Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

They said AI would change everything. It did—just not the way you think.

The boys dissect the hysteria around AI search, SEO panic, and why your competitors are about to burn their marketing budgets chasing algorithms that don’t care about them.

Because here’s the dirty little secret: AI doesn’t make people change their minds—it just helps them justify the ones they already had.

Episode Highlights

• Why AI is just the Yellow Pages in a shinier suit
• How “fast-talking AI salesmen” are selling fear, not strategy
• What McDonald’s and Porsche teach us about skipping the search entirely
• The truth about why your best marketing investment is still offline
• How to own the “tomorrow customer” instead of chasing today’s click

🎧 Hit play. Then go build a culture that actually means something.

📱 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

👉 Question for you: Is AI search the new marketing revolution—or just the same old Yellow Pages in disguise?

💥 Brought to you by Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services

On this episode of Advertising in America, we explore how AI is changing the way people search for your business.

Now people are searching for companies to do business with using AI. And everyone is up in arms because now it sounds like AI will do your research for you and help you form your opinion.

Your competitors are likely being sold a bill of goods by fast-talking AI salesmen; they're being bombarded by the threat of being left behind. They're gonna change stuff, a lot of stuff. The more they change, the more these salesmen can charge.

The internet doesn't know what information is what, and so the user must decide.

Most digital marketing companies are not marketing companies. They're sales channel sales companies. They're selling you the thing that they provide. I respect them for that.

Computer brains are changing; these brains, the ones in human heads, aren't changing much at all this year. And you can still reach those brains, those people, those customers, the way you always did.

Ryan Chute: On this episode of Advertising in America, we explore how AI is changing the way people search for your business. Is search engine optimization dead, or is it more important than ever? Let's ask Chris to list everything that's wrong with the internet today, Chris.

Chris Torbay: So here's what's wrong with the internet.

People use the internet when they want the answer to any question. What's the capital of Tanzania? Dar es Salaam.

What’s the highest ranking achieved by legendary Hawaiian sumo champion Konishiki?  Ozeki.  He was so close to becoming Yokozuna, but alas, he was denied.

How long is an oboe?  Yay big.

These are all things I actually know because of my profound, but somewhat haphazard, intelligence. But you could have looked those things up on the internet, and felt as smart as me. And the information is likely to be pretty accurate. Wikipedia is well-moderated, so inaccuracies are quickly rectified.

But ask the internet how good Nickelback is, and you will get a wide variety of answers, based on the wide variety of opinions people have posted. You will get some information from the legions of die-hard fans – and there are millions of them, by the way … that’s how they got to be one of the highest-grossing bands of all time – and you will get a bunch of snark from the haters who go on in great detail about how – and why – they are crap.  

The internet DOESN’T KNOW what information is what, and so the USER must decide.  And unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for you), that means people fall back on their own pre-existing opinions and use the internet to justify why they’ve been right all along.

A similar thing happens when choosing a business to patronize. In the Before Times – in the 1900s, back before the turn of the century – we had the Yellow Pages – a big book of ads from people saying, “Pick me.” You could buy a big ad or a small ad, but people still had to pick.  Then we started Googling things like “Jewelry store near me,” and we’d get a list of retailers that WE thought were impartial. Companies could actually buy their way to the top of the list, but still, you had to pick one.  Even when we see a ton of 5-star reviews – or 1-star reviews – from knuckleheads we’ve never met, it’s still up to US to decide what value we place on those opinions.  If you really want the thing you’re looking for, and you’ve already made up your mind, you might look at those 1-star reviews and think, “Yeah, but this guy sounds like a knucklehead, so I can totally ignore his 1-star review, and just buy it! ‘Because I want it!”

So now people are searching for companies to do business with using AI.

And everyone is up in arms, because now it sounds like AI will do your research for you and help you form your opinion! ChatGPT, or Siri, or Claude will tell people which company is good at what, and the mindless consumers will do what they’re told.

“So, how do I get AI to say it’s me?”, you ask.

AI is still just another Yellow Pages. If you’d paid a guy to flip through the Yellow Pages and read the ads to you, it wouldn’t have made them anything more than a list of businesses you knew nothing about.  If you’d paid a guy to read out the top five responses in a Google search, however weighted they may be by paid search, you would still have had to choose from the list of businesses you knew nothing about. So when you ask AI to find you a plumber, it’s going to do what the internet has always done and say, “Well, there’s this guy, and this guy … and this one has low prices, and this one has speedy service, and whatever random facts it manages to scrape from the various websites.

And just like before, if you recognize one of those names and you remember something specific about them, you’ll say, “Oh wait, I know these guys! They seem good. I should pick them.” Like we always have.

You will fall back on your own pre-existing opinion and use ChatGPT’s response to justify that you’ve been right all along. The AI-powered internet is still just the Yellow Pages – in a shinier package – and no one has ever built their brand on the Yellow Pages.  You build your brand advertising offline and serving your customers, and however they search, when they find you, they will remember you, feel connected with you, and make the decision they are drawn to make, no matter what the search device tells them.

Ryan Chute: I don't care what ChatGPT says, Nickelback is crap. I can say that I'm Canadian, Mick.

If I had a nickel back every time someone asked me about AI search this year, I'd be a thousandaire. What are your thoughts?

Chris Torbay: I'm excited about AI, but not for the reason you probably think. What I love most about AI is that one, nobody really understands it. Two, whatever it is now, it will be something else in three years. And C, everybody feels they have to change everything. Is this good? Yes. But only if, like me, you zig when everyone else zags.

Throughout history, we've been told everything is changing, so you'd better not be left behind. And so brands dutifully make reckless modifications to their marketing plans because the only thing they know for sure is that they can't keep doing what they've been doing.

And the only ones who disagree with them are consumers. You see, consumers don't change their opinions, their preferences and their behaviors just because a bunch of software engineers tell them that they're going to. In fact, consumers are quite predictable, slow to adapt, and slow to accept new things.

There's a lot of inertia in consumer behavior. Brands can act quickly, but your customer likely doesn't, and that's why Chris can tell you about a focus group they did at Anheuser-Busch, asking what the Budweiser tagline was, and they said, “This bud's for you,” which they hadn't been promoting for about eight years.

So I said this was good, and here's what I mean. Your competitors are likely being sold a bill of goods by fast-talking AI salesmen; they're being bombarded by the threat of being left behind. They're gonna change stuff. A lot of stuff. The more they change, the more these salesmen can charge. So they're going to be recommending a lot of changes.

Your competitors are gonna fall for it. It's a whole new world. AI is here, and if you don't do it the new way, then no one's gonna be able to find you when they search for you on AI. Well, you know what? I've heard that shit before. And although computer brains are changing these brains, the ones in human heads aren't changing much at all this year, and you can still reach those brains, those people, those customers, the way you always did by talking to them over and over again about stuff. They care about, making them laugh, or think, or ponder like a friend, unchanging. If you ask me, the biggest opportunity in marketing that AI presents is the ability to differentiate yourself from your competitors by changing nothing.

Ryan Chute: If AI’s big secret is that people don't really change, then you're gonna love this next part. And that from our sponsors now at 25% more cussing.

Ryan Chute: We're back. Now, let's discuss whether Chris is living under a rock and Mick is just minging about those damn kids today.

I think we all agree that AI is changing where people are searching, but essentially, people are still searching like they've always been since the Yellow Pages. So, how does ChatGPT generate the responses when we ask, “best AC repair in Phoenix?”

Chris Torbay: Perhaps the mistake that we're making is that we are assuming that searching with AI is somehow a monumentally shifted way from how we've been searching before.

And here's what I'm getting at. When we talk about, well, people are searching on AI, and the people who are trying to sell you AI to help with your search are still basing it on something, on an assumption that is not quite true. It's based on the assumption that consumers do not have a preferred brand.

And that, by the way, is exactly how the Yellow Pages came to be, right? I mean, we've talked about the Yellow Pages before and what a powerful advertising medium it was, but it was really only a powerful advertising medium if there was no strong leader in that category. So if nobody in your town was the leading plumber, then you go, well, you go to the Yellow Pages, you just go to plumbers, and you look at all the plumbers.

And when you flip to the restaurant section of the Yellow Pages, there'll be big, big full-page ads for restaurants. But here's what wasn't there, McDonald's. They never bought a big ad in the Yellow Pages. They really didn't. And in fact, try this at home, Google “hamburgers near me” and you'll have to go through like eight or nine pages till you get to McDonald's.

And yet their parking lot is always full. So they have managed to skip Google. They skipped the Yellow Pages and got straight into people's heads to the point where, if there's a group of people that said, “We need to get a quick burger for lunch, where are we gonna go?” Somebody in that room would say, “Eh. Fuck it. We’ll go to McDonald's.”

And so they skipped it. Well, those people will also skip the AI search if they already know and love you and don't necessarily have to do that. So in that sense, I don't think it's changed much at all. We have to wonder, are we assuming that there is no leader in this category?

Ryan Chute: That’s a very, very valid point. And when we look at the data, the data does tell us that yes, a lot of people don't have a chosen provider, but that's probably because there's not a whole lot of companies doing a great job. Branding their companies and putting out a message that matters, which is a huge opportunity for the one or two people who do, big or small.

Mick Torbay: That’s kind of where I'm coming from. If the solution to getting more people to call your business is to find an AI solution, to get them to magically come to you, instead of going to somebody else when they're searching those bland, unbranded keywords. You know, category keywords, then that is just proving the point that there is no leader in that category, and that's a tremendous opportunity for brands. Then take that leadership position.

