Ron Lynch — The 3-Part Formula That Can Make Any Product Sell

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flowchart with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf.

Hey, hey.

Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, Joe.

Matt. That's not fair.

Joe pressed the record, thinking he was gonna get the upper hand on me, but I got it.

It's not fair.

He got to be the one to press the button for once.

I feel so powerful.

This is weird, huh? We actually, like. I feel like, what are we doing? I feel like a newscaster now? Because, like, we actually decided to get all professional and print out notes for all of.

Yeah. So this is a little interesting right here. Well, it was both of us. You know, we have a note taker on our team, and we also go through and actually do a crap ton of research on every single guest. We do as best we can.

It may not sound like it. Sometimes we like to sound like we don't know what we're talking about, but we actually do insane amounts of research to sound like we don't know what we're talking about.

So now we look like we used to present these things on the TV in Matt's office, but we're like. It's kind of annoying. Can't see everything all on the same page, especially if you have a lot of notes or if you want to go check our. While we're talking. So now Matt's like, hey, we could be newscasters.

Yeah.

Like Ron Burgundy.

Shout out and a whale's vagina.

Wow.

You're too far.

That's where we live.

Oh, yeah.

San Diego German.

So now we have this. That's the sound of newscaster papers flickering in the wind. And now we look smart. We can take notes, and it's essentially. I mean, it's definitely helpful.

It's a better way to do it.

This is the longest intro without saying, who the heck we talking? We're talking to today.

Yeah. How did we go three years of podcasting without actually using printed notes?

Because we were trying to be know it alls and use our brains. Good. Not well.

All right, so who are we talking to?

Mr. Ron Lynch. The Ronnie Lynch.

Ronnie Lynch. This was a fun episode.

Hell, yeah, it was.

This dude is somebody, but you expect anything less? No, we always do fun episodes. But Ronnie.

But Mr. Lynch himself. Come on. Come on. He was bringing the gang.

No. So Ron lynch is a guy that I really, really want to go sit down and have beers with, because I feel like we would get stories for days and days and days. This guy worked in the infomercial space. He Was involved in like, oxiclean. He worked with. What's the infomercial dude's name?

Billy Mays.

Billy Mays? He worked with Billy Mays?

Yeah, he has his watch even. That's really cool.

He's the marketing genius behind GoPro. Have you heard of GoPro?

Never.

It's this little like camera.

Not before this episode at least.

It's like a camera that you can ride like motorcycles and strap it to your head and it goes underwater and.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So he didn't invent GoPro, but he is the marketing genius behind it that helped, you know, create the entire marketing campaign that blew up GoPro to a household name. Like a household other than Joe.

Yeah, yeah, I was off the radar. But I also hear that Ron makes a really good pizza. So that's actually why I want to hang out with him a little bit more.

Just kidding.

But obviously I think he's actually a good pizza maker. Yeah, that's what it seems like. All right, so Ron, he's done a lot info commercials and all that stuff, but even screenwriting, he went into that whole background. He actually, he breaks down how he thinks of.

Just how he formula, just how he writes these screenplays and stories and jokes and they all kind of are the same thing. At the end of the day you'll hear that. But it's just, it's. It's really cool to hear his thought process. Yeah, well, creative process and actually getting stuff out of his head, which a lot of us don't know how to do.

This was an episode where I personally had like a lot of aha's. I'm sitting here taking notes going, this is something we can use in our business. This is something we can use in our. He broke down a strategy to pitch anything. Literally. He. He broke down a three part strategy saying basically if you use this flow, you're going to be able to sell stuff.

Yeah.

And it was just awesome. I mean, this guy worked in all these big infomercials. Now he's got a very. A great online career, taking what he learned in the infomercial space and applying it online. And so we just cover the gamut of these topics of infomercial, the infomercial world and the online world and bridge that gap. And it's some amazing stuff. And you are going to learn something. So do not turn this one off.

Why would they? Why would they.

I'm going to gracefully transition into saying that we're going to take the notes for you on this episode.

Are we? Do we Always do that.

Well, Steven does it.

Okay. Yeah.

Just making sure. So we have Stephen. He's the host of the Hustle and Flow shorts show, and he takes notes on every single episode and then graciously makes those notes available to you for a short amount of time.

Why is that important to me?

Because you can take notes on these notes. You can.

So you don't have to do the notes yourself.

You can look at these notes. You can frame these notes.

That's very good.

Am I not hitting any of the benefits?

You're not hitting me at all.

I'm not hitting the benefits at all. No. We take notes because you're probably driving right now. You're probably out for a walk or doing the dishes or something and don't have a pen and paper in front of you. And we basically find all the golden nuggets in this and we put them into a nice little companion that you can go and get them from. From.

So if you like things.

Or golden nugget finders, which Matt is or Steven is.

He's like a truffle pig. That's what I was envisioning.

I made it cry. This is good because that's essentially what we're doing. We're providing for you here with the EGP letter is what we're calling it. Wow. No, it's not. It's the companions.

So leverage our truffle pig and. And go to hustleandflowchart.com comp c o m P. And that's where you can get the details to get these companions. Again, they're only available for a limited time. They do go away, like, a week after the podcast is live, and then we have a way for you to get it, but it's all explained there. So go get these notes while they're still available. Hustlinflowchart.com comp c o m P. Let's go talk to Ron Lynch.

Ron, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming.

Thanks for having me. Matt and Joe. Good to talk to you guys today.

Yeah, we're chatting a little bit before the recording, talking about all the crazy lunatics that we know and all the interesting things that we try to tell ourselves, like we're good musicians. And you're Elton John, I hear.

Well, it doesn't matter who I play. It sounds like Elton John.

And you have the suit to match, which is really cool. You just showed us.

Kidding. I just had a gap put in between my front teeth just for that very purpose.

Had it surgically done. Dental implants. Yeah, man, well, thanks for hopping on. And, yeah, you were, I think, just in the last, like, month or two, been referenced by a lot of our guests, and we're just like, okay, well, this is really cool, because he's booked on the show and they didn't really say anything specific, so it left me with a lot of questions. Matt.

And I wonder.

We're like, okay, so he's interesting. He's done a lot of cool stuff.

Mentioned, referenced, or indicted.

It might have been indictment. Yeah, I'm gonna leave that to them, though.

Scenarios. Let's talk about it.

Yeah, man.

I mean, you have quite the history, and you run in all the different circles. So you have that marketing circle. We know a lot of the guys that like the baby Bathwater, all these interesting places that they hang out.

I mean, just catch us up to kind of where you started. And we don't need the whole dog and pony show. But where did you kind of get into this whole game and brought you to the point where you're at now?

I'll skip the 20 years of grocery retailing experience that I had and jump into movies and screenplays, because that's really where I started as an entrepreneur.

You didn't have any takeaways from your grocery days that you applied to the film industry?

