Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

Whether you can afford mass media — radio or TV — usually depends on two factors:

1. how big your town is, meaning how expensive your media is to buy, and
2. how big you are in terms of revenue

Your profit margins also impact this, as the higher your profit margins, the more money you have to spend on advertising at the same revenue size.

But assuming decent margins and a location that’s not in or in the shadow of an expensive mega-city, the mass media tipping point usually comes at around $2-3 Million in revenue.

Please understand that this is very much a ballpark figure, but if you’re looking for a rule of thumb, there it is.

So assuming you pass the benchmark, here’s how to tell if you can’t afford NOT to use mass media…

• If you’re suffering from being on the pay-per-crack treadmill, aka, paying way too much for digitally-sourced leads…

• If you’re attracting too many price-sensitive leads…

• If you’re stuck in the middle between larger and smaller competitors…

• If you’re trying to de-commoditize yourself and fatten your margins…

• IF you’re getting beat-up by low-priced competitors…

• Or IF some of your competition are already running strong mass media campaigns…

Then chances are you can’t afford NOT to use mass media once you’ve crossed the revenue threshold to afford it.

Basically, if you’re doing, say $2 million in sales and you calculate an advertising budget of $200K in total, then you should be able to carve out about $100K for mass media branding.

And that’s more than enough to get started in most markets —

If you’ve debated whether to make your pricing publicly available on your website, you’re not alone. This is a particularly daunting question for businesses with complex pricing structures. But here’s the truth, both B2B and B2C buyers aim to be at least 70% confident in their buying decision before they pick up the phone or inquire on a website. This means when we require them to “Call for an estimate”, it’s likely to lead to frustration and they’ll likely look for their answers elsewhere.

Let’s dive deeper into why posting pricing online, even if complex, can be a game-changer and how to do it effectively.

Common Objections to Putting Price on the Website

Commoditization:

Some business owners don’t publish pricing because they want their customers and competitors to see them as a brand, not a commodity. But, let’s think like your customer.

If your customer needs:

• A Toilet replaced
• Taxes submitted
• Cremation service
• HVAC installed
• Or insurance for their business…

Do they see the product/service as a commodity (anyone can do it) or highly specialized?

If they see it as a commodity but you treat the pricing as “highly specialized”, it easily comes across as:

1. You don’t have enough experience to know ballpark pricing
2. You’re trying to complicate it to take advantage of the customer.

What many forget is a brand can sell commodities. Commodities are easy for the customer to understand and purchase.

Bond with the customer before they need what you offer, then make your offering as simple as possible.

Complexity:

Another reason business owners don’t publish pricing is they feel it’s too complex. “our pricing is complicated and we want our sales reps to educate (sell) them on why we’re the best to provide context (justification)”. But customers want to self-qualify, make a quick decision, and move on. By withholding pricing from them, we create a lack of transparency and distrust with our customers.

So, if you have complex pricing what’s the remedy?

Simplify if you can, estimate if you can’t.

Let me share a real-life example of simplification, my wife and I interviewed contractors for her interior design business. One Contractor, Carlos, noticed that all master bathrooms have the same primary cost levers (vanity, shower, toilet, light fixture, tile). He then changed his pricing model from hourly, to flat rate based on the room, offering an allowance for higher-end finishes. (Ex: He charges the same price for all master bathroom remodels, regardless of size)

Did he lose some projects? Yes.

Did he lose money on some projects? Occasionally.

However, the simplicity in pricing matched how customers wanted to buy AND built trust that the rest of the project would run as simply as his pricing.

Carlos now has a waitlist, consistent subcontractors, and hundreds of 5-star reviews. He made things simple for his customers and they rewarded him for it.

Simplify if you can, estimate if you can’t.

If there’s no way to simplify, you can build trust and convey goodwill by giving them a ballpark price. To do this, start by identifying the primary and secondary levers of your pricing.

• Primary Levers: These are the major factors that influence pricing and are usually non-negotiable for customers. For example, the model of a car would be a primary lever.

• Secondary Levers: These are factors with less smaller on pricing. This could be the trim level in the car example. Important, but typically secondary to the model.

Once you’ve identified your pricing levers, rewrite them in language your customer will understand. Here are three examples I’m helping clients with:

To help you communicate this on your website and across your company, let’s start by playing out what an inbound phone call would look like.

Notice, you don’t need to be narrow in your estimate, just narrow enough to convey transparency, and a desire to help them make the right decision for themselves, (both of which help your brand)

Once you know your levers and script, you can create a pricing video and/or a pricing calculator on your website.