Chris Torbay: The other thing that's interesting about AI is everyone assumes, and I think it's because it speaks in plain language, right? Whereas your previous Google search would just give you a bunch of entries, whereas this one gives you a lovely paragraph, and it makes it sound like somebody smart has said something. “Well, I found this company over here, and they specialize in such and such, and I found this other company over here that specializes in this other thing.” And it was things like, “Wow, you've really dug and done some research.” And it's interesting, which is that it is still a product of whatever it can find.

And, like back in the seventies, when people still had big ENIACs that were the size of an office floor.

Mick Torbay: He means computers.

Chris Torbay: They invented this term GIGO, “garbage in, garbage out,” and that is still true today, which is, if all AI does is check everybody's website and take the random bullet points that are on everybody's homepage, then if everybody's saying the same things about low prices and quality products and qualified staff who really care about your needs, the AI is just gonna choose to say this thing from this guy's website and choose to say this thing from this other guy's. They haven't vetted them, it hasn't thought it through, they haven't checked and compared it with the reviews, and said, “Well, these guys say they have low prices, but a lot of people disagree.”

It hasn't actually done this thing, but because it presents the answer as if it were your best buddy saying, “Well, these guys downtown have this.” You seem to think it carries some weight, and it's really just grabbing random, random facts off the internet, and they may or may not be true.

Ryan Chute: My pal Tim Brown 🪝 at Hook Agency, recently posted about the most cited websites for the different AI models.

Number one, Reddit. It goes through 20 of these things, and these are just the top 20.

• Wikipedia, 26%
• YouTube, 23%
• Google, 23%
• Yelp, 21%
• Facebook, 20%
• Amazon, 18%, and on, and on, and on.

Well, why does this matter? Well, if we're thinking about how I can spend my limited marketing dollars the wisest and still get the volume and momentum that we get, that we want, that the big players are spending the money on, how do we compete against the big players?

Well, the answer is to say something that's relevant enough that you have customers talking to you on Reddit, about you on Reddit. You know, I think our friend down in the Rio Grande Valley who is absolutely eviscerated on Reddit.

Mick Torbay: There are four or five subreddits about how much his ads suck.

Ryan Chute: But then there are the people who support him, and there are the people who are for him and against him, respond to it and say, “No, I think he's great. It's amazing.” Yeah, that's right. And they say by name, and they say very specific things. And all of these things start to show up on Reddit.

Now, for a very tiny digital budget, this man is generating tremendous revenue, tremendous volume, and tremendous lead flow. And it's all because he has a terrific brand to get him in front of the competitors in his marketplace, rather than trying to be on 20 different things deeply and robustly with one marketing coordinator on staff and a respectable budget.

So this is very much about how do we win this game? Well, you can invest all of your dollars into digital saying things that no one cares about, and you're not gonna satisfy Google's EEAT, but the natural language processing that it's looking forward to say, “Yeah, these guys are relevant and they're saying something important.”

What in the world do we need to do? Well, we need to do exactly what you say, the same thing that we've always done. Tell stories, be relevant, look bigger than you actually are by having a huge frequency, not a huge reach. And say something that matters.

Chris Torbay: And give people a preconceived conception of somebody that they know in that space.

Ryan Chute: Know, like, and trust.

Mick Torbay: Our guy in Texas, because he's all over the television, he's all over the radio. Literally, everybody in that community has an opinion either for or against. But the point is, they have an opinion, whereas most air conditioning companies, people are not even aware of their existence. So our guy at least is, is on the radar and therefore, you know, even the people who say, “I hate that guy's commercial.” It's like, great, but name me an air conditioning company. There, fuck you. I win.

Chris Torbay: Where else are you gonna go to?

Mick Torbay: Because I wonder we're on the short list.

Chris Torbay: I also wonder if human nature, regardless of how much nicer, I guess, AI interaction is as opposed to just typing in queries and having to figure it out yourself, based on a list or visiting a few of the things to figure it out. You get this lovely text conversational response back. But I wonder if people, it's interesting you make that comparison to “let's get a hamburger.” If you asked your friends, “Hey, where, where should we go for a hamburger?” Does anyone say, I got a great idea, let's go on the internet and search through and see if we can find something. Or, would you rather have somebody say, “I know this really great place downtown. Let's do what Dave said. Cool, let's try Dave's place.”

Like I would much rather do that. I don't want to go search; I didn't want to have to Google it. I didn't want to have to dig out the Yellow Pages 25 years ago. And I don't necessarily want to write a good prompt for ChatGPT and spend all that time, if somebody can just say, “Hey, I got a brand that I actually, totally like, why don't we try with this place? You guys will love it.” Done.

Ryan Chute: Well, that's often why we went back to the same restaurants all the time.

Chris Torbay: Exactly, because he knew it was a sure thing.

Ryan Chute: We knew what to expect. We understood the consistency of it. The implied agreement was already in place, as you'd expect.

Mick Torbay: Well, and that's sort of what I was getting at at the beginning, is all these discussions have this assumption, which I think is flawed, which is before we buy anything, we always search. And it's like, well, that's only true when there is no preferred brand. If I said to you today, “Can you, can you pick me up some ketchup on the way home?” You would not take out your phone.

Chris Torbay: “Let’s see what all the ketchups are.”

Mick Torbay: “Which ketchup has the best, has the most five-star reviews?” No. There are actually some people who are skipping the search entirely, and that's what we are recommending.

We're recommending you skip the consumer taking the step of the search, which could be Google, in the day it was Yellow Pages, and soon it'll be, “Hey, Siri, tell me the best catch-up.” No, they're not doing it. We want our consumers to skip the search entirely, already have the solution in their head, or be standing next to a person who has a solution in their head and say, “Let's just do this.”

Chris Torbay: I think I've mentioned this one before. When I worked on the Porsche business, one of the things we knew about Porsche was that when people are ready to buy a car like that, normally, when people are ready to buy a car, they have a shortlist, and the average shortlist of all car buyers is sort of three or four. And so when you're ready, it's like, “okay, well I'll look at the Corolla and I'll look at the whatever, whatever, but I've got a shortlist of three or four,” and you maybe go to whatever.

When people are ready to buy a Porsche, their shortlist is on average 1.2 cars. They've spent their whole life saying, “One day I will buy a Porsche 911.”

That's where you want to be. And nobody says, “I'm 55. I've made a certain amount of money in my law firm. Now I'm ready to buy a car that I only drive, you know, two seasons outta the year.”  I want “Google sports cars that I only drive in the summer.” You know, they don’t. They have always wanted this brand. They knew that one day they would get to where they could buy it. They're looking forward to when that day comes. They've got a brand in their head. They don't Google it.

Mick Torbay: Well, that's sort of my point is that these people who are trying to sell AI solutions, everything's different now because of AI. What they're doing is they're saying to people, when they're searching you, it's based on this flawed assumption that everyone is gonna be searching, and there is no leader.

Chris Tobay: There's no one who knows what they're looking for.

Mick Torbay: And so we need to stop them and say, “Hang on a second. Everyone is searching at all times, and there's no leader. That's a pretty huge assumption, which is not true.”

Ryan Chute: Well, and so are we optimizing for AI search? You're certain not to get to the top of the list unless you're the biggest. You could force it. For periods of time with gaming the amount of content that you're putting out or getting blips along the way, and having all kinds of AI-generated key wording to AI search.

Sure, but you're putting in a massive amount of effort for a short-term gain, and that is then going to be shifted over to paid search, where you're now going to be paying for not only to show up, but you're also going to pay against your competitors.

Chris Torbay: And you’re doing all this effort, as Mick says, for the people who don't have anything in mind, who are undecided. There are a bunch of people who aren't going to be captured by all that effort.

Ryan Chute: So it quickly spirals out of control. Like what you're saying is that we're dropping $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a month, on trying to get the today customer on an AI search to be on all of these different search listings and beat our competitors and pay the person doing it and pay the pay-per-click tax when the cheapest pay-per-clicks that you'll ever get are always and unpaid-per-clicks. No-pay-clicks is the brand.

Chris Torbay: Your actual brand. Either Google your name or they type your name in, the consumer says, because they know you’re a reputable company.

Ryan Chute: That's right. And, that's good advertising,  in the sense of they're typing in your name, but even typing in your brandable chunks, typing in little stuff from

Mick Torbay: Typing in the stuff from the ads they heard. The one with the kangaroo? “Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. Google will figure out which one is the one with the kangaroo.”

Ryan Chute: Well, and AI will do it far better than anything else when you have this ultra, ultra uniqueness. Billy Ray's hole digging….

Chris Torbay: And, Wally, the walrus, know the Wal Air conditioner, walrus. If you type that in South Carolina, you will get Waldrop. And AI will give you Waldrop Plumbing Heating Air, in fact. So that's how you answer that question. How do I get AI to pick me?  You ask AI, “Who's that walrus who fixes air conditioners?”

Ryan Chute: This is where I do enjoy AI search, is that I do type in incredibly vague things that I know about, that I have forgotten the names of specifically, and it's able to pull this stuff up.

Do I want to be trying to chase down AC repair guys that I like or the best AC repair guys in South Carolina or Greenville, or do I want to be the Walrus Air Conditioning Company in Greenville? Boom, you own that! You absolutely own that. Because your competitors can't be the Walrus Company. If they do, they're gonna fail. They can't be the Billy Ray hole-digging company because if they do, they'll fail. And you got that for fractions of the price.

Now, where did you invest the money? In the brand. The difference being that a brand is a compounding effect because you're building real estate in the brain. The real estate that you build digitally, is a sunk cost. They see it, they experience it. You pay for that experience of them experiencing it, and then it disappears from their brain, and you go back to being invisible again. Well, that's not a winning solution. You're just spending money to lose it. Where with branding, you're spending the same money, but you're doing it to build a compounding effect in the chemistry of the brain that's going to have you completely win out over the list.

