the client might go, "I don’t know about those crazy ones. But I like that first one where you talked about service and selection."

So the agency has to be brave enough to not bring a safe one. To only bring ideas they think are going to make a difference.

And if all three ads you present, if you're one of those agencies that comes with three different ideas, you can't make one the easy one. Because inevitably, that's the one they're going to buy. And then it's on you. Then you go back and say, "Yeah, typical client — they didn't go for the good one." Well, why did you give them that option? You brought it with full endorsement of your creative directors. Don't bring three ideas if you think it's stupid to buy the first two.

MICK: We at Wizard of Ads, we can't do that because we're paid on performance. So we will not present an idea we know is not going to move the needle, because then we will get fired, and we know it. I would rather get fired now than get fired in a year because in year one, we actually lose money considering how much work we put in, compared to what we get paid in year one —we need to get to year three before we break even. So we would never bring an idea to a client if we did not believe it could absolutely move the needle.

In the larger agency world, they bill by the hour. They'll bring a couple of ideas because they're billing for all of it. There's no downside to bringing them. And if they run the ad for a year and a half and it doesn't build the brand, they don't care; they're not paid on performance, they’re paid by the hour. 

CHRIS: They’ll try again next year. 

RYAN: And that leads back to this: if you don't trust the people you've hired, fire them. Don't edit them. It's a complete mistake to start putting your own little flavor on things. If you have to, you've got the wrong people. 

CHRIS: If you feel like you're the only one who can fix this, then why are you hiring somebody to give you broken ideas? Do it yourself.

RYAN: And if you are going to speak up,  to Mick's point, what are you speaking up about? "I like it," "it's good," "it's bad," "I don't know, it doesn't feel right" those are useless commentary. 

CHRIS: You're a focus group of one person; that’s not relevant. And second of all, you may not be the target. 

MICK: You are absolutely not the target.  You are, by definition, not the target. If you're the client, you have to buy your products and services from this brand. So don’t tell me you’re the client, you are the one person I do not have to convince this is the brand for you. By definition, you are not thinking like a customer in this category because you’re not a customer. 

CHRIS: You already know way more about diamonds, or whatever else it is, than the buyer. 

RYAN: Certainly one aspect is taste, and the other is strategy. So this conversation is really about: what are we trying to achieve? How are we moving the emotional middle here to get a person to take an action or, at the very least, store you in memory because they know, like, and trust you until such time as they need what you have to sell?

MICK: The feedback is very often more along the lines of "you didn't mention enough features or benefits." And less often: "You really didn't make me feel much. You weren't reaching me on a deeper level. Can you dig in a little bit more."

CHRIS: The interesting thing that you said in your piece, was the number of times you came back to can I explain that to them, explain that to them, right? The feedback is helpful in the discussion. For example, if you say "there's not enough features and benefits" well, that's a conversation we can have now about whether we should be talking about features and benefits. We've done a previous podcast about whether you should fill an ad full of features and benefits or make an emotional ad that makes me like you as a service provider. That's a conversation I can have, and I can explain why I left features and benefits out. But that's because you said something concrete. You had an explanation to your feedback as opposed to "I don't know, I don't like it." That doesn't help. I can't debate it, I can't explain it, I can't rationalize why, even though you don't like it, it's the right thing.

MICK: But you could ask your ad person: "What is it about this ad that would make me want to listen to it, and maybe listen to it more than once even if I don't want to make a purchase in this category?" That's the entertainment question. And there should be an answer for that. If your ad person can't answer why someone should listen to or watch this ad even if they're not in the market for what you sell, you need to go back and answer that question. Give me some entertainment.

Imagine this: we're making a little sitcom, or we're telling a story, or we're doing a little vignette, and we're going to want to follow this, and we're going to want to hear the next one. We're going to want to hear the next one. It’s a story. It has a continuing story arc. Are we going to buy a water heater this week? No. But I still want to hear what these people have to say.

CHRIS: That's useful for Geico insurance. If I'm currently not in the market for insurance, why would I want to hear their ad? Well, because the gecko is funny every time. He's got a quirky little British accent; he says what he thinks, and he takes snide pot shots at people. There's an answer. 

MICK: At least there’s something there. 

CHRIS: And then maybe I will grow to love this brand, and when my insurance comes up for renewal, I'll switch providers. But there's an answer to the question: I can tell you what's entertaining about that.

RYAN: Well, this is all backed up by another one of Ryan's fun facts. Teresa Amabile, Harvard Business School, her 30-plus years of peer-reviewed research on creativity in the workplace, most famously The Progress Principle with Steve Kramer, 2011, shows that the single biggest predictor of creative output is whether the creator's manager protects their forward motion or interferes with it. Vague, taste-based feedback like "I don't like it" is the most destructive form of management input she has ever documented.

CHRIS: Absolutely. Yeah, that's a subtle point. It's like she's loving me. Which is not helpful.

RYAN: Roy certainly, you know, has been saying this for years. This is obviously the precipice of Mick's famous committee and leadership video that's out on the interweb. That brings us to Mick's four big questions, distilling down the questions you should be asking reflectively about the creative in front of you.

MICK: And sending it back until those things happen. One of the things I'm always reminded of when we're talking about approving great ads: every great ad you've ever seen on TV or heard on the radio, someone approved that. Some courageous person said, "Yeah, we're going with this. It's crazy, but we're doing it."

We've also discussed the fact that most advertising is terrible. In every category, in every world, in every market, most commercials are absolute garbage. 

RYAN: Statistically speaking, it's +99%. 

MICK: A crazy amount. Every one of those ads was approved. Let that sink in. When you see a terrible ad, a real stinker, where it's just "service, quality, benefits,” there’s nothing there. It’s all about me-me-me-me. Here's who I am, here's where I sell." It’s just that crap. Someone approved that. Someone said, "Yep, put that on TV. 

CHRIS: I like the part where they hold up the package and go 'now 2 for $14.99.' Yeah, that's great. I love that you put that in there."

MICK: Let that bother you. The next time you hear an ad and think, "This is a complete waste of 30 seconds of my time," think to yourself: somebody approved that. Someone gave it a big thumbs-up, used my favorite word, wrote a giant telethon-sized check, and said, "Blast this at humanity. Make people hear it over and over and over again." This super crap ad.

Everything is approved. So how important is it to approve great ads? Really freaking important.

RYAN: And it comes down to these four questions: Is it an ad that can only be unique to us? Does it entertain? Does it set us up for a campaign? And does it make the customer feel something? If we can answer or explain those with a yes in each category, we know we're walking down the right path. Whether it's your taste is inconsequential. What matters is that it's true to your brand, and that those four things drive this forward and make something happen in the listening audience.

MICK: Most really good ads have all four. Most ads have none of them. So start with one. Dammit. Just for goodness' sake, start with one. Build up to four. It would be lovely to get up to four. 

CHRIS: It’s like Everest’s base camps. You go up, you come back, you go up, you come back. 

RYAN: If I were to look at these four, which one would I start with? I would start with the one that makes them feel. Then I would certainly go to "make it unique to us." By making it feel, by virtue of that fact, it's likely to entertain. You're always going to offend somebody, and that's okay. Entertain the masses and don't expect to be universally perceived well.

And then setting up for the next one, not every single one is about the campaign. There are an awful lot of people who are about the cute and clever of the moment, the killer ad, the one-stop-shop or the one-hit-wonder. And look, if that's all you have, that's better than 80% of ads out there. But to mature into a properly done campaign, you're going to deepen into those other questions.

MICK: If you can get a couple of those things into your ad, you're already going to be in the top 10%.

RYAN: This is a bonus. I think this is probably one of the biggest things that encapsulates what we've talked about today: the job of the approver is to enable. It's not to author. That's probably the big takeaway. You're not co-writing this ad. You're trusting people who know how to write to write ads. You're steering and approving. And the approval itself, by virtue of the fact that you've approved it, you've created the ad.

MICK: Your job is to call balls and strikes, not play the game.

CHRIS: Or to create the environment. I always come back to the fact that one of the best music producers of the last 20 years is Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin does not play an instrument. He was the head of Def Jam Records. He's produced a lot of great artists. He's not an engineer. not sitting there working the faders. He doesn’t play any instruments; he doesn't write any songs. He works with artists to draw out the best of their careers. And somehow he gets them to think about things differently. "Have you thought about... what else could you do to accomplish this?" 

He doesn’t say, “Can you put more notes into the guitar solo? I think more notes is better than few.” He doesn't get into the granularity. He just makes people want to be better. And he makes people dig into themselves to bring out the best creative, and that’s what you can do as the business owner or as the marketing director. How do you create an inspired environment where people want to do a great ad for you? Want to do a great campaign? A great marketing idea?

RYAN: That's awesome. I feel like I'm the Rick Rubin of Wizard of Ads.

CHRIS: He has a ridiculous beard. 

RYAN: Yeah, maybe that's what it is. I think it certainly has a part to play. 

‍Gentlemen, this has been a treat. Another great conversation around what we can do to make people's lives easier and have more clarity on how to get the great stuff out into the universe.

RYAN: So look. If you're running a business in America and you're the one who has to approve the marketing, the ads, the campaigns, the next direction, here are the three things I'd want you to walk out the door with.