Sharing Pricing

To make complex pricing accessible, consider using video or a calculator on your website:

• Pricing Videos: Keep these short (5-7 minutes max). A pricing video should cover your primary levers and common secondary options with the goal of helping customers understand a general price range. This should also help them feel more equipped to make a buying decision.
  • Here’s an example of a pricing video to give customers ballpark pricing

• Pricing Calculators: A calculator allows customers to plug in primary lever inputs and receive an estimate.
  • Here’s an example of a pricing calculator by an HVAC company

Benefits of Transparent Pricing

• Brand Alignment: When your website, videos, calculators, and sales team share the same message and pricing, customers are more confident in your brand.

• Optimized Messaging: With consistent messaging across touchpoints, your business becomes less dependent on the skills and knowledge of individual employees.

• Better Leads: By providing answers (especially pricing) upfront, customers who cannot afford you, won’t waste your team’s time.

• Pre-sold Customers: When customers feel informed and empowered, they’ll be more comfortable reaching out and buying, as they’ll feel less risk of being taken advantage of.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

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Let me tell you what really grinds my gears: businesses still asking, “How did you hear about us?”

At first, it seems smart—track the ROI, and see what’s working.  But let us be crystal clear: it’s not smart. It’s lazy, amateurish, and borderline rude.

Episode Highlights:

• Big brands don’t ask—they already know what’s working.
• Customers give inaccurate answers that lead to bad data.
• It’s rude to shift focus from their problem to your marketing.
• Marketing works through multiple touchpoints, not single channels.
• The question is a leftover relic from the Yellow Pages era.
• Build brand presence instead of chasing false metrics.
• Track real performance with tools, not customer guesses.
• Align every part of your brand to build trust and preference.
• Smart marketing makes your brand unforgettable—no questions asked.

Asking “How did you hear about us?” is outdated, unscientific, and kind of selfish.
Focus on a strategy that builds trust, not confusion.
Stack your touchpoints. Build memory. Create preference. Be unforgettable.
Stop asking the wrong question—and start owning the market.

You’re not here to beg for breadcrumbs.
You’re here to bake the whole damn pie.
Let’s go.

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Welcome to Advertising in America, the podcast, where we meet entrepreneurs, where they're at in their marketing and bust through their bottlenecks, breakpoints, and blind spots hosted by Wizards, Ryan Chute, and the Royal Torbay twins, where we put the fun in marketing fundamentals. Are you ready to dominate your marketplace?

Are you ready for outrageous advertising? Do you want to become a household name, brought to you by Wizard of Ads for Services?

Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today.

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Ryan: On today's episode of Advertising in America, we want to know how you heard about us. Will asking this question help fine-tune your marketing mix, or are you just getting sold a bill of goods that will never pay off? Mick, I'd really like to know how you heard about us. What do you have to say?

Mick: Okay, sit back because how did you hear about us is something that triggers me. Ever call a company and the first question they ask is, How did you hear about us? You know why they're doing this, right? They want to know which of their advertising efforts resulted in this call.

They're hoping that you say, I heard your commercial on 104.5 Duck FM or maybe you'll say, I see your billboard every day on the way to work or perhaps you'll respond, I saw your TV commercial on my favourite show. Here's the part that bothers me. The reason the business person is asking this question is because they don't know the answer. 

Think about this. A company spending literally thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing doesn't know what works. How dare you? How dare you not know? What's the matter with you? You're doing all this marketing stuff and then wondering if it's all a waste of money. This kind of, what kind of amateur shit is this? You know who doesn't ever ask, how did you hear about us? Home Depot. They never ask this question, you know why? Because they already know the answer. Because they're fucking professionals. And most importantly, they know the answer a customer gives when you put them on the spot won't actually help them anyway. Home Depot has more than one path to connecting a customer with a purchase. You can go to the website, maybe listen to a radio commercial, or see an ad on TV. Perhaps you're just driving by and see a giant orange store. Asking, how did you hear about us doesn't give you a useful answer because you can only give one.

Maybe you've seen Home Depot ads on TV for years, saw their trucks on the road, heard radio commercials, got their flyer in your mailbox, and they're asking, how did you hear about us? Well, which one of those is correct? I mean, if you're holding the flyer in your hand, I guess it's the flyer that worked. All that other stuff was a waste of money, right?

Only, maybe the TV commercial was really great and that's why you bothered to read the flyer in the first place. Oh, and your business has multiple paths to a sale too, doesn't it? Did they see a truck wrap, hear a commercial, visit you online, maybe spot you on Google Maps? Probably all of the above and more.

The answer is never just one thing. So the question is meaningless and you're wasting your customer's valuable time asking it. Shame on you. But my best / worst example of how did you hear about us came from a real client of mine. He'd been working with me for about five years and business was up by a lot. His competitors were struggling, his business was thriving in the same market. So imagine my surprise when the client calls me up and says, we're cancelling the radio campaign.

