Tired of Pretty Ads That Don’t Sell? This “Ugly” Approach Works

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me, your host, Jim James. Now, if you are running ads on social or you're getting involved in digital and it's not working, you're spending money and the agency is maybe delivering pretty ads for you and the thumbnails look nice on your YouTube, but you're not getting any results. My guest today is going to tell you probably why and more importantly, what you can do about it. In fact, my guest today runs an agency called Ugly Marketing, which in itself gives us a clue to how he thinks. But also he's going to tell you the difference between really digital broadcast and digital engagement. And he's also going to tell us how he's built a team of Gen Z that are so good that his clients for his design agency are asking him to consult on how to get Gen Z staff to work so effectively. And my guest today is Wayne Mullins joining us from Alexandria in Louisiana. Wayne, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Jim. I'm excited for this chat today.

Well, I am too. And for those people that want to watch this on YouTube, you can see Wayne has probably got the designer set. He has a beautiful mic set up, but he also has a fantastic pink couch. He has the words remarkable in pink neon against a black wall and he has a beautiful frieze on the, on the wall. So it actually looks like a virtual set. But it's a true set, Wayne, isn't it? Because ugly marketing, you like to view things a little bit differently, don't you, to traditional agency. So tell us a little bit about Ugly marketing. First of all, how did you come up with such an original name?

Sure thing, Jim. So again, thank you for the compliments on the, the backdrop here. The, the room, this room definitely stands out and it captures attention for sure. The name Ugly mug Marketing actually comes from a quote by a gentleman of the name David Ogilvy. So David Ogilvy was the co founder of what was at one point the world's largest ad agency. Ogilvy and Mather, they're still, I think, one of the top 10 in terms of size with offices around the world. But David had a quote within his offices that was this. I would rather you show me an ad that's ugly and effective over one that's beautiful, but isn't. You know, Jim, that one phrase is really our North Star. You see my background, as you mentioned, in lawn and landscape, that background, I worked with other marketing companies, other marketing agencies, and those agencies were always showing me really fancy things. Fancy websites, fancy ads for magazines, things like that. And my complaint was these beautiful things that looked amazing weren't driving sales. And so that became my North Star with the marketing agency.

I think that's great. Thanks for referencing David Ogilvie, you know, one of the scions of the ad agency world. But, Wayne, you've built your own agency, ugly marketing, and you've got clients from around the world, even though, as you said, you're in a town of some 48,000 people. So it's a testament to the work you're doing. What's the secret to then success to create marketing that works rather than marketing that just looks pretty wonderful.

Question, I think, you know, there. There's so much. We could dive into so many different directions here. We could go with that. One of the things that I think is most important when you're crafting or creating a campaign, it was centered around what I would call the three Cs of design. Now, these are the three Cs that are taught at pretty much every design school around the world. So anyone who's designing a website or a magazine or, you know, even social media campaigns are probably familiar with the three Cs. And the three Cs are simply this. You have contrast, which is kind of the contrasting elements, the colors that are used on the ad or on the website. Then you have the composition, which is the structure or the layout of it. And then the third C is the content that is the actual message being portrayed. Now, the way that most people, particularly designers, they love to approach it. They love to do creative things. They love to do things that are beautiful. So they start with the composition, the structure, the layout, or maybe they even start with the colors. Right? They have a certain color scheme that they want to go with, but that's a mistake. The place that you must start is you must start with the message. The content itself, the content must resonate. Not with you, not with me, not with the designer, but with the audience we are trying to communicate with. Because at the end of the day, if that message does not speak to them, if it doesn't cause them to. To stop and examine the story, the narrative that is taking place in their mind, they're never going to move to that next step in taking action and doing business with us.

Wayne, how do we get into the mind of that person that's going to receive this ad bid on, you know, on social media, maybe in print or on the radio or even as a podcast ad? How do we get in their mind when we don't get to meet them and see them in the way that we used to when we used to go to, you know, in retail or in offices. How are you helping clients to understand who the clients are?

