BrandingBlog by Dave Young
By Dave Young
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Podcast Description
Marketing Advice and Advertising Strategy for Local Business Owners
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Ari Meisel of LessDoing.com | This week I got to spend about a half hour interviewing Ari Meisel. We connected a couple weeks ago when I found his "Less Doing" productivity blog and he asked me to be a guest on his podcast to discuss Shortcut Blogging and how we are making it easier for CEOs to blog. I was fascinated with his approach to productivity and how it sprang from his battle with Crohn's disease. His victory over his disease and how he approached the battle is the basis of Ari Meisel's TEDx talk from May, 2011. In this podcast, Ari tells his story and shares some of his favorite and most effective productivity tools. He is an advocate of doing away with your To Do List and using systems that simply make your tasks appear at the moment you need to work on them. He is also a big advocate of using virtual assistants to take your focus off of your more mundane tasks. Pretty cool stuff. All of the links we mentioned can be found on Ari's site in the description of his Achievement Architecture coaching program. I really like his approach and enjoyed talking about all of these geeky tools with him. | 2/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Shawn Phillips of Full Strength | Confession: I never feel more out of my element than when I'm hanging out with athletes. I met Shawn Phillips a few years ago and have slowly gotten to know him a bit in the last 6 months. I'm one of those "unfit" clueless people who never heard of his brother Bill's book "Body for Life" back when it was changing the world. I managed to be totally clueless while they grew their EAS supplement company and sold it. I Yep, that was me, sitting on my ass watching TV while Shawn was changing the shape of the world. So, why am I interviewing Shawn? Hey, it's never too late to start paying attention to getting stronger and eating better and growing older with a bit of grace. Is it? It's an admittedly awkward interview on my part. It's half confession, half therapy session. Shawn's passion is men's health in those "middle" years. We're not young guys any more and we're not old-timers. I like his idea of sustainable fitness. I like his Full Strength protein shakes. I like Shawn's passion for education and his concern for the state of men's health. Here's a chart from his book, Strength For Life, that will help you understand the phases of fitness that he and I discussed. I hope you enjoy the interview. | 2/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Roy Williams and The Pendulum | Wow. I told Roy Williams that I wanted to hear the scary bits about his new book, Pendulum: Where We've Been, How We Got There, Where We're Headed, he reluctantly agreed. He's traced back the trends of societal change 3,000 years. What he's found will give you a few reasons for apprehension the next 20 years or so. Don't expect many direct applications to advertising and marketing. You won't find them in this book. However, he doesn't want to be known for just ringing the alarm bell and sending us all into hiding. So, he will be following the Pendulum with a new book called Invisible Heros. These are the type of people who can lead us out of whatever mess we find ourselves mired in for the next two decades. If I were you, I'd have a happy movie ready to play after you listen to this one. You'll need it. | 2/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Brett Feinstein – Political Advertising | Brett Feinstein is a partner in the political advertising agency Pound & Feinstein. He's one of those guys that you have to get to know to understand. He's loved and admired by those who take the time. If you know Brett Feinstein only superficially through Facebook or another near anonymous web arena, you probably only think you know him. That's because he treats Facebook as his own psychology lab; questioning, pushing, shocking and provoking to see what kind of reaction he can get. It can be alarming...if you don't know Brett. I've known him for almost 10 years now and I always enjoy getting together for a meal when I can catch up with him or on Skype for a podcast interview. We talked for almost 4 hours. Most of it after I shut down the recorder. I still ended up cutting about 30 minutes out of our official podcast interview just to get it close to an hour. If you're a student of marketing and advertising, you're gonna like this one. We compare and contrast the various strategies used by retailers and candidates. I was surprised, enlightened and entertained through the entire conversation and I hope you will be too. What I left on the cutting room floor was mostly a conversation about Facebook that got a little personal for a few third parties. So, I decided not to share it. We did cover campaign strategy, messaging, research, direct mail and the life of a political campaign staffer. | 2/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSoundbites: Super Bowl Reach | NOTE FROM DAVE: The "SoundBites" podcasts are usually re-written in an article style (via Shortcut Blogging), but this one was such an interactive conversation that I decided to simply use the transcript. Enjoy the game! So far...in these pre-game days, this is my fave: Beuller? Beuller? Want to read the transcript? Chris Loghry: Welcome to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads partner Dave Young. Dave wants to talk Super Bowl. I didn’t know you were into football. Dave Young: I’m not into football, Chris. Chris: Oh, you’re into advertising. Dave: Yeah, that’s right. [laughs] That’s right. Everybody gets focused on the Super Bowl ads every year, don’t they? I mean… Chris: Oh, they do. Dave: The die-hard sports fans, of course, want to watch the game. And there are some of us that would just rather see the ad reel at the end of it. Chris: And there are a lot of people that just watch it for the ads. Of course, now with You Tube and other