Well, that's odd. It's been running for years. What's the problem? Well, none of our sales are coming from the radio commercials. So I asked him, how do you know where the calls are coming from? Well, because we ask every single caller as soon as they call, how did you hear about us? And pretty much we, they never say, we heard your radio commercial, so obviously the radio doesn't work.

They all say they got a referral or word of mouth or the website. Never the radio ads. Well, this makes me furious, but not for the reason you think. I mean, yes, I wrote the radio commercials, but that's not why I'm pissed. I'm pissed because asking the question is rude. Asking that question to your customer is rude. You're changing the subject from what your customer wants to talk about to what you want to talk about. And how dare you do that, ever! A customer calls with something specific on her mind and you're all, well, first things first, I want to know if I'm spending my marketing dollars correctly. So hold on to your problem for a while and help me more help me with get more efficient with my spending. No, stop that. Stop it. 

When a customer calls you, you solve their problem and then you let them go on with their day. You never change the subject from what matters to them, to what matters to you, ever. They didn't call to help you with your marketing. Don't ever make your problem the customer's problem, ever.

And it doesn't matter what category you're in. It's never okay to ask the customer to become an unpaid marketing focus group of one. Oh, and just to hammer home my point, the client who called me wanting to cancel the radio campaign, you're gonna think I'm making this up, but I'm not. I'm going to name names. That client, John T. Donahue Funeral Home. Let that sink in. Somebody picks up the phone because they need funeral services. And the first thing they hear is, how did you hear about us? I know you've had a death in the family, but before we go into that, can you help me with my advertising? I think I might be wasting my money on radio or another medium. Did you hear our commercials? No. What about our billboards? Did you see those?

Just hold on a minute. We'll get to your dead mother in a second. You haven't, I haven't solved my ad budget problems yet. Yes. Asking the question is rude. It's always rude. It's particularly rude in this case, but it doesn't matter what business you're in. It's never the customer's job to track your marketing of effectiveness.

Stop asking customers. How did you hear about us? Stop that. Stop it right now.

Ryan: Now, Mick, I know you're triggered right now, and I want you to know that this is not a safe space. We're going to be absolutely horrible to you right now. Now, didn't actually get a panic room in here, but we do have a pancake room. We've called it the Waffle House for you, buddy. Chris. How did you hear about us? Just curious.

Chris: I say, go ahead. What's the downside? Mick's going to tell you it's rude. People call their dentist because they have a toothache and you interrupt them to ask about your marketing. Okay, so, it's America. Rude is our God-given right. It's in the Constitution. You Tesla-driven liberals can whine all you want about politeness.

I'm driving a diesel-powered Ford F-150 with a big ol’ pair of balls hanging off the trailer hitch because I think it's rude. You don't like it? Suck my tailpipe. And seriously, what's the downside? Somebody just spent 20 minutes on Google trying to find a dentist, visited a bunch of websites, read some reviews, and finally called you.

Now you inconvenience them a little with a quick marketing question. You think they're gonna hang up in a huff and go back to the internet and find the second-best dentist? No. So worst case, you tick someone off a little bit before they hire you anyway. Best case, you get some intel on your marketing. Which brings me to the second thing that Mick's going to tell you, that it's bad data. 

Back in the old days, if you asked that question, there were decent odds that the caller would literally be holding the Yellow Pages, so they'd probably just say the Yellow Pages to get you to move on. These days there's pretty decent odds that they are literally in front of a computer having just googled you so they're probably going to say that. Bad data, which doesn't account for all the other places that marketing has shared your brand with this caller. So, okay, I got a better idea. Ask him a couple more questions. There's a weird psychological phenomenon that says if someone doesn't like you very much, you ask them to do you a favor. Seems counterintuitive. You'd think if they don't like you that you should do them a favor. But, no. You ask them to do you a favor. No one's quite sure how this works, but it could be that asking someone to do a favor makes them think, Wow, that's the kind of thing that they would ask their friend to do, so maybe we're actually friends. Or, maybe it's a mental scorecard. If you do them a favor, they think, Great. I hate this guy's guts, and now I owe him one. But if you ask them to do you a favor, well, now they think that you owe them. They think they're ahead. So, go ahead. Ask your caller to do you a favor. Sure, she's a little ticked off that you haven't started talking about her toothache yet, but now she's doing you a favor, so maybe you're friends after all.

And hey, you want better data? Ask more questions. When the caller says yeah, I guess I found out about you on Google, get the CSRs to say, well, sure Mrs. Jenkins, but when you saw that whole list come up on Google, how did you pick us from that list? And that's when she's going to say, I recognized your name from that awesome radio campaign that Chris Torbay wrote, and that's why I called you.