Chris Torbay: And then no matter where, it was Google last decade, it's AI this decade, whatever it is, a decade after this. It’s going to win at that too.

Ryan Chute: Well, and it's moving to voice search, and people are going to do exactly what I do, which is poorly explain the thing that I kind of remembered because I've not had enough interface with the particular brand yet, but I knew I found something that I liked about it.

And then in two, three years time, as your brand is deepened in five years time, and 10 years time, as your brand is now entrenched in your community, you own it. And that really is what we're trying to figure out for our clients.

I perceive the marketing mix differently. I believe that the marketing mix is three different things, generally speaking. It's not about the channels, it's about what we do with our marketing. One being the brand awareness, two being the sales activation, and three being the lead capture. And when you get that mix right, your lead capture costs are going to start to dramatically drop, you're going to see the cost of this stuff go down because you are doing the things necessary to have the people looking for you, and you only.

And that's the real challenge. But 90% of the effort is in lead capture, the four, maybe five different ways. Five, if you have a showroom. Four different ways that you're going to get a customer? Well, the easiest, fastest, cheapest long-term strategy here is always going to be to have the brand that people know, like, and trust before they need you and come top of mind when the trigger happens.

That's always gonna be the way.

Mick Torbay: Well, and one other little thing that I think is worthy of mentioning is I don't think we give the consumer enough credit for being able to tell the difference between something paid and something not paid.

When you're, when you're searching on Google for something and a particular paid answer comes up, I think people know, well, that's not necessarily the best one. That's the one who spent the most.

Chris Torbay: Scroll down a bit here and see what else.

Mick Torbay: And as soon as people start paying AI to put their name at the top of that list, then you're not really asking your buddy, “Hey, have you heard of any good air conditioning companies?” Actually, what you're doing is you're talking to your friend who gets paid to tell people what kind of air conditioning companies.

And I don't think it's going to take that long for consumers to realize, “Wait a minute, they're not really trying to give me the best thing. They're trying to give me the thing they were paid to do.”

If I ask my friend who works at the Apple Store whether I should get a PC or a Mac, gee, I wonder what he's going to say.

Ryan Chute: It’s no different than asking your buddy, introduce me to a nice girl and he introduces you to a prostitute. That's ultimately what's, well, ultimately that's what it is though. You're, you're saying, “Oh, this is the one you pay for versus the one that you'd marry.” And there's a dramatic difference between the two. Both are fun, but one is much longer-lasting than the other. And at the end of the day,

Mick Torbay: Well, this has gotten awkward.

Chris Torbay: I'm gonna take your word on that one.

Mick Torbay: And he's married now, so it's fine. There's nothing weird about it,

Chris Torbay: What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

Ryan Chute: So many years ago.

You guys, so yes, is there an effort to be done in training effectively AI, that your brand is the brand of choice through unbranded keywords? Yes, but it's a fool's errand to invest the bulk of your money and to rely solely on that because what you become is the slave of the channel. I promise you that the channel wants you to be their slave, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Bing. All of these organizations are doing everything in their power to keep you on their platform and to contain you as a revenue source. It's an absolute tragic mistake for business owners to be thinking about how do I show up on all these things without asking the more important question of how do I show up for less?

Mick Torbay: How do I skip all of that shit?

Ryan Chute: Exactly. I show up, I'm present where people go looking for me, but because I've done something of impact.

I talked to a friend of mine the other day, Lisa Nichols, a very famous woman, she's buddies with Tony Robbins, and these guys are all transformational coaches, and she said, “You don't get fame without first giving impact.”

And this is true. Now, we have a parasocial relationship that we can create, and you have to earn your celebrity in your town. But you're never going to get that without first having done something that sticks with the potential buyer or the potential buyer's friend who's going to influence you to buy that parasocial relationship.

The long-term, much, much, much bigger winning game is to put a balance of your marketing budget into the brand awareness segment, and then to balance that out appropriately with lead capture in the unbranded world, but do everything you can to transition yourself away from the unbranded world as quickly as you can. Which is probably gonna be somewhere in the realm of three to seven years, depending on your market and your competition, and all of the different factors that you have at play that are affecting your competitive landscape.

Mick Torbay: The only alternative to doing it the easy way, which is what we're talking about, is to do it the hard way, which is to just try and buy your way out of this problem and spend your way to the top of that list.

Chris Torbay: And that is an endless pit of money.

Mick Torbay: And that is a ridiculously expensive, expensive way to do it. And that's the only thing that these channels will recommend you do.

Ryan Chute: And it's not lost on us that you need leads today, right? You need to go hunting. You need to feed your business, the cash it needs to survive. It's also not lost on us that it feels expensive when you can't attribute it. So you're like, “Oh, I didn't show up, so I'm not getting leads because of this.” No, it's not happening that way. It's a balancing act of the two, and you have to transition out of one and into the other. You will absolutely spend more on marketing if you're ambitious and looking to grow, and have an operation and capacity to support your growth, but then it's not expensive.

If you want it to remain expensive for a really long period of time, you keep dumping your money into things that don't give you any compounding effect in the brain.

Mick Torbay: Fight it out with all the other non-leaders.

Ryan Chute: It's way less expensive to own the real estate in the mind than it is to own the real estate in the digital presence. So if we can just get rid of the costs around the digital presence, will we still show up? Yes. But, what if you were able to get a thousand leads, like one of our clients does every single month, on their name, not on AC repair near me? That keeps their trucks busy. They do many, many tens of millions of dollars. This is possible, but it takes effort, and frankly, that's why branding is hard for people. Because they don't understand branding. It's not your truck wraps, it's not your logos, it's not your colors.

Mick Torbay: And Google is not going to recommend that you spend your money doing that. They're gonna recommend you spend your money with Google.

Chris Torbay: Yes.

Ryan Chute: Oh, absolutely. Golly. Like, no one wants to absolutely convince you. Most digital marketing companies are not marketing companies. They're the sales channel, sales companies. They're selling you the thing that they provide. I respect them for that. They're not bad people. They're doing a service.

Mick Torbay: But their job is to sell the thing that they have, sell their service.

Ryan Chute: That's right. And they're in a silo. And that silo is perpetuating failure.

Mick Torbay: The billboard guy is going to say, “You should spend your money more on billboards if you actually wanna succeed.” We don't care where you spend your money. We want you to make money. The three of us.

Ryan Chute: This is it. Where you spend to say it more, maybe a shifting or nudging over how we say that. We absolutely care where you spend your money. We just want to spend the least amount of money for the most amount of results of impact. And that's going to mean that we're going to look at the whole landscape, online and offline, instead of just AI search, and that matters a lot.

EEAT. Have an interesting story. Say something that no one else can say. No one else can talk about Wally the Walrus. No one can talk about Billy Ray's hole-digging. No one can talk about Call Dad AC & Heating in the same way that our clients are talking about it. And that makes a massive difference. Not today, but for the tomorrow customer, that's gonna skip all that stuff and go right to where you're looking for. They might do it on AI, they might do it on voice search, but they're still going to be looking for “that” keyword, not the generic unknown keyword, and that's way cheaper, way more powerful, way more opportunity for your growth of your business at a much more reduced cost in the long term.

Most of the people that we deal with work with long sales cycles, high average tickets, and massive amounts of competition. So you have to find ways that you're going to be able to create efficiencies, and this is just one of those things. Not to say that you don't do those things as well, but investing your dollars in a slightly different mix is not going to garner a today result, but it is going to garner a tomorrow result, and then it's going to far outpace your next week's result. And I say that, on a consolidated timeline, three to five years is when you should see the multiplier effect of your brand kicking into play, not just the fractional growth that you would get from it normally.

‍Ryan Chute: AI isn't a magic bullet, and it isn't the death of SEO either.

It's just the latest version of the Yellow Pages; shinier, faster, but still dependent on what people already know and feel about you. 

So here's your job. Build a brand that people remember so that they look for you by name. Unless you're a giant, you need to chase keywords that only you can own. “Best AC repair in Phoenix” is too expensive, but no one can steal your authentic and unique brandable chunk.

Content is king, but generic keyword content is dead if you want to truly get ahead. Until next time, this has been Advertising in America. Thanks for tuning in.

Till next time. this is Advertising in America.

‍

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

Join us on our socials @advertisinginamerica. Wanna spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today. Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.

Qualifying Questions have been a popular litmus test to determine whether a prospect is worth working with…or not. Countless businesses engage in qualifying prospects to help weed out those who aren’t ready and willing to buy your solutions. At the end of the process, qualified prospects who survive are deemed worthy to enter the sales funnel.

There’s just one problem: qualifying prospects is utter nonsense.

The reality is clients don’t need to be qualified. It’s the solution provider that needs to be qualified.

Stop making your problem their problem. It’s bad manners. 

Why?

The fact is, your customers aren’t the authority on the solutions they need. You are. It’s your job to ask the right questions to determine if and what you might have to solve their problem correctly. 

Your business and solutions may not always be the right fit for your customer’s needs. Using qualifying questions will allow you to properly assess a client’s situation and determine the perfect solution for their problems. 

One must never use their solutions as the gold standard prior to working with a prospect. It’s always about identifying your client’s specific needs first, and then presenting the right solutions to their needs.

That’s what qualifying questions should be about. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how qualifying questions work and explore 27 questions to ask prospects.

How Do Qualifying Questions Actually Work?

Sales statistics information reveals that at least 50 percent of your prospective customers are not a good fit for your solution. That’s why many businesses think that qualifying prospects is a good idea to avoid wasting money, effort, and time.