I have zillions of them.

Seriously? No. We took crappy grocery stores and turned them into great grocery stores. And the tool for doing that was a cooking kiosk in the store. So we did the live demonstrations.

I thought you were saying that you were like a grocery bagger and you were going to skip the part where you bagged groceries for 20 years.

I did. It was actually one of my favorite jobs. I hope that when I retire, I bag groceries because you get to meet a lot of people and talk to them. That was a great job. I worked my way up in the grocery business, and we did demonstrations eventually. Store director.

That's actually really cool. I did demonstrations, product demonstrations in stores like Whole Foods and stuff at some of these things that you said, and it was fascinating, man. You meet some interesting people. You meet a lot of weirdos, too.

I'll tell you a story real quickly about that, and it's something I've never said on a podcast before, which I think is kind of fun. There was this really old, kind of kooky black lady that used to come in my store in Seattle in Queen Anne Hill, and her name was Sarah. And we would put a chair up for her in front of the cooking demonstration booth, and we had a chef There, his name was Jacques, and Jacques was just absolutely the bomb. Great demonstrations. And Sarah would come in to see his demonstrations all the time. And sometimes it would rain and she'd wear a plastic produce bag on her head. And she was really sweet. And one day she said, well, I'm going to hang around. She had kind of a Louisiana accent. So I'm going to hang around because my son's going to come in and pick me up later on. I said, all right. I didn't think anything of it. Pretty soon, about 7:30, this limousine rolled up in front of the store. And Sarah's son, the Quincy Jones.

Sarah Jones, Quincy Jones. Mom was our customer and she used to come in the store. And he came in and he was like, I'm looking for my mom. And I mean, you could have peeled me off the floor with a scraper. I was absolutely befuddled. And this was at the height of Michael Jackson's Thriller album.

Yeah. So you're just like, yeah.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

What was the guy's name that we just saw a presentation from at War Room?

Oh, Ken Craigen.

The producer.

Lionel Richie. And he helped. Yeah, he worked with Michael Jackson during that phase.

Yeah, yeah.

Crazy. Yeah. That whole era. I mean, that's the thing with grocery stores, too. I remember from back when I was in there, you never know who you're going to run into.

Yeah.

Celebrities, crazy people, you know, potential mentors. Who knows?

But.

You worked on, like, GoPro and I think. Was it Oxiclean?

I worked on the Orange Glow part of the Oxiclean business and knew Billy Mays very well. Wrote a couple infomercials with him. He's a good friend of mine. In fact, I have his orange watch he gave me before he passed away. Good dude.

Wow. Cool.

That's so cool. So how did you get into that world?

One of my customers in the grocery store was shooting infomercials for the George Foreman Grill. And he introduced me to George Foreman's agent, Sam Perlmutter. I sold Sam Perlmutter a script for a movie called the Real Vanessa. And.

That. The guy called me back and he said, hey, did you sell Sam Perlmutter a script? And I said, I sure did. He goes, how'd you meet him? I said, through you.

You could write an infomercial? And I said, absolutely. And the next week I was in the infomercial business and I was out of the grocery business that quickly.

Wow.

Okay.

So it really did start in the grocery store. How cool is that?

That is very cool.

So you Met Quincy Jones, and you started this whole new trajectory selling scripts. So what was it like?

I actually met Steven Spielberg's partner, Kathleen Kennedy, who's now the head of Lucasfilm. Her sister shopped in that store. I met her there as well and leveraged two scripts to Spielberg early on. And so it was a very unusual store. Let's just say that I can make a movie about that store that would blow your mind.

Is this out in Austin by you?

No, it was in Seattle. It was on Queen Anne Hill. It was a tiny little store, but I will tell you, everybody in the world shopped there. It was weird. It was like being in Zabar's in New York, but in Seattle. Wow.

All right. That's the place to be. So you're in the biz in this info business now. Infomercial business.

What.

What was that like? You sold this script. So what'd you do after that point?

I ended up making, writing, and directing. I spent a lot of time on sets. So I kind of walked into the infomercial business, and they allowed me to direct things right away. I went right from the bottom to right to the top.

I did food service for about a week in the infomercial business, and then I started directing because I knew how to run a set.

I knew how to do a demonstration. I knew how to make films. So we just put films and demonstrations together, and that's infomercials. And over the course of the first few years, I worked with some really excellent psychologist type copywriters like Steve Ober and Marcia Kent and Rick Cesare and Sean Fay and people that were talented in that space. And.

Then it turned out I had a natural gift for that kind of copy.

It sounds like a trial by fire. You just kind of. Well, you were willingly putting yourself into the whole ring there. And it just kind of developed organically.

It did. I was extremely fortunate because when I started in infomercials, there was a lot of inexpensive media on television. And the first four or five shows that I did all did over $100 million.

Wow.

Which was very unusual. I didn't know it was unusual. Which made me go, oh, this is easy. I did Kevin Harrington's Flavorwave Deluxe infomercial that did over $100 million and lasted 10 years. I did a light relief that lasted 10 years. I had a lot of shows like that early on that just worked.

I was very fortunate. And then the business got tougher and tougher as channel expansion happened and media diversified and the Internet came along. But I'm very Grateful that I got to do that then, because it taught me how to market on the Internet.

Yeah, so you were already ready. You had the formula down, you had all the resources, it sounds like, just to migrate to the Internet.

Well, I imagine that the strategies and philosophies are pretty much the same. It's just a different medium.

You know, I think that it isn't, isn't because a lot of people didn't make the transfer. There's a lot of. I have a lot of colleagues that never quite figured out the Internet. And for me, it was. It became relatively simple after I had done a show called.

Aerogarden. Aerogarden was a complex, complex product. It was a hydroponic garden for your countertop. But it had a number of consumer verticals. So we had to make advertising that was a appropriate for a variety of verticals. And that was the thinking that unlocked GoPro for me, which was one product with multiple verticals. And GoPro came along the same time YouTube, Facebook took off and verticals became important. So in those years between 07 and 11, we saw the shift of 15% of our sales going from online as an industry to 60 to 70%. Now it's 80% online. So learning how to channel, market vertically and integrate a brand is the secret to the Internet. And the folks that are doing that are winning.

Yeah. So with someone like GoPro using them as an example, did they start off with one vertical? I know they've always been extreme sports, kind of angled, but how did they approach this whole vertical thing when you got involved?

You know, Nick Woodman is a really smart guy and he saw what was going on. And I originally wrote the brief and the strategy for the company, and I only did it in about three or four days. And then we got together and I'd written him a half hour infomercial and we'd agreed that we were going to shoot this half hour infomercial. And he called me one morning and he said, hey, Ron, I don't want to do that. I said, oh, shit. Like, I thought I was being fired. Like, what do you want to do? And he goes, I want to do 13 different spots. I went, oh, good, take that infomercial I wrote and spread it out on your bed.