Then ask them to tell you maybe which spots they remember, or which lines, or which offers, and there's your good data. And now, she's done you a favor. Instant friendship. So, in conclusion, yeah. Ask them how they heard about you.

Ryan: I really have no idea which one of you two is the evil twin. Seriously, it's, It's getting to me. Before peeling back this onion any further, let's hear a word from our sponsor.

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Hey, listeners. Wizard Ryan Chute here. Want a personalized strategy that instantly 4X the effectiveness of your marketing dollars? Schedule a free call with me at wizardofads.services. We'll chat about your goals and how you can quickly dominate your marketplace. I have limited availability though, so don't delay.

Well, I guess you could delay a bit, but not too much. That'd be like an over-delay. So maybe you just skip the delay part entirely and book a call just as soon as you're ready to start making money. You certainly don't to delay that, right? And now, pitter-patter.

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Ryan: No, because it's got layers. It's like an onion, though. Oh, and it's also because of his crazy defence about the thing that really kind of stinks a little bit. Yeah. It stinks like an onion. Yeah. I seriously did like the Yellow Pages.

Mick: Let me get this straight. You think we're not wasting enough of our customer's time.

Chris: A better idea. I got an even better idea. Which is you ask them the question. You ask them the follow-up question so you get good data.

And then you say, Mrs. Jenkins, thank you very much for helping me out. You know what? I'm going to give you 100 off your bill. Now! That's value stacking. That's classic Ryan Chute right there. Now you've asked.

Mick: Wants her fucking problems solved. She doesn't want to talk about you and your commercial.

Chris: You've just given, you've just surprised her with an extra hundred bucks.

Mick: You referenced that I was going to talk about bad data. By the way, the data is bad. It's absolute shit. And that's because people will say anything to get you to stop talking about the bullshit they don't care about and get them back to their thing. So they will tell you whatever's at the top of their head.

I saw fucking skywriting. Can we talk about my problem? My dead water heater. My fucking whatever it is I need. The idea that you think you're going to get good data when you put someone on the spot when they don't want to talk about this thing, they actually have a thing that they really want to talk about. They made a phone call about it. And now you're going to say, you're going to derail that whole thing in order to get them to talk about something stupid. They will very quickly derail your problem and get them, get it back on track to it. And they'll say anything and I can prove it.

Ryan: That's true and look, I can prove it because in Scotland we had a mailer that we were sending out for an event. I was live at that event. 1500 mailers did not arrive. The Royal Post let us down, sadly, that they don't really, they very rarely do that.

However, never arrived. So, there was this committee that started buzzing around, thinking we should change the scripts of how we're gonna call out and see if they got their mailer and stuff. And I said, no, we're not changing anything. We're absolutely going to say the exact same thing because I was kind of curious about what was going to happen here. And I tracked the results. So we literally had tracking sheets. 22% of people said that they had received the mailer that was never sent. 33% of us saw us on TV that never ran. 7% of us heard us on the radio that never ran. Never existed.

Mick: It's not just bad data. Bad data in and of itself is already kind of stupid and wasteful. The worst thing is you're going to take bad data and then you're going to act on it. Oh my God, you're going to do something based on this really, really shitty data. There is no worse idea that's ever been invented for business than to gather shitty data and then fricking act on it.

Ryan: So true. So true. So it is, it's a complete red herring.

Mick: And the results of that, you just said from your, your Scottish example, don't surprise me in the least Roy Williams did exactly the same thing when they launched the Benjamin Franklin, the Punctual Plumber, they ran radio commercials for six months before they opened the company. And then they tracked how people heard about them radio was like number six on the list of the previous five things. They didn't do there was no word of mouth. There was no company. There was no website. was no billboard.

Chris: My Dad's been is using that for years.

Mick:  None of that shit. A friend recommended me. No, they didn't. Your friend didn't hire us because we don't exist there. It's shitty data and then we act on it. So we're wasting people's time rudely making them solve our problems instead of us solve their problems. And then the data we get is shit.

Ryan: 31% heard it about them from the newspaper. They didn't run newspaper. This is Benjamin Franklin. 24% saw the TV ad, no TV ad. 19% say said a referral. Nope. There was no company. It didn't exist at that time. 17% had no idea. Not surprising. That's actually probably the most accurate data there. 4% heard it on the radio.

Mick: 4%. Literally 100% of the people heard it on the radio, otherwise, they wouldn't be there. It was the only thing that they had.