• ‍One: Hire well, then get out of the way. Find the people who are great at this and let them be great at it. You didn't hire a copywriter to give you the chance to be a copywriter on the weekends. You hired them because you cannot do this job yourself. Pay them. Trust them. Then physically remove yourself from the meeting if you have to.
  ‍‍
• Two: When you do speak up, speak about the criteria. Not the execution. "I don't like it" isn't feedback. It's a feeling. Try this instead: "This could be any competitor's ad." Or: "This doesn't make me feel anything." Or: "I don't see how this becomes the next chapter." Those are real notes. Those give the team somewhere to go. The other ones just make them quit.
  ‍
• Three: Remember, the approver enables. The approver does not author. Your job is to create the conditions for a great ad to exist. Not to rewrite the great ad somebody else brought you. The names we still remember in advertising history aren't the ones who fixed the commas. They're the ones who looked at something scary and said, "Yeah. Run it."

‍

If you don't hear anything else, hear this:

Every great ad in the history of advertising was approved by someone who said yes when their gut was screaming no. That's the move. That's the whole skill. Saying yes to the things that scare you,  after you've made sure they're scary for the right reasons.

Hire the right people. Trust the right people. Get out of the way. And when it works — take the credit. They won't mind. They'll hand it to you.

Until next time. This is Advertising in America. Thanks for tuning in.

‍

Thank you for joining us on Advertising in America. We hope you enjoyed the show and captured a nugget of marketing magic. Wanna hear more? Subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your friends.

Do you have questions or topics you want us to cover? Join us on our socials @advertisinginamerica.

Wanna spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Ryan Chute today.

Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.

Are you running direct response ads? No? Well, you should and I'll explain why below. Whenever you do advertising for your business, you should have one goal in mind: conversions. This includes all the people who need your thing today, and all those who will eventually need your thing, someday. You want to elicit responses and prompt your market to take action on your offer, whatever it is. However, how many times have you run an advertising campaign only to receive a few clicks and one depressing lead? Chances are, the principles of direct response marketing don't emanate in your advertisements. In direct response advertising, the entire point is to get potential customers to respond to your ad immediately. This means including a call-to-action (CTA) that's impossible to say no to with an offer that's too good to refuse. The truth is that you can riddle your advertising with as many CTAs as you want. However, this will not necessarily translate into conversions. Crafting direct response ads is both an art and a science. The art comes from direct response copywriting which is the use of persuasive, powerful words and mind-blowing angles. Conversely, It is a science because you need to know the intricacies of human psychology and neuroscience to actually persuade people. Unless you have both in your direct response ads, you're bound to a result of poor engagement and measly returns. You can't afford that as a growing business in the residential home service industry. Wizard of Ads™ is here to prevent that from happening. Here, we'll share with you everything there is to know about writing direct response ads. Keep reading.

What are Direct Response Ads?

Direct response ads are a form of advertising that aims to elicit a quick, specific response or action from users. Take note of the keyword "specific". By publishing direct response ads, you want readers, viewers, or listeners to take the action that you want, immediately. This could be to purchase your products, book a call, or sign up for a service, etc. That said, direct response marketing is the polar opposite of traditional marketing. The normative system of marketing focuses on building relationships and establishing brand recognition. In direct response marketing, businesses focus on driving conversions through ads to acquire customers, generate sales and a quick ROI. The key is in the immediacy of the response. Ads are direct, to the point and focused on a specific CTA. Nonetheless, I believe that striking the right balance between direct response marketing and traditional marketing is key. In their groundbreaking book, the Long and the Short of It, Binet and Field teach us you must invest 60% to 70% of the budget on branded endeavors and 30% to 40% of the budget to entice the “today” sale. Allow me to explain. Say, you bagged an HVAC installation gig through your direct response ads. Anyone who had their HVAC installed will have the unit maintained and repaired eventually. You want to be the business that gets both the installation and maintenance service. Only a healthy mix of direct response and traditional marketing will enable you to do this. Why? Because you didn't skedaddle after you got their coveted yes. You built a long-lasting relationship that got them committed and invested in your business. In other words, you can't have one or the other. This is especially true in a tightly competitive landscape like the residential home services industry. Your lifeblood is your club memberships, and only both traditional and direct response marketing can give you that. If you're struggling to craft killer direct response ads for your business, Ryan Chute from Wizard of Ads for Essential Services can help. Book a call.

Recruitment Ads

To some degree, recruitment ads are a form of direct-response ads. No other comes close to explaining their similarities than Roy H. Williams, in one of his Monday morning memos. In April 2018, Roy published a 60-second recruitment ad from Morris-Jenkins Plumbing and Air Conditioning from Charlotte, NC. The ad reached a staggering 19 percent of the entire Charlotte population in a span of three days. Listeners heard it an average of 6.3 times and cost only seven-tenths of a penny for every repetition per person. These are incredible feats and all, but the most important component of the ad is their wonderful copy. I won't mention it here so as to avoid plagiarism. My point is that Roy H. Williams hit the trifecta that broke the science of direct response ads. The advertising message he crafted had these three elements: remarkability, credibility, and urgency. We'll dig deeper into why these characteristics are important in a bit. Here are the tidbits that made the recruitment ad a head-turner:

"Would you like to make one hundred thousand dollars a year?"

This a truly remarkable message, considering the median salary of plumbers in 2021 was $59,880. Plumbers get immediately hooked when they hear these numbers.

"You hear Morris-Jenkins on TV and radio all the time."

Everyone in Charlotte knows who Morris-Jenkins is very well and they have a wonderful reputation. This line reminded listeners who was talking. Morris-Jenkins’ immense credibility wiped away the skepticism that plumbers may have from the previous promise.

"Be at Morris-Jenkins this Saturday at 8 a.m. for a confidential interview."

While their CTA is not to be at Morris-Jenkins within five minutes, they still displayed a sense of urgency. The interview was one-time. If a plumber missed their chance, they'll have to wait for another announcement.

Now then, what's with these three elements? Let's discover below.

Remarkable, Credible, and Urgent Ads

Again, direct response advertising is anchored on offering immediate specific actions. This is a quality absent from non-direct response advertising. "If that's the case," says plumber Joe, "let's just add a CTA button in all our advertisements." A respectable attempt, but a heartbreaking one when he realizes his ads yield little to no conversions. His strategy overlooked one problem: what makes him think his ads are persuasive enough to actually drive that action? Remember that sales happen when an alignment of principles occurs. Similarly, you can only persuade someone when you know what makes them tick and attack from that angle. It is basic science, and it tells us there are three things: remarkability, credibility, and urgency. These three are the combined secret sauce of successful direct response ads. Let's explore them further below.

Remarkable

Let me ask you something. Which is the more interesting news?

1. "Elon Musk spotted driving around town with the newest unreleased Tesla model."
2. "Elon Musk's newest unreleased Tesla model was stolen."

Okay, I agree, it sounds harsh but anyone would probably say B, right? But why? Because it's more remarkable. It tickles the right spot and piques our interest better. After all, so what if he drives around town with a new Tesla concept model? That's normal and quite frankly, no fun. You only truly access the realm of remarkability when your ads go against the grain. Adding a story that shatters the system and a fact that breaks the status quo is what people want. Saying that plumbers can earn $100 thousand is interesting, and truth be told, mouth-watering, especially for plumbers who earn half. What remarkable value do you offer that makes you stand 600 ft. above your competition? Do you have a perfectly fair competitive advantage that elevates you above the Sea of Sameness? That's your “remarkable.”

Credible

Another pillar in the success of direct response ads is their sense of credibility, particularly, of the one speaking. In the case of Morris-Jenkins, their many successful services and commercials have cemented them atop the industry. One mention of their brand name and every plumber is all ears. Here's the thing. For businesses that are only starting out, your credibility may be nowhere to be found. Does that mean you can't produce successful direct response ads without being a household name? No, not at all. However, you do need something to show for when people begin wondering about your credibility. This could include but is not limited to:

• A website with an appealing user interface and a smooth user experience
• An optimized local listing in Google Business Profile
• Optimized, authoritative, and value-dense content throughout your website
• Good and positive reviews
• An active social media page
• Desirable company culture and work ethics

With these elements, your business can rival even more popular brands in the direct response marketing scene.

Urgent

Finally, what makes direct response an action-driven approach is the pinch of urgency garnished throughout the ad. In Roy H. Williams' ads, he indicated a clear time, date, and place for the plumber and HVAC tech interview. Naturally, anyone who missed the date loses their spot among the Morris-Jenkins ranks. That's the sense of urgency the ad creates. With a desirable offer, you reclaim the power of decision-making away from your customers. You back them into a corner where their only choice is to take action now or miss the chance forever. One of the biggest drivers of urgency is having a sale. While I'm not all for lowering prices, I do believe in its power when done strategically. In the residential home service industry, you could try a limited-time offer for your club membership. Of course, list down the advantages of your value proposition.

What if a Direct Response Ad is Not Working?

The success of direct response ads is anchored on the presence of those three elements. Conversely, the absence of either one or two means your ad may flop.

1. If the ad is not remarkable or does not have a remarkable offer, people will not talk about it.
2. If the ad or you are not credible, your words, like static noise, will go over your listeners.
3. If the ad is not urgent, people take away the purchasing power from your business. They will decide when they want to buy. Sooner or later, they'll forget they ever came across your ad.

Direct Response Marketing vs Customer Bonding

Direct response marketing is distinct compared to customer bonding. When you bond with someone, you aim to build bridges and break barriers with someone. You're not after a quick buck. You want to be friends with them. You can only do this through constant association, hence the term "customer bonding." Customer bonding can be done in a variety of ways like through content or newsletters. They're not after your customer's cash, rather they simply want to introduce your company to prospects. Messaging that bonds with customers are the building blocks that make your direct response ads successful. You want to focus more on customer bonding ads, content, emails and social media posts than exploit direct response ads. As Roy H. Williams puts it:

"Customer bonding ads build long-term reputation and relationship. Direct-response ads erode it."