But what this data doesn’t reveal is how well the seller understood their prospects' needs. Time and time again I have listened to sales presentations and wondered if the salesperson was even in the same room when the prospect expressed their desires and needs. 

Qualifying a prospect is lazy, entitled, and selfish. Being qualified to offer a solution by really understanding a prospect is key. We all know that the buying process should always revolve around our customer and exceed their return on perceived investment. Their investment is money, energy, time. Once your solution's value exceeds their MET (money, effort, and time), a sale is made. 

To this end, qualifying questions should not be used to qualify a customer, but rather, for the seller to become qualified to sell them the right solution.

Think of it this way.

A sales professional asking qualifying questions to customers is like a doctor diagnosing a patient. During the interview, doctors don’t shove their medical achievements, facilities, and expert staff down the patient’s throat. 

Instead, they actively listen to the patient and try to understand the sum of their symptoms. Only when they have a complete understanding of the situation will they be able to prescribe the right treatment.

For you, qualifying questions operate with the same intent.

You want to fully comprehend your customer’s situation to properly diagnose their needs. This enables you to prescribe the right solution. Ultimately, when your presentations are tailored specifically to your customers’ needs, you will boost your conversion rate, average sale, and profit in the process.

27 Qualifying Questions to Ask Your Prospect

The thought of all the possible questions you could possibly ask a prospective buyer can feel overwhelming. When I really studied all these questions, they ultimately fell into three essential categories. 

1. The prospect's needs that make them feel right about the purchase.
2. The environment that the solution is exposed to.
3. The solution needs to be the most fitting option, perceptually and literally. 

Well conceived, open-ended questions help you gather intelligence to determine the best solution and if your business is the right fit for your prospects. 

Contrary to popular opinion, there are stupid questions. These are the ones that neither propel the conversation forward or set you up for a successful closing sequence.  

Furthermore, pay attention to the tone you set. Use your playful voice and your reassuring late-night FM DJ voice. Your vibe will directly affect the responses you receive. 

This is why you build a deck of solid qualifying questions that uncover the 3 essential needs. 

27 Qualifying Questions 

Prospect’s Needs

1. Would I be crazy to think you want this fixed right the first time? 

“No” oriented questions allow the customer to feel in control and state their truest desires. Everyone is transactional until you make it relational. This is done with tactical empathy and confident competence. 

2. Who has been servicing your needs up to now? 

Finding out if you're the fool or the favor helps you figure out how to win their favor. Rule of thumb: if they are a new customer and have used the same provider more than once, you’re in the role of the fool. Figure out what’s changed. 

3. When home repairs like this come up, how do you tend to fund them? 

While clearly not a question to ask early on, this is a great way to open up a conversation about finance options, minimizing the cost, and saving money. It’s a portal to a deeper, more empathetic, more competent solution. It’s never about you making money. It’s always about how you save them money, stress, and time both during and after the problem is resolved. 

4. Have you had any bad experiences with contractors before? 

Knowing what not to do is arguably more valuable than knowing what to do. Most people are guided by good manners and a servant's heart. Recognizing things that trigger a negative feeling allows you to show up in the best way. 

5. What matters most to you, the cheapest solution, or the lowest overall cost solution? 

The cheapest solution is most often not the lowest cost solution. Most customers don’t want the best solution, they want a slightly better solution than what they have now. If it is broken, they want it fixed. If it can’t be fixed, they want a new one that gives them the most value for their money, efforts, and time, both during the sale and after. 

6. Would you rather have the same thing as you have now or an upgrade? 

This is a simple to answer either/or question that clarifies where the buyer’s mind is at the moment. You’re setting yourself up to share options by planting a seed that you offer choices, not ultimatums. 

7. When were you hoping to have this problem solved? 

The short answer will naturally be, “It depends.” This question holds some tension in it, but you want to understand how much urgency the prospect has to make this problem go away. You can decide how to most appropriately raise consequences in your closing sequence. 

8. Would I be off base to think you’re probably anticipating some problems arising?  

When you gently tug out and preemptively address objections before they become a roadblock, you make closing so much easier. This shows up as empathy, and allows you to show your competence, which are the 2 key ingredients to trust. PRO TIP: After you’ve asked the question, go silent and allow the prospect to speak. 

9. Would I be silly to think that there are 2 decision-makers for something this important?  

Using “no” oriented questions allows you to protect your prospects' dignity with a sense of control. They will be certain to correct you if they are the only decision-maker, but almost always they will reveal they have a built-in stalling mechanism in place to avoid quick commitments. Knowing this allows you to set up your closing sequence for a higher chance of first-sit conversions. 

Environment‘s Needs

10. When did you notice the change? 

Knowing when things changed, internally and externally, is helpful in coming up with an accurate diagnosis. Things don’t break in a vacuum. You also learn how urgent the issue is to them. If they’ve been putting it off, I’d be curious what hasn’t felt right to have them act. 

11. What are some of the ways you tried to make it work again? 

You learn a lot about a person’s understanding of the problem by what they attempted to do before calling you. From nothing to something, you gather helpful intelligence. In some cases, the equipment is exposed to tinkering, while in others, the solution has been sitting there uncared for. 

12. When was the last time it was given scheduled maintenance?

Having a homeowner verbalize their duty of care gives you a good indication of what you’re facing. Most people want their home’s major systems to silently work and remain invisible. That means they often forget about it. This gives you an opportunity to sell them the convenience of annual preventative maintenance. 

13. Would I be out of line to advise you if I find something concerning? 

Asked in a nonconfrontational, “no” oriented question, you can elicit a lot of helpful information from the environment their home’s systems survive or thrive in. The environment includes both what a system is exposed to and how the systems are cared for. 

14. Are any of your spaces uncomfortable? Do you have all the hot water you need?

By speaking about how the prospect's environment feels, you are exploring the environment from the opposite direction. This shows both empathy and competence, which has them feeling right about you solving any problems you may identify. 

15. Might it be crazy to think you invited us here today because you’re not completely happy with how your system is operating?

This ”no” oriented question gives your prospect a safe way to reveal anything that they have on their mind. People can be hesitant to show their cards, and if you were to ask the same question, soliciting a “yes” response, they will be more guarded as they fear you trying to make a sale. 

16. Does this room/equipment get exposed to any extreme conditions? 

Are there abnormal conditions that could be affecting the existing solutions or new solutions? Heat, cold, old wiring, wind, large windows, low water quality, etc., all have the ability to affect performance. If the prospect recognizes it as an issue, it is an indication that they are open to accepting specific performance or finding solutions. 

17. Do you want to fix it or risk it if I find something is broke? 

While you’re not trying to find problems, very often there are small problems that can be fixed to avoid an impending catastrophic failure. This question plants a seed of doubt and indirectly asks permission to share your concerns if any arise. It’s an empathetic way to broach an uncomfortable conversation about a grudge purchase. 

18. When’s the last time you gave your system a deep cleaning?

Ever go into a teenager’s bedroom and nearly die from the smell, twist an ankle, and hear a rustling noise as you run out in terror? A lot of homes are like this for residential systems and equipment. Every once in a while, it’s essential to give everything a proper clean.

Solution’s Needs

19. Has the equipment been keeping up with your comfort? 

Knowing how people perceive their equipment performance will give you insight into two things. One, their level of interest in their equipment, and two, how they feel the equipment is serving their needs. 

20. Does your equipment do…or not do something you want? 

If there is a gap, they’ll share it with you. If there is something unpleasant happening, they’ll tell you. Not surprisingly, they will never offer up what they don’t know to offer up. So, stay curious. Do you have a lot of dust in the house? Do your tub, toilet, or taps have stains? Do your lights ever flicker? 

21. Would it be uncommon for you to have a power bill over $500 a month these days? 

Framing this question to a “no” oriented response empowers the prospect to respond effortlessly. Removing friction from an odd, mildly intrusive question allows you to get past the first roadblocks of a more open conversation about how you could improve their situation with more efficient solutions. 

22. Does your equipment ever make any funny noises? 

Funny noises are a good indicator of potential problems. The term “funny noises” leaves space for family-friendly humor, too. Keep your word choices simple and relatable. Don’t be afraid to even mimic a few of those potential funny noises to drive home your point with a bit of a chuckle.

23. Did you pick out the equipment, or did you inherit it with the home? 

Asking a prospect how old their equipment is will expose you as a slick Willy sales guy. Asking them if they bought it or inherited it is a subtle way to learn more about the relationship they have with the equipment. 

24. Anything you want me to pay particularly close attention to today? 

Your client called you for a reason. Give them their voice so they may guide you. This shows empathy and respect for their input and opinions. It also presents you as more competent, having given them the time to feel heard and understood. 

25. Where do you keep your filters? 

People who know where the filters are typically care for their equipment. For those who have no idea or don’t have filters on hand, have a lower duty of care for their equipment. One prospect likes having you help care for their equipment, and the other desperately needs you there to care for their equipment.

26. Do you notice any weird smells coming from your equipment? 

Smells are a sign something’s wrong with your household equipment. They are intrusive. They give your home a stigma, mentally and emotionally. And you are your client’s problem solver. Their painkiller.  Their odor eater-upper. 

27. Would I be crazy to think we could fix it today instead of replacing it? 

In the greedy world of short-term sales quotas and revenue maximization, all to please a bunch of soulless shareholders that don’t even live in the same state, the privately-owned, hometown contractor that wants to be appreciated at church on Sunday, their kids' football game on Friday night, and the grocery store on Wednesday. Replacement sales will happen when they need to. 

Finding ways to save a customer money (at the right price to be profitable) represents your brand far more than closing that big deal and leaving a trail of disappointment. 

Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. 