First of all, that question is, is great. And it is a huge challenge, not just for us in marketing, but for entrepreneurs, business owners. You know, as an entrepreneur and business owner, we have a million things on our plate, right? There's a million things that we have to pay attention to. And if we're not careful, we lose sight of the very person or the very people that we exist to serve, and that is the customer. So there's two simple exercises that we love to walk our clients through. Number one is creation of what we would call a customer avatar. Now, a customer avatar is merely a fictitious character of your ideal client. So what are their age ranges of that ideal client? Where do they live? Where do they work? What type of automobile do they drive? Do they have kids? Are they single? Are they married? What type of TV shows do they watch? Do they watch tv? What magazines are they looking at? So we build out this profile of our ideal customer. And what this does, number one, is it gives us some information when we turn to go start marketing, where do we need to show up for these people?

So if.

If we don't spend the time to do this, we may be throwing a lot of money reaching a lot of people who are not our ideal customers. See this time and time again. So customer avatar is the first exercise, and then the second exercise, which takes this to a whole different level. And this one is extremely powerful. It's called the magic journal exercise. And what we have our clients do is imagine that you are your ideal customer. And we want you to write a page from your ideal customer's journal as if you were them. So imagine this gentleman, your. Your ideal customer, wakes up in the morning. They wipe the sleep from their eyes. They stumble over to their desk or to the couch. They pull out their journal to sit and just journal for the morning. They take a sip of their coffee, they flip open the journal, and somehow there's words on the page that should be blank for the day. They wipe their eyes, thinking, hey, am I dreaming? What's going on here? And they begin to read these words. And these words talk about what they are experiencing. Their pains, their frustrations, their triumphs, their joys. What is taking place in their lives. And so that is the exercise we want our. Our clients to walk through and work through. And here's why. When we do the customer avatar it gives us a lot of great information about how to target, how to reach the right audience and ensure our message is going in the right places. But when you do the magic journal page, what it does is enables you to connect with your customers on an emotional level. And when you do that, you cut through the noise. Because if you survey what everyone else is doing, they are talking to people based on facts and data and why we're the best choice. But when you speak to them about them, you immediately stand out.

That is wonderfully insightful and as you say, very sensitive as well. In terms of writing a journal, I haven't heard anyone talk about creating a magic journal. As you are the avatar, let's really take to the next, to the next level. Isn't it as well, Wayne? So many of us get into the habit of, if you like, spraying and praying, you know, of creating content that, as you say, probably doesn't have contrast, maybe doesn't have the right content, doesn't have the right colors. What about the dangers that you see where people are getting onto social media using tools like Buffer, Zoho, these amplification tools, they really enable us to broadcast at scale, don't they? Do you see that as being dangerous in some way then? If you'd really need such an almost an aesthetic and empathetic approach, I don't.

Know that I would call it dangerous, but I may call it wasteful. And here's why. We look around as entrepreneurs, we look around and we see competitor, a man, their photos on Instagram look amazing. So we think, oh, we've got to, we got to have amazing photos over on Instagram or we look over on LinkedIn and we, we see the post and the engagement that our competitor gets with their post and, you know, all the comments and stuff, and we think, oh, well, you know, I need to write a clever post on LinkedIn. And so we're constantly showing up and throwing up our messages and hoping that they resonate. And what I would say is that most entrepreneurs, they aren't actually doing social media. What they are doing is digital media. And the difference is when you do digital media, you show up with a megaphone, like you were saying, gentlemen, and you're just broadcasting your message, hoping that it hits the right person, that it resonates with the right person. And the reality is, we all know it doesn't work right. Look at your results. Look at your frustration with quote, unquote, social media. You're unhappy more than likely because you're following the wrong approach. Social media means conversation. Social is about dialogue, not monologue. And so my question for you would be, how are you actually showing up and engaging with the people who matter most to, to your business? When you show up and engage with them in meaningful ways, you turn what everyone else is doing, digital marketing into social and you win.

