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- [00:00]
Eric
Eric It's All Killer, no Filler I'm Eric and for today's podcast, we are diving back into our sister podcast Adventurous, with Avery, creative lead over at Pilothouse. In her first ever episode, which we are previewing today on the All Killer, no Filler airwaves, Avery dives into some of our favorite and least favorite ads of all time to find out how they have helped shaped today's cultural landscape. If you haven't already, make sure you go to Ad Dash Venturous on the DTC Podcast Network, which we'll put a link in below. And make sure you subscribe to Avery's podcast because every week she's putting out awesome creative insights that you can use to fuel the success of your campaigns. But for now, enjoy her inaugural episode and on with the show.
- [00:44]
Avery
We are at one of the most interesting intersections of marketing and communications that we've really ever been in. You, as an advertiser today have more access to public sentiment than anyone who has come before you. Comments Organic Reviews I have a couple tips for how to create a really strong process around ad creation and ideation. Number one is we're getting very uncreative in our Ad Creative, which I hate. Part of this new podcast is really bringing to light some stories about just great ads. The greatest ad of all time. I actually do smile every time I say see it.
- [01:33]
Eric
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- [02:29]
Avery
Hi, welcome to the very first episode of Adventurous, a new podcast produced by DTC and hosted by me, Abes. My goal for this whole podcast is that every episode you guys walk away with a piece of advice that's tactical and totally practical and you can implement the very next day in your ad account. I think that's what we've been doing on DDC for a long time and I've had so much fun sharing little tips and tricks and then hearing that they work. I love reading those types of comments. Um, it's really exciting to me. But what I wanted to bring to this podcast is this new layer of really injecting as much creativity in our marketing as possible. I really want to help you guys improve your performance in the short term. I want to help you guys build those brands. But I also really want to see everyone start experimenting a little bit more, getting weird, as I usually say, taking risks and seeing how that does actually help you get closer to your base and bring in new people to your brand. We are at one of the most interesting intersections of marketing and communications that we've really ever been in. There's more opportunity now than ever before to show someone an ad, but that also comes with this sort of double edged sword of people are getting really annoyed by ads. Not that commercials were ever anyone's favorite form of television to digest, but when we were making TV commercials, there was a lot more thought and time and budget put into one of those single spots. So they told stories and they were very entertaining and very artistic in their own way. And we're sort of, in my opinion, starting to lose that a little bit with just this demand for content. We're getting very uncreative in our ad creative, which I hate, hate and is really boring to me as someone who is also advertised to. So part of this new podcast is really bringing to light some stories about just great ads from the past, how they've moved people and how they shifted culture and what is really cool about them, what is really good about them, what can we learn from them in this sort of modern new era of marketing? And how can we learn from them to add a bit of sort of resiliency to our brand, make sure that we are, like I said, bringing in those new people and creating a really sticky experience for folks through fun creative advertising. I'm just super excited to keep diving into all things creative with you guys. We've got really great guests on the horizon that I'm really excited to speak with and we've also got really exciting subjects that I'm really excited to tackle. So I'm just going to get straight into it. This first episode I thought I'd kick off with my own personal favorite ad, which if anyone has ever talked to me for more than 10 minutes, they probably know that it is gut milk. I'm a really big advertising nerd. So I feel like I work under the assumption that everyone has a favorite ad. But in prepping for this podcast, I found out that that's not necessarily the truth, but I do, and it's always been gut milk. Ever since I started being interested in advertising and marketing. Got Milk has always stood out to me because obviously everyone knows the celebrity campaigns. Kermit the Frog. Bit of gut milk. Love that. I think I've referenced the Muppets in some short form videos that I've made for this podcast. So love all the Muppet references happening. But yeah, Kermit did it. Mario. Actual celebrities. I remember as a kid seeing, like Taylor Swift do a gut milk ad and feeling an urge to drink milk. I do come from a household where we didn't really have straight up dairy products when I was growing up. We did have a lot of soy milk in the house, but I can remember a very specific yearning for a carton of milk because I saw celebrities that I loved doing