Every page was a spot for a different sport. And so we shot like 13 different sports and put them on 13 different networks. So it was under the brand umbrella of GoPro. But you guys probably saw things that were reflective of your personalities because of the media you were interacting with. But there was Flat bottom racing for GoPro in Florida. There was people on ATVs, there were people on kayaks, there were people skiing, There were people on motorcycles and bicycles.

The launch of that product was really in multiple verticals.

Wow. And was it always heavy on YouTube for those verticals and the message to get out there, or was it other, other places online?

It was. It was primarily on television in those verticals. And then when you got to online, it was more and more verticals because there was an endless supply of people providing their content for us. And we were real smart because we provided them with the opening. All GoPro commercials have the same opening, which is a shot of the product and says, GoPro, be a hero. And all of them have the same CTA at the end, or did for 10 years, which was every day we give a complete suite of our products away. And we made those two creative elements available online so people could make their own GoPro commercials. And you couldn't tell the difference between a consumer's GoPro commercial and ours, with the exception of the precise time, length and the specific content.

Interesting. Yeah, because I'm just Picturing a typical GoPro commercial and they're all slightly different, but yeah, they have the opening and the ending is the same. And, yeah, like, I totally forgot about that. But it is kind of crowdsourced in a way. You know, the messaging in the middle there.

The first two years of GoPro, we had no athletes. We were using consumer footage. And we had one guy, Neil, who was inside the company. His dad was the cfo. And Neil's famous for being a wingsuit guy jumping off the cliffs in Norway. Yeah, the first 18 months or so, it was all user generated, pretty much. Or Nick generated it from racing his car, but it was primarily user generated. And then we got Kelly Slater and Shaun White and Sean for a few years, and Kelly only stayed for a year or two, but that was kind of how it started.

Yeah. So in these verticals, if someone were to apply something like this, maybe they want to crowdsource the material. What does it look like in terms of the persuasion and the flow of a video like that? Are there still. Is there a voiceover on that kind.

Of a structure you guys follow.

In GoPro? One of the things that was interesting was there was never any features or benefits shown. It was just raw footage. So there was the opening in the close that had an audio hit with them, the kind of the Bum Bum. And there's no VO in any of them. And it was music. And frankly, in the first year or two, we kind of had to put the brakes on them as a client a little bit because they were sourcing music off the Internet and we're like, well, you can't just take anybody's music, dude, you're gonna. Dude. And we ended up creating a whole bevy of music with them that we were hiring bands and they provided a catalog of songs. And it was easy to get the consumer to make commercial. Then the right length, because you made the song the right length.

Got it. That makes sense.

26 second clip. And that's what they're gonna cut to.

Gotcha. Was there a reason for that, that length of time, the 46 seconds?

No, 26. And the reason? Yeah, it's because it's. It gives you two seconds at the front for the tag and two seconds at the end for the tag and you've got a 30 second commercial.

It's just. Okay, so it's just. Yeah, nice little hit there. Interesting. Okay, so going now. Okay. You've done so many projects. What I'm trying to think of where to start because there's so many different rabbit holes and I guess what's a commonality above them all, like a flow that someone listening here can take Your wealth of information, these different products and things you've tested. Is there kind of like a structure that you like to follow when you're creating some kind of short, call it a video or something persuasive that you always kind of lean on?

There is a formula and I tend to do 2 minutes, 1 minutes and 30 seconds. Now we do 15 second videos and it's. I think of things as kind of the structure of a joke in a lot of ways is what's the opener that gets you to listen and lean into a joke and then what's the middle of the storytelling part and then the end is the punchline. And good creatives are generally structured like jokes. But if you think about that, jokes are stories. There's something dazzling in them. There's something that gets your attention up front. In many ways, they're like short horror movies. Horror movies start the same way. There's something short and suspenseful up front that engages you or movie trailers. There's short journeys that we are enticed on. And the challenge that most people, business owners or people that have invented something have is they want to jump into the story about them and the viewer wants to hear a story about them. So my number one thing is always make the story about the viewer and always make it interesting about them. And if you can create curiosity up front, you have a much higher probability of engagement.

So it's almost like, would you say, opening a loop, something that's already in their head, something they're thinking about that you're just like, okay, this is going to be a trigger and I'm getting them. It's that grabber to take them deeper into the story. Right from the beginning.

Yeah. And I want them to self identify so that when I utilize the media that I'm not wasting media dollars on people that aren't interested. So the algorithms of Google and YouTube and Facebook will grab the right audience.

So there's generally a technique that I teach. I teach a lot of classes. I'm sure you guys are aware. One of the really simple techniques that I can cover here, and I've covered it in other podcasts. But it's interesting, I think, is the three question technique of there's three questions that you can ask anybody that closes them before they know what the product even is. And the first question should qualify them with either their problem or the hope of the solution you're going to offer. The second question gives them an insight that there's an innovation that they've probably never heard about that if they keep listening to you, you're going to share. And the third is that there's going to be an offer that they can obtain that unique solution if they hang around long enough. So you can come up with any product in the world and use that process. And in three sentences, close somebody and get them to either click to your website or get them to listen to a longer piece of content.

Do you have any examples of that in use, like maybe for GoPro or one of the products that you've worked with in the past? These are the three questions that we focused on for this product.

I do, but, you know, let's do something different, if you don't mind. Let's let you pick a product and I'll just do it. Just prove that it can be done with pretty much any product.

Hmm.

Shoot. Okay.

Look around your office and see something there that's a legitimate product and kind of tell me what the product is and we'll do it.

Let's talk about the. Was that the Takamini acoustic guitar in the corner over here?

Sure.

Okay.

It's a black guitar and it's acoustic.

It's an electric acoustic.

Electric acoustic. There we go. Okay. Didn't even know that. There you go.

Did you ever have the desire to kind of be a star, maybe even play an instrument. Did you know there's a new way to learn how to play the guitar? With one of the most incredible tools in the world that can be acoustic or electric and make you a star. In fact, if you listen just a little bit longer, we can tell you how you can have one in your home tomorrow and play a song live in front of people this weekend.

Boom. That is amazing.

Where do I buy it?

3 stars.

So now all I have to do is go back and recover the story, right? And you're like, I don't even know what a takahime guitar is, but I'm kind of down to do this. And what I'm selling you is a lesson in guitars. Mmm.

Yeah. I love it. It's like we're just showing you this tool, this thing that's. Yeah, it's beautiful. But yeah, let's be honest.

The trick is you can play it and there's like, talent, like you're going to get the attention you want. So we could, you know, you can do that with anything and people will lean and go, shit, I'd like to learn how to play guitar in a couple days. Well, if I had the right teaching tool and they exist. I know they do. I could teach you how to play a song live in three days, no problem. I did teach you how to do it. An hour.