And it's a really good distinction that you drawn there, which we don't normally do, which is actually we use digital and social media as synonyms. Right. We talk about social media and digital media as if they're interchangeable, but really you're saying that really one is a technology and one is a behavior. And we really need to think of them as maybe social in a digital media, not one in the same. So Wayne, thank you for calling that out because it's really, really valuable and helps people to also maybe be less disaffected with digital media, but rather see their approach in a different light. Now a generation that really understands the social aspects of digital media are Gen Z. How are you engaging this generation? Because at the kind of work you are doing as well at ugly mug marketing, you need the young to be doing some of this work. So can you share with us how you're overcoming the challenge that a lot of people talk about, which is getting young people to want to, want to play a role and be engaged in a company?

Yeah, you know, so that, that question leads to an answer which has to do with probably the biggest failure, one of the biggest failures of my entrepreneurial journey. You know, Jim, for the first seven to eight years of running this agency, I was of the opinion that culture, the culture within our organization was something that I would one day get to like. It was this, this thing that, you know, when we had enough resources, when I had enough time, when I had enough staff, I would eventually address culture. And here's what I've learned, is that if you are not intentional about building a high performance, self accountable culture, then you are unintentionally allowing a disengaged and underperforming culture. And that for me came out of a luncheon, an entrepreneurial luncheon that I went to about eight years ago now. I was invited to this luncheon. It was a mastermind group and there was probably 15 to 20 other business owners in that room. And it just so happened that that day the topic was going to be your team and how do you build your team, how do you grow your team, how do you inspire your team, all this stuff. And so the very first question that the facilitator asked, he said Go, we're going to go around the room. I want you to state your name, your business, and how many people work for you. Well, Jim, there was this one entrepreneur in the group who everyone knew his business. He had about six or seven hundred employees at the time, very, very successful. And everyone knew of him just from the success that he had in his business. So people start and they're going around the room and they're stating, you know, their name and their business and the number of employees they have on their team. And it gets to this person who everyone looks up to, admires and respects. And he says his name, he says his business name. And then he says, in terms of the number of employees who work for me, it's usually about half of them. And so the room erupts in laughter and everyone's talking about, oh, I can, you know, I can relate to that. No one wants to work. No one wants to show up for the next hour and a half. That was the entire conversation. It was how people don't want to work, how they are unmotivated, uninspired, how all they want is a paycheck. And to be honest with you, Jim, I left that meeting very depressed because in my brain I was thinking, is this what I have to look forward to, right? Is this the battle that I'm going to always have to face? And out of that contemplation and out of that kind of depression, what I realized was there are organizations who have phenomenal employees. There are organizations who have amazing cultures. And I knew that that's what I wanted for ugly mug marketing. And that was the day that one day, that one instant, that one seven years of failure in terms of not paying attention to culture culminated with that one lunch meeting which turned me down. This path to learning to build a culture that is both engaged and high performing.

Wayne, I love that story. And I think, you know, you and I were employees once and we both suffered from the seeing the divergence between what we got paid and what we earned for the company. And we lose track, don't we, as entrepreneurs of how easy it is to feel disconnected from the, from the company. How have you then gone about creating this self evaluation, high performing culture? Just, you know, because it's so interesting in what you're doing and generating this engagement. Love to hear that from you before we move on to the more sort of still getting noticed aspects of the business?