sources you don’t really have to sit through the whole thing, but… Dave: That’s true. And sometimes those ads are released on YouTube even before the game. Chris: So, what’s been your thoughts on Super Bowl advertising? I haven’t even looked to see what kind of rates they’re getting this year. It always seems to go up no matter what the audience, doesn’t it? Dave: It really does, and last time I paid attention, wasn’t it about a million dollars a second, something like that? Chris: Something like that. It’s, you know… it’s crazy expensive. Dave: And, you know the big selling point is the huge reach… Chris: The captive audience worldwide. Dave: Yeah, it’s a gigantic audience. And so, if you remember conversations we’ve had about the advertising performance equation and reach versus frequency, what the Super Bowl offers is this huge, huge reach. And reach is just the number of people that an ad reaches. Frequency is how many you’re reaching and you measure frequency over, you know… yearly, weekly, monthly, whatever. And so when we buy radio, for example, our goal is to try to reach people three times in a week. And it usually takes 20 or 30 ads, depending on the station—sometimes more, sometimes less—to accomplish that. Chris: Super Bowl advertisers aren’t getting much of that then, aren’t they? Dave: No, no Chris: With one ad. Dave: For the most part, yeah. There may be a few companies that buy several ads. Chris: True Dave: But yeah, you’re getting a frequency of one with however many gazillion people you have. It’s extra large reach with minimal frequency. The only problem with it… it can be a good thing, depending on the business, right? So, if you’re a big brand that does business with people year-round, all the time, day in, day out, You’re Coca Cola. You’re Chevrolet. You’re just a giant corporation that it can be a good exposure for you, I guess is the thing. If you’re just trying to sell something… it can be a little weird and it can be strange to try to figure out if it’s a good buy or not. Chris: It can all also backfire, can it not? Dave: Well it can, because you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. Chris: Right. Dave: So if you’re a company that has to save up all year so you can buy your Super Bowl ad… I think it can be either a waste of money or really harmful to your business. Chris: You would advise against it in most cases, I’m guessing. Dave: In most cases, sure. And there are some companies that just have money to burn and they want to be on the Super Bowl and it’s important to them… I think of Go Daddy, for example. They always have some Super Bowl ad that’s just got racecar drivers and hot chicks in it. Chris: Right. And you wonder, “What’s the point?” Dave: Yeah, the funny thing is, they’re not relevant to the business they have. Chris: Right Dave: Right. They try to get you to their Web site and, “Hey, you’ll see more by going to | 1/31/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Chandra Clarke – CEO of Scribendi | Remember the scene in the movie Pulp Fiction where Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) accidentally create a serious mess of their car by shooting the guy in the back seat? The only solution is to call in an expert...a cleanup guy. Winston Wolfe (brilliantly played by Harvey Keitel) to the rescue. I love the Winston Wolfe character. He knows how to fix a bad situation. When you've got a writing mess (a dog's breakfast, as my Aussie friends would call it) you need to call in an expert. Scribendi is to bad writing as Winston Wolf is to Jules and Vince. Scribendi is a professional editing and proofreading company. I did some copywriting work for them a few years ago and reconnected with CEO Chandra Clarke for this podcast. Chandra and I had a nice rolling conversation about how businesses can utilize her editing and proofreading services and why. I learned that her company has employees in every time zone on the planet and is available for projects 24/7, year round. A couple of sites that I mentioned in the podcast were www.duhcorp.com and www.huhcorp.com which are fictitious companies on real websites with very creative tongue-in-cheek copy. In case you're wondering what kind of mess Vince and Jules have in their car... (If the bad words bother you, don't play it. Seriously.) | 1/26/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSoundbites: Fire Fast, Hire Slow | This is age old advice in management circles. Kinda funny how hard it is to do in practice. And it’s one of those topics where you look at business owners and managers and you think, “They really should take this advice.” I really want to talk about the “fire fast” but I’ll just touch briefly on the hire slow, because there are loads and loads of resources on how to hire people. Just remember that the worst thing you can do is hire the first person through the door that you think could probably learn to do the job. The biggest pressure point on hiring somebody too fast is that often it’s the owner or manager that’s having to pick up the slack for not having someone there in the first place. So their goal is, “I need to get somebody in here so I don’t have to work as hard.” And yet, if you hire the first warm body that comes in the door, you can actually create bigger problems. Just Google “hire slow” and find some ways to hire better and hire more slowly and more deliberately. You’ll do a much better job of getting the right people in and you won’t have to fire as fast because you’ll have hired better. The firing fast it’s really something that, if you’re not doing it, could really be a killer in your business. It can really damage things. Not only the way the customer perceives your business but the employees that work with them. Just look at the different points of view. From the manager: if you’re not firing fast, you’ve got somebody that’s just a drag on your time. You can’t get them to do what you want them to do. You can’t get them to do it well. You can’t get them to work well with other people. From the co-workers’ point of view: keeping them is kind of a slap in