Dang.

Okay, so this is amazing because you could use this. I'm just imagining all the different use cases of this three question technique that you have here.

I mean, you could play it.

I'm telling you this, it never doesn't work.

Okay, go ahead.

No, I mean, it never doesn't work.

Oh, it never doesn't work. Yeah. I thought you said there's one place that it doesn't work. I'm like, oh, shit.

But yeah, I could see it's intrigue and people love stories and you're hooking them right from the beginning and that's something.

I made them the hero of the story.

Yeah.

I didn't sell a guitar. I sold you playing a guitar.

And.

The potential of what's in that person. Maybe their desires matched up with the algorithms of YouTube. Recommended video. Maybe your ad pops up with that message right there.

I can also see how well this would work for a company like GoPro. Because the GoPro marketing is literally you looking through somebody else's eyes experiencing something that they're experiencing.

It is. I'll give you a little insight to that too. Because after that two second intro of GoPro, be a hero. Bump, bump, there's Always one more element to all of the commercials, and that was something that we crafted intentionally, and that is the POV of the footage. When you turn the camera on on your computer, the first two seconds is always you looking stupid at the camera going, is this thing on?

That's true.

All of the commercials start that way. They start with an avatar of a surfer or somebody with goggles or a helmet, and it's them looking going, oh, yeah, the thing's on. And then you turn around and see the footage. So it's those two pieces of. And that really is the first question is, are you a badass skier? Would you like to show people? But we did it visually. Show your face, then show your footage. Now, you don't have to tell anybody you're a badass skier. You just proved it.

Yeah, it's a quick flash. So have you seen this same kind of model, like the GoPro model outside of projects that you've been involved with, but other folks kind of doing this really well in other spaces, other companies?

Yeah, I think that people do it well all the time. And I know you're going to ask me for an example, and I'm going to be hard pressed to come up with one.

I just thought if there was something obvious there.

Yeah, I see it constantly.

You do? Okay. Yeah. Because the GoPro just seems like the most obvious, even without you around here. I think almost everyone has that picture of a GoPro video just because there's so fricking many of them. Yeah.

It was such a prolific campaign. I mean, it still is.

Still. Yeah. Model's been tried and true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I guess on projects, when you approach them now, because you're doing a lot. I know you do a lot of mentorship. You have your own agency, a big baby agency.

So what is like, is the focus to always. I don't know. I guess. What's a good starting point for someone who has a product that feels like there is a larger mass appeal? Maybe they want to use this video approach. Is there a starting point that you always recommend for folks if they're totally green and have never done this before?

There's a couple things you should do. One is you should make sure that you have a business. So one, you should do a creative and strategic brief. I don't know if you guys have been to my Facebook page. I think at the top of my Facebook page, there's a pinned video that's been there for a while. And it's me making pizza in my kitchen, and I walk people through how to do an ad path. And I show a variety of ads that were made extremely inexpensively. And then I show some expensive ads to show that the techniques used for cheap stuff can be used for expensive stuff and vice versa. But path is important. Then when you watch the video at the end, it says, hey, click the page and message us. And we send you a blank strategic and creative brief. Well, the purpose of that is for anybody to sit down and go, okay, do I have a product that's got a true USP unique sales proposition? Am I solving a real problem? Because if you're not solving a real problem in the world, you probably don't have any innovation. And you might potentially be selling a commodity. Like, if you just go find something on Alibaba that you really love, but 400 other people are selling it in the world, you are fast going to find yourself into the race to the bottom of price and Amazon's gonna kick your ass. So you have to have innovation, then you have to have an audience. The problem that I had when I started my career was I had to pick things. I was good at it, but I had to pick things exclusively. That appealed to 80% of America because TV's expensive and I was showing 80% of America my products. So I had to have cookers and vacuum cleaners and like these consumer goods and electronics that would appeal to everybody. You don't have to do that anymore. Right now there's people you know. Frank Kern is a great example of somebody who went out when he started his career and did this dog training thing. And he went from breed to breed to breed. And he kept relabeling the same thing with a different breed of dog. And he would get these amazing audiences and conversions because he was basically selling people baby pictures of their own dog. Right? Like, you're a Golden Lab lover. I can teach you how to tag your Golden Lab. And the Internet is right with that kind of focus, so you can target the shit out of people, which is incredibly useful. So you need an audience. Then you need to know you have margin, and you have to have a 4 to 5 to 10x margin to market with. You have to have that space in your product financially to have the profitability, to feed the marketing machine, to grow it. So those three things are critical. Yeah, that's the starting point. Now, once you get past there, then you get to talent. Now comes the storyteller. Now comes, can I tell the joke? Can I tell the story? Can I be compelling and riveting to keep somebody's attention for 15 seconds to 15 minutes to close them on a purchase that is going to be beneficial to them. And that's an important thing to me and it's very critical for when I select a project upfront, is that I know that the end user is going to have a great experience. One of my biggest pieces of advice I give people is don't sell shit because it's going to come back and haunt you. Sell good things because the end of the sale is not a consumer purchasing. The end of the sale is having a purchasing consumer happy who refers another purchasing consumer for free. And that's how brands are built. Are people saying, no, I bought it, it's good, it's true. I'm glad you're an early adopter, but I bought it first and it's a fantastic product. You should get it. That's how brands are built.

That is so important. Yeah. The referral aspect of it. I'm just thinking of like this toothbrush I bought and it actually died the other day. It's one of these kind of they'll deliver you a new toothbrush head bristle thing every three months, so you're always fresh.

So it's the Dollar Shave club of toothbrushes.

Exactly. I mean, there's a million of those now. And the thing died the other day and I was like, crap, it's only like six months old. What the hell? And we hit them up and they're like, oh yeah, we'll just send you a free one or a replacement. You don't have to worry about it. And didn't ask any other questions. I'm like, shit, that was cool. And it was like within five minutes, I'm like, hell yeah, I'm going to tell people about this company now.

And now you're broadcasting it to a podcast that's getting listened to by tens of thousands of people.

And I don't know the name of the brush, so it's not really going to help them too much.

The brain better find out what that is.

Yeah, it's.

Yeah, it's one and to your point. So here's something that we this came.

Up the other day.

I was in an interview segment in a, like a roundtable with a bunch of people, and they were discussing the difference between direct response marketers and brand marketers. And I got super frustrated as an audience member because I'd done both successfully and I didn't feel like the people that were talking about it really had their hands around it because they were either brand marketers or Direct response marketers, and they hadn't done both. And this is something that I think that everybody should kind of get their brain around is people think of brand marketing as being Kleenex. Oh, well, when I want a tissue, I think of Kleenex. And that's how people refer to it. Well, that's true. But, Scott, Tissue is a huge company. Pepsi is a large company like Coke is. So there's something more to brand than just, can I substitute my name for a commodity? And I believe what it is. Most of us as human beings interact with five or six or eight brands as.