gut milk. So the celebrity sort of imagery as well as the got blank almost phenomena that took over in the early 2000s is what most people think about when they think about gut milk. But for me, advertising nerd, the first installment in this saga is really the most exciting to me, which is the Aaron Burr ad. I am obsessed with this ad. It has inspired my career, like, time and time again. I go back to it, I watch it, it makes me smile, like every single time. I think it's such a masterpiece and masterclass in advertising. It's funny, it's punchy, it's so meticulously composed. Every single thing about it is absolutely, absolutely perfect to me, which is why it's my favorite ad and why I wanted to start this new adventure. Wink, wink, talking about it, because it's just. It's an oldie, but a Goldie. Like I said, the first ever installment. Not the milk mustaches. Like a lot of people think. That actually happened a few years after the first ad was launched. The first ad is the Aaron Burr Alexander Hamilton TV spot. It started with Goodbye Silverstein and Partners prepping a pitch for what I think is the funniest client of all time, the California Milk Processor Board. That is the cmpb for all of you milk fans out there. It's such a funny client. It's so random. It's just milk. Which I think makes the story even better because it's just milk. Like, who thinks about milk? Who cares about milk? Nobody. And for years, the sort of tagline about milk was milk does a body good. We all knew at that point that milk was good for you and also necessary. Which is the least sexy product story you could possibly be handed as an advertiser. It's basically like another version of water that some people can't digest and also some people find really yucky. It's such a funny, interesting subject for these ads. It's so unexciting in every single way and so uninteresting as well. The real kind of golden nugget and I think turning point, as Goodby Silverstein and partners were prepping to pitch the California Milk Purses Award was through a focus group where a woman said that the only time she noticed milk is when she ran out of it. Which is a super interesting thread, right? It's like the absence of the product is actually what sells the product. And when people even consider the product at all, when it's not there is when people start thinking about it. I do really want to point out the focus group part of this equation and I want to draw your attention to the fact that you as an advertiser today have more access to public sentiment than anyone who has come before you. I'm talking about comments. I'm talking about organic reviews that people post about your product. It's like if you are an artist like Ariana Grande, reading comments is probably not going to be that productive and it's not going to be that good for your mental health because that is a different art form where advertising is so interesting because what those people think and say should directly affect what you produce as an advertiser, right? So looking at those comments, I know there are a lot of very unhinged folks just trolling around in comment sections of ads. And not everything I'm saying is going to be really valuable, but there are so many golden nuggets for you to find out there yourself if you just sort of start looking. One rant that I go on a lot is as modern advertisers, we often think that we know best, that we understand the product the most, and because of that deep understanding of the product, that we're going to know how to sell the product the best. And we know all the sort of tips and tricks to making good, short form, real content, all of these things. But that's such a dumb take when you have so much opportunity, like I said, more than anyone else in history as an advertiser to find out what people want, what do people care about, about the product? What do people actually think about when they look at this product, people give you that information a lot of the times for free in these comment sections. So first lesson on Gut Milk. So look at those comment sections, because it's the same, a little bit different, but for all intents and purposes, the same as running a focus group way back in the 90s. You get that direct feedback. And again, nobody's ever had that. So stop wasting that privilege and start utilizing those comments like yesterday. But back to Gut Milk, after they had that insanely gorgeous thread of the absence of the product being the thing that was going to sell the product, they actually rigged up a camera in their office in the fridge, got rid of the milk and filmed folks opening the fridge and realizing that there was no milk. Which is brilliant, right? It's so smart. It kind of added to their own snowball effect of having this little thread. And then you start to see people actually reacting, you know, scrunching up the nose, looking around the fridge in confusion, and then angrily shutting the door was basically the reaction of all of the people in the office, which is exactly what you do if you're looking to make yourself a coffee. You just got there in the morning, no milk. That kind of ruins your day. And so again, really proving their own concept, which is the most interesting thing about milk is sort of when you