In other words, use direct response ads sparingly in your business and focus more on customer bonding fronts. Newsflash, Wizard Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads for Essential Services can do both for your company. If you need an advertising expert to make your ads for you, book a call.

Bryan Huddleston has had plenty of experience with rebrands.

As a product manager and tech council executive in Nashville, he’d watched companies shed old identities and emerge with new logos, color palettes, and signage that looked great on a business card.

So when he sat down with Ryan Chute and the team at Wizard of Ads to begin reimagining his newly merged garage door company, he came in with his guard lowered.

“I can deal with anything,” he told himself.

And he meant it. After 30 years in technology — Microsoft, Dell subsidiaries, startup ventures — Huddleston had learned to lead with curiosity and follow the data. Whatever the agency brought back, he was ready.

At least he thought he was.

Cornerstone of success

The story of Dad & Daughter Garage Door Service actually begins with a man named Jim Mulholland.

For 30 years, Mulholland, his wife Jo Lynn and daughter Christy ran Cornerstone Garage Door in middle Tennessee. Jim handled the technical side, including dispatch; Christy was responsible for the back office – the call center, accounts receivable, purchasing, inventory, ordering, customer care and fleet management. Jim developed his own system.  He had no software and no dispatch board, just a whiteboard in his head.

He could track 50 jobs a day on his own, routing seven to nine technicians by zip code alone. When an emergency call came in, Mulholland would hear the address, picture the grid, and know exactly which technician was close enough to help.

Together, the Mulholland family built a multi-million dollar business with that approach.

“Amazing,” Huddleston said.

Mulholland also is a man of faith. He’d chosen the name Cornerstone because he wanted a name that would reflect his belief systems. Some 17 years before the merger, Mulholland’s business had grown too big for one person. So he asked his daughter Christy to help. She remains with the business, now a teammate of Huddleston.

When Huddleston came to Mulholland in 2024 — he calls himself “the accidental tourist” because he more or less stumbled into home services after a career in enterprise software — Mulholland didn’t just sell him a business.

Mulholland wanted someone who would protect the customers, protect the team, and honor Cornerstone’s guiding principles.

“He wanted someone who would carry on that tradition because of his value set,” Huddleston said.

Building Homeowner Trust to Stay Top of Mind

The merger closed in October 2024. Within 45 days, the entire operation had moved from paper and whiteboard to ServiceTitan, the cloud-based software for the trades. Technicians turned to iPads. The team grew. And Huddleston began thinking about what would come next.

He had already seen what most marketing agencies sold. Logo packages dressed up in the language of strategy. Visual identities built around what looked good on a truck wrap, with no story to anchor them. In his years as a product manager, he’d gone through product marketing training and come out the other side with a conviction that would now shape everything: story first, visuals second.

“The story you have is way more important than features and functions,” he said. “You have to attach problem, solution, and for the customer, there’s always an emotion.”

He’d already befriended Chute at Wizard of Ads, and when the two spoke Huddleston made his feelings clear: He wanted a story that exemplified the brand, so build around the story, then build a visual identity.

It was hand-in-glove with the way Chute works.

“Feelings are the cornerstone of our strategy,” Chute said. “If we can’t make people laugh or cry or feel something about what they’re facing, we haven’t done our job.”

The only way to do that, he said, is to learn as much as he can about the business and the team.

So Chute spent about two days with Huddleston, tapping into his history and beliefs. His tech background. His upbringing in rural West Tennessee, where he’d hauled hay and cut tobacco and learned what hard work felt like. His marriage. His three daughters, 19, 16, and 14. And one of the reasons he’d gotten into the garage door business in the first place: To give them somewhere to learn, to grow, to contribute.

The team at Wizard of Ads then spent another 45 days working with its team in development to create the right brand, image, logo and marketing to fit the story, centered around a basic human connection.

Chute and his team had found two natural stories – the connection between Mulholland and Christy, and the connection between Huddleston and his daughters.

“We try to make people feel something special about something they already feel,” Chute said.

It took 47 more days for Wizard of Ads to get the brand approved, and another two months to firm up the visual and editorial production. In a little under four months, Chute was ready.

He called Huddleston and conveyed a simple message: “You need to sit back; we’ve got a concept that’s going to melt your brain.”

Huddleston’s response to himself: Whatever.

A brand you can feel

The Wizard of Ads team was not pitching a new logo. They were pitching a world — two characters, a dad and a daughter standing back to back to become the living embodiment of the business.

Dad represented the technical side. The trained technician who understood the difference between an insulated and non-insulated door, who cared that homeowners were safe, worry-free, and proud of their home..

Daughter represented the business side: accounts payable, scheduling, customer calls, inventory. Together, they didn’t just split duties — they created something. A family. A partnership. A story that anyone could feel.

“We tried to represent Dad in an upright, and honorable manner,” Chute said. “And to respect women in so much as we respect their diverse perspectives in the trades, their attention to detail and their ability to run a solid operation.”

Wizard of Ads had written radio scripts. Sitcom-style, serialized, the two characters bantering back and forth about the business, about homeowners, about their life. The ads would run like episodes, not commercials.

Then came the last script.

In it, the Dad looks at his daughter and tells her she’ll be running things. And then he says they’re changing the name. To Dad & Daughter Garage Door Service.

The script ends expressing with the two expressing the most important of words to each other: I love you.

Huddleston wasn’t ready for that.

“I suspect we might have made him cry,” Chute said. “We have a win when we do that.”

Huddleston sat with it. He talked to his wife. He talked to Christy. What he heard confirmed what he was feeling.

This wasn’t a brand strategy. This was truth expressed in fictional form. It was Mulholland and Christy. It was Huddleston and his own girls. It was every ‘girl Dad’ sharing the future with his daughter. It was also every family that had ever called in because their garage door was broken and felt, for a moment, a little vulnerable.

He said yes.

Value and validation

The rebrand launched in March of 2026. Two vans rolled out wrapped in the new identity — the dad and daughter characters bold against the paint — and the radio ads began airing across middle Tennessee.

The results were immediate, and the reactions not something Huddleston had planned for.

One evening, one of his technicians stopped at a grocery store. When he exited, there was a man standing in front of the van, holding his newborn daughter while his wife photographed them.

“I was just blown away by that,” Huddleston said.

Then came the call from Mulholland.

Mulholland doesn’t listen to the radio, so he hadn’t heard the ads. But some of the men he goes to church with had pulled him aside to say they’d heard the commercials and that they were awesome.

Mulholland went online and read the About Us page Huddleston had written — the careful, honest account of what Cornerstone had been and what Dad & Daughter now was.

He called Huddleston.

“I really like what you wrote there,” Mulholland said.

Huddleston said he felt that was Mulholland saying, ‘Hey everything is OK.’

Huddleston had made the name change not on impulse but after prayer, reflection, and long consultation. He had carried Mulholland’s legacy into it, and Mulholland’s legacy would carry forward.

“I promised him I would do that … ” Huddleston said. “My responsibility is to provide, which means providing the way for everybody on the team to be better than what they were while I honor what Jim has built. That they have opportunity for the future. I'm just more pumped about that than anything else because I love every person on the team.”

There’s even more to the story

Dad & Daughter’s approach has led to success. The goal for 2026 is to double the $3 million it reached in 2025, with hopes to reach $20 million by 2028.

“Then we’ll figure out if we need to go to $100 million,” Huddleston said.

That matters, obviously. But to him what matters more is the story.

Huddleston is thinking about dad-daughter safety pamphlets. He’s thinking about how to teach his AI voice agents to speak with the warmth and banter of the two characters his brand is built around. He’s open-minded about any way he can help the connection between any parent and any child.

Underneath the strategy and the technology and the growth targets, there is that human element.

“If we can help one family and just one family have a better connection between a father and a daughter or anyone inside of the family, a mother and a son, whatever that is,” Huddleston said, “then all of that's worth it.”

Matt Pozda sits in a wing chair in his self-proclaimed 'zen den,’ left leg crossed over his knee.

He looks into a camera and deadpans: “I read a book on anti-gravity the other day. It was impossible to put down.”

In another Instagram video, Pozda asks: “What makes pirates such good singers? They can hit the high Cs.”

Both videos conclude with the musical jingle: “All you gotta do is Call Dad … dot-coooom.”

Pozda is the CEO of (you guessed it) Call Dad, an HVAC and plumbing business founded in 2013 in Charlotte, N.C., that now has eight locations in the Carolinas.

Originally called Sky HVAC, the business rebranded itself to Call Dad in late 2023 -- which led to Call Dad’s social media marketing featuring “dad jokes.”

With help from Ryan Chute, Partner and Strategist at Wizard of Ads for Essential Services, Call Dad rebranded itself with a better story to tell.

“The first thing we try to accommodate with any rebrand is to tell a story that is true to the values of the company that we’re representing,” Chute said. “There’s nothing worse than creating a truck wrap and titling a company without a true story behind it. We like to do the opposite. Find something the people would voraciously stand behind. Create a brand you can recognize from the moon.”

A 14-Hour Deep Dive Uncovered the Brand That Was Already There

The process started with Chute and others from Wizard of Ads sitting around a conference table with Pozda, who had left investment banking to buy the HVAC and plumbing business, as well as others on his team.

But Chute didn’t want to just understand the business. He wanted to understand the people at the business and find the best way to tell their story.