Merit badges for ourselves. We add these brands to our life so that we're communicating with the world, who we are. So if you think about the car you drive, the type of bag you put your computer in, the type of jean or shoe or pant and shoe that you wear, and jacket and sunglasses, you can start to build a character like a movie character. Right. If you wanted to build a certain kind of movie character, if you wanted to build a Jason Bourne, you would dress him like this. If we wanted to build a James Bond, we'd dress him like this. Well, they're both spies. They both do the same job. But we definitely know the character traits and brand differences between Jason Bourne and James Bond. And the two movie companies have done a very good job of distinguishing one from another. That's what we do as people. So when you're building a brand, what is the attribute, the personal attribute, the single attribute you want your person to grab and put on themselves? And if you start to look at brands that way, like Nike and Adidas and Puma.

Can you distinguish one from another with an attribute?

Definitely.

Right?

Yep.

That's. Brand is what's. What's the merit badge? What's the personality character trait I'm gonna get from being either a Porsche guy, a Lexus guy, a Ford F150 guy, or a Volvo guy, or, like Joe.

A Tesla guy, Subaru guy. So saving the planet.

But when you start to think about it, you go, that kind of is the reason I buy that brand.

Yeah, it's Apple's. Apple's brand with computers and all their phones and stuff. Same thing.

Yep. And why is Apple so predominant in the US and not globally?

It's probably.

Is it something with society and the way that we, you know, kind of use these things as, like a status symbol?

Yeah. Like it became a thing. I mean, one of the smartest things Steve Jobs ever did with Apple was make the headphones white.

Cause you knew what was in people's pockets the minute those headphones came out.

Yeah.

Everybody walked around with their headphones and you knew that was an Apple product. That was no accident.

True.

It's so interesting. I never thought about that until. Just this. Until you just brought that up. That's so interesting.

Well, think of the commercials. Like, they highlighted the headphones as the only thing that's white in the commercials. Everything else was blur.

I never made that connection. They're all sort of like, silhouetted, but you still see the white headphones.

Yeah.

Yep. Because the product's in your pocket.

Damn, that's cool. So then. So you have that combo of. Yeah, I could see the brand and the direct response. You're pulling in all these different characteristics. And now, you know, with the Internet, and it just makes it a lot easier with the verticals you were explaining.

Well, the only difference is there is no difference, is that all the brand people are now coming to direct response because they're learning, hey, you can tell a consumer a story about them instead of about us, and they can click to buy or they can click for interest, and you can chase their ass around the Internet forever because you've got them pixelated now. You've got a Google tag manager on them. And we know exactly who they are and what to serve them next.

Those are the people that are going to win the marketing game 100%.

Yeah. It's all about segmentation. We tout it all the time. We do the same thing. We follow everybody around based off of segments.

So is it basically getting to a point where businesses shouldn't really say, look, we want to focus on direct response or branding? Like, really these days it's all of the above. Right.

It's direct response branding.

That's another one Frank Kern's actually doing right now. Really well.

Yeah. You're using Frank as an example. He's really, really big on the branding game and just trying to have his videos everywhere right now.

Yeah, he's a smart dude. I love the guy. I think he's absolutely an amazing, proven talent.

Yeah. Yes. And I love what you said about the whole screenwriting thing, too, because I know that's something that you do as well, it looks like. And I think Rob Burns was kind of telling us is you still enjoy to kind of write out all these different screenplays. And I could see now how it involves so much of branding, direct response, story, persuasion, all these elements.

Do you do that out of passion or is that like a practice thing that you're. You're always Writing and thinking of new angles and storylines I like.

You know, it's funny, I just. I just finished writing a book and I'm working on it right now with Tucker Max. Now, normally Tucker's method is you go, you hire them, they get you a ghostwriter, and they kind of work together with you. And that's not how he writes. That's not how I write. I would say we're feels comfortable saying we're close friends. And I wrote this book and I started writing a joke, and it was a joke about people, trainers who train trainers, you know, coaches who coach. Coaching how to coach on the Internet.

Yeah, yeah.

There's these people that have never done shit that are out there selling their programs, and I'm like, highly skeptical of their expertise because they don't seem to have any actual experience. And I was thinking about the story about a kid training, going, like seeing an animal act at the circus and going to the trainer and going, hey, I want to learn how to train a gorilla. And it started as a joke in my mind. And I sat, I came home and I started writing the joke. And actually.

Our mutual friend Robo, Rob Hendrickson, was over staying at the house and I said, I started writing this joke and I want you to read it, but let me finish it. And I was at about 1500 words. And about three hours later, I handed him 7500 words.

Wow.

He's like, dude, this isn't a joke. And I'm like, I know, it's getting. It's turning into a book. Five days later, I had 50,000 words. Wow, dude, 350 page book. And I gave it to Tucker and he went, oh, my God, this is the most boring book in the world. No one's ever going to read this. I understand what you're trying to do. Cut it in half. And so I got to version 7 of the book and we talked some more about it. And he goes, you know what you should do? You should write a screenplay, because this is really a screenplay about this. I'm like, you know what, you're right. It's kind of my core talent.

Yeah.

And so now I'm writing that as a movie. But I've written 14 movies now. And I just like the process of storytelling. To me, it's discovery. Because as I'm writing it, I'm not writing a movie. I'm watching a movie and I'm taking dictation.

Got it. So watching a movie, meaning someone else's movie, you're kind of taking. Are you taking notes? From their story? Is that what you're saying?

No, no, I'm saying.

So my movies tend to start with things like, hey, there's a knock on the door. And I open the door and there was a box. And I open the box and then all I do is sit back as a writer and I watch. Like, this window appears in my mind in the upper left corner of the room.

And I watch what comes out of the box and I write it down and I see what the character says and then another character shows up and I literally take dictation. Like there's people who say they have. They channel or whatever. I don't call it channeling. I just have an active imagination. And I just watch what happens and I write it down as fast as I can. I get to page 60 and it surprises the shit out of me.

I was going to ask about the.

Process, but I love how organic it just flows to you.

There's no process whatsoever.

That's amazing. Does it always start off with some kind of mystery thing? I like the box idea because it's like, anything can happen. Let's see where the mind goes.

Well, to tell you, I mean, that's a true story for me is that I saw. In 1999, I saw an episode of HBO's Real Sex and they did a segment on these animatronic robot dolls called Real Dolls. And so this. You guys, I don't know if you're familiar with this or not, but this is actually a thing and it's a huge business now.

I've seen it. It's kind of creepy.

Matt's very aware of.

We don't need to talk about how very aware he is.

He's in the same room.

Yeah, it's weird.

But I went to kind of dove down into that thought process of, okay, let's say you get a silicone, 130 pound, 5 foot 6, animatronic sex doll that has, you know, I guess is anamorphically correct.