the face because here you are paying this person that everybody knows shouldn’t be there, and you’re not paying as much attention to your good employees because the bad employee is taking up all your bandwidth. So the co-workers get upset. You’re also damaging your reputation with your customers: we’ve talked about the Personal Experience Factor. A bad employee that is interacting with your customers is a recipe for disaster. Finally the business owner perspective: it’s just a drain on profitability. You’re paying somebody that’s basically a cancer inside your organization. The simple way to solve this is that if you want to improve morale, fire all the unhappy people. That seems kind of glib and like it’s the punch line to a joke, but that’s really the core of it. The unhappy people are going to fall into one of three camps. They’re either victims “Oh they just work us too hard, they expect too much of us.” Or they’re non-believers. “Ah, I would never buy the car that we sell.” They don’t use your products. They don’t believe in the kinds of things that you’re doing in your business. So they’re just poisoning everybody. Again, they’re there for a paycheck. Finally, the know-it-alls. These are the people that they’ve been around so long, “Oh, I’ll tell you why we can’t do it that way. You know, we tried that ten years ago, that’s not going to work.” That’s the know-it-all attitude. Those can sometimes be turned around, but usually they’re so set in their ways that they’re hard to turn around. Last summer, a client of mine actually went through and got rid of the victims, the non-believers, and the know-it-alls. They got rid of all their unhappy people. They have three retail stores and they cleaned house of those people. Their sales for Christmas this year were up 24% over last year, unreal in a retail environment. I don’t know what the average was this year for Christmas versus the previous 12 months, but to be up 24% is pretty good. I don’t know how much of that to attribute to getting rid of the unhappy people. But the people that they kept sold a heck of a lot more, and their stores were just more fun to be around. Your other empl | 1/25/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Michele Miller on Sports, Politics and F.A.R.E. | Recording this Podcast was a blast. I've been working with Michele Miller for 10 years now and being able to share conversations like this is exactly why I started podcasting. What really made this one fun is that we were face-to-face instead of on Skype. We were both in Palm Springs to have an annual meeting with a client that we've worked with almost as long as we've been Wizard of Ads partners. This past year our retail client grew 28% over the previous year. That's a big deal any way you look at it. In this rambling conversation, we discuss trends in societal change, sports (was it baseball or football?), politics and New Year's Resolutions, or the lack thereof. You'll learn about Michele's F.A.R.E. mantra and my own twist on it. I hope you enjoy it. I think I managed to maintain my family friendly rating on iTunes. Somehow, turning on the recorder kept us both from flinging f-bombs around the room. This picture was from her Wonderbranding Class at Wizard Academy on Halloween, 2007. Yes, she taught the class dressed like this. | 1/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Raffy Pendery, Interwebs Genius | I love talking to Raffy Pendery. You'll like him too. We chatted about 3 of his amazing creations. RealStatistics.com is an online graphing tool that lets you upload all of your business stats and helps you make sense of it all. If you need to keep your training ducks in a row, he's also developed a platform called RethinkTraining.com for managing your company's training materials while monitoring your trainees' progress. Brilliant. And, if you're a local business that relies on brick & mortar sales, plus ecommerce, plus email marketing, plus putting your goods out there on Craigslist, all while keeping close tabs on what's working and what's not...his team co-developed GreySuitRetail.com. It'll blow you away. Raffy is truly one of the good guys on the internet. I met him when he was just starting to grow his empire. (This picture is a very young Raffy at Wizard Academy.) At the end of the podcast, we talk a bit about Hana-Li, his very talented singer-songwriter wife. Check out Hana-Li on Facebook. | 1/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Craig Arthur and Big Plans for 2012 | After a busy holiday season, it was nice to have a leisurely chat with my good friend, Craig Arthur. Since this is the first episode for 2012, we mostly talked about his plans for the new year and his renewed commitment to blogging. He is using the free outlining process that I produced for Shortcut Blogging. If you'd like to try it, just go to www.shortcutblogging.com/outline. It may not sound like it in the podcast, but I got pretty excited when he talked about doing more free workshops this year in Australia. I may have to weasel my way onto his stage somehow. It's been a couple of years since I've been down under and I'm missing it. Read more about Craig's activities by following him on his Wizard Chronicles blog, on Facebook and on Twitter. Thanks for coming along in our podcast journey! The photo is Craig peeking out his room's speakeasy window at Engelbrecht House on the Wizard Academy Campus. | 1/6/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Irene Watson on Book Publishing | Irene Watson's media empire focuses primarily on self-published authors who need reviews, publicity and coaching for making the most of the book creation and promotion experience. Her site, Readerviews, offers a wealth of knowledge archived over years of helping authors. Her services are priced and sized just right for authors trying to break into a bigger pool of exposure. I first met Irene at Wizard Academy. She took the Blog and Web workshop from Paul Boomer and me several years ago. I really had a good time catching up and learning about the many things she can do to help