He knew that Pozda owned a respected HVAC company, but quickly recognized that the Sky branding was not unique to the people it represented.

“When we look at a brand, we’re aiming for fame,” Chute said on a video produced about the rebrand by Wizard of Ads. “We’re aiming for that ability to be larger than life. Don’t tell people a story; be the story.”

Much like he did with Dad & Daughter Garage Door Service, Chute and his team dove into the story of Pozda and his team.

“I thought it would be a four-hour marketing meeting,” Call Dad Chief Operating Officer Mathew Stewart said. “It ended up being a 14-hour Dr. Phil therapy session.”

“They wanted to dig deeper than I ever possibly imagined,” Pozda said. “Not necessarily [about] why the business, but why I had any interest in doing anything in life.”

“Yes, it got intense, and we got deep,” Chute said. “We love doing that. That’s our happy day when we can do that with clients, especially with people who are open and forthright. These are good people doing good work.

“It was really the stories of their childhood, their wives, their parents, their kids, and it was so abundantly clear that these guys were the Dads of all Dads.”

That determination came from the personal stories Pozda, Stewart, and others shared. They talked of their Dads, of their children, of the experience of being a Dad, what it meant and why it matters. And of Pozda leaving the financial world because he wanted to spend more time with his children. Chute sensed something.

“I’ve been doing this for 30-plus years, and I’ve lived a life of reading people,” Chute said. “There’s only so much surface-level stuff that you go through until you realize people have something very significant or they don’t. My experience is really what’s given me the ability to realize we’re working with the real McCoy. Matt is definitely one of those folks. He’s genuine, and he’s not afraid to talk about things he’s not good at.

“Then together they all had a humility about them that allowed them to get past pomp and circumstance of a bunch of smart dudes in the room together trying to show everyone who’s the smartest guy. None of that happened. They were kind, funny, with a willingness to be vulnerable. Also very clear. All their answers were robust.”

Call Dad’s Brand Resulted from a Search for a Feeling

The more the discussion continued, the more Chute believed he was onto something. As he sat in the room, he checked to see if the domain name CallDad.com was available. When it was, he presented the idea.

“I’m built to look for things that make you feel,” he said.

Everyone in the room felt the bigger idea of Call Dad. Who can say they’ve never thought of calling their Dad in a time of trouble, or of wishing they could? The promise of Call Dad is fundamental on the most human level: Dad is on the way to help.

“I can’t tell you how many times someone has stopped us, and they’re like, ‘Hey, I love the name. When I have a problem, I call Dad,’” said Bryan Southers, Call Dad’s Head of Sales.

Pozda said he’s received letters from customers describing how Call Dad’s service filled the expectations they had for their own father.

Katie Biddle, head of Customer Experience and Marketing, said one woman shared how she did one last Google search and found Call Dad.

“She had just lost her Dad,” Biddle said, “and she said it was like someone was speaking to (her) and she thought, ‘I need to call them.’ Which is really special.”

A memorable anecdote in the meeting came from Pozda, who, after hearing a quip about dad jokes, related that at his home, the family held a contest every Sunday. Whoever told the “best dad joke” was freed from dish duty.

Dad Jokes Aren't Just Funny — They're a Marketing Strategy

Those Dad jokes now are a facet of the social media marketing campaign around Call Dad. The jokes drive the hits on the company’s Instagram page, with Chute saying the dad jokes are “killing it.”

Social media was just one part of the overall marketing approach, though, an approach tailored to the business and its story.

“Many don’t understand how marketing works,” Chute said. “People believe it’s a matter of using pay-per-click (PPC) ads, getting the truck wrapped, doing community work, and the job is done.

“I developed a relational advertising framework a few years ago. It considers all of the information that’s been researched for the last 20 years. The concept is straightforward and focused on two key factors: Brand-building and sales activation for lead generation, and the infrastructure, online and offline, to capture leads.”

Lead generation means branding and sales activation, Chute said, and includes call to actions, offers, and promotions. Lead capture is the infrastructure a business uses to capture said leads, like PPC and form fills.

“People go to a place and choose to walk down the road because you compel them to,” Chute said. “So we ask: ‘What is the most efficient way for us to build that with the highest impact message?’ This means we build a marketing structure that is different from what you usually see.”

That structure includes all media channels. Radio is typically the most economical way to talk to an entire trade area in most situations, and Chute said he tries to “really leverage the theatre of the mind to get people engaged.”

Radio, Billboards, and Truck Wraps: Building Fame Before Chasing Leads

With Call Dad, the initial impetus was radio with high-repetition, high-impact messages, supported by billboards strategically placed across the market, giving the company greater reach with  a  strong and memorable message repeated in key ways. This allowed the company to focus much of its initial rebranding costs on truck wraps and uniforms.

Two years later, TV was added, with a roster of billboards in all of Call Dad’s eight locations. Social media is focused on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, with the emphasis on deepening the brand from different angles. Entertaining social media posts spread the message that Call Dad is likeable and trustworthy.

“Advertising for home services is hard,” Chute said. “You are dealing with an externally triggered, grudge purchase. People come to you in a negative headspace. Nobody is excited to buy a new hot water tank or HVAC repair.

“If we can resolve their problem with a positive disposition or positioning over and over again, we’ve succeeded. People are going to pick the things that make them feel happiest in an unhappy situation.”

$38 Million and 67% Growth — The Payoff of a Brand Built on Truth

Pozda said in April 2026 that Call Dad had seen 67% year-over-year growth, and would finish the year with 210 employees and revenue of $38 million.

“That experience was something I never imagined, that someone would dig as far as they would to understand how to position a business around that individual’s values,” Pozda said. “The connectivity and the growth were well beyond anything we ever imagined.”

Back in the zen den, Pozda is bringing that zeitgeist with yet another dad joke.

“What do you call an alligator in a vest?” he asked.

“An investigator.”

Most businesses know why they sell what they sell...

They love the craft. They believe in the product. They built the business around it. And then they build their advertising around it too, which is exactly where the money starts disappearing.

Because why you sell is never why they buy.

Coke doesn't advertise sugar water. Porsche doesn't advertise engineering specs. Life insurance companies don't sell financial instruments. And if you're in home services, you are not selling wrench-turning, roof nails, or refrigerant. You're selling certainty. You're selling the feeling that someone capable is handling something that was making life worse.

The gap between why you sell and why they buy is where most advertising fails and most businesses never find it because they're too close to what they sell to see what their customers are actually reaching for.

In this episode, Chris, Mick, and Ryan dismantle one of the most expensive misconceptions in advertising: that your product is the thing worth selling. They walk through the gap between what you offer and what your customer actually votes for with their wallet, why going "one level deeper" than your product still leaves you short, and how the best campaigns in history earned loyalty without ever mentioning the thing they were supposedly selling.

Mick's home healthcare client said she was in the "peace of mind business." Mick pushed back. The business she was actually in? Not going to a nursing home. That distinction is the difference between an ad that moves product and a campaign that moves people.

Episode Highlights

• Don't Advertise the Category: Why spending ad money on what every competitor can also claim is money you're giving away.
• The Literal vs. The Ethereal: Why the greatest ad campaigns in history don't spend a second talking about the product.
• The Co-Op Dollars Trap: Why accepting Goodyear's money to mention Goodyear in your ad means you just paid for half a Goodyear commercial.
• The Nursing Home Campaign: How "live where you want to live" defeated every stair-lift competitor in a single tagline.
• New Coke Proves Everything: People preferred the new formula in blind taste tests and rejected it anyway. Feelings beat facts. Every time.
• The Quarter-Inch Upgrade: Levitt said don't sell the drill, sell the hole. But it's not the hole either. It's the picture. It's getting your spouse off your back about the picture for six months.
• The Swap Test: Cover your logo. Replace it with your biggest competitor's name. If the ad still makes sense. Congratulations, you've been advertising for them.
• Attract Some, Repel Others: Why a campaign that speaks to everyone belongs to nobody and why that's exactly right.
• Captain Confusion Is the Villain: The emotional enemy in home services and the story that defeats it.

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🎧 Hit play if you've ever run an ad and wondered why it didn't move the needle. The answer is probably in the first three minutes.

👉 Does your ad still make sense with your biggest competitor's name on it?

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💥 Brought to you by Wizard of Ads for Essential Services

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On this episode of Advertising in America, I got to admit, I thought this was going to be the easy one.

These days, you can't hardly walk past a marketing guy without hearing the term ROAS, return on ad spend. First of all, if something has the word ass in the name, you've got to wonder if they're talking about you.

Business owners not knowing what business they're in is actually a tremendous opportunity for you because your competitor probably doesn't know what business he's in either.

If you're advertising beer, I already know how to use it. I already know what's in it. None of your ads should tell me about the beer. Now, your advertising has to tell me why you're the beer for me.

So, if everyone else is advertising facts, features, or benefits, you've just won the lottery because you're going to advertise feelings. You're not going to advertise why you sell it. You're going to advertise why they buy it. And if you're not sure what the difference is, don't advertise at all because you don't know what business you're in, which means you don't know what the fuck  you're doing.

Ryan Chute: On this episode of Advertising in America, I going to admit, I thought this was going to be the easy one. What are we advertising? You sell pizza, you advertise pizza. You sell trucks, you advertise trucks. Ain't that the game?

Computer says no.

Ryan Chute: Apparently, the greatest ads aren't really about the thing you sell at all, which is going to require some explaining. What you talking about, Chris?