run out and what happens when you do run out of milk. So as the team kept working through Got Milk, they realized that this thing on their hands that was so weird as a tagline and so weird as a piece of advertising in general, that it almost created a bit of tension, I think, with the product being milk. So something that's really cool about Gut Milk, in my opinion, is also the typography that they've used to represent this entire tagline. It's not like a really basic understated font. It's in your face, it's recognizable. And even the audio, they hired an actor to record the original. Got Milk is a question that's also very specific. And milk is such a non specific product, and I would say non specific industry, that there's an interesting tension that gets created where it just feels different, it feels interesting. You want to look at it gut milk, but it's also packaged up in this really unique way. So I think that in itself is so genius. It just makes so much sense if you think about it, to have this association you can start to make with milk itself. If you compare milk to like a very dry red wine, a very dry red wine sparks something in you. You know, you think about tannins, you think about base notes. It's interesting to your palate when you drink it. So subsequently, it's interesting when you think about it later on. But milk in a carton is just milk. Like, it's milk. There's nothing that you really think about deeper than that. So adding those little extra layers to make it something that is weird quirk outside of the box was genuinely so, so, so smart. One note that I loved from listening to Goodbye and Silverstein talk about Got Milk? Is that they actually included those little milk mustaches on pictures of their team in the Leave Behind. The Leave behind is just a in the olden days like, packet that was left with the client after they made the pitch. But they never actually themselves did that in a campaign. It was later on. And I feel like that's another really poignant lesson for us DTC today, because the milk mustaches eventually did become like an actual cultural phenomenon, but they weren't right at the inception of the campaign. And it really makes sense because a picture of Beyonce and her mother with a milk mustache, while incredible and burned into my mind forever, doesn't actually do the job of explaining that you need to have milk in the house. When you don't have milk in the house, something bad is going to happen. It's just a cool aesthetic, but it doesn't actually prove what Goodby, Silverstein and partners were trying to prove, which was the absence of milk is the most interesting thing about milk. So I think that's, again, a really important note because today in DTC marketing, it's really easy to evolve our advertising efforts. It's way quicker to shoot and film an ad that meets today's standards. You can and should use iPhones to make ads. You know what I mean? Like, it's so much easier to get an ad in front of people. So really taking your time and understanding the roadmap of the campaign that you're working on, I think is so important. And this is a great, great example again, of at the time of inception, it didn't actually carry the full angle that they were trying to execute, but later on, those milk mustaches. Crazy, right? So, yeah, I think that's just a really good thing to keep in the back of your pocket that you don't have to do every idea at the very beginning. Start to warm things up, make sure that you've got the angle really strong, and then you can start riffing on things. But I do really want to talk about the actual commercial because it, like I said earlier, is the greatest ad of all time. I actually do smile every time I see it. I watched it a few times in preparation for this, obviously, and it's just so good. I think that one of my favorite facts to tell people about the first Got Milk commercial is that it was directed by Michael Bay. Like, highly successful director Michael Bay, Transformers. He did the first Got Milk ad, and you can see why he became so celebrated as a director. Because the way this commercial is shot is genius. The way that he dressed the set geeks me out every time. The premise for anyone who hasn't seen this ad, is that we've got this guy. He lives and breathes Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr. He loves that famous duel. His whole home is decked out in different pieces of memorabilia and merch. Like, he's got the guns, the bullet. There are books on the shelves. He's got artwork of the duel. He's obviously really, really obsessed. I do have to say that the guy that they cast in this looks exactly like someone who would be obsessed with the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. I can't describe it beyond that, which I think also makes it really genius. It's so magic and adds to the success of the ad that you look at that guy and you think, yeah, he would be a huge history buff with all this stuff around his house. So we've got that guy. He's hanging out in the crib, he's surrounded by his merch, and he starts making himself, I think, the craziest sandwich you've ever seen. This ad did come out in 1993, which is a few years before I was born. So I don't know if everyone back there was going nuts for