Sure.

How are you? Want to go down that rabbit hole? Okay, so this exists. If I had one of these, I just immediately, when I was raised in a pretty decent family. So I'm like, okay, let's say my folks come over.

Let's say my friends come over. Let's say I date a girl. Let's say that I use the thing. How do you wash this thing, by the way? Like, these questions started entering my mind. Like, this is a pretty weird thing. And then I started to think about the objectification of women. And I went, I'm stopping right there. I'm gonna write a story. So I wrote this movie about. And I have to pick people in my mind, so I picked Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley, who were a couple at the time. And I wrote this movie about what if Hugh Grant was a UPS driver. And at the end of the week at ups, they auctioned off all of the shit that was not deliverable, all the damaged product, to each other for beers on the loading dock. And he thought he got a tv, and he got home and he opened the box and there was a foot.

And that's how the movie started in my mind. And so I wrote this whole movie, and I eventually sold it to Sam Perlmutter. It got rewritten a couple of times, and it became a movie called Lars and the Real Girl, which was one of Ryan Gosling's first movies.

I remember that movie.

Wow. But that's how, like, to me, the movie, by the way, the script, they rewrote it with a SAG writer, and it was completely different by the time it came out. But that's how it started for me. I was just like, huh, that's a weird topic. I just watched it and I wrote it down.

Interesting.

That's funny. That's a movie I actually remember watching with my wife with Ryan Gosling, and he had the doll, and he kind of fell in love with the doll.

Yeah, I know. The whole town acted like the doll was a real person to benefit his psychology.

Yeah.

Wow.

This is just so cool, because, I mean, I'm sure we all have our own level of imagination, but it's up to us to actually.

Get that stuff out of our head, that vision.

And also extend the vision. It's like a yes. And, like, okay, so the box arrived. Yes. And what's going to happen after that? And who knows where that takes you? I mean, do you ever have an end goal with this, where, you know, all right, this is the conclusion. This is where I'm headed.

I'm usually surprised. Sometimes I know what the end is. I'm usually surprised by page 60 or the Middle or the turn in the story. Like, characters appear and things.

Things happen that surprise me. Characters know each other halfway through that, oh, they knew each other before the movie started. And I didn't realize those two characters knew each other. And that's part of the reveal. So things like that happen. But through the process of learning to do this, because I. Obviously, I started at a very young age doing this. I was standing on a movie set, and I was standing next to Jeff Bridges, who was the star of this movie, and I was an extra in the movie. And I asked him, like, how do I get to be in your shoes? He said, it's super easy. Make sure your dad is Lloyd Bridges.

Yeah, that'll do it.

I'm like, well, you got a point there. And he said, so if you can't do that, then write. Because if you write, you'll get a job. You'll always have a job in Hollywood. And I'd already been an actor for a couple of years. And so when he said that, I just took the advice. And every time I have got good advice from a mentor, I just went and applied it. And what I discovered very early on was the work comes first.

I got my first patent when I was 19. I wrote my first movie when I was 20. All of those things became beneficial.

And a lot of people, I think, wait for an opportunity to act upon the opportunity. And I think that the inverse is actually true. The universe is waiting for your actions to provide you with opportunities based upon the actions you've taken.

I love that. It's similar to. I read something in the. I believe it was the Four Agreements, the book, and it was essentially said something about, I believe this is the right book. But, yeah, you can stand at the edge of that cliff and wait for wings to magically appear, or you can jump, and essentially something will. Those wings will appear, the universe got your back, and the right path will shape up. You're basically creating opportunities with that action.

I will tell you that my life has been an absolute nonstop experiment in that thinking, and it is paid off 100% of the time. Wow, I love that.

That's cool.

The universe that most people don't figure out, and the ones that do can't explain it to the ones that won't listen.

Do you ever get in times where you get in your head and it stops you from action?

Yes. But I've also been in times where I've been stopped from action due to the lack of available resources or technology around me.

Just say I've had product products or projects that I've written down, and I've said, I'm going to do this when the resources are available or the technology catches up. And those have turned out typically to be very true. And then I take the action. Now when I see the technologies there, it's like, okay, I'm jumping in now.

Got it. Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. The resources.

So I actually have a note here on our notes, and I'm kind of curious what Your thoughts on this are how has media and the, the marketing and stuff, how has that affected the, the real world in reality? I, I have a note here. It may have been something you, you mentioned on, like a different podcast or something about how the media and the advertising and the marketing and, and all this is actually having a big impact on what we see in the real world.

You mean life imitating art and art imitating life?

I suppose. Yeah.

Yeah, there's a certain amount of that going on.

I think that the most useful thought for people listening is to be aware of how something that used to be impossible to do because it seems small or narrow is now so possible. With 8 billion people or nearing 8 billion people on the planet, you only need 5 or 10,000 that are like you or like your idea to create something of momentum. And it's very simple if you are very creative and smart about doing that and finding those people.

And the Internet is ripe with opportunities. It's about having a really sharp point on your spear. Your product and your messaging. And if you get out there and just fire, you know, I mean, it's not unlike the Vikings, you know, fire that lit arrow into the night sky. There will be people that will see your arrow if you've. If you've done it correctly.

Yeah. Now, with all the videos and all the stuff you're putting online, how important is split testing to you? Or do you even do split testing of the creatives?

I split test offers a lot of.

I discover things through creative that lead me to split testing. I'll give you an example with our Breathbox product.

I launched a whole variety of creatives early on and I probably made some mistakes and didn't realize it, but did some discovery along the way. I started with pieces that were probably too long and the thing that eventually worked for that product was doing an extremely short, short 15 second to 30 second version of the same ad, which was again back to telling a joke, was this product is Breathrox is.

A breath mint based on pop Rocks. It's sugar free. It's got zinc. The zinc lasts for a long time and makes your breath fresh for hours because it kills the hydrogen sulfide gas in your mouth and your stomach and your esophagus. So it's kind of a complicated science story. And we kind of started with telling that story and then we went to before and after creatives storytelling stuff. And then I got this idea one day and went, you know, what if. Who uses a breathalyzer? A cop? What if we wrote a commercial where it was a cop pulling over a consumer, but the person breathalyzed the cop.

And I just took that idea and built it upside down and went, yeah, we could do that in a really short creative. So I asked my friend Kurt Molly to come over and his girlfriend Christine and shot this spot, which cost me literally nothing to shoot. I used my camera. One of my sons was the sound guy. We used one of my sports cars, and Kurt went and rented a cop outfit for 35 bucks from the, like, Ruby in disguise here in town.

He'd be the perfect cop, too.

And he's like, the perfect.

Comedic foil because he's a big guy, but he's so sweet.

Yeah.

So he's got a little bit of Barney Fife in him, but he. Not really.