Chris Torbay: Isn't it funny how sometimes the best ads out there, the most successful ad campaigns you can remember, don't really advertise the things they're supposedly advertising? Coca-Cola is a sweet, caramel-tasting cold drink in a cool-looking bottle with fizzy bubbles. They mention that exactly never in their ads. The sweet, fizzy, caramel-tasting cold drink is 100% of why people love it, and they mention it 0% of the time. Coke spends all their effort just trying to be the brand you like. These days, you can't hardly walk past a marketing guy without hearing the term ROAS, return on ad spend. First of all, when something has the word ASS in the name, you're going to wonder if they're talking about you.

But second, when you're trying to figure out if you're getting the right ROAS, maybe your ad spend is advertising the wrong thing to generate your return. I recently bought one of these things on the internet. I'll pull it out of my pocket. It's a little credit card-sized thingy, and if you fold it this way and fold it this way, it turns into a little tripod you can stick your phone into. Now, if you're going to try and sell me one of these, which they do all over social media, you've got to tell me how it works. You're going to show me how easy it is to set up, and you've got to tell me that it's made out of strong materials that aren't going to break, and it's light enough to carry, and it's exactly the size of a credit card, so I already have a place to put it. And then you can tell me all the times it'd be great to use this to hold my camera instead of going like this all the time when I want to take a selfie.

You need an ad that is all product information, design specs, and usage cases. If you're advertising beer, I already know how to use it. I already know what's in it. None of your ads should tell me about the beer. Now your advertising has to tell me why you're the beer for me. If you're advertising diamonds, you don't have to educate me on cut, color, clarity, and carat weight. I don't even care about your expertise except insofar as it will help me. You have to tell me why I will be better served or reach a better outcome when I buy them from you.

If you're a plumber, you don't have to tell me how intricate it turns out your job really is. You just have to tell me that your work will give me a shower that will be awesome. Advertise the things that are going to make you the brand for me. Why are you over your competitors? Don't use any of your ad spend to tell me things that are true across the category. And yes, quality, great service, wide selection, competitive prices, convenient location, and a qualified staff who really care about your needs are claims made by everyone, so they can't be the thing that you advertise to make me choose you, even if they're true. If other people say it, it cannot be your differentiator.

Don't use any of your ad spend to grow the category unless you are by far the category leader. Even Heinz Ketchup doesn't spend much time telling you new, fascinating potential uses for ketchup. They tell you when you should choose Heinz. And don't devote any of your ad spend to the brands that you sell. People can get those brands somewhere else, too, so you should be spending your money on why they should be getting them from you. Co-op dollars might not be as good a deal as you think if the message ends up being about that brand and not about yours. Don't advertise the literal. Advertise the ethereal.

On the surface, Porsche and Kia advertise largely the same way: cool cars, fun to drive. Even though one of them is actually a German-engineered race car. The trick is that something about the Kia campaign makes Kia drivers think that's the car for them, and something about the Porsche campaign reaches Porsche drivers right in that secret spot that makes them go, "Oh, yeah. Right there."

Advertise that thing. That's the kind of advertising that gets you RO in your ass.

Ryan Chute: Chris just spent 45 minutes describing his thingy. A thingy. Wouldn't tell us what it was, just kept calling a thingy. God bless your wife for staying with you all these years. How long did it take you to sell her on your thingy? Never mind, no. I don't want to know. Mick, please take it away.

Mick Torbay: I've mentioned this before on this program. I'm convinced that fully half the time people don't know what business they're in. Chris phrases it differently. He says they're advertising the wrong thing. I say they don't know what business they're in.

As long as Porsche thinks they're in the transportation business, they don't stand a chance. Thankfully, they're one of the few businesses that understand what they're really selling. They're selling the opportunity to feel like a race car driver, and that's something that people, mostly men, have been yearning for since they were five years old. We've always wanted to feel like a race car driver. Porsche gives us this feeling by making an actual race car and then putting enough technology into it so that we don't actually kill ourselves whilst driving it to work.

Here's the giveaway. They put about as much effort into making the engine sound like a race car as they do into making the engine perform like a race car.

That's how I know I'm right. Business owners not knowing what business they're in is actually a tremendous opportunity for you because your competitor probably doesn't know what business he's in either. Plumbers think they're in the wrench-turning business. Roofers think they're in the business of nailing shingles to the top of houses, and that's great. Keep it up, guys. My clients know better, or at least their ad guy knows better.

Rule of thumb: look at what everybody else is advertising. What is their pitch? What business do they appear to be in? Great. Let them own that. Don't try and beat them at that game. It's probably the wrong game anyway. Your job, or if you work with us, my job, is to find out what game you should have been playing all along, the game you play better than anyone else, the game the consumer is playing.

And the consumer is motivated by feelings. Remember what I said? Porsche is in the business of letting you feel like a race car driver. Feelings are much more powerful than facts, features, or benefits. Life insurance companies understand this. Life insurance is a very practical thing. It allows you to solve financial problems when the primary earner is no longer generating revenue. That's what it is, but that's not how they advertise it. Note how quickly they pivot to protecting your family. That's about feelings, friend. So if everyone else is advertising facts, features, or benefits, you've just won the lottery because you're going to advertise feelings. You're not going to advertise why you sell it.

You're going to advertise why they buy it, and those things are almost definitely not the same. And if you're not sure what the difference is, don't advertise at all because you don't know what business you're in, which means you don't know what the fuck you're doing.

Ryan Chute: Mick said plumbers think that they're in the wrench-turning business. I got to admit, the last time I called my plumber, I did not want a wrench turner. I wanted a hot shower. Not with the plumber, of course, just, like, in general. There were no wrenches on my mind. We'll be right back.

Ryan Chute: Okay, we're back. Did you notice the twins said pretty much the same thing? Chris says, "Don't advertise the literal." Mick asked, "Do you even know what business you're in?" Either way, same answer. The thing you think you sell isn't the thing the customer's buying. Let's pull this mess all apart. So let's start off with Ryan's fun fact. The quote that everyone in marketing has heard, one that I personally disagree with,

"People don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole."

This was popularized by Theodore Levitt, originally Leo Geneva, it's the whole notion of don't sell the feature, sell the benefit. And the reason why I disagree with this, which alludes back to Mick's point about you, you do not sell what you think you sell, is we think we're selling benefits. We think that when we sell a mattress, we're selling a better night's sleep. The fact is, we're not selling a better night's sleep, and we're not selling a mattress; we're selling a better waking day the next day. So it's the advantage that the better night's sleep gives you; it's the advantage of the benefit. And this is where most marketers make the mistake. They're only taking it to the next step; they're not taking it to the step that the customer actually cares about.

Chris Torbay: I think that's the important part is people have gone through this exercise a number of times, and they always get to the first level away, and they think they've accomplished it. That's not... “That's right. We don't sell widgets, we sell peace of mind.” And you go, “Yeah, peace of mind." That, you are only one step in. You are still nebulous; you're still not changing my life.

Mick Torbay: And I guess when you,  the good part about that story is that at least you're thinking about it. We know it's not the drill, it's the hole. Is it the hole, or is it actually, I'm trying to hang a picture?

Is it I'm trying to hang a picture, or is it I'm trying to get my wife off my back for she's been telling me to hang that picture for six months? At least you're going down the right path. But the danger that can come up when you're trying to figure out what business you're in is that I find out, I find very often when I say to somebody, “Have you thought about what business you're in? Because it might not be the business you, you're specifically in," is that they tend to want to get more broad in it. “We're in the people business. We're in the solutions business,” which is so broad that now it includes fricking everything.

Chris Torbay: Every company is a solutions company, and you have no idea what it is they actually make or do.

Mick Torbay: So what I try to remind them is that when you're talking about what business are you really in, it is in fact a very specific business; it's just, and probably narrower than you think, but it might not be the one that you think of every day. And the best example of this is a company that I used to work with that was in what they would call the “home healthcare business”. So they sold scooters and wheelchairs and stair lifts and devices that would go in your bathroom, so you could hold onto the tub and get in and out. And this is specifically for people who identify with disability or might be older and are not quite a- as safe, feel as safe as they once were.

And I said, "Do you know what business you're in?" And she said, "Oh, yeah, I'm in the home healthcare business."

“No. I don't think you're quite onto it." And she said, “We're in the feeling comfortable, peace of mind business." There you go.

Chris Torbay: The first level away

Mick Torbay: The first level. But it's "No, you're in a very specific business, and once we nail that down, I think we can make a very powerful campaign."

And I made her work at it a little bit, but what I said was, "The business you're in is in, you are in the business of not going to a nursing home." And that's very powerful, because that's emotional, right? Nobody wants to go into a nursing home. So I built everything, the entire campaign, around staying in your home longer. Because the reason why people go into a nursing home is that they don't want to climb the stairs anymore. Because they feel uncomfortable in the bathroom or falling in the bathtub. They're going to fall down.

It's all those things. It's you can solve all those problems by going to a nursing home, or you can just fix the problem. And then you get to stay at home longer. And I can't seem to chase my grandkids around. It's like if you had a scooter, you could. And even the tagline that I wrote for them was, "Live where you want to live, and live with confidence." It's about not going to a nursing home.

So all of their competitors are offering, are talking about the stair climber 5000 with the six horsepower motor and the racing stripes and the cup holders. The features, the benefits the brands were telling them to advertise, because that was what made that product a particularly good product. It's fuck all of that, and actually speak to the consumer about what matters to the consumer in the language of the consumer, and you won't be surprised that those ads really move the needle.