Ryan: Great literally. And 5% said other. They weren't 100% sure about it. Put that beat on there. When we've run the data, this has been this has happened, more over and over and over again. We did a similar thing in Detroit not long ago. And look, every time it comes up with the most ridiculous concept combination of numbers that prove our point every single time, you're wasting your time, you're wasting your energy, and you're chasing a red herring, you're chasing a ghost that's never actually going to serve you the way that it needs to serve you.

And that's all we're trying to get at here, is that it's important that we pay attention to the things that matter, not the things that don't.

Chris: Well, and the interesting part, and I mean, the truth is I agree 100% with what with what Mick has to be a good debate.

Mick: Has but I do like want to yell at.

Chris: And it's good fun. But what I loved is that discussion about how it is, almost all the time a bunch of things. I mean, it's interesting the Benjamin Franklin thing, they just ran a radio campaign, and they came out of nowhere. But as he said with Home Depot, there's the building, there's the trucks, there's the outdoor, there's several different media there's word of mouth, there's referrals, there's all kinds of different things. And the fact is almost anything that you buy or use, you have heard about it in a couple of different places. You know, when you finally get yourself an iPhone, is it the TV ad? Is it the Apple store? Is it your buddy's got an iPhone? Is it the TV ads from 10 years ago when the guy said, I'm a Mac, I'm a PC. It's all of those things. 

Finally, all those ways that you have heard about that brand have finally sort of culminated in you making a choice. And so if you were to ask that person a question, as you say, you've got to pick one and it's never one, even when we do the big campaign and there are just a few other  things, like the fact that your trucks are wrapped or the fact that you've got a prominent location, it's three things then. It's the fact that when you hear that radio ad, you go, the guy whose truck I've seen with the, you know, Wizard on the top.

Mick: But you used the example of big companies, but I believe in medium-sized companies, which is generally the clients we're talking about. They also have multiple paths of finding out about a particular brand. And the most ridiculous thing you can do is get so bogged down in the tracking of how did this lead come in. I literally know people who are so ridiculous that they put a different phone number on their truck as compared to the phone number that's on the website, as compared to the phone number that's on the TV commercial, as compared to, because they want to try and sort, oh, and they do an outdoor campaign. They put a different phone number on that because they want to know, well, was it the outdoor? Was it the truck, like how did this thing come in. And again it doesn't tell you why the customer called, it tells you the last thing they did just before they

Chris: And even that might be inaccurate, right? Because they may see that billboard, they're not going to pull over to the side of the road, get a pen out. Write it down, get back on the highway. They're gonna get home and say, I saw a billboard for mixed discount dynamite and they're gonna Google it and find the phone number. Now they're gonna get the Google, the one that comes up on Google and it's gonna be attributed to being the one that's the links when what it was actually the billboard.

Mick: In Latin, it's post hoc ergo proctor hoc. By the way, that's a sentence that's supposed to remind you that it's fucking stupid and it's not true. It happened because of what happened just before. That's not a, that's a fallacy. That's why it was such a popular phrase that they translated it into Latin.

Chris: What it goes to show you people have been making mixed arguments since Roman times.

Mick: Since the freaking Roman times.

Chris: Stop calling, stop asking the Toga purchasers where they heard of your toga shop.

Mick: And the idea of wrapping your trucks is not so that people will see your truck wrap and stand outside next to your truck and dial the phone. That's not actually going to happen. And even if zero people call the number that's on that truck, it doesn't mean the truck wrap was not useful. And ditto for all of the other things in almost every case, a client in a medium-sized business has a wrapped truck, has a website, has some sort of an outdoor thing might have a high visibility location and an offline campaign and an online campaign, and all of these things work together. And if you don't understand that you have no business being in the marketing world, you should have somebody else do it.

If you really don't know the answer to that question, how dare you? You're a fucking amateur and that's bullshit, and you need to stop it.

Chris: Well, or, does it even matter? Because, one of the things we say to our clients a lot is, you know, here's the campaign. It's going to be a really strong campaign. Lots of people are going to see it. We know the reach and frequency and all those sorts of things. But then when we find it, when we get the billboards to align and we get the website to align and we get the, you know, when they do a booth at the local fair, it looks the same. 

What it does is it makes the brand look big and consistent and well thought out and solid and you know, that builds trust. It doesn't actually matter, it, like, what is important is, is what all of that cumulatively conveys as opposed to whether right? So, you do all of those things. They all contribute a little. Doesn't matter how much each one contributes. The fact is the totality is what's meaningful. And so you do all of them so that you continue to look like that big market-leading, trustworthy brand.

Mick: And that's why Dunkin Donuts doesn't ask you how they're heard about you when you walk in and get yourself a cup of coffee.