a slice of dry, untoasted bread and a bunch of peanut butter. I don't know if that's, like, the fantasy of the ad or if that was truly something people were eating in the 90s. I don't know. Please let me know. But anyway, he makes this insane, like, mini sandwich that just has so much peanut butter on it, and then he takes the biggest bite of all time while he's listening to the radio. And as they're sort of wrapping up the last song that was playing, the radio announcer comes on, and they say, for $10,000, which is a ton of cash in 1993, we are going to ask the audience one question, which is, who shot Alexander Hamilton? So us, at this point, as the viewer of this commercial, we know that this guy has it in the bag. And the announcer then says, let's go to the lines, see who's out there. They call this guy. It is one of those moments in life that just feels like, what are the odds? Everything's taking perfect shape. Here's this guy. He knows so much about this duel. It's the most simple question, who shot Alexander Hamilton? He's obviously, he's gonna get this right. You know it while you're watching this ad. But then tragedy strikes. This guy has got a mouthful of his insane small peanut butter only sandwich and he goes to pour himself a glass of milk. And he does not have any milk. He is on the phone to the radio station unable to say Aaron Burr repeatedly. And we watch him try to pour the milk out. There's this really interesting shot where they're kind of shooting through the glass, which I believe was done with a very big prop glass. But it looks so cool and it really gives you the sense of an empty glass. Like you can really feel his panic as he's trying to say Aaron Burr, but his mouth is so full of peanut butter that he can't. It's so devastating. Devastating to watch, but also so, so, so funny. So we can't get the answer out. He loses the $10,000. And then we get the beautiful tagline at the end, which is, got milk? It is brilliant. One thing that I love about this story as well is that there were no edits on this ad. It was so well scripted and well shot. Then goodbye. And Silverstein got it back from the editor. Nothing. First pass. Perfect. Which is crazy. Like, if you work in any kind of marketing at all, there's usually quite a few notes at that kind of place and time. Nothing ever really comes out perfectly first try. So it is wild that something so good they just did. I think it's so cool. And what makes that ad so good is the setup of the punchline and the attention to details. Like the little details make it so, so, so interesting to watch as a viewer, which was kind of the name of the game when you're making TV ads. And it's still the name of the game when we're making ads for whatever social platforms you're using. It's crafted with so much care and creativity. And I really like bunching those two words together, care and creativity, because I believe that that is the intersection where all good marketing actually happens. And the care has to creativity so that you can really thrive, I think in the process. And when I mean care, I mean, like when they were putting this pitch together, the team cared enough about the product, which was Literally, milk. Again, the product is milk. So to add this much care and detail to milk is crazy. But they really took the time to understand what resonated with real people who drank milk. Like, what does an actual human being think about milk? What do they care about? What matters the most to them? What kind of word association. They did all of that work, all of that care. And again, it's milk. It's like the least interesting product of all time. But they took the time to really understand what people felt and thought about the product. There was so much attention paid to things like the logo, like I mentioned earlier, the voiceover, even before they started thinking about the physical set, which, like I said, was so funny and meticulously put together by Transformers director Michael Bay. But even before they got to that stage, there was just so much care and attention brought into this project that then the creativity really can fly out of, I think the entire team. Again, I've said it a lot, it's milk. Like, who cares about milk? Nobody cares about milk. You have to be so creative to make something like milk attractive and exciting. Exciting enough that celebrities were, like, lining up to have milk mustaches painted on their face for years. That is such a elevated level of creativity. And it only happened because that base layer of care was driven by, I think, a curiosity that all of us marketers have, which is just, why do people care about this? Why would people care about this? And so, like I said, once they have that base layer of care, they're really able to just unleash creatively on this thing. And it shows. Something that I find, like, really exciting as well is that curiosity. I think that curiosity comes even before the care, but it kind of just represents like a need to know. Like I was saying with the comment section, what do real people actually think and what do real people actually feel about this product? I think that something that we can really take away as current day marketers as well is just the trust in that process and that