Ryan Chute: Not surprisingly, most of the consumer behavior, behavioral sciences from the 1950s has been lost in a sea of distraction, shiny objects, and nonsense.

But back then, when David Ogilvy and Eugene Schwartz were talking about product awareness, situation awareness, the sophistication of the market, all of these things were helping us clarify.

In home services, if somebody doesn't have a problem with their air conditioner or hot water tank, they're not product aware, they're not problem aware, they're not situation aware, but they're sophisticated about hot water tanks in so much as they know that hot water tanks make my water hot, and there's a million choices out there. So advertising to that person who doesn't care is hard. But when something breaks, it's way easier to speak to that customer. The fact of it is that we're not speaking to them when it breaks. We're speaking to them before it breaks, if we're doing it well, or at the moment it breaks, and hoping to compete in that world, in that realm with everyone else.

And this is where we're going with it, if we're really going to connect with the customer, we have to choose when we're going to connect, but we also have to choose how we're going to connect with the messaging that we use. And the messages change. Before, they didn't care about your name, they didn't care about your brand, they didn't care about your products, they didn't care about the features, they didn't care about the benefits.

They care about themselves. They care about their life going on as it always has. So let's use the most valuable currency we have, and that's entertainment, until such time. Now we're entertaining them about the salient product of what we sell. But we have to pay attention to that throughout this whole process of if we're going to advertise, what the heck are we going to say that actually makes a difference?

Coca-Cola sells happiness, friendship, and connection using polar bears. They haven't advertised cocaine sugar water since 1868.

Mick Torbay: And they're not even in the polar bear business.

Ryan Chute: No.

Mick Torbay: To Chris's point, regarding my brother's thingy, I think there's a really interesting point in the home services world. Plumbing, HVAC, roofing, garage doors any of those sort of essential services for somebody's home.

In every example, the consumer, the homeowner, understands those things completely. We do not have to explain what replacing your broken water heater is all about. We don't have to explain the concept of “You're too hot, we're going to replace your air conditioner, and then it'll be the right temperature.”

This is a wonderful opportunity from a messaging perspective, because we don't have to do any of that. We can simply just have you feel good about this brand, think of it first, like it the best, have a good internal feeling about it, and we can spend 98% of our time just making you feel good about this brand, and then all we have to do is, "You know we fix air conditioners when they break, right?" That's it. That's it. It's done.

Ryan Chute: Which is sales activation. That is a call to action, right? And a lot of people lose sight that it is as much of a call to action as anything else, right? You don't have to have "It's 29 bucks. If you don't buy it today, it's going to be gone forever," no nonsense. You can actually just say, "Hey, we sell this thing. Just so you know, if you need that thing, we sell it."

Chris Torbay: And that's the misconception there that what business people think you're in is the low-price business or something like that. And that's not the aspect of it, and that's where, again, erroneously, a lot of companies use the power of the brand name of the thing they sell as a reinforcement of what their brand must be like or what, what they must be like as a company.

You and I worked on a company that was a Goodyear Tire retailer. I talked about the idea of co-op dollars, right? Where you think, "Hey, if I mention Goodyear three times in a commercial, the Goodyear company will pay half of the thing." This seems like a good idea, except that what's happening is you are now not telling me why you are the person I should get those Goodyear tires from. You're telling me why Goodyear is awesome, which people already know. And so you are advertising the wrong thing. You should be spending all of your money on why I should get them from you, because I can get them from somewhere else. And using someone else's brand to have a rub-off effect on why you are the brand is a tough leap to get the consumer to make.

Mick Torbay: I think a lot of the time people think of it in terms of, "Hey, Goodyear's going to pay for half of my ad." And I'm always thinking, "You just paid for half of a Goodyear ad." Because you can buy tires a lot of different places. And if you're paying for Goodyear, that's good for Goodyear. I'm not 100% sure that's going to give you ROAS.

Ryan Chute: There we go. But leading into this, Ryan's fun fact: Theodore Levitt, 1960, guys. This is not new information.

Mick Torbay: Even before Chris was born.

Chris Torbay: I think so.

Ryan Chute: I don't think so. Harvard Business Review number one most downloaded article ever in the history.

Chris Torbay: In 1960, they were downloading this article. They had to go to Harvard. You had to take a stone rubbing of it.

Ryan Chute: Most reprinted, and it still continues to be downloaded. You can actually, I looked it up. All right. You can actually download this article. Marketing Myopia is the name of it, and Levitt's argument is that companies fail because they define themselves by the product they sell instead of the customer they need to serve.

And this is exactly it. When you're advertising Goodyear, you've defined yourself as Goodyear and by Goodyear, not by the customer and their needs. And what this alludes to is that we already know that this is a mistake, yet we continue to do it because somebody who doesn't know anything about marketing is giving you supposed marketing advice.

Chris Torbay: And they think they're in the wrong business. "I think I'm in the business of selling Goodyear tires." Yes, but no, what business are you actually in?

Mick Torbay: And this is client-focused thinking. And given no other input, what is the client naturally going to do? If you own a Goodyear store and you sell a lot of tires, what are you going to? What is going to be the first thing in your mind?

By the way, today you just bought $100,000 worth of tires. Probably from Goodyear. And you're thinking to yourself, "Holy crap, I'm going to sell a whole lot of tires over the next six months. I should tell people because I just bought a bunch of these that I'm in the business.

Chris Torbay: Goodyear tire

Mick Torbay: So what is that business owner going to be thinking that they need to do? You’ve got to give the business owner a bit of a pass for getting that wrong. It's not their fault. But a kind advertising person will say, "I know you, you feel like..." And I had the same conversation with my home healthcare person, who had just spent $100,000 on scooters and was like, "I'm going to sell some scooters." It's like, "You need to sell not going to a nursing home, and the scooters will go." The stair lifts will go. You need to be the place that people think of when someone, when their deadbeat son-in-law says, "We should just put Grandma in a home." It's like, "No, I should fix my bathroom. That’s what I should do, and I've got some money."

Ryan Chute: Which requires them to stay in their home, which means that they need a scooter to get down to the mail.

Chris Torbay: We need a stairlift to get them upstairs. And they'll figure out that when I go to this store, who's going to help me with this? I might buy a scooter, I might buy a handle, I might buy a stairlift. They're

Ryan Chute: Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School, Jobs to Be Done Framework. This was back in 2016. He's written earlier articles on it, but the customers don't buy products. They hire products to do a job in their life. Understand the job, and you'll understand the brand.

I think that's a very interesting article that I read, and it was really instilling the idea that not everything that we buy is to tell the world who we are, and we're a part of the world. So it tells us who we are. It tells our inner circle, our outer circles who we are, what our status, what our rank is, what we see as valuable, important, and true. And it's tapping into that chemistry that's going to get us the result.

Mick Torbay: It's amazing how many products or categories you can connect with identity, which shouldn't be connected.

Chris Torbay: There's some that you expect and then others that you don't.

Mick Torbay: Yeah, clothing, you get it. Okay. You wear this ridiculous shirt all the time. We're not sure what you're trying to prove with that. But the point is that, for whatever reason, that's your identity. Computers should not be part of your identity, and yet some people buy Apple and some people won't. And why is it that I keep buying these stupid overpriced Apple products? Why? It's because that is part of my identity. I am the sort of person who buys a MacBook Pro and not a Dell. I cannot parse it out why I do that. It makes no sense. It's not what the computer looks like shouldn't matter. It's the thing that comes up on the screen, and that should matter, and that's all the same, but it does, and that applies to cars.

Chris Torbay: Yeah, I was going to say, automobiles, it's weird because of how much we talk as if we are buying them for technical reasons. We buy a pickup truck because of its towing capacity

Mick Tobray: How often are you towing shit with that?

Chris Torbay: Because of the size of the engine. It's no, you just want to be the guy who owns the Dodge Ram. Come on.

Mick Torbay: So far, too many things are connected with identity, which makes me think maybe it's everything. Maybe the roofer you call defines who you are. And therefore, if you are the roofer who somehow portrays yourself as this kind of person, and thus this kind of brand, then people will say, "That's the kind of roofer I would hire." It shouldn't work, but I think it does.

Chris Torbay: Yeah. Think about coffee shops, right? Coffee is coffee. You can argue the different places make it different ways. But coffee shops very much align with the kind of person you are. Are you a Starbucks person? Are you a Dunkin' person? And both of them will say, "Ah, that place isn't right for me. This place is right for me."

Ryan Chute: And they're both a badge of honor too. I mean, in a weird way, at the end of the day the Dunkin' person looks at the Starbucks person and says they're a bunch of pretentious twats, and then the Starbucks person looks at "Oh, you're a Dunkin' person?"

Mick Torbay: And then if someone goes to the local craft coffee shop and says both of those.

Ryan Chute: Exactly. Gets offended when they actually sell milk from a cow. So I watch a lot of Brooklyn coffee shop on TikTok. Very funny. I recommend. Let's think about it. Plumbers don't sell wrench turning. What do they sell? Are they selling the hot shower? Are they selling?

Mick Torbay: You're asking too big a question. This would vary client to client. When we're working with a client, the idea that any good, strong marketing idea is interchangeable with another client, I would submit, is either the wrong idea or not a particularly good one. SoI'm going to question the premise of your supposition. In the home healthcare business, I think it's clear. But that's a niche category. Plumbers, people understand it. I think it would come back to what does this plumber stand for?  And thus, what do I, as a consumer, how would I relate to that guy?