The Rest of the Diagnosis

Not all questions are for your client. Much of the questions you need to have satisfied come from cleaning and inspecting the equipment and the environment it is in. Make it a good practice to NOT ask questions that the environment and equipment can answer for you better. This will show your competence. 

A prognosis without diagnosis is malpractice. 

Once the doctor gathered all the anecdotal information, they would set about running tests. Your job is no different, even if the diagnosis is to replace the old unit. 

Why? Because what if? What if the system could be fixed? What if it was something simple? What if the ethical sale is a repair? 

Would a doctor amputate a leg if he could stop the infection? No. Neither should you. 

Be thorough. Be satisfied that you turned over all the stones. Serve the buyer at the highest level, and they’ll demand that you come back, again and again. 

Did You Notice?

Not a single question started with the word why.

Most of the questions we have are why questions. It instantly exposes intent. There’s just one problem. It’s TOO forward. It feels cunning. It FEELS intrusive. Almost adversarial. Certainly salesy. 

The good news? Any “why” question can be asked in a different way to get a response. Often a better response, because you’ve not set off their spidey-senses. 

When you embrace the truth about serving others at the highest level, you operate within the two core elements of truth — empathy and competence. 

And that means choosing your words with intention. 

Even the smallest changes will garner dramatically better results. 

Remember, in a transactional category, the only differentiator you have is how you make people feel. 

Good Selling. 


Interested in asking Wizard Ryan Chute the questions you want the answers to, contact us today!

Step into the smoke-filled boardrooms of Madison Avenue with Advertising in America. Ryan Chute, Mick Torbay, and Chris Torbay pull no punches as they debate the most expensive myth in marketing: the “perfect lead.”

Episode Highlights

• Why chasing the “Glengarry leads” could bankrupt your business.
• The dangerous illusion of digital targeting and search intent.
• Why brand-building beats hyper-targeting every single time.
• The real math behind reach, frequency, and cost efficiency.
• How messaging, not media, is the ultimate form of targeting.

🎧 Hit play. Then go build a culture that actually means something.

📱 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

💬 Do you believe in the mythical “perfect lead,” or is mass media still king in building brands?

💥 Brought to you by Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services

In a world of opportunity, we can send our limited resources to good leads or bad leads. If all we want are the good leads, where can we go to just talk to them? 

Targeting good leads. The Glenngarry leads the magical list of leads where everyone is rolling in cash and ready to buy. They just don't know anyone who sells what you sell or does what you do. Is there such a list? Maybe. 

Budweiser advertises a lot on TV. Is that because that's where all the thirsty beer drinkers are? No. Are there tons of TV viewers who aren't even beer drinkers? Sure. But the medium still builds the brand very well among plenty of people who are the target. Reach that group with a relevant, compelling, memorable message, and you will have plenty of targeted leads. 

Targeting good leads is the most expensive way to market your business. You can't afford to spend good money showing Chris Torbay how good your geotechnical drill is. 

When people say fish, where the fish are, what they really mean is…

Ryan Chute: In today's episode, we're going to debate the best way to target the good leads. To start, let's hear from Mick on the best way to target these supreme specimens. 

Mick Torbay: Nobody wants to waste their money talking to the wrong people. In marketing, we call that wastage. Premium brands understand wastage. You put an ad for a Rolex in a magazine, and you have to know that about 90% of the people who read that magazine can't afford a Rolex. So wastage is a real thing. And you need to understand how to reduce it. Ideally, you would not spend $1 transmitting your message to anyone who cannot afford what you sell or is otherwise not inclined to buy it. So, that leads us to targeting; targeting good leads, the Glenngarry leads, the magical list of leads where everyone is rolling in cash and ready to buy, they just don't know anyone who sells what you sell or does what you do. Is there such a list? Maybe.

One of my Wizard of Ads Partners has a client who is in the private jet business. He buys them, sells them, charters them, leases them. If you want to take a citation jet from Regina, Saskatchewan, to Palm Springs, I got a guy. That's right. Private jets in Saskatchewan, Canada. This is a province the size of Texas, except it only has 1.2 million people in the whole freaking place. Now, how many of those 1.2 million people can afford to buy a private jet? The answer is not in the thousands. It's in the dozens. Can you effectively market your private jet business without targeting?

No way. You can't use TV, radio, print, or outdoor. Too much wastage, and you can't use digital because there's no search intent. If they're not looking, you can't target them. No search intent means digital is a dead end too. So my partner bought the list. Expensive, yes, but absolutely necessary. 

I feel bad for any business that is put in this position because targeting good leads is the most expensive way to market your business. If you sell industrial mining equipment, you sure as shit better target your leads. You can't afford to spend good money showing Chris Torbay how good your geotechnical drill is. There's 50 people in the world who buy those, so you'd better be on a first-name basis with all 50 and target. The hell out of each one.

But remember, in our quest to not spend one dime on people who can't afford what we sell or are otherwise not inclined to buy, we can easily get distracted by the not one dime part. Reducing wastage to nothing is not actually achievable. And there's an intersection where the cost of a good lead is actually higher than the wastage it's supposed to prevent.

Think of wastage as something you wanna reduce, not eliminate. Because as you get close to zero wastage, you're now paying a fortune to reach almost nobody, and that's not a good strategy. I'm lucky because most of my clients do not have such a narrow target. For the most part, they're looking for homeowners or adults, 18 plus, or women 30 and over. Now that's a demographic that doesn't require a lot of targeting. You can reach those people by the thousands for just pennies using mass media. Way cheaper than targeting. If you have a competitor who's trying to target leads, when the demographic is homeowners, don't do anything to change his mind. He's gonna spend himself into the ground. Let him do that. Unnecessary targeting is a beautiful thing when it's being done by your opponent. 

Ryan Chute: Wait a minute, Chris doesn't know shit about geotechnical drills. Or does he? He does know a thing or two about advertising, and I'm not sure whether to think more or less of him, Chris?

Chris Torbay: The best way to get more targeted leads is to get more leads, reach more people, become familiar with more people, be the brand more people think of first and like the best from that vast pool, the right people. We'll sort themselves out. There is no medium where people whose air conditioner just failed, hang out. There is no medium where guys about to shop for an engagement ring, hang out. Will they Google it at the last minute? Sure. But if that's your strategy, you've already lost. 

Budweiser advertises a lot on TV. Is that because that's where all the thirsty beer drinkers are? No. Are there tons of TV viewers who aren't even beer drinkers? Sure, but the medium still builds the brand very well among plenty of people who are the target. Reach that group with a relevant, compelling, memorable message, and you will have plenty of targeted leads. 

By all means, don't target badly. Don't advertise Budweiser during Saturday morning cartoons. Don't advertise Barbie dolls on a home renovation show, or on one of those car fixer-upper shows. When people say, fish where the fish are, what they really mean is; don't fish where the fish are not. But that's only specific to a degree. It means fish in a lake, don't fish in a parking lot. But within the lake, the fish are everywhere. There isn't a secret spot where you can just drop your line and konk a fish on the head with your hook. You still have to fish, and it still takes time. 

Targeting the right audience by choosing the right show or the right medium can only be so effective, and audiences change. If you reach consumers who are not your specific target today, they may very well become your target tomorrow or a year from now. The fish swim around, the fish get bigger. The spot that was no luck yesterday could be full of fish tomorrow. My bigger question is, where did you get this impression that there actually was a way to only target your message to only the people who specifically need your product or service right now?

Who the hell suggested that this would be possible if you were just a little bit smarter? Because that guy has set unrealistic expectations for how the universe works. Do you go into a bar hoping that inside there is one single girl who is exactly your type and has a thing for guys who are exactly like you, and you buy her one drink, and she accepts, and you propose marriage? No.

No one expects that. That is how the world works. Do you walk into a purse store and find them displaying one purse, and it's exactly the one you wanted? No, they literally have hundreds of purses because they have no idea what you want and no idea what the hundreds of other people who come into the store might want. And that's the purse store. These guys totally know that vertical. Bloomingdale's has to do that with purses, and underpants, and pillowcases, and coffee makers. Everybody is different, and the same people are different tomorrow. And criteria change and circumstances change. Stop thinking there's a perfect target and a perfect solution for that perfect target.

There's bad targeting and there's good targeting, but good targeting only gets so good, and it doesn't get any better. Be a great brand with a great offering and a memorable message. Be present enough that people will know you well and be likable enough that people will turn to you when the opportunity arises, but do all that broadly. The more successfully you do that broadly, the more hot, immediate targets you will reach. 

Fishing with a rod and reel at your favorite secret spot is fun, especially if you what you really like doing is spending the entire day in the sun chatting with your buddy, drinking beer. If you like catching fish, get a net. Go into the ocean. 

Ryan Chute: Huh? Stay tuned.

Ryan Chute: It seems to me that there's two angles of approach here. That one, you could get the good leads before they get to Google by targeting them with epic ad copy or that two, the second angle is that we target homeowners from age 35 to 55 years old females, because they're the most likely to call and ensure our message is in front of the right people at the time when they need your thing. What's the best play here, guys?

Mick Torbay: I wanna start by answering your question as asked.

Who the hell told you that there's a way to target people? The answer originally was the Yellow Pages. They originally said, “This is where people look when they're just about to buy. Do you want to talk to people who are just about to buy?”

“Oh, yeah, that's exactly who I want.” And more recently, the search engines are saying exactly the same thing. Come to spend your money with us because we have people who are just about to buy. The part they don't mention is the people who are just about to buy, who do not already have a preferred brand.

Chris Torbay: The people who are brand completely clueless at that moment.

Mick Torbay: And that's the part that we don’t, that they never mentioned to you, is that they're only talking to people who don't have a preferred brand. The reason why people don't have to Google where to get a burger this afternoon is because a couple of burger ideas are already in their heads.