Ryan: Yeah. Now a lot of this data is covered in a video that you can find on YouTube by Les Binet called The Short Of It, and it really does kind of capture the holistic nature of, marketing. Now this is over a decade worth of research and collected data. So we're talking about sizable sample sizes well researched, well-documented proof that in fact it is a cumulative effect. It is a compounding effect that matters more than the last touch attribution that we're giving whatever place they came from last.

Mick: Even Google will tell you that the best SEO you can possibly do is to have an offline campaign.

Ryan: That's right.

Mick: If people will then do direct search, rather than by intent search or organic search or category search they will even acknowledge and they will show you their data that shows that an offline campaign will accomplish that. Even though nobody will call you up and say, you know, Hello, I heard your radio commercial and I'd like to purchase some products and services. If anybody ever calls you up and says, hello, I heard your radio commercials and I'd like to purchase some products or services. You can say hello, Mrs. Torbay, because that's my mom. She's the only one who does that.

Ryan: The only one who does that.

Mick: Literally the only person who does that.

Ryan: She does it a lot actually.

Mick: Well, mean, she's a team player and we appreciate her.

In fact, I had a client in Edmonton who had someone call up literally and say hi there. I heard your radio commercials and I'd like to spend $35,000 on one of the products they sell and of course, he'd heard me say this before except that my mom doesn't live in Edmonton. He was trying to figure out why she wanted to go like four time zones away to buy a you know a really expensive product which she didn't.

Ryan: Tell me about the Yellow Pages Story.

Mick: Well, so how did you hear about us was invented by The Yellow Pages and that's because back in the good old days before Google, the Yellow Pages was Google. And, and so that allowed people to search by category. That's what I mean, we we search by category. Yeah, Yeah you'd look it up, in the Yellow Pages, under T, instead of Dave's Tow Truck. So, they would have the Yellow Pages, and the Yellow Pages had the phone number. Of course, that was the only way to get a phone number back then.

We didn't have every freaking phone number on the planet in our pocket back in those days. The phone was here, and the phone book was right underneath it. And so if you needed a phone number, you'd do that. And so you'd have a business that would have a TV campaign or a radio campaign or a newspaper campaign.

But then when you actually needed the product or service that they provide, well, you have to call them. Well, if you know that they're a jeweller, then you go to Jay and you look it up and there's a, there's the ad and You go good and you dial them up and they'd say, cool, how did you hear about us? And so the Yellow Pages would say, make sure you ask your customers when they call you. How did they hear about us? They would literally be holding the Yellow Pages in their hand. That was good for the Yellow Pages.

That's why they invented it. That's why no other people did that. Cause there was nobody else who was holding the freaking thing when they called. So Yellow Pages invented this self-serving thing so that they could prove to that purchasing the Yellow Pages was a good idea and it was a good idea. It was absolutely essential. It was as essential as having a Google presence is today, but it wasn't the only thing that mattered. The thing that's wrong, is that we don't have ten boxes to check and if we do have ten boxes to check what's the fucking point? You're checking all ten boxes? The data becomes shittier again.

Chris: But that is why I like my three-question idea because it's good for my business, not good for your business, which is if you ask them three questions, then they are going to say, yeah, okay, well, before I Googled you, yeah, I guess I'd heard you on the radio and then I'm going to get credit and now my

Mick: I think the gonna be even more annoyed with you. And they're going to just say, I don't know. My fucking uncle told me we can, can we please stop with my broken water heater?

Ryan: So certainly creates a friction point also,

Mick: Also you're wrong.

Chris: I am. I am. You know what? I will give you, I'm 100% wrong on this one, but it's a good conversation. 

Ryan: It doesn't make for good commentary. 

Mick: He does like riling up his brother I’ve been doing it since I was 11.

Chris: Whatever you do, don't ask people how you heard of us.

Ryan: Yeah.

Mick: I mean, I know I make a good case. 

Chris: I'm the more compelling of the two brothers, but don't do it.

Mick: He's the better-looking of the two. But he’s wrong about this.

Chris: I am wrong.

Ryan: They come for the conflict. That’s what makes this fun.

Mick: And stay for the cursing.

Ryan: Right, the cursing and the jokes. Before we go though, let's talk about three actions that you can take to figure out your ideal marketing mix.

Chris: But first, word from our sponsors.

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Remember that saying, only half of your marketing is working, you just don't know which half? Let's help you with that. Book a free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today at wizardofads.services. Yes, that's a URL, wizardofads.services. Now let's get back to the show.

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Ryan: In conclusion, to wrap things up, stop asking, how did you hear about us? It's flawed data and red herrings. Measure what needs to be measured, but don't subscribe to this notion that all things must be measured to be effective. 