Chris Torbay: Well, because, and again, your first inclination to say they sell confidence or they sell, that your water heater's going to last or that your toilet's not going to leak, or they sell competence, they sell confidence.

But then, I agree. I would put it back to the person and say, "How are you going to do that in a way that your competitor, who is also taking that first leap away from I sell toilets to I sell plumbing confidence?"

I've got an electrician client in Chicago who is 100% electrician. Against many of his competitors, what he can sell is the expertise of being a guy who does that and that only, as opposed to other people who may do a bunch of things half-assed and yet he does this 100%. But it has to come then from the brand that when you sell that confidence, you sell it from a perspective that is unique, too.

Ryan Chute: Both of you holding those positions, what it seems like I'm hearing is that you're selling certainty more than anything else, which is probably the biggest culprit that we deal with against. Now, how we show up in uncertainty and solving for certainty is what the home services space fights against- the villains that we fight against and all of the different iterations and variations, which is where the story becomes unique.

Who's the hero? Here's the guide. Who's the villain, how are we fighting the villain in all of those, in those framings? But it's not unlike jewelry. We're not selling jewelry per se; we're selling the look on the woman's face, or to be said more directly, we're selling blow jobs.

Mick Torbay: You're not even allowed to sell that in a lot of places.

Ryan Chute: No, this is it. But if you sell jewelry, here we go. It ends up being this really interesting decision of what is it that we're trying to achieve here, and it goes back to this whole stuff that we see from Ogilvy & Mather about how sophisticated the market is. What is it that they feel as the real pain at different stages, and how can we lean into that in a very broad storytelling way?

Many angles of approach, as Roy would say, to get in and get the customer to pay attention in an entertaining way.

Mick Torbay: If you're doing it well, it should attract some, and it should repel others. With that, that's going to scare people right from the beginning. It should attract everyone. You cannot be all things to all people. If you're all things to all people, you're nothing, and you're nobody, and you can be ignored.

I've got a client on the West Coast that has a family-owned, female-owned business, and we built a whole campaign around how it's this very motherly type person who looks after her staff the way a mother does. And she speaks to them like a mother, and she jokes with them like a mother, and they joke back as they would with their mother, and you get this, and we never say family-owned, and we never say female-owned.  But we show it rather than telling it.

And I've got another client on the East Coast where the company is owned by former Marine Corps officers, and he tells the story about how he was trained as a Marine Corps officer. He's a true leader, and he has tremendous respect for the people who work for him, and he runs his company with military precision, and he has specialists who, just like the military does, they operate like specialists, and they take things seriously. It is not; there's nothing joking in his. There's nothing fun about that campaign. It is about taking things seriously and translating a life where things used to be life or death, and then saying, "We take it that seriously when we're fixing your water heater." Not interchangeable at all. That campaign, some people will be very attracted to that campaign, some people will find that off-putting. That's okay.

We are not for everybody, but there are going to be a lot of people who are going to say, "I like the kind of guy he would hire is going to be incredibly good at their job, because if they're not good at their job, he would be repulsed by that.” Again, this is a good example of why a good campaign can only work for this client. If you think you can rip off someone's idea and say, "I'm going to do that," good luck. It will not work. The consumer will smell that pretense so far away, and it will die quickly.

Ryan Chute: Even if you're a Marine, frankly, because the disposition of these gentlemen is very different than the disposition of other Marines that I've met. And, jokes aside, being a Canadian military myself…

Mick Torbay: You can’t help yourself ...

Ryan Chute: I really can't. Just so many crayons. This guy didn't have a single crayon in his office...

Mick Torbay: Say nice things about Marines.

Ryan Chute: But what it circles back to me in this conversation is advertising why they buy, not why you sell, right?

So Simon Sinek came up with this whole notion of start with why. What most people took from that is, what do I believe in, and all of this context, the Golden Circle and the whole thing, great. I love Simon Sinek, and his notion is right.

But where it leads astray when we get into marketing is that we're talking about ourselves and what we sell. Why do we sell it? Why we sell it is only the first part, just like we talked about with features, benefits, and advantages. The why we sell it is the benefit. The advantage to the customer is why the customer would buy it in the first place. They don't care about us. They care about what's going to solve their problem. This is the thing that we, as creatives, strategic creative writers, and strategists, are coming up with individually for each client, to your earlier point. Yes, everybody is defending and fighting uncertainty in their own ways with their own stories, their own messages. They're bridging the gap of trust with empathy and competence. But without that understanding that we have to go one step past what you sell into why they would buy, we miss this whole point.

Chris Torbay: Why is the why that you have for selling it important to me as the buyer?

Mick Torbay: I think Simon Sinek does a good job of at least breaking out of the original thing, which is, "Here's what we do. Here's who we are, here's what we sell." And that's what we have to remember the bar is tremendously low. In marketing, regardless of category, it doesn't really matter, regardless of market, it doesn't matter. Most advertising, television, radio, digital, "Here's who we are, here's what we sell," which is, of course, answering two questions that nobody is asking. Who are you? Who are you? What do you sell? And what do you sell? So he did the right thing by saying, "For God's sake, stop talking about who you are and what you sell,” because nobody gives a shit. And that's a start, but you're right, he doesn't go far enough, and that's why Roy, in his books, Roy Williams, goes farther along saying, "Speak to the consumer in the language of the consumer about what matters to the consumer.” Stop talking about your fertilizer. Talk to me about my lawn. That's the next stage. But frankly, just to get to where Simon Sinek got is already like miles ahead.

Chris Torbay: You're 85% of the way there.

Mick Torbay: We're talking about the last 15 here.

Ryan Chute: That's it. Fun, Ryan's fun fact: Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow, brilliant book, Oxford University Press, 2010, and the ongoing peer-reviewed work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Brands don't grow by being different. They grow by being mentally available and emotionally distinctive at the moment of decision. Features blur, feelings stick.

Powerful statement, and that's really what we're trying to get to here in this conversation is understanding the nuance of those differences.

Mick Torbay: I think Coca-Cola proved that in the '80s when they changed their formula to something that, in focus groups, consumers preferred. They focus-grouped the hell out of that formula change. They focus-grouped that to the ends of the earth. People preferred the new taste of Coke, absolutely 100% in blind taste tests. The new taste of Coke tasted better. But people didn't feel good about it. They liked the slightly shittier flavor because they had grown up with it their entire lives, and they were repelled by the idea, "I can't have that anymore." It's "You don't like it." "I don't care if I don't like it." It's, "

Chris Torbay: “Give me more of that cod liver oil."

Mick Torbay: It's insane. But it just goes to prove we, we make our decisions based on emotion. And when we have to remember that, what business are we in? We're in the emotion-creating business. We create feelings. That's what we, that's what we do for a living. We make people feel things that they shouldn't. They shouldn't have a feeling about an air conditioning company. They shouldn't.

Ryan Chute: In 2003, Gerald Zaltman said that exact same thing in Harvard Business School: How Customers Think. He was using neuroimaging and metaphor elicitation research. Zaltman found that roughly 95% of purchase decisions are made unconsciously, driven by emotional associations the buyer can't even articulate.

Mick Torbay: “I know I'm going to buy that thing; I just have to spend a couple of days figuring out how I'm going to explain it to my wife. I’m going to go and cherry-pick some facts and figures so that I can buy that thing that I am going to have.”

Ryan Chute: And that shows up in Daniel Kahneman's work Thinking Fast and Slow. We've certainly been talking about it with Wizard of Ads for eons. It is the precipice of this.

People aren't buying with reasoning, they're buying with emotion. And it goes into the brain emotionally, goes over to the rational side for reasoning, and then the rational side kicks it back to the emotion to make sure that it feels right before they tip the scales, break the seal, and step into the sale.

Mick Torbay: So, as a business owner, I would say you almost certainly can't do this exercise by yourself. You almost certainly can't figure out what business you're in as long as you're in it. As long as you're sitting in your office and you're doing the thing that you do all the time, you're kinda going to land in the same place that everybody else who sits in your chair lands in. So wherever you naturally feel that's who you are, and that's what makes you distinctive and what makes you who you are, all your competitors are going to land in the same place. And if you're wondering why all ads sound the same, that's why. It's that client-based perspective. And so if you want to break out of that, you really do need professional help. You need someone outside who will dare to tell you you're not in the business you think you're in, and won't get beat up for that.

Ryan Chute: Look, I see it as three layers to start, one is the features. Family-owned, and we do this, we have people care, and all the blah, blah, blah. Then we have the layer number two, the benefits. We fight uncertainty in home services. But that's where most people stop when they're doing a better job than most. The whole Simon Sinek notion here of start with why. But then there's the next layer beyond that is how are we fighting uncertainty? What is it that we do?  

Mick Torbay: Prove it. Prove that you're fighting uncertainty.

Ryan Chute: And the problem in that layer is that even if you're really good at figuring out the uncertainty part, you're probably not going to tell the how and what of the golden circle of your why that the customer cares about in an entertaining way.

Mick Torbay: Probably not.

Ryan Chute: So great, you've just told them in an incredibly boring way how and what you do to fight uncertainty, and no one cares.

Mick Torbay: It's hard. It's harder than it looks.

Ryan Chute: It's way harder than it looks. That, listen, the first time I stepped into the very first partners meeting in 2017, by the time the first day ended, I was like “I'm not going to write a damn thing for anyone ever."

This way beyond my scope of ability, and I would have had to have started 30 years ago, like you guys did, what, I think, 30 years ago.

Mick Torbay: 75 years ago for Chris.

Ryan Chute: 75 for Chris.