someone maximize the potential of their book. | 12/22/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Year-End Tax Advice from Adrian Van Zelfden | I've been getting Adrian Van Zelfden's "Tidbits in Time" emails for several years. He's a huge history buff and he enjoys a historical almanac to the point that he started sending out a monthly missive to share his celebration of what happened when. He started by sending it to his friends. None of that opt-in stuff, just a "hey, you might enjoy this as much as I do" kind of spirit. And, when you get an email, any email, from the smartest CPA/Lawyer around, what do you do? You open it and read it. For his friends who also happen to own businesses, he started putting a section at the end "For Business Owners Only." The December issue had a 12-page, single-spaced PDF attached to it full of Adrian's best Year-End advice to business owners. As I skimmed and scanned it, I knew that this was information that would be helpful to a lot of my readers, so I got Adrian to join me for conversation and this podcast is the result. If you'd simply like to get to know Adrian, you could bail out after 15 minutes or so when we start to get our hands dirty in the numbers. If you'd like a copy of his checklist, go to Adrian Van Zelfden's Facebook Page, Tidbits in Time and click on the "Join My List" link in the left column. He's also given me permission to send it out, so if you join my list you'll also get a copy. A third option is to go to vanzelfden.com and shoot him an email. You'll get a good sense of his dry humor if you google the latin phrase in the header of that page. So...how good is he? In 30 years of helping clients with taxes and going with them to countless IRS audits, he's often walked out with the IRS owing his clients money. More importantly, he's never lost a dime of his client's money in an audit. That is, his record is perfect. He's never had a worse outcome than having the IRS say, "Yep, this tax return is just fine. No changes." Damn. That's good. I like doing interviews that get me a bit out of my comfort zone. Finances, taxes, government...you get the idea. For an example, if you haven't listened to my interview with Pamela Yellen, you missed out on her surefire way to grow your cash without exposing yourself to risk. And now, I hope you enjoy Adrian and that you find his timely advice worthwhile as you seek to keep more of that hard-earned money for yourself while staying out of trouble with the IRS. | 12/16/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSoundbites: Measuring Radio Results With Web Analytics | Adam: Welcome once again to BrandingBlog Soundbites, with Wizard of Ads partner Dave Young, from BrandingBlog.com. I’m Adam Lefler, hello Dave. Dave: Hi Adam Adam: Dave, today were sitting down talking about measuring radio effectiveness on a web... | 12/13/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Magical Thinking with Jeff Sexton | Sometimes I'm a bit intimidated to talk to Jeff Sexton. It's kind of like going back to high school and having an intellectual chat with your old English teacher...or in this case, an Olde English teacher. He's been doing an awful lot of Magical Thinking lately. One of the more interesting examples involves tiger p***s. Yep. In addition to discussing feline phalluses (phalli?) I also got him to talk about how a business owner can use Magical Thinking to improve marketing, merchandising and the customer experience. That's the practical application of Magical Thinking. Of course, if it's phalli you want, go check out this guy. One more thing....if you enjoy this podcast and get it on iTunes, it would be so cool if you could give it a rating and a comment. Thanks! | 12/9/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSoundbites: Personal Experience Factor and The Approach | Adam: Welcome once again to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads Partner, Dave Young from BrandingBlog.com. I’m Adam Lefler. Hello, Dave. Dave: Hi, Adam. Adam: Today, we’re talking about Personal Experience Factor: the Approach. What do you mean? Dave: Well, Personal Experience Factor, Adam, is the term that we use in the Advertising Performance Equation that relates to the actual experience that you’re delivering to a customer if you’re a brick and mortar retailer. If you don’t understand the advertising performance equation, you might not be familiar with this concept. But, what we hold in this equation is that the actual in-store experience has a great deal of effect on how effectively your advertising dollars are being spent. It seems like a disconnect to most people because they think, “Oh, well the advertising should just be bringing people in the door.” The real issue is the dollars that you’re spending on ads, if you’re doing it right, should have a long-term, lasting effect. It’s true, the dollars that you’re spending in advertising are responsible, in many cases, for getting people in the door the first time. Right? My first visit to your store may be as the result of your advertising. It could also be the result of a referral or a recommendation from a friend. Whatever it is that got me in your door the first time, it worked, right? I came in the door, I crossed your threshold the first time, and I’m there. All right. So, what gets me in the second time? It’s the experience that I had the first time! Adam: Right, exactly. When you walk in that door, that feeling you get and the experience, that will keep you coming back. Dave: Exactly. So, if they drop the ball there, what happens is they miss out on one of the most powerful things that they can do in advertising, which is to generate a feedback loop of referral business. If you get people in the door and you give them a good experience, you ignite this little fire that says, “Hey, when I go out and somebody needs your product, I’m going to recommend you because I had a good experience there.” That’s the kind of a feedback loop that feeds back into share of voice and share of mind, which are other parts of the Advertising Performance Equation. We’ll talk