sometimes things just work. I see a ton of marketers, a ton of brands spinning their tires. I think the issue is sometimes we don't have enough trust in our own creative process to be confident in the end result. So when you get to this level of if we're about to ship an ad, you're not 100% confident with it because you don't trust the steps that it took to get there. I've personally put ads together in like 10 minutes. And I mean, like been in a photo editor or a video editor myself with a Like hair brain scheme at 7pm on a Saturday night, just putting them in there. And those are the ads that sometimes sadly win, that take me 10 minutes to put together. I say sadly because sometimes you spend like weeks ruminating and researching an ad into oblivion and it just flops. But I think being free of that really helps you stay agile as a marketer, because I trust myself and my process that I have done so much work beforehand that sometimes the actual ad is going to be concepted and executed in an afternoon, maybe even shorter. So I think really having your own process and owning that process yourself, really important. I think that a lot of the times too, when I see like a shakier brand, I guess that's a way to put it, or ads that feel disconnected, they usually don't have a very firm or repeatable process in place. So I think to me, like the biggest overall lesson in gut milk is to trust your process. And also if you don't have a process yet, to discover one and get one defined. I have a couple tips for how to create a really strong process around ad creation and ideation because it's something that I have spent a lot of time doing in my career and also helping folks find that perfect process for themselves because it's going to be so different for everyone, right? And it's going to be so different depending on your marketing activations or the size of your team. But here are a few little easy tips that I use to help form a process around actually creating ads that work and are interesting and creative. Number one is I really fiercely protect my own research time. This looks different as well with every client. I, for example, have gone to like coffee shops or stores where I know products that I'm working with are sold. And I will sit there for hours while I work on other things and watch consumer behavior around those products. So I look to see what, what, like colors they're gravitating towards, what are the expressions on their faces, like, what emotions are they holding while they read the details and touch and feel this product? All of this really helped me in the past understand the process of shopping for specific products that I did have the privilege of seeing in the wild in real life. And then it helped me set up better funnels for those customers on the actual DTC side, which is very fun and very cool. So once I really understood how people were tangibly interacting with these products, I could then move that to a PDP and give them a very similar experience, but on their phone instead of having to go into a store. And I think that a lot of agencies nowadays will maybe build you out like a single custom GPT and call it a day. In terms of research, I don't think that that that is sufficient ever, period. I think that before calling it a day, you need to add that little human stank on things and really look for information and interpret it in a different way. I think that building a custom GPT has definitely given me access much faster to a lot of knowledge that's already out there. But I think that you're going to have to dig a little bit deeper, and I think that's what makes good marketers. Like I said, it's that curiosity to see what are people actually thinking about. So take the time, watch reviews, read the Reddit threads, go to those places where your customers are and really dig and you're eventually going to start finding little golden nuggets. Comment sections Like I said, I Every single morning for the clients that I work with, I go into Ads Manager or North Beam, Triple Whale, whatever we're using. I check to see how things are performing and then I check to see the comments on those ads, whether they're performing well or poorly. Because the information I get out of there, like I said, is so monumentally important to the process of creating marketing that actually resonates with people. Another really prime piece of my process and everyone at Pilot House is group brainstorms. Not siloing yourself in creativity is so important. It's such a huge chunk of our culture at Pilot House. No idea is a bad idea in a brainstorm and everything is welcome, I think, is such an important idea to instill in folks when we're doing creative work. I love to structure creative brainstorms so that everyone sort of comes to the table with ideas and ads ready to rip so that we can talk about it. That's also optional. I know a lot of people like to just get in a room and talk about the product and see what comes out of that. I do believe that the smaller the group, the better. When it comes to brainstorming, especially in early stages, you really want to be able to double tap into the ideas that the group is collectively interested in. I think that's really where the magic happens. When we start doing group brainstorms, I