Plan out your marketing budget to address the short-term and long-term goals in your marketing. Binet and Field suggests that a home service company, for example, should get a mix of about 60 percent of the budget to the brand presence and that 40 percent of the budget should be put towards sales activation. 

When you're just starting out, it'll be the other way around, but your goal should be to reverse that over time. 

Thank you for tuning in to Advertising in America, and remember, you're an American, not an American’t. Get out there and be awesome today. You can do it. Till next time.

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Thank you for joining us on Advertising in America. We hope you enjoyed the show and captured a nugget of marketing magic. Want to hear more?

Subscribe. Leave a review. And share this podcast with your friends. 
Do you have questions or topics you want us to cover? Join us on our social at @advertisinginamerica.

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

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

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You don’t have to be big to be famous.

Marketing researchers found big companies have an unfair advantage in continuing to dominate the market.

The next biggest unfair advantage is interesting. Creative. Not data, not budget, creative.

This means, that by having great creative/copywriting, you too will have outsized results to the budget you have available.

Your creative is leverage. There are 3 main levers that if utilized can help you become famous and wealthy, even on a relatively small budget.

Strategy

Strategy is what ties all of these circles together.

Most businesses don’t have a marketing strategy.

• They follow the crowd… when they should be standing out from it.
• They market inconsistently… when customers need frequency of exposure to build relationship with you.
• They offer an inconsistent experience… when customers expect continuity (brand alignment).

A poor or average strategy will lead to wasted marketing budget and stunted business growth. In this blog, you can learn how to create an optimal strategy.

Creative

If your marketing efforts look/sound like an ad, your efforts will be ignored or frustrate potential customers. Thus wasting your hard-earned marketing budget.If your creative/ad copy is phenomenal, you can literally create marketing campaigns whose effectiveness compounds over time.

“What emerged from the analysis was that creative execution was by far the single most important element of advertising under a marketer’s direct control when it comes to delivering a return on investment. Behind it were a host of different media planning and strategy factors that were all vital to success too. But creativity shone out as something that could yield special results.

This chimed with other research. Nielsen, Binet & Field – even McKinsey’s, a famously rationally-orientated consultancy – all concluded that businesses that excel in creativity perform the best in terms of hard financial metrics. Creative was the single biggest lever that we can pull when it comes to supercharging marketing ROI.”

— Link Below

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Expert creative allows you to win customers with fewer exposures to your ads and therefore lower spent budget.

Media Buying

Did you notice that each circle of marketing profitability (in the top chart) that followed Creative Quality is a function of Media Buying?

Media companies from Social Media to Billboards and Direct Mail to Radio want to sell the spots they have left, that no one else wants.

If you ask a media seller “How many times will the average customer need to hear/see this ad each week for me to become their business of choice” they won’t tell you… because they don’t know.

Media sellers are skilled at selling and have little to no incentive to prioritize the effectiveness of your marketing’s placement, frequency, schedule, etc.

Thankfully, this research exists and my team knows all of it.

Takeaway

By running your creatively exceptional ads with an ideal schedule that aligns with a cohesive strategy, you’ll be on your way to becoming famous in your community with all the financial rewards that come with it.

You don’t need the budget of a massive company to become a massive success.

Source Quote on Creative Effectiveness: https://www.thinkbox.tv/research/thinkbox-research/the-drivers-of-profitability

The ground moved beneath our feet.

There. It did it again.

That first tremor was the growing reality of gender equality.

The second was the shrinking of mass media.

These trends aren’t connected, but they’re both significant.

Gender equality is changing the nature of romance. Don’t believe me? Watch any romantic movie from 20 years ago and count the anachronisms, those interactions that belong to the past and do not seem to fit the present.

Gender equality also affects advertising and marketing in ways you might not expect.

Not many years ago, it was assumed that lovers would marry and buy a home and establish a life together. But then an entire generation of women was taught not to depend on a man, but to establish a career and a life on their own.

I’m not being critical. If Pennie and I had daughters instead of sons, this is probably what we would have urged them to do.

That advice to young women changed the landscape in marketing. A study published by Pew Research Center indicates that in 1970, 84% of U.S.-born 30-to 44-year-olds were married. By 2007 that number had declined to just 60% and if we extrapolate the trend into 2015, the percentage of married 30-to-44-year-olds is currently at 54.8% and falling. We went from 16% single to 46% single in just one generation.

A once-proud nation of families is evolving into a proud nation of individuals.

The motivations that drive husbands and fathers and wives and mothers are different from the motivations that drive individuals who have no one depending on them but themselves. Consequently, the language and logic of ad copy must be altered to connect with this altered audience.