about that another time. When I talk about the Personal Experience Factor and the approach, we could do a weekly podcast and never talk about anything besides Personal Experience Factor if we want to talk about all the different things that make up someone’s experience in your store. We could talk about hiring, we could talk about merchandising, and decor, and design, and product mixes and pricing, and all those things that happen inside the doors. What I wanted to do in this episode was just drill down on what I call the approach. That is to look at your business through the eyes of someone that’s approaching it for the first time. So, I’m not even in the door yet. I’m a block away. Can I see it? Is your sign readable? Is your location decent? As I get closer and closer, is your paint peeling, or does it look good? Are your windows clean, or are they dirty and smudgy? Is the sidewalk swept off or is it covered in dust and gravel? Those kinds of issues all have to do with the approach, and it’s that whole concept of “you only have one chance to make a first impression.” You need to start with Personal Experience Factor by taking a step away from your business and looking at it from a distance. I like to use the metaphor of an airliner coming in for a landing at an airport. They have to be able to see that runway from a long ways off. That’s why runways are all marked consistently. If you’re a pilot, you know a runway when you see it. If you’re landing at night, the lights have to be just right. Everything has to work just right. This is before we ever get to the gate, right? Before the wheels touch down, everything has to look good. | 12/6/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSoundbites: Mistake #9 – Great Production That Missed The Mark | This is Mistake #9 of the 12 Most Common Mistakes in Advertising, as presented in On Your Market. Adam: Welcome once again to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads partner Dave Young, from BrandingBlog.com. I’m Adam Lefler. Hello Dave. Dave: Hi, how you doing Adam? Adam: Doing well, how about yourself? Dave: Great, thanks. Adam: All right. The last time we were still on the biggest mistakes of the twelve. And we’re on number nine now. Great Production that Misses the Mark. What is number nine, Dave? Dave: Well, great productions that misses the mark. You know we’ve all seen ads, and we go wow, that was really cool, that was really funny, humorous, whatever. But, what was it trying to get me to do, what product was it representing? In a simple way, that’s really what we’re talking about, is an ad that you go "wow, that was really cool", and you can’t name the product. You can’t remember anything. It just made you laugh; it was interesting it was well done. Right? So sometimes, that seems to be the bar that advertiser reach for, and then they scratch their heads and wonder, why their ad budgets’ not working, very well. Does that make sense? Adam: Yeah, it certainly does. It’s one thing to get people talking. It’s another thing to have them remembering what they’re talking about. Dave: Exactly, so there’s this story from 1967. Are you familiar with who Stan Freberg is? Adam: I’ve heard the name. Dave: He was a big radio guy, he’s the guy who started in the ‘80’s with the concept of radio is the theater of the mind. So, some people might remember, I mean radio stations all over the country, used to play this industry promotional ad about turning lake Michigan into a giant lake of hot chocolate. And the Air Force, flying over dropping marshmallows in, and you know, all of this stuff. So his point was, that using radio, you can do things that you couldn’t actually do in physical reality. You can create things, and you can do it on a really low budget. If you wanted to make a TV commercial, like that you just couldn’t do it. Nobody could afford to do that. And that was before the days of, CGI. So still that was a problem. And Stan Freberg’s a very creative guy, as far as doing these campaigns that are just kind of over the top. And in 1967, this is one of his deals. Pacific Airlines, which was a little commuter airline, on the west coast. They hired Stan Freberg, to design an unorthodox campaign. What he suggested was that Pacific Airlines, poke fun at the one thing airlines never mention, which is fear of flying. So, at Freberg’s direction, Pacific Airlines placed full-page ads in newspapers. And this is verbatim, the copy that was in these ads. It said, “Hey there, you with the sweat in your palms. It’s about time an airline faced up to something. Most people are scared witless of flying, deep down inside, every time that big plane, lifts off that runway, you wonder if this is it, right? You want to know something fellow? So does the pilot, deep down inside.” I mean can you imagine reading that, and going, oh, my gosh. I don’t think, well I would hope that pilots, don’t have that feeling, deep down inside, right? That’s what they’re known for, is their confidence. And that’s not the message you want to convey to the public, about your pilots, or your airline, so. He didn’t end there; this was a campaign that they took all the way, through to the customer experience, inside the airplane. So he also arranged for flight attendants, to hand out survival kits, which had rabbit’s feet in them. And they passed out the book, “The Power of Positive Thinking.” And when the plane touched down, the flight attendants were supposed to shout, “We made it, how about that!” The airline went under, two months after the campaign started. So, it was a really, clever, creative campaign. Well executed, well done, and it killed the business. And it only took them tw | 11/29/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Mark Effinger | I managed to corner Mark Alan Effinger for this week's podcast. If you know Mark, you'll really enjoy this episode. If you don't know Mark, just buckle your seatbelt, hit play and hang on. Mark and I helped teach a book writing workshop several years ago with an all-star cast led by Mike Drew. We talk about PR, Brain nutrients, Amazon, Sean