So we got this. We put her in this. We have this red sports car. We put her in this red sports car. And Kurt walks up and he goes, excuse me, I need your license and registration. And she just immediately is like, whoa, your breath is kicking, dude. Blow into this. And he blows into a breathalyzer. So now sudden, you've got a copy blowing into the breathalyzer. She shows on her phone, hey, yeah, your breath stinks. And this is, by the way, that product's a real product. And she hands him the product, and he looks at the product, and there's just a product shot in it. We don't even say what the product is. And she says, I'll let you off with a warning. And she speeds off.

15 second AD.

Wow.

But what the ad allowed us to do is it allowed us to open up an ad funnel, where at the top we simply said, woman breathalyzes cop. And it was a picture of a cop. It was Kurt dressed as a cop. We opened up a second ad path that said breath lives matter.

Yeah.

We did those with intention because we had learned earlier on that our audience was divided, that we were drawing in a fair amount of African American and Hispanic consumers.

Who were willing to insult each other in content. So they would see our ads, and they would list each other's names in the comments and say, hey.

David, Shauna, you need to see this spot. I could put people's names in it, like, hey, you got bad breath. Look at this shit. Only a thing.

Calling them out publicly. Damn.

So it went viral because people were making fun of their friends.

That's exactly what had happened with the. But that was the second and third tier ads. And I knew if I could get in an earlier ad in the path, that can be more successful. So we Created these ads with salacious titles. So woman breathalyzes cop. Just in three words. Cop's a bad word. You wouldn't call a cop a cop. You call him officer policeman. So you know when you use the word cop, you're talking about a bad guy. He's dirty. And woman breathalyzes cop. Now you're going, shit, was this cop drunk?

Like, you have to click it.

Yeah.

We got with that ad, adding those two audiences together, 3.3 million pixels planted for $10,000.

Jesus.

Which allowed us to put the second ad. Now we know who the audiences are. We parse those audiences, and now we start sending them intentionally. A second and a third creative and an enter to win the product free. Once you get to the second ad or the third ad, and then you see, hey, enter to win the product free. You enter to win, and I have your data. And now I can directly get you into an email campaign and off of paid media. At that point, I'm converting people 50% in media, 50% via email, and I'm selling a million dollars worth of product.

Super simple. Anybody can do that. The first ad cost me buying Curt and Christina breakfast.

That's so damn cool. Did Kurt help out with some of the ad strategy too?

No, we didn't need it at that point. It was just so easy.

It's so organic. Yeah.

We just threw it out there in front of the stuff that we were already doing, and it just cranked. And it was like, that was the minute where I went, oh, I understand. This is exactly the same as infomercials. Start chopping these things into pieces and breadcrumbing them to the audience. And I was smacking myself in the head going, I'm a guy who's been doing this for 20 years, and I could have been doing this online the entire time. Wow.

Yeah. No, we're super, super good buddies with Kurt. I have a standing call with him every single week, and he's been actually feeding me a lot of these same concepts that you're saying. And a lot of it is actually kind of clicking a little bit better in my head. Just in the way you're explaining it right now, too.

Yeah, he's super talented at it. Well, here's the last thing about contesting and why you should give your product away every week is most people don't think this through. We all are four to eight years old in the inside. And when you're an eight year old kid and you see a box of cereal and you enter the contest to win.

What do you? Do you do it started in the mailbox every day. We started. Okay. Like, we all did that as kids. We all still have that same psychological expectation. What we don't realize is that it's actually an early adopter's behavior. You enter a contest, you think that you deserve the product. You've now said, I want the product, it's mine. It becomes so much easier for me to sell you the product with offers after I get you to psychologically cross that barrier in your mind.

Got it. So the contest serves as almost like, hey, just an easy way into my ecosystem so I could follow up with you, maybe give you a cool offer on the back end of that.

Yeah. Well, it's essentially people raising their hand saying, this product you're giving away for free, I want it. That's why I'm registering for this thing. So they're sort of confirming in their mind that this is a product that they want. And when they don't win the contest, it's still sort of locked into their head that I want that.

So back to GoPro. Every CTA. And GoPro was every week we give. Every day, we give away a full suite of our products. People would see these disparate creatives on different channels, not realizing it was a huge campaign. They'd see the Flatboat campaign on ESPN2 and they'd go online. There was a pattern interrupt. You'd have to enter your data to see the website. So you put in your email address. That pattern interrupt would go away and you'd be on the GoPro site and you'd realize, oh, shit, everybody is going to enter this contest because they're filming everything. And we'd already crossed that barrier in the consumer's mind. So not unlike telling a joke. There's the punchline. It took me a while to figure it out, and it was right in front of me the entire time.

Damn, that's so powerful. That's so cool.

And I guess just the daily cost of that giveaway just kind of factors into that, I guess, into the ad.

Budget.

Your ad budget. And you're foolish not to because you know you're going to hand out samples of your product. If Walmart called tomorrow, you'd send them 50 SKUs just to get into Walmart. Well, that's a month and a half's worth of giveaways. If you gave one away a day. If you're giving one away a week, that's an entire year's worth of giveaways. Give it away.

Jesus. Yeah, just give it away. And think about like, there's so many info product owners, people with digital products listening right now. I mean, how many of those could you think you can give away?

Well, that's what's better than getting 10% off or 20% off your offer. Because if you start giving percentages away from your product, you're degrading your price. But if you just flat out give the whole thing away, you can still say it's worth 500 bucks. But you can have one hour contest and it's still worth 500 bucks.

Now, how were they actually picking the winner? I don't know. We don't really need to get super into the logistics of how this was run. But how did they pick the winners on that kind of thing?

There's actually services that are independent third party services that you hire, that are apps that keep you legal and do your picking for you so that you can later on, if anybody ever sues you or you get in any trouble, you can point and go, hey, here's the service that does this. So there's legitimate third party services that do that and it's very inexpensive.

Gotcha.

Okay, got it. That makes sense. Okay, this is great because you just kind of, we ended on this whole give your stuff away as a sample. And that's kind of how it started in the grocery store, right? Just giving, giving samples away and getting them into the, you know, into the know of that product or whatever it is.

You know what's crazy is I, I actually learned that in Seattle at the Pipe Place market from the fishmongers. When you walk through the Pike Place market and they've been doing this for a hundred years, all those guys behind the counter and all the fish places lean forward and they put a shrimp or a prawn in cocktail sauce in front of you.

Yep.

Would you like shrimp? And in a consumer's mind, a shrimp's worth a dollar. So they've get, you've now given them something that's a dollar, they take it and they feel obligated to buy your fish. And that was an intended technique 100 years, I believe.

Yeah, I saw that, I experienced it.

Yeah. Well, it's kind of like that Cialdini principle, the one where he's talking about the Hare Krishnas that would go and give the flower and then they get the donation. Yeah, the reciprocation.