So if we today, we wanted to quickly grab some lunch, we wouldn't have to say “burgers near us.” We just go to fricking Burger King or Mickey D's. So sadly, that's the answer to your question.

Chris Torbay: I think you're right.

Mick Torbay: They sold a bill of goods because it's horseshit.

Chris Torbay: And beyond that, too, it's not just the search engines; it's all digital marketing that has created this, too, where you pay per click. You have, or you have display ads where you only pay when somebody clicks on them. So only a person who is looking for lemons will click on this ad for lemons, and allegedly, then, what they tell you is that, and it's trackable, and we can measure exactly where your people are coming from.

Mick Torbay: And it's based on a false premise, which serves that advertising medium to sell you more advertising.

Chris Torbay: But then it erodes the reality of the world, which is that people are just walking around, and you cannot get into their heads. You cannot target specific people at specific times when they're just about ready to buy and they're looking, all these sorts of things, that's an unreasonable thing to think of. To think is possible.

Mick Torbay: I also think that to some degree, people will conclude that a good lead is somebody who bought, and a not-so-good lead is somebody who didn’t.

Chris Torbay: There are lots of good leads.

Mick Torbay: Our clients run into this challenge all the time when their CSRs are on a phone call and they take a call, and then at the end of the call, they have to say, "Did it close, did it not close?" And there's another button, especially on ServiceTitan says, “this was not a lead.”

And there's a lot of times when people will click on this, “Oh no, that wasn't a lead”. And then if you actually go and listen to that fucking call, “Oh, it was a lead.” All right. It's just you.

Chris Torbay: I think that's a good point.

Mick Torbay: And you've now magically made your close rate get higher. Because everybody who doesn't, who calls you and doesn't buy wasn't a lead.

Ryan Chute: It should instead infer that I wasn't a salesperson capable of doing my job.

Chris Torbay: Or any number of other things. I'm a homeowner. If you want to advertise wallpaper to me this year, I'm not going to wallpaper anything in my home this year. I'm pretty, pretty sure about that. But will be in three years, in which case I'm a lead. Eventually, I'm gonna get to it. Am I a lead now? Am I gonna close this week? If you're a better salesperson, am I gonna close this week? No, we, everything's pretty much the way we want it, but in the future, there will be a time that I will close, in which case I'm a lead now, if you’re brand building.

Ryan Chute: I think that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what lead gen is and what branding is, and what sales activation is.

Mick Torbay: Now, we have to define our terms.

Ryan Chute: We do. And I think that when we all communicate with the same language, that will have a much clearer path to how we construct our marketing.

So in marketing, we have brand awareness, and we have to say things that would attract a relational customer.

Sales activation is going to attract the transactional customer. So we have to have both of those. About 40% of your business and home services should be focused in on the messaging around, around activation. Get somebody to try us out. Now that doesn't mean discount necessarily, but it does mean to do a thing now.

Mick Torbay: Find a reason to take them down the funnel.  That's a little bit.

Ryan Chute: So it's about where they're on the funnel at, in the funnel. And branding isn't at the top of the funnel. Branding is at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel and way past the funnel when we're trying to continue the relationship afterwards.

Sales activation happens along the way for the things that we might be able to entice somebody to do, or to bring them in deeper into the funnel to do something with us in the first place. The missing piece of this equation is this ferial thing called lead generation.

The reality of it is that branding and sales activation are both lead generation activities; all of it is lead generation. Your truck wrap is lead generation. Your website, right? The uniforms that you wear, the performance that you have inside the customer's house, the great work that you do, the warranty, all lead generation, for the next time they just decide to work with you or not.

Where the problem lies is the portal, to which they transition from not a customer or a previous customer to buying something from you now, or at least giving you the opportunity to buy something right now, going from lead to prospect. For me, a lead go to prospect is they've booked an appointment, they've shown up in your store, they have done a thing that has required them to take an action to transition from one state to another state.

This is a portal, this is symbolic. But it's deeply important because when we recognize that it's not about lead gen, it's about capturing a lead or being present where the leads are when they need your thing, we're now talking about spending money on conversion presence or portal presence. Having that ability to be able to quickly get the customer from m not us to us, and then converting them into a prospect. And when we get them to prospect, it's our job in sales to get the thing done, which is going to be supported by the marketing, communication, and creativity that we started before we got to Google.

So if all you're spending your money on is the portal, why are they gonna pick your door and reach for your doorknob versus the 400 other doorknobs that are sitting in front of them at the exact same spot.

Mick Torbay: On the topic of targeting, what concerns me the most about the topic is that I think there's a lot of advertisers who say, “I've only got a certain amount of money, so therefore I must target.” And how shall I target? I would submit that if that is your starting place, you may have already made a mistake. Because I would look at it in terms of, do I have to target or should I target and what I want to, I want the answer to be is you either don't have to target or, “oh crap, I have to target.” If you have to target, that's bad news for you because it's expensive and it's fewer people.

Chris Torbay: But I also wonder, like it's a continuum, right? So the example of private jet, I think, was a great one. That one, yes, you've got no other choice. You've really gotta do that. I think generally speaking, it's a bit of a continuum, and so many things, it's easy to get a bit better. To get better than that starts to get more and more expensive. And that's the challenge, which to reach. You could do a bad job. So let's not do a bad job. Let's find things generally where are homeowners wide, generally where these people where can you find them? What media do they listen to? What sort of shows do they watch within that medium? All that kind of stuff. But then, beyond that, you're still gonna get lots of noise and lots of other stuff. You can only be so good without doing that extreme thing.

Ryan Chute: That's the red herring, though, right there. And I love that you brought that up, Chris.

One of our media buyers that we're working with right now is looking at a particular landscape where they can't service the whole city. So they're saying, let's target. Every time you add something to the target, the cost goes up.

Mick Torbay: And the number of people you reach goes down.

Ryan Chute: So what we're talking about right now is the critical conversation around efficiency versus spend. Now, here's where the break happens.

I'm a small business operator. I have $5,000 I can spend on that thing to target, right? I have to choose who am I going to lose, right? Which is something we talk about all the time, and who are we gonna lose, but we're talking about it from the standpoint of messaging. And the answer to this, by the way, the spoiler alert here, is that the people you choose to lose. The targeting that you do happens in your message, not in your people, not in media choice. But sometimes you gotta choose the channel, and you've gotta choose who to lose. I can't go on all of the radio stations. I'm gonna choose the most efficient option possible.

When I'm in that small part of the city where I can only do so much, I'm going to have to shrink it down and just talk to these people, but talk to them over and over again. So it's not your budget, it's always a reflection of reach, not the frequency or message. Always invest in frequency and message properly, and targeting becomes more freeing as you get more money.

Chris Torbay: But also the reason you're still gonna have so, you're living within your means. You're targeting as many people as you can, or you're advertising to as many people as you can, given the means you have. It's targeting with its message. And what that means is there's a bunch of people in there who are not going to buy because the message is talking to a specific subset, even of that smaller group.

Ryan Chute: And that's where the problem lies when people say, “Hey, I'm going to target women 35 to 75, homeowners only of a certain income with a college degree and two kids at home.” All of a sudden, you've got this perfect little thousand people you're gonna talk to

Mick Torbay: And damn is that's expensive.

Ryan Chute: And that's not only expensive, but absolutely ineffective.

Chris Torbay: They don't all want your product this week.

Mick Torbay: Their water heaters all work right now.

Ryan Chute: Exactly. So what we're talking about here from a targeting standpoint is if you are looking at targeting for a budget, target the geography. Target +18 if it's social media.

Mick Torbay: Unless you're selling Barbie, in which case maybe not +18.

Chris Torbay: Here's the interesting thing, I made that point about if you're selling Barbie dolls, don't put them on the car fixer-upper show. Guess who watches those? Car fixer-upper shows? Dads. Dads. Dads. Oh, they've got daughters. How many dads have got daughters? About 50% of them.

So it's actually not bet. It's not great. But it's not like even within that, you'd certainly be the only right, the only daughter toy that is advertised in that show, in which case you're gonna stick out. People are gonna remember it. So maybe it's not all that bad, actually.

Ryan Chute: But the trick from that next step forward is you're in front of dad's talk to dads and about how to make their little girls' habits.

Chris Torbay: There we go. Messaging use.

Ryan Chute: Targeting dads. Is the message that you're targeting, it's not the actual dad, right? We don't wanna talk to all dads because there's going to be a whole bunch of people that aren't dads right now. But if you know what, if you run that ad and these people are 18 years or older, it has been scientifically proven. I don't know if you guys know about this yet or not, but 10 years later, it's 10 years later, they're exactly 28 years old.

Mick Torbay: Or in my case, 43 years later. We’re starting to have kids.

Chris Torbay: It's interesting, Mick makes the point about about don't run a TV ad for geotechnical drills because there's only 500 guys who buy those. Have you ever, because I have seen all three of these on like major network television, have you ever seen an ad for General Electric? Bombardier or Siemens?  

Those are ads that are aimed at bond traders, and corporations that might, airline CEOs, things like that. And they'll run it during the football game. They'll run it where? Everywhere. And that's 99.99999% wastage. But it's still worth it. Because you know those, that subset is out there, and if the message to those people is relevant, and you go, “Wow, Bombardier, they seem like they're really got their act together.” I don't know if you're a bond trader,but  you might buy the bond, right? Like it might invest. And so mission accomplished.