Phillip's Full Strength shakes, and loads of other crazy stuff, including the time that Mark overdosed Rich Christiansen with niacin. It's basically unedited and rambling and just soooo Effinger. This is the kind of conversation that I love having with Mark. We've had so many of these, and this is the first I recorded for a podcast. I know there will be more. Effing Effinger. | 11/25/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSoundbites: Impact Quotient – An ad’s power to convince | Chris: Welcome once again to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads Partner Dave Young from BrandingBlog.com. I’m Chris Loghry. Hello Dave. Dave: Hi Chris. Chris: We wanted to talk about Impact Quotient. I would like to start by asking you what that means to a client. Dave: Well, simply put, Impact Quotient is an ad’s power to convince. There are strong ads and weak ads, and most businesses really don’t think all that much about whether or not their ad is carrying the weight that it should be based on their budget. If two businesses have identical budgets and spend it on the exact same schedules on a radio station, for example, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to have the exact same results because the Impact Quotient of an ad can leverage a schedule to outperform an identical schedule. Basically, it can turn a smaller ad budget into a larger share of mind by leveraging a more convincing ad than your competitors. You can literally get double the results of a budget by having a really strong, really powerful ad. It doesn’t really cost that much to do a better ad than a mediocre ad. That’s the really surprising part. Chris: And maybe you said this, but are we talking specifically about the ad copy, the theme of the advertising campaign? Dave: The really important thing when you’re writing an ad for a business is to find something to say that is powerful enough that you can make a powerful ad about it. Most businesses just want to write we have fast, friendly service and we’ve been here since 1952. Chris: Family owned and operated. Dave: For all your “fill in the blank” needs. Chris: And prices. Prices seem to always find their way into it. Dave: They think that everybody wants to hear what every little thing is going to cost when they come in. In reality, what you really want is a powerful offer. That goes deeper than just writing a powerful ad. It digs into the strategy of the business itself. If your business hasn’t thought through how you’re going to stand out from your competitors, it makes it really tough for an ad writer and you end up with mediocre ads. Chris: And when you say a powerful offer, you’re not just talking about this weekend’s sale. You’re talking about what your business has to offer a customer. Dave: Exactly. There a chain, I guess it’s a franchise of heating and air conditioning companies, and our Wizard of Ads Partner, Roy Williams, put together the strategy for them and the messaging. They’re called One Hour Heating and Air Conditioning. They could just run an ad that talks about how they’re a heating and air conditioning company and they’ll take care of you and come out and fix your air conditioner when it breaks and fix your heater when it’s not working, just like all the other HVAC companies. These guys invested in a business model that says, “Look, if we’re not there when we say we’re going to be there, you don’t pay for our call. You don’t pay for anything that you need.” That takes some strategy back in the operations of the business. These guys not only have to deliver what they say on their message, they have to figure out how they’re going to deliver it. It’s a little bit deeper than just the message on the face of it on their ads, because the ads say if we’re not on time, you don’t pay a dime. They put systems in place that allow them to follow up on that promise. It’s worked like gangbusters for them. They’ve had something to say that other HVAC companies just can’t do. They can’t match it because they don’t understand that there’s also a system behind it. But it makes for a very, very powerful ad. A high Impact Quotient. Chris: I think one of the most interesting things is the first time I’ve heard the name of the business, when you just said it, and that’s the first thing that popped into my mind, One Hour Heating and Air. There it is right there. That’s going to appeal to a lot of people, b | 11/22/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Wizard of Ads Partner, Tom Wanek | Tom Wanek is the author of Currencies That Buy Credibility. A great little book for finding some unique ways to give your business sound credibility in the eyes of your customers. On the podcast this week, we discuss the chicken and egg scenario of customer experience vs strategy and core values. Which should you focus on first? Tom is one of those guys who I'm always having interesting conversations with about marketing, branding and strategy. This time, I had the recorder running and you get to listen in. | 11/18/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSoundbites: Personal Experience Factor | Chris: Welcome to BrandingBlog SoundBites. I’m Chris Loghry along with Dave Young from BrandingBlog.com and a Wizard of Ads Partner. We’ve talked about several things. We’ve included the Ad Budget Calculator in a couple of the podcasts. You can always ... | 11/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Veteran’s Day Guest – Joe Perez | Joe Perez makes me proud to be an American. I've known Joe for about 6 years. We first met at an event at Wizard Academy. I always knew him as the operator of a landscape architecture company in San Antonio. We'd run into each other now and then, when we were both in Austin. It wasn't until we attended the Awesome Sauce class this August that I found out about his military adventures and his new company. Turns out Joe spent the last days of the Cold War chasing Soviet agents across Europe. He was in Berlin when the wall came down. When I mentioned that his resume read like a character in a Tom Clancy novel, he