Absolutely. I think, Jim, that it really boils down to these two parallels. One is alignment and then the other is autonomy. Alignment and autonomy. And as entrepreneurs, what I've discovered is we typically fall into one of two camps. We tend to either be micromanagers or we tend to be completely hands off. And then what happens is we vacillate back and forth between these two things, always defaulting back to our natural tendency. And when we do that, we are creating havoc within our own organization. You know, one of the things that I would say that I walked away from that meeting with the realization of is that it's not the employee's fault that they're unmotivated, uninspired and unwilling to show up and work. That is solely my responsibility. It is my job as the leader to ensure that everyone on the team is going in the right direction, is pulling in the right direction. So when I say autonomy and alignment, those two things are critical for alignment. It's all the stuff we know we should have, that we know we should do. It's the vision, it's the mission, it's the values. It's ensuring that the people know what we're trying to accomplish and where we're trying to go. And our values give them the guidepost to help them ensure they're staying on the right path as they pursue that mission and that vision that we've set forth for them. And the beautiful thing is when you have high alignment around those things, you can have high autonomy. And autonomy just simply means that when you have the right people on your team, people who are aligned and pulling in the right direction towards your vision, you can trust them to execute. You can trust them to use their gifts, their unique gifts and their abilities as they see fit towards that mission. Now, that doesn't mean we don't have, you know, some check in points. Our weekly team meeting and the way we have that structured is a very important part of the culture that we've created. But those two elements are so vital to building that culture.

When I love that and as in the same way that as a, you know, a coach on the sidelines doesn't go on the pitch and play right, you, you've established the ground rules for the team and then you have to let people come play, make the plays, don't you? Wayne? Wayne. Ugly mug. Marketing. You know, it's about this time that I ask people who so far in the interview seem indomitable and invincible. I do ask the, the mistake question, is there something that you've, you've done, you touched about culture, so maybe let's not go back over that, but is there something that you've done in A marketing getting noticed front, that that didn't work as you would have hoped and maybe you would let us know so we wouldn't do it ourselves.

Sure. I think, you know, in, in the marketing perspective coming into this, I got sidetracked a lot. Just like any other entrepreneur. I knew the right ways, quote unquote, right ways to do things, the right way to market. And yet, because I had so much on my plate because of all the things going on, I allowed us to become complacent in our unique approach to marketing. And specifically, what I mean by that is, you know, I believe there's a huge difference between advertising and marketing. And earlier we talked about how those, how the words are kind of synonyms and can be used as one in the same. But the reality is advertising is merely a piece or a component of marketing. They're not used interchangeably. But what happens by default, and this is exactly what happened to me, is we default back to doing advertising things and assuming that we are being strategic with our marketing and we're not doing a bunch of different things. Social media, television, radio, print, email, you name it, whatever the things are. Just because you're doing a myriad a bunch of different things, that does not mean you're being strategic and that doesn't mean you're doing marketing. What you're doing are a bunch of advertising pieces and you're calling it marketing. And that is a tremendous mistake. And the challenge, Jim, is this, that that mistake we often can't see because we're under the illusion that all of these things that we're doing are actually part of a cohesive marketing strategy, and they're not.

And Wayne, if you want to solve that problem, how do they take a view of their business from a strategic marketing point of view? How do you. How do you suggest you do that? You talked about creating the avatar, for example, which conceivably is strategic, but a little bit tactical. Is there something that you'd recommend as the, as the founder of several businesses now and with ugly mug marketing, is there something you'd say solves that problem?