Mick Torbay: I mean, it's coming up to

Ryan Chute: It's more than 30 years. We'll just say that. That's yeah, so we're just celebrating anniversaries at this point.

Mick Torbay: It was the cotton gin you were first working on.

Chris Torbay: Yes. The cotton gin, yes. I think it's really going to take off.

Ryan Chute: He helped Jim Beam with his first run.

Let's do the swap test. Take your last three ads, cover up your company's name, replace it with your biggest competitor's name. Does the ad still make sense?

Mick Torbay: Or is it absolutely impossible? Would it be absolute gibberish?

Ryan Chute: If the ad still works word for word with a different company name on it, congratulations, you're not advertising for yourself anyway. You're advertising for the industry. A real brand ad would feel completely wrong when somebody else's name was on it, to your point, Mick. That's the bar that you need to set as a minimum bar. Yeah. And it's through entertaining storytelling where you're coming up with, based on a true story, characterizations that speak into the customer's why, not your own. This has been a fantastic conversation, guys. I look forward to us getting onto the next episode.

Ryan Chute: Here's the thing. If you're running a business in America, here's what I'd want you walking out the door with. One, stop selling the little purple pill. Sell the gleeful stroll to work the next morning. Your customer isn't calling you for your thingy.

They're calling you for what your thingy gives them. Two, the biggest feeling to overcome is uncertainty. People buy what you have to sell when you make them feel better than your competitor does. Three, forget different. Be distinct. All your competitors look exactly like you. Find a way to show up in a distinct way.

Pull every competitor ad in your zip code, then refuse to advertise the same thing. Everyone says quality service, 24-hour emergency, family-owned since whenever. Cool. Let them have that. Go tell a crazy story that takes the emotional high ground they were all too scared to or too incompetent to claim. If you don't hear anything else, hear this.

You are not in the home service business. You are in the feelings business, and your greatest villain is Captain Confusion. Kill the bad guy and win the sale. Go tell that story. Until next time, this is Advertising in America. Thanks for tuning in.

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Thank you for joining us on Advertising in America. We hope you enjoyed the show and captured a nugget of marketing magic. Wanna hear more? Subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your friends.

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Wanna spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Ryan Chute today.

Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.

For many, ad writing can be intimidating. There are so many elements that go into good ad copy, from the creativity needed to come up with an attention-grabbing headline, to the knowledge of how to target your audience and craft a message that speaks to them. Achieving this part is half the battle, so how do we follow these strategies and get the results we want? When writing ads, your target audience needs to feel like they are at the center of your world. You must know who they are, what they want and how to speak their language. And the best fool-proof way to do that is by using the word "you."

In this article, we will show you how to write compelling ads that your target audience can't resist — from the basics of ad writing to the very principles that make "you" a moneymaking word in advertising.

How do you Write an Ad?

Ad writing is different than any other type of writing. You have to be able to capture the reader's attention and convey a message in a short amount of time. To do this, you need to understand your audience and what they are looking for. Ad copywriting should be clear, concise and persuasive. It should also be free of any grammar or punctuation errors. The most integral part of ad writing is the headline. The headline is what grabs the reader's attention and urges them to read more. Then there are subheadlines, which elaborate on the main points of the ad. You also have the slogan, which is a short, catchy phrase that sums up the ad's message; the body copy, where you will deliver your persuasive message; and finally, the call-to-action, which gives the reader an action of to do next. Ad writing is a skill that takes practice to perfect, and it's important to remember to keep your audience in mind. Write ad copy that speaks to them directly and tells them what they want to hear. However, writing ads can take up a lot of time and effort. At Wizard of Ads for Essential Services, we can take on any and all of your advertising needs. We create ad campaigns that drive results, so you can focus on running your business. Contact us today to learn more!

What are the Key Components of an Ad?

An ad is made up of a few key components that work together to create a persuasive message. Here are some of the biggest key components of an ad that you should include in order to build a successful ad campaign.

Headline

The headline is one of the most important components in an advertising copy, as it is the first thing that people will see. It is crucial to ensure the headline is catchy and interesting to grab people's attention. The headline should also accurately reflect what the ad is about so that people know what they're getting themselves into. For example, a headline for an ad for a new car might be "Introducing the newest addition to our line-up: the 2017 Ford Mustang!" The ad writing for this headline is enticing and tells you exactly what the ad is about — a Ford Mustang. If the headline was something like "Looking for a new car? Look no further!", it would not be as accurate and would not reflect what the ad is selling. The reader would likely be misled and think that the ad is for a general car search, rather than a specific model. The headline is therefore an important part of an ad because it sets the tone and informs the reader of what to expect.

Sub-Headlines

Sub-headlines are the area of text that appears directly below the headline on an ad. They are there to draw attention to the most important points of the ad and can influence whether or not someone decides to read it. Good sub-headlines will:

Be relevant to the main headline: They should reinforce what the headline is saying and add additional information that will help persuade the reader.

Expand on the main message: They should provide more information about what the ad is offering and why it is beneficial.

Be interesting: They should be able to stand on their own and be something that would make someone want to read more.

Highlight key benefits: They should focus on the most important selling points and make it easy for people to see why they should be interested.

Contain important keywords: Including the right keywords in your sub-headlines can help improve your ad’s search engine ranking.

By using sub-headlines, you can make your ad writing more effective and increase the chances that people will take notice.

Slogan

Slogans are short, catchy phrases that serve as a call to action or summarize the main message of an ad. Slogans should be memorable and often used in marketing campaigns to create brand awareness or drive sales. Some famous ad copy examples of slogans include:

Just Do It (Nike)

Think Different (Apple)

I'm Lovin' It (McDonald's)

Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hands (M&M's)

Slogans are effective because they are concise and easy to remember. They can also be powerful tools for creating an emotional connection with consumers. When choosing a slogan for your ad, it is important to consider what you want your ad writing to achieve. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Drive sales? Create an emotional connection? Once you know what you want your ad to do, you can craft a slogan that will help you achieve those goals.

Body

The body is responsible for delivering the message and convincing the reader to take action. This is where you include your persuasive arguments, statistics and testimonials. It's also important to make sure your body is well-written and error-free, as it can make or break an ad. To write great ad copy for the body of your ad, start by brainstorming what you want to say. Once you have a solid idea of your message, start drafting your ad copy using the following tips:

Keep it short and concise: You only have a few seconds to capture your reader's attention, so make sure your ad copy is easy to read and understand.

Use strong verbs: When writing ad copy, use powerful verbs to create an emotional connection with your reader. For example, "save," "enjoy," or "experience."

Use numbers and statistics: Numbers and statistics can be very persuasive, so be sure to include them in your ad copy if possible.

Use testimonials: Testimonials from real people are incredibly powerful and can be very convincing. If you have any testimonials from satisfied customers, be sure to include them in your ad copy.

Highlight the benefits: When writing ad copy, always focus on the value of your product or service rather than the features. Your readers will care more about how your offer can improve their lives than the technical details.

Visuals/Graphics

Including visuals and graphics in an ad is one of the greatest ways to ensure that it will be effective. Visuals and graphics help to convey the message of the ad by providing a visual representation of the information being advertised. They can help to grab attention, communicate complex ideas and make the ad more memorable. Visuals and graphics must be well-designed and correctly implemented to entice an audience, otherwise, they can detract from the ad's effectiveness. To implement eye-catching visuals and graphics in your ads, consider using images, infographics, videos and other multimedia. Be sure to choose something relevant to your product or service that will resonate with your target audience. Keep in mind the overall tone of the ad and make sure that the visuals support it. If you're not confident in your ability to create effective visuals yourself, consider hiring a professional designer to help you out. By including visuals in your ad, you can greatly improve its chances of success.

Lay-out

Ad layouts are important for a couple of reasons. For one, they help to ensure that the ad looks professional and appealing. Additionally, ad layouts can be used to strategically place key components of the ad, such as the headline and call to action, to maximize their impact. There are a few key components that all ads should have. The headline is one of the top key components of an ad, as it is what will catch people's attention and convince them to read further. The call-to-action is also critical, as it tells people what you want them to do after reading the ad. Finally, you'll also want to include some branding or contact information so people know who created the ad and how they can get in touch. With a flawless ad layout, you can create an ad that's both visually appealing and persuasive.

Why “You” is the Most Irresistible Word

As someone who works in or around marketing and advertising, you may have been told at one point or another that mentioning the name of the company at least seven times in your ad is the best way to reach customers. However, the word that’s the most irresistible in the English language only has three letters, and that powerful word is “you.” When your audience sees or hears the word “you,” they become immediately engaged. It puts your ad in the present tense, with the viewer as the main subject and protagonist. It will encourage the viewer to imagine their lives with your product or service, and that’s a powerful motivator. To make the most of this strategy, you need to ensure that every time you mention “you,” it’s accompanied by some sort of benefit. Whether that’s a lower price, a new feature or simply the peace of mind that comes with using a well-established brand, your ad needs to offer something that resonates with viewers on a personal level. Using the word "you" in your ad copy is an excellent way to create a personal connection with potential customers. By putting the viewer at the center of the ad, you encourage them to imagine how your product or service can improve their lives. Although crafting the perfect ad can be difficult, it’s well worth the effort. When you partner with an experienced and talented team of ad wizards, you can bypass all of that trial and error and create ads that are sure to grab attention and convert leads into customers. At Wizard of Ads for Essential Services, we are just the ad sorcerers you are looking for. If you’re ready to take your advertising to the next level, contact us today!