said, "funny you should mention that," and proceeded to tell the story of how his unit was involved in Clancy's research for Clear and Present Danger. Wow. He ended his military career in a comfortable assignment in a castle in Verona, Italy, during the Bosnian war. A fitting reward for years of service. He came home and put in 12 years in his dad's landscape architecture company. About 18 months ago, Joe started a new business focusing on government contracting and helping returning veterans find jobs and start businesses. It's called Frontline Support Solutions and he's already growing and helping our veterans. Joe is also on the board of directors of the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce. On this Veteran's Day, it was an honor and a pleasure to spend an hour with former U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent, Jose M Perez. I hope you enjoy the interview. | 11/10/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSoundbites: The Myth of Reach | Chris: Welcome to BrandingBlog SoundBites. Dave Young is with us again from BrandingBlog.com. Dave is also a Wizard of Ads partner. Last time, Dave, we talked about the Ad Budget Calculator, which is a free tool that folks can use online to calculate an ad budget. Now you wanted to take it kind of to the next step, I suppose, and talk about the “myth of reach.” Dave: The “myth of reach, it just sounds mythical, doesn’t it? Chris: To start with, yes. What is the myth? Dave: Well, the myth is that most advertisers, (it’s a big mistake advertisers make), they buy more reach than they can afford. Chris: Okay. Stop right there and explain to me what you mean by “reach”? What are we talking about? Dave: Right. Two key equations in the advertising performance equation are frequency and reach, and anybody that sells advertising is going to play to their strong suit. They either have a medium that has a huge amount of reach, meaning that if you ran one ad, it’s going to reach loads and loads of people. Super Bowl advertising is a good example of a high-reach ad. Chris: Okay. Dave: You run ONE ad in the Super Bowl. You’re going to reach a billion people. Chris: That’s also a high-cost ad. Dave: It’s very high cost. Reach is expensive. Chris: Right. Dave: Reach is expensive. The flip side of the coin, though, is frequency. Frequency is just asking, “How many times are we going to reach that same person in, let’s say, a week’s time?” That’s how we typically measure it at Wizard of Ads is, in a one week period of time, how many times are we going to reach the same person? Chris: Is that because people, naturally, I guess maybe they don’t tune out but they don’t really catch it for awhile? Maybe they have to hear it a few times before it really gets their attention? Dave: Absolutely. Unless you have what we call a high Impact Quotient, and we’ll talk about Impact Quotient in a future show because that’s a whole other topic. Chris: I bring that up because that’s happened to me. I mean, there may be a commercial, whether it be on TV or radio or whatever it is, that I know I’ve probably seen 20 or 30 times, but never really stopped to pay attention to what it was. Maybe it’ll catch my funny bone at one point and I start laughing. My kids are like, “You’ve never seen that before?” I’m like, “Yeah, I probably have, but I didn’t really watch it.” Dave: Often what happens is it’s because it was poorly written. Chris: Okay. Dave: It fails to grab someone’s attention or it fails to have relevance. So you’re going to need lots and lots of frequency if you don’t have a very well-written ad. You certainly need way more frequency than you do if you have one that gets to the point, that’s relative to people’s lives, and gets the message across quickly and easily and powerfully. When we talk about Impact Quotient, that’s the ad’s ability to convince. If we look at it, Chris, in just some examples of events in your life, I mean, there are events in your life that you remember having only experienced them one time. Chris: Right. Dave: You can remember exactly where you were and what you were doing on September 11th, 2001. Nobody needs to remind you of that. It’s burned into your memory for the rest of your life. There are a few other events that are like that. People that are old enough, talk about that type of memory the day that JFK was shot. Chris: Pearl Harbor. Dave: Pearl Harbor. The day the space shuttle exploded. Those kinds of events have such a high impact that they’re seared into our memory and they’ll never get released. Well, guess what? Advertising’s not that powerful. Chris: I thought you were going to have a secret formula where we could do that. Dave: Joe’s Hamburger Stand is never going to have a message as powerful as 9/11. It’s just not going to happen, unless Joe kills all of his patrons in one day. Chris: And that would be fo | 11/4/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Hello Houston, it’s Charlie Moger | Charlie Moger is a Wizard of Ads Partner based in Houston. One thing that's always impressed me about Charlie is that he either goes big or goes home. I don't know if it's a Texas thing, or just a byproduct of his upbringing. He's accomplished a lot as a radio pro, an ad guy and for many years following the death of his wife, a single dad. He got himself married again a couple of weeks ago, and I can assure you that if he took the time to ramble for nearly an hour with me, the honeymoon's over. (Just kidding Sandie) I told Charlie that among other topics, I wanted to discuss the correct pronunciation of his name. We did manage to accomplish that one in the first few minutes of our recording...and then by the end, I said it wrong again. I'll be having Charlie back again soon to discuss how he is doing some pretty specialized video for his clients. For now, I hope you'll enjoy just getting to know him. | 11/1/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSoundBites: How To Calculate An Ad Budget | BrandingBlog SoundBites is a new podcast. In contrast to my rambling weekly talk-show format, these are concise topics that