I think to begin, you have to understand kind of the fundamentals of what marketing is. At the end of the day, I believe that marketing boils down to psychology and math. So psychology, from the perspective of we're trying to persuade people, we have to convince them, we have to position ourselves, our business, our products, in such a way that it persuades people to change their stories to buy into what we're selling. The math part, you can't be A strategic marketer. If you aren't watching the numbers, if you are not holding every dollar spent accountable for an roi, you are not being strategic. So one of the very first places that I'd love for people to start when we look at the psychology side, is just simply this. There's really three ingredients to move somebody to become a buyer. Number one, we have to identify, like the avatar piece, who those people are really clearly. Then we have to get them to know about us and to like us. It's that simple. Get them to know about us and like us. At that point, what we would call them is they are now friends of ours, right? They're not customers, they're merely friends. The next step is we have to move our friends into customers. And the one core ingredient, Jim, that's needed to do that is trust. And here's the thing. People don't trust us as entrepreneurs and they don't trust us as marketers. And the reason is this. They know that we have a vested interest, that we are biased towards our product or service. So if they don't trust us, the question is, who do they trust? And so that varies from company to company, organization to organization, but it's not us. We need to make sure that we're using reviews, we're using case studies, we're using testimonials, we're using previous clients who are willing to speak on our behalf. And then the super quick, last final piece to being strategic is this. We all know when. When I talk to entrepreneurs, when I talk to business owners, or when I'm speaking at an event and I ask, where do your best customers come from? The resounding answers usually come back from word of mouth or from referrals. That's where our best customers come from. And then my next question is simply this. What percent of your budget is allocated to turning your existing customers into evangelist for your brand? So answer that question truthfully for yourselves, and then I would challenge you to, to just begin moving more of your marketing dollars over to that side of the equation. You know, you think about it, Jim, there's 6.4, 6.5 billion people on the planet today with this little device. I'm holding up a smartphone. That means there's 6.4 or 5 billion people with the ability to share our message for us. And yet, as entrepreneurs and marketers, we're so busy trying to find the next person that doesn't know about us to get them to like us, to trust us, to buy our stuff instead of empowering our existing Customers and clients.

That's a great. A great piece of advice. And the idea that actually one of our greatest real marketing assets really are our existing customers. And we're so busy finding new ones, we often neglect the existing ones. There's often not a budget, as you say, for referrals, and yet there really should be. Wayne Mullins over there in Alexandria, Louisiana. If I asked you for a. A book or a podcast, what would that be, do you think?

The one that comes to mind is a book called Michael Jackson, Inc. So it's about Michael Jackson, the famous pop star musician, and it's really about the business side of Michael Jackson. And one of the most fascinating things about that book is the way that he learned to position himself. Even the way he gained the title of the King of Pop was very intentional. It was very calculated. It didn't just happen. And so that book really is about how do you stand out in a very crowded marketplace.

That is fascinating. Wayne, I can't let you get away without just explaining very briefly, how did Michael Jackson end up getting the title of King, which I thought belonged to Elvis.

Yeah. So it actually boiled down to they wanted him to appear on a certain award show, and he negotiated in that that the only way he would appear is if they use that title to call him out onto stage. So that is the way he ended up with the King of Pop.

So really, the message for those of us entrepreneurs is understand your positioning, understand where you want to be positioned. Wayne, you're positioned wonderfully in that amazing studio there. Ugly mug marketing. If people want to find you, how can they do that?

The simplest place is our website. That's just ugly mugmarketing dot com. All of our socials there, email addresses, phone numbers, all that stuff's all in one spot.

Wayne, thank you so much for agreeing to come on the show today. I've really, really enjoyed it.

Thank you, Jim, for the opportunity to have enjoyed our chat as well.

So Wayne has shared with us a number of things, and what I really like is this combination of some strategic thinking, quoting David Ogilvy and Talking about the three Cs of content composition and contrast, foundational work in advertising. But also he's really understood the importance of alignment. And the culture can't just be a byproduct of how you behave. Culture is what you establish with intent. And I've learned that lesson myself over 25 years as well, that that's the most important thing for engaging existing and new people to work for you and with you. And also that then resonates and really goes out into your customer community as well. And that final point about Michael Jackson, I didn't expect that we'd get that. But this idea that really, as an entrepreneur, you also have to be very intentional about how you position yourself, because otherwise people will position you as they want to position you. So be intentional about that as well. So a wonderful, wonderful interview today with my guest, Wayne Mullins, the CEO, founder of a company called Ugly Mug Marketing. My name's Jim James. Thanks for joining me, your host on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. If you've enjoyed it, do please leave a review. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.