That's what it's a lot of reciprocation. But it's, you know, there's no new stories, there's new, new tricks. There's just better storytellers doing the old tricks.

I love this.

Do it just apply with the new technology.

My favorite person in our industry who is not in our industry is Darren Brown. And if you don't know who he is.

Oh, yes, yes.

The hypnotist magician guy. Yeah, that guy's a mentalist, I guess.

Mentalist, yes.

Well, if you think about what he is, he does what we do for a living.

He's just better at it.

He's predetermining outcomes for people based upon understanding psychology. He's not a mentalist, he's a psychologist. So are you. That's what you do for a living. Whether you like it or not. You're just practicing without a license.

Yeah. And I love Darren Brown because he'll break it all down and explain exactly what he's doing. After you just saw it and you're just like, holy crap. Okay. You're just totally breaking down human concepts.

If someone were to want to get into and go like, who the hell is Darren Brown? First of all, it's D E R R E N Brown. He's English. And one of the best videos that's very short that walks you through like what the hell's going on here? Is with Simon Pegg and Simon Pegg's birthday bicycle.

Ooh, I haven't seen that one. Okay, I'll have to check that one out.

It's a seven minute video and it's absolutely worth the watch.

Got it. Cool.

No, he's fascinating. I remember he had a show, I think called the Push.

We've had like three of them on.

Netflix where he basically convinces people that they need to essentially try to murder somebody.

Kill someone. Yeah, throw them out.

The. He has about 20 full length shows on YouTube. In fact, I was about five years ago, I was teaching a class and Ian Stanley was in it. And I'm sure you guys know who Ian is. And I turned. Ian was like, I've never heard of Darren Brown. I'm like, you're English. You should know who this person is. Ian went home and I'm not kidding you, because Ian is so talented and so smart. He watched probably 15 hours of Darren Brown straight and called me and he went, thank you. That right there changed my life.

Yeah.

How come I haven't seen any videos from him by Baron down or anything?

Because he does like this lie Topaz and his Gardone and his characters. He makes fun of all those guys.

He does, he does.

Baron Down.

I forced him to do Tiny Robins.

Have you seen that one?

Yeah. It's a hilarious shot at my house.

It's like we wanted him. Instead of being huge, be tiny. Tiny robins get small.

I love that. I haven't seen that one. I'll have to hunt that one down.

I love it. Very cool.

Well, I think we're at about the end of our time here.

Yeah. We want to be respectful of you.

So a couple last questions. What's a book or something that you just recommend to folks or you just find yourself going to all the time? Because it's that good.

Minus Darren Brown.

I mean, it doesn't have to be a book. It could be a documentary, a movie. Is there any sort of resource that you recommend a lot or that you refer back to a lot yourself?

You know, I use simple copywriting books that like words that sell. Like, I'll go back and like, just look for synonyms and stuff. But I'm not really in a place where this art form for me grew out of experience, not out of knowledge, as you can tell. Like, I didn't study this my whole life. I kind of fell into it.

So I'm probably not the best person to ask for, like, hey, this is my go to.

I watch a lot. I've watched a lot of movies, a lot of classic movies. I've watched a lot of movie directors. I listen to a lot of other people's ad copy in entertainment, things that I like.

I like good storytelling because it really boils down to good storytelling. So I don't know that there's kind of a go to. I think that there's. If there was one, it was probably. There was a book written about like, there's only 20 screenplays, I think, and I can't remember the title of it, but that was the essence of it is probably Googleable that there's only a limited number of stories in Hollywood. And that would probably be something I'd point you to. Got it. You're still telling stories.

Yeah, no, it's all storytelling. And then you layer that with some Darren Brown isms in there. Watch 15 hours of him and I think you're pretty gold. Take some damn action too. Right.

So the other thing that I watch a lot of is comedy.

Speaking my language. Now, I've seen pretty much every stand up special on Netflix and hbo, so.

Ooh.

And with inside of Comedy, the person that is probably the most current to me, there's a lot of people that are funny, like Jim Jeffries and like people that are insult comedians and stuff that are funny. Currently. But people who are clever storytellers that are connecting disjunctive things. And Eddie Izzard is probably my favorite.

Because, like Robin Williams, he would take things that were not connected in your mind and connect them. And that's a very critical skill when you're doing sales, because the moment you take two neurons in someone's brain and connect them, they're going to fire off some serotonin and oxytocin. A chemical reaction is going to happen. And what you've just done is created a memory and a new neuropath for them. You can do that enough times. You as a salesperson, you as a copywriter, or you as a brand will now have embedded the attribute of the brand that you want into the consumer's mind. So when they think of, you know, I want to be kind of like above and beyond in tech and kind of in the future. You're a Tesla customer.

Yeah, yeah. You want to be involved in that whole thing.

Yeah. So I highly recommend comedians.

Okay.

Yeah. I love that you said that, because that's something that I've had, like, a pretty strong belief around, is that the standup comedians are some of the most intelligent people. Because just what you said, like, that ability to connect the dots between two seemingly unfamiliar things, or even to, like, the ones that can point out the absurdity in things that we totally take for granted, I think is amazing. I think it's such a great ability to have. And I actually, on my bookshelf, have just a ton of books on stand up comedy because although I never plan on doing stand up, it's something that I study the hell out of.

Yeah. Like this book that I was just in the middle of writing. I'll wrap this up. Is there was a. The joke was kind of like, how do you train a gorilla? Right. How do you. This kid goes and sees how a gorilla is trained. And so the place that I went to mentally was carrots.

You're like, well, wait a minute. Why would you train a gorilla with carrots? Carrots, like bananas? Like, yeah. So this guy's going to use carrots because he doesn't want the kid that's learning how to train. He doesn't want the gorilla to imprint on him. So he's going to give the kid carrots because the gorilla hates carrots.

See, that's funny.

I like it.

That's a funny joke because you're like, oh, fuck yeah, carrots.

Never thought about that.

I love that.

Totally disjunctive.

I love it. All right, guys, that's a good wrap up. Hey, where should we send people? I know you got a lot going on. Where should they learn about you if.

They want something useful? If they want to read something that I've written about advertising, you can go order the book buy now that I wrote with my former partner Rick Cesare at Amazon. If you want something current on how to do ad flow and how to do a creative brief, go to my Facebook page for the big baby agency message the page and our messenger bot from Segmate and my good friend Carl Schucher will send you a 15 page blank creative and strategic brief that you can utilize for any product and that will get you pre registered to get my book for free when it comes out.

Boom.

Awesome.

That is the best giveaway I think we've ever had on here. Go check it out. We're going to link it up in the show notes too. Ron, appreciate you man. It's been a good time.

Appreciate you guys. I appreciate you having me on. Have a great day.

You too, buddy. Thank you.

Have a good one.

Thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliffs Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

Go get it Wiki Wiki.

We love you.