will average about 10-minutes. I'm using the Shortcut Blogging method. I hope you find them useful. Please let me know. A full transcript follows... Our first Soundbite is a lesson in how to set an ad budget Chris: Welcome to Branding Blog SoundBites, we’re with Dave Young from BrandingBlog.com and a Wizard of Ads Partner. Dave: Hi, Chris. Chris: How are you doing? Dave: I’m doing great today, thanks. Chris: I know you want to talk about how to calculate an ad budget and it’s going to raise a lot of questions because it’s an interesting topic for a lot of folks out there that have a business, and want to make the most of their money. Dave: Absolutely it is. So what do you want to know, Chris? Chris: Where do we start, first of all. How do you calculate an ad budget? Dave: John Wanamaker, who was a big department store guy a hundred years ago - everybody knows the quote, yet not everybody knows it’s John Wanamaker - but one of the things he said is, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” We’ve come up with some techniques to calculate an ad budget that make a little bit more sense than just throwing as much money against the wall as you can, and seeing what sticks. Chris: You guys don’t just sit around a conference room, decide, “Hey, this is going to work.” This is real experience, this is things that have worked, and things that haven’t worked, and you’ve kind of fine tuned it, right? Dave: Yeah, it’s really actually the formula for it. This was given out in Roy Williams’ - I think it was in his, it was either his first book, or it was “Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads”; “Wizard of Ads” being his first book. And it’s basically simple straight forward math once you know the numbers. You just have to do some simple math. And I’ve actually got an online tool. If you want to follow along, I built this online tool back in 2006, and it’s at AdBudgetCalculator.com, so if anybody wants to go there, you can see how simple the math is, and play along with it as we go. But the important thing is that business owners need to figure this out. There are so many business owners that either spends until they don’t have any money left, on advertising, and hope for the best; or they’ll not spend enough. We always tell people not spending enough on advertising is worse than spending too much. Chris: Right. Dave: It’s like buying a ticket halfway to Europe - just not going to get the job done. The thing is, you can certainly overspend, but if you spend only half as much as you really need to spend, you’re wasting more money than if you overspend. Chris: Yeah, you’ve got big dreams and you’ve got hopes and aspirations. You’ve started your business. How do you even know where to start? What part of your budget is it? Is that where we’re going with this - is how to start and how to build it from there? Dave: Absolutely. So you start with your projected annual sales and depending on whether you need to play it conservative or you’ve got a little bit of money to spend, you can look at your previous year’s sales. If you want to be kind of conservative with it and see what your ad budget should have been, or you can say, “In an ideal situation, I think we can reach this amount in the coming year,” and base your ad budget on that number. And what I recommend to people is to do both and kind of then look for a middle ground somewhere. So if you look at the ad budget calculator, you just take a business’ projected annual sales - so let’s just assume that the town I live in, a million dollars might be a lot of money. That might seem awful big, but in most cities a retail store, a service industry business doing a million dollars in a year, that’s pretty reasonable, pretty doable, and so | 10/28/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrandingBlog Radio: Carmine Leo on Emotional Intelligence | Emotional Intelligence. Do you have it? How would you know? I was certainly curious about the topic, so I interviewed my Facebook friend, Carmine Leo. He's a life coach who works with high performance individuals, executive staff and even plain old folks who just want to get more out of life. The tools of Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Literacy are the means of helping his clients understand their choices and how to act. One thing Carmine and I have in common: We both choose to live in tiny little places, off the beaten trail. Join us on our first ever conversation this week and learn with me about a topic that can help you get more out of life. Note: The books that Carmine mentioned are Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. | 10/24/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 25 Episodes |
Customer Reviews
Dave Young: Charlie Rose Just Got Served!
(That was a South Park reference, for those who may have missed that).
Dave Young is both a Wizard, and a True Star (and, uh, that was a Todd Rundgren reference). Dave is a communications, social media, radio and multimedia Ad Expert.
More importantly, he's a student of how people operate - how they think and act and buy and support. As a result, his insights combine to make for some incredible "a-HA!" moments.
And fun. Yeah, always a bit of levity with Dave.
Enjoy. I assure you you'll learn a thing or three about marketing both online and off. And you'll have a blast getting from here to there. I also recommend seeing Dave live, if at all possible. He's one of those people who makes you feel better about your place in the world. And you leave with some incredible tools to do better as well.
The BrandingBlog has helped me to become a much better consultant to my clients.
Dave Young is obviously well connected because he books killer guests. And he's obviously well liked because said guests say some amazing stuff. And though it's been a whiles since he was "young", as his name would suggest, he's thoughtful, brilliant and delightfully twisted. And those qualities shine through in this free podcast. If you're interested in advertising I'd recommend you subscribe.
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