Mick Torbay: You might also acknowledge that almost no major decision is made in a vacuum. And that bond trader might be deciding to do it, but he also has a circle of other bond traders that he talks to. He might talk to his wife, or he might talk to his executive assistant. He might talk to his mentor. And in fact, at every stage the numbers get a lot huger. And suddenly, if everyone in America has a good feeling about General Electric, then all of the shareholders of this company might say,

Chris Torbay: “Oh, I guess we're, they're doing great things. Why don't we invest in them?”

Mick Torbay: I certainly feel good about the General Electric engines on this airplane.

Chris Torbay: And I guess that’s my point, which is whenever you try to get too specific of a targeting, you go. Are you sure your target's that small? Or do you think your target's actually way bigger? Why don't you grab a lot of people?

Mick Torbay: Especially since it costs so little, since it's to reach millions of people.

Chris Torbay: Like pan for gold in there. And finally, you'll find that they were in there. You didn't see them initially when you scooped up the big fistful of dirt.

Ryan Chute: But let’s put some math on this thing. Let's put some math on this thing by talking about doing some targeting. Now, when we did this particular study, we had a couple of different things at play here. We had a measuring company that is producing absolutely astounding metrics for us. Just rock your socks off metrics, and you go, woo, wow, like we can win here. Then we do our zero in targeting. And we have two different companies that we're looking at comparing this to as to getting this content on, and the goal is that we're trying to get frequency at the right frequency for the least amount of money, for the most amount of people.

So in one instance where we removed all of the targeting, what we found was that we actually got down to about a $5 cost per 1,000 people, talk to three times a week. Wow. I'm paying $5 to talk to 1,000 people. Every week, three times. Not too bad. Not too bad. Not the best. There's way more efficient buys than that. We have buys that are under a dollar that do the same thing. Different markets, different strategies, different channels.

When we started using dialing in, tuning into the very specific metrics, we got it up to $48 for the perfect customers. $48 three times a week, every single week. Now, do you want to spend $48 for 1,000 people, or do you wanna spend $5 for those same 1,000 people? How many more thousands of people can you buy?

Mick Torbay: Nine.

Mick Torbay: That's called math, right?

Ryan Chute: There you go. Nine times the amount of people. And do you know what those nine times more people know?

Mick Torbay: Other people.

Chris Torbay: They know Other people.

Ryan Chute: Other people. And if you say the things that actually matter that catch their attention, that entertain them, that actually draw some sort of conclusion that you are the value-based solution that they're looking for, will they tell their mom, dad, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, next-door neighbor, or friend? There's a lot higher chance of success here.

Now, what if we took that $5 per 1,000 people and got it to 40 cents? And what if we, instead of that, on that 40 cents of having a 30-second ad, we turned it to a one-minute ad? Now, how many more people are we talking to? We're talking about just a metric shit ton more people. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people. That we're now talking to and at a minute-long ad times by three ads a week. To the same people. By the way, to the same people that we're talking to, we're talking to hundreds of thousands of them. We're targeting them inasmuch as we're targeting everyone.

But we're now talking to basically your population. We're doing it for a fraction of a penny, and we're talking to them for two and a half hours a year. Two and a half hours a year. Can you imagine talking to two and a half hours of clients a year? Now they may not need the thing when they saw your ad. Most people don't.

Mick Torbay: But maybe they have a preferred brand now. And now they are going to be Googling you in your category.

Chris Torbay: And that's part of it is sometimes when you hear people talk about, “oh, I wish I could target,” it's because it comes from desperation. They're not in a position to build their brand over the years and say, "Why don't we become the market leader?" They need a call tonight. So that they're, so that their truck doesn't, doesn't sit around all day tomorrow.

Ryan Chute: And this is the obsession.

Chris Torbay: Targeting is not the cure to that.

Ryan Chute: That's right. This isn't Field of Dreams. Just because you're on Google doesn't mean you're going to get chosen. And if you are, you're up against all of the people, all of them that have more money than you. All of them, right? And they're going to outspend you.

Mick Torbay: You will bleed out playing that game. Unless you've got the most money, which you probably don't,

Ryan Chute: And if you do, you're probably not dealing with us because you've been bought by private equity. And yes, you know you're doing the thing that you need to do.

Mick Torbay: The things we're talking about are here are not hypothetical because our clients expect us to make the market leaders, and this is exactly how we do it. We're not holding shit back here. This is how we do it. We don't do it by targeting fewer people for more money. We do it by targeting more people for less money. And for the most part, our clients are not as narrow as the private jet guys, where they have no choice but to target, and if you're in a business where more people knowing who you are, knowing why you matter, and knowing why you stand apart from your competitors, if that would help you, then that's the way to do it.

Do it the less expensive way, reach more people for less money, instead of the other way around, which by definition is what you're doing when you're targeting.

Ryan Chute: The rule of thumb is very simple. If you can buy a list, buy it. If you can't buy a list, do mass media. And I think, where the biggest disconnect for people is, I only have $5,000. I can't do radio, or TV or anything else. You probably can't do TV, but you could; you definitely do radio well.

Do you know that you could, depending on your town? If you're ready to service all of, gosh, what Tampa, all of Tampa, Florida, you can absolutely start targeting Tampa, Florida as a whole for $5,000 a month on radio.

You will absolutely get a cult following of people that listen to that one station that you're going to get a real good deal on, because you're gonna have us figure out how to get you a real good deal and negotiate out that desperate station that was happy to put 40,000 people in front of you. It's gonna be one of the worst stations on the radio. It's gonna be one of the worst.

Mick Torbay: Don’t get the number one station, that's for sure.

Ryan Chute: It 100% will not, but you know what it'll get you? It'll get you the right frequency with the right message in front of a small group of people that will start doing your thing. And do you know who? They know people.

So you're 40,000 people. How much does that cost you? About $20,000. About $20,000 to do those. 40,000. And it's about. But even 40,000 people for $40,000, if you're ready to drop $3,000, $3,500 a month, you're in good shape. For $5,000 a month, 60,000 people, $60,000 a year, there's a pretty darn good chance that we're gonna get you somewhere in the realm of 100,000 to 120,000 people. If we could get a real deal, good deal to come together.

120,000 people versus occasionally passing by somebody as they're doom scrolling on social media, as you're trying to get their attention with no message that matters in an emotional environment that has you being completely and utterly ignored,

Mick Torbay: And you think of how few of those 100,00 people have to need what you what you sell now, it's a tiny number of those, if it's 1%, if it's one 10th of 1% that's 100 people, right? Oh my God. That's pretty good. It's not something that's possible when you start targeting.

Now, if you're only reaching that perfect group of 400 people, how many of those people have need a new water heater today? Is it two? Oh God. And how many of them are gonna buy from you? Like, the numbers become so low so quickly, and did I mention how fucking expensive it was to buy those 400 people?

Ryan Chute: Hugely expensive. And that's why small markets are usually very cheap markets to purchase for us. But they're also, least efficient because we're not talking to as many people, right? So if you're in a tertiary town or area, you're going to spend more per person as a cost, but you're going to absolutely be the big fish in a little pond right away.

Mick Torbay: And this is exactly how we do it.

Ryan Chute: This is exactly how we do it. And look, when you start thinking about it that way, the real question is how do I target? The simple answer is you target with your message. You matter in your message. You become the company that they know, like, and trust, for one, when their system or solution or problem lets them down. The thing you sell lets them down. And the guy that they currently have let them down. Those two things are letdowns.

Boom, you're in, right?

Chris Torbay: But target with your message, and not with your choice of media.

Ryan Chute: That's it. That's it. The call to action is we're going to be there fast. The call to action is not necessarily a discount.

Mick Torbay: The call to action is, you remember us and you like us and you feel good about us because we entertained you, we’ve been with you every day when you went to work. Every day when you drive home from work. It's those people. “Oh, yeah. That guy with the penguin. It's awesome.” There are a lot of ways to get into people's heads, and some of them you can argue they don't deserve to be there.

But it doesn't matter if you deserve to be there. If you've been with them and part of their daily routine and you've done something that made them feel good, You told them a nice story, you entertained them, you made them giggle on the way home, then you will become remembered. That is absolutely predictably possible.

Ryan Chute: But that does require you saying something that resonates with them, that matters. That's what we call salient. That does mean that you have to say things that are going to bond you with the gut, with the prospective clients.

Mick Torbay: And it takes time.

Ryan Chute: And it takes time. Be ready to have a relationship before the relationship even starts. Everyone's talking about relational selling and relationships, and no, it's about being relational.

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Ryan Chute: There is absolutely the truth between short-term and long-term, and when we really think about this, again, what's one of those ways that we target? Well, it’s through the copy.

What are we saying in the copy when we're targeting? It's about talking transactionally or relationally. Now, if our goal is to target the high-value leads, it's not about targeting the people with the biggest houses and the highest net worth in your zip,

Mick Torbay: Or magically finding the people whose water heater broke this morning. 

Ryan Chute: That a super expensive lead, right? Because that's hyper targeting. What we're targeting here, is a high-quality lead, is the relational customer that's able to pay you. That's it. 

Mick Torbay: And who will choose you as their preferred brand? Literally, months before they need it. Months and months. 

Chris Torbay: As they like way, the way you behave, what you stand for, the kind of vibe you give off. And it may be that high-end, high-service, high-touch. Things they know deep down that I bet you this guy's also not the cheapest, but they are identifying with that, they are attracted to that aspect of it, way before the day their water heater actually craps out.

Ryan Chute: So targeting happens in the relational disposition of your brand, not the transactional disposition. That's why you should have 40% of your messaging towards sales activation, which will diminish over time, that sales activation, those offers, those things. You should be asking people to buy stuff from you. Yes. 40% of the time. Somehow call to actions. But, we absolutely need to not be that impetuous teenager sticking their hand out, begging for $200  every time they see you, either. Because now you're creating this commodity-based, transactional customer.