The trend toward singleness is sociological.
The erosion of mass media is technological.
Each trend accelerates the other.

If the majority of a nation is watching the same TV shows at the same time, listening to the same hit songs at the same time, and receiving similar news from similar sources simultaneously, we can expect that nation to think and feel in similar ways.

Mass media ruled America in 1970. Radio was a rock station, a country station, a talk station, an easy listening station and an instrumental format called “beautiful music.” Then you had ABC, CBS and NBC TV. Ted Turner wouldn’t create the first cable network until 1976 and FOX didn’t appear until 1986. When a movie left the theaters, it would go to the drive-in theaters where it would be shown for a reduced price, then appear on network television for free about a year later. DVRs, DVDs and videotapes did not exist. You either had to be where a movie was showing at exactly the right time or you missed it. This forced us to gather together at specific times for entertainment where we all heard the same commercials.

Mass media brought us together physically and it united us psychologically. It also gave advertisers a platform for telling their stories.

Advertising was easy in those days.

Today’s technology allows us to opt-out of mass media. This is good for the individual but it presents a significant challenge to the advertiser. The advertising opportunities created by new technology are highly targetable but they’re also shockingly expensive. The most efficient thing we’ve found so far costs 4 times as much per person as broadcast radio. And although the digital product gives us the ability to pinpoint target a specific audience, that advantage doesn’t deliver anywhere near enough benefit to justify the inflated cost. This is not theoretical. We’ve learned these things through testing.

I’ll bring this to a conclusion:

We’re approaching the end of a golden time when courageous advertisers can invest money in mass media and see their businesses grow as a result. My suspicion is that we’ve got perhaps 5 to 7 more years before retail businesses and service businesses will be forced to begin playing by a whole new set of rules. No one yet knows what those new rules might be, but this we do know: the sharply rising costs of digital advertising are not being offset by a rise in efficiency.

Buy mass media while the masses can still be reached.

Reaching people one at a time doesn’t offer nearly the return on investment.

At Wizard of Ads®, we house the psychological marketing strategies you need to stop the scroll. If you're looking for nostalgic ads that will break through the noise, book a call with Wizard Ryan Chute today.  

Sometimes I think we go through our lives trying to impress an invisible audience called “everyone.”

“What will everyone think?”

Invisible would be bad enough, but I think “everyone” might also be imaginary. Emil Cioran was probably right when he said, “If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.”

“We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.”

We buy cars, clothes, furniture and art to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are.

Is it possible that everyone isn’t watching? Is there a chance that everyone is under the mistaken impression that is it we who are watching them?

It’s funny when you think about it.

And it’s also how I make my living. I’m an ad writer.

When you have a strong attraction to a brand, it’s because that brand stands for something you believe in. You see in that brand a reflection of yourself as you like to believe you are. What authors do you read? Do you subscribe to any magazines? What type of architecture attracts you? Do you listen to music? What kind?

Tell me what a person admires and I’ll tell you everything about them that matters.

Does it bother you for me to say these things? Please don’t let it. I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about an “else” named Everyone.

There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

The hidden mechanisms of explosive ad writing are rarely seen because most people don’t want to believe they need identity reinforcement and affirmation. They are offended by the very suggestion of it. But the truth is that most of us need these things deeply.

I met a man a year ago who paid me to give him advice for a day. We spent that day talking about several companies he owned. At the end of the day he asked if I might be willing to write ads for these companies and I – for a variety of reasons – declined. A few months later I received a long email from him telling me about a troubled company he had acquired that had lost two-thirds of all its customers, a loss of about 20 million dollars in annual revenues. I wrote back and told him that I would write ads for this troubled company, but not for the others.

The first ad I wrote shares a bittersweet, true story from the childhood of the man who hired me. It’s about something that happened to him when he was 10 years old and it’s why he bought the troubled company. Upon receiving the ad, he called six different people and read it to them. Each of them got tears in their eyes.

Not because the story was about him, but because it was about them, too. The story in the ad is about a certain kind of magic that each of us guards deep in our heart like buried treasure. Even you.

I have every confidence that the ad campaign will recover those lost customers and lift this once-troubled company into a sunlit sky.

To write an explosive explanatory ad, you must choose:

1. How to end.
2. Where to begin.
3. What to leave out.

You must include specific details in your ad or it won’t have credibility: “a year ago… two thirds… 20 million dollars… 10 years old.”

But you must also leave something out of your ad or it won’t trigger curiosity: “…a certain kind of magic that each of us guards deep in our heart like buried treasure.”

You really want to read that ad now, don’t you?

Unless you work with seasoned marketers with rich experience writing irresistible advertising, like Ryan Chute’s teams at Wizard of Ads®. Book a call.