Mick Torbay: And don't be surprised when that's exactly who you get. A person who wants a discount. 

Chris Torbay: Yeah. And the greatest brands, in fact, that percentage gets very low. Apple, virtually never transactional, and the only urgency they have is the new ones here.

But basically, they just make you really want one of those products. And they don't just target the person whose phone just broke. I was gonna say, they don't just, people, target people whose phone is four years old. They continually, continually, market themselves. 

Mick Torbay: And the only reason why they ever take put something on sale is because the new one's there. If they are old enough justification for lowering that. You don't actually want that one anymore. 

Chris Torbay: You'll find the brands like that, in fact, don't target at all. They say who they are, and the people find them. And if you say that message with a wide enough, broad enough appeal, or a broad enough spectrum, you will appeal to the people that you're gonna appeal to within that.

Ryan Chute: Folks, this has been another episode of Advertising in America. If you like what you see go ahead and smash that like button. 

Mick Torbay: Don’t smash it. Gently.

Ryan Chute: Do it gently, touch it just softly. touch it with a loving caress. Go in and leave us a review. We'd love to hear you. We're happy to take your smack talk as well, like we love it all. Just give us some interaction. We want to hear from you. We want to know that we're connecting with you and you're feeling something. Till next time.

this is Advertising in America.

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

Join us on our socials @advertisinginamerica. Wanna spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today. Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.

I was whining to Clay Cary about the interest rate the bank was going to charge me to fund a real estate investment. I felt the percentage was way too high.

Clay asked, “Is the deal you’re about to make a good deal? How much money will you make from it?”

I answered his question conservatively. He said, “Now let’s calculate the total amount of interest that you will pay on the loan that makes this deal possible.”

We calculated the dollar amounts.

I was going to make hundreds of times more money on the real estate than I was going to pay in interest on the loan.

Clay said, “As a rule of thumb, if the interest rate you are paying determines whether or not the deal you are making is good or bad, you are definitely making a bad deal. Don’t judge according to percentages. Judge according to dollars.”

Here’s a thought.

Why do banks never get angry about the huge profits that YOU make on deals using THEIR money?

I have never heard a bank say, “We supplied the money, but you are keeping most of the profits. That’s not fair. You should give us more money than we originally agreed upon.”

Banks never say that because banks always remember that YOU found the deal and decided to let THEM make some money on it with you.

Here’s another example of how percentages can be misleading.

Woody Justice had been in business for 6 years when I met him in 1987. His business was circling the drain. Woody’s biggest year had a top line of $350,000. His goal was to someday sell $1,000,000 worth of jewelry in a single year. That would put Woody in the top 10% of jewelers nationwide.

I began working with Woody and we grew more than 100% a year for two years in a row. We blew past the $1,000,000 mark in the second year. About a dozen years later, Woody was grumpy. He said, “We used to grow by big percentages. But last year we only grew by ten percent. You need to get your shit together.”

“Woody, how many dollars did our top line grow last year?”

“We grew by a million dollars,” he said.

“Woody, when we first began working together, a million-dollar jump from $350,000 to $1,350,000 would have been a 286% increase. We would have nearly quadrupled your best year ever and you would have wet your pants. Evaluate yourself by dollar growth, not percentage growth. Percentages will lead you to believe that you are doing better, or worse, than you really are.”

Woody made a face but didn’t say anything, so I continued. “And by the way, we’re running out of people in this Dairy Queen town. If you want to grow by big percentages again, we’re going to need to open another store somewhere else.”

I could say those things to him because we were close friends.

Woody died unexpectedly 14 years ago but I still have his number on my cell phone. I tell myself that if I press that number, Woody will hear his phone ring.

As long as I don’t delete that number from my phone, Woody Justice will never be gone.

Hundreds of businesses have jumped on the bandwagon, posting witty memes about a couple at a Coldplay concert, hoping — praying — to go viral.

I wish every business owner could go viral once, so they could realize how little it actually moves the needle.

Aspiring to go viral is like a kid dreaming of being discovered on American Idol, but never taking a singing lesson or booking a gig. Year after year passes while they wait to be “found”… but nothing changes. No growth. No traction. Just hope without effort.

Your business’s growth is NOT on the other side of going viral.

I’ll say it again for those in the back: Your business’s growth is NOT on the other side of going viral.

Believing otherwise isn’t just naive — it’s lazy.

The best singers, athletes, and business owners don’t wish their way to success. They train, they hire experts, and they outlast their competition. They remove every variable they can’t control and get to work on the ones they can.

Let’s break it down.

Hire Experts

The need for expertise becomes obvious the moment you get serious about growth.

Nearly every guest on To A Million And Beyond has echoed this truth: hiring the right people or firm unlocked a new level of performance in their business.

Growth is only “voodoo” to those who don’t understand the process.

Real marketing is not about making one flashy video. It’s not about chasing trends or creating something “viral-worthy.” It’s about crafting a strategy rooted in your business’s core identity—and building messaging that speaks to real people, consistently, over time.

Think about a cardiologist. They don’t just study the heart in isolation. They understand how the heart fits into the entire body — how every part influences the other. That’s what expert marketers do. We don’t just make things that look good; we make things that work together to build trust, spark emotion, and drive results.

That’s where many media companies fall short. Yes, they create beautiful videos. But their only goal is views. Their strategy? Get lucky.

“Hope is not a strategy.”

If you want impact beyond the post, you need a strategist who understands human behavior — someone who can craft felt messaging that aligns with a proven growth system.

If your marketing doesn’t make people feel something, it’s worthless.

And if people don’t know, like, and trust you, they won’t buy from you. Going viral might get you known (so does streaking across a football field), but if you’re forgotten tomorrow, what’s the point?

Train

Success isn’t a lottery. It’s earned.

You want predictable, compounding growth? Then stop waiting for a lucky break and start doing the work. Even if you go viral and get a big cash hit, what’s next? If you haven’t learned how to build and scale with intent, the money will dry up as fast as it came in.

True growth means evolving. As you scale, new challenges emerge — and your strategy must adapt with you.

Last week, I proposed a major revenue model update to a client. They’re seasoned business owners, but the ideas blew them away. Not because they were flashy. But because they fit seamlessly into their business’s larger picture — ideas only an outside expert with perspective could see clearly.

An expert gets you on course — and corrects you when you drift. But you still have to do the work. You still have to train.

Outlast the Competition

We call the first 9 months of any new marketing strategy the “chickening out period.” That’s how long it typically takes to start seeing meaningful revenue shifts. Why? Because trust takes time.

And most business owners aren’t used to that. They’ve been sold a lie: that they can go viral, run a couple of Google Ads, and cash in. It’s why we go out of our way to be brutally honest with prospective clients. We don’t promise fast money — we promise real growth.

But that growth is earned, not granted.

The ones who stay the course become household names.

The ones who quit? They keep playing Google’s slot machine, or hoping for the algorithm to smile on them.

The Bottom Line

I didn’t write this to discourage you. I wrote it to give you hope — the right kind of hope.

Hope rooted in reality.

If your current approach to marketing feels like a gamble, it probably is. But it doesn’t have to be. You can grow predictably. You can become a trusted brand. And you can build a business that lasts.

But you have to stop waiting to be discovered.

And start building on purpose.

Clarity and Brevity are the highest creativity. But “clear and brief” does not mean simple and predictable.

One the most talented writers of advertising in the world would be surprised to hear me call him that. Jonathan Edward Durham is a novelist. He recently posted this random thought.

“‘Why am I so sad today?’ I ask myself after staring at my little handheld sadness machine and clicking all the sad little things that will definitely make me sad.”

You may not agree with Durham’s statement, but you will agree it was artfully crafted.

What Durham gave us was clarity and brevity without predictability. This is the mark of a great ad writer.

“Why am I so sad today?” immediately gets our attention. We are compelled to keep reading.

We are surprised that he owns “a little handheld sadness machine.” But our cleverness allows us to translate it as “iPhone” and we receive a tiny spasm of delight.

You have never heard of “a little handheld sadness machine” but you knew exactly what it was.

His 30-word sentence demonstrated clarity, brevity, and creativity, but none of what Jonathan Edward Durham wrote was simple or predictable.

Durham’s ability to bring us – his readers, his listeners, his customers – into active participation in a one-way conversation is pure genius.

Jonathan Edward Durham causes us to become engaged with what he is saying.

You can do it, too.

“Time + Place + Character + Emotion.” That’s it. That’s how Stephen Semple turns a weak story into a powerful one in his famous TED-X talk.

Here’s how Jonathan Edward Durham uses Time + Place + Character + Emotion to tell us a story in less than 30 seconds.

“About two years ago, we moved across the country. It was a big, stressful move, and anxieties were high all around, and it had only been about six months since we rescued Jack, so he was really just beginning to adjust to having a forever home. Needless to say, Jack didn’t understand why a bunch of strangers were taking all of our things, and he was having a very, very ruff time with the whole process.”

“We want Jack to live forever. That’s why we feed him The Wizard’s Magic dog food.”

Jonathan Edward Durham’s wonderful story became an excellent ad with my addition of just 16 words. “We want Jack to live forever. That’s why we feed him The Wizard’s Magic dog food.”

You already know how to write the 16 words. Now you need to learn how to tell a wonderful story in 76 words like Durham did.

Time + Place + Character + Emotion.  Give it a try.

Roy H. Williams

PS – Most people use too many words to make too small a point. The average writer wraps lots of words around a small idea. Inflated sentences are fluffy and empty like a hot air balloon. Good writers deliver a big idea quickly. Tight sentences hit hard. – Indy Beagle

“Facts tell. Stories sell.” – Tom Schreiter

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