like to schedule them. You know, with some clients I work with, we do a monthly brainstorm and that's really helpful. You need different touch points once every few weeks. It depends on how many ads you're generating. But I think having that that conversation instead of just staying kind of everyone in their own lane is super important. And that's where the really fun ideas usually happen as well. Next piece of advice is that when I'm briefing ads, part of my process is making sure that I am in the right sort of headspace and environment to really think about every single piece of the ad. So when I'm briefing out ads, whether that's like writing a script or talking to a graphic designer, I'm never doing those things in between calls or like on the go from my phone, I like to be sitting. I usually like to have a cup of coffee or a matcha and I will really think about again a 360 view of that ad. So does it look the best it can look? Is the hook the strongest that it can be? And then I also sort of double tap into my own thought process around how does it fit into the actual storyline that we're telling of the brand? I have talked about this on all Killer, no filler before, but it takes so much content to be relevant in today's media landscape. But that content has to be good. It can't be shitty content. I'm not telling you to rip a ton of ads that look the same. It all needs to be good, which is really hard to do. I know because I do it, but it's really difficult to do. So thinking about that, you can't just do that on the fly, if that makes sense. You need to give yourself the capacity to really think about. Does this make sense with the ads we're running and the story we're telling on Applovin versus Pinterest right now? Does it make sense with where we're going to send this traffic? That's also something that I think people miss a lot. What is coming on the other side of the click? Does this fit into that narrative and that story? So this third point, it's just really about having space to think about all those things and not feeling overwhelmed by the amount of content that's demanded of you to produce. Instead of building yourself a chunk of time where you can really get into things and at the inception of your ads, be really strategic about what you're putting in them. And the kind of last piece of process advice I have is that I tend to think improv is a little bit lame. I will say that. But I, yes, end every single piece of ad creative that I am reviewing or that I produce myself. When I'm looking at that first draft, I love asking questions like, like how could I make this funnier I feel like that is very obvious. Some of the clients I work with and I, I feel like we're having a competition all the time who can make the other person laugh the most and the most often. I also think about what will this actually look like on platform? What will this look like? If someone is going through stories and reels, how does that first couple of seconds look compared to what they might have just seen? So how does it actually stand out? Is a great question to ask yourself. And then I also usually try to figure out, does this ad spark curiosity? Does it spark anger? Does it spark joy? You're not going to get every one of those things, but every ad should aim to spark one emotion out of people. It shouldn't just be what you could call a selfish touch point, which is like, here's the product, buy it. You should be exchanging a experience in that ad. It should be entertaining. And entertaining doesn't have to necessarily be funny. I know that I talk a lot about how humor adds to an advertising effort, but it can also be anger. It can be annoyance. That's another kind of part of the Got Milk equation, is activating that anger that you probably felt the last time that you realized that you were all out of milk. So figuring out at the end with a little yes and how do we one up each other? Does it spark anything? Does it make me laugh? All of these different questions before you actually ship it out there. One really great thing again about the way that we advertise now is that you might see the finished product of an ad, think of a way to make it funnier, but you can still get that ad live, and then in the meantime, work on the sort of funnier version of it. I kind of mentioned that before too. It's really easy to evolve a story and an advertising through line nowadays, so take advantage of that. Don't feel again like harbored by the amount of content that we have to create today to be relevant and to grow a brand and scale. Think of it as an opportunity. That's what I do. And it seems to be working. Think of it as a really exciting opportunity to have fun and keep building and making things better. But that is Got Milk. I really had to adhere to notes because like I said, I could genuinely talk about this ad all day. The Michael Bay of it all is so funny. The like continuation, how it's affected culture is like no other ad out there, in my opinion. Nothing else has become culture in advertising like Gotmilk has. So that is Got Milk. I hope you guys enjoyed it. That was the very first episode of Adventurous. I hope you guys enjoyed it and you're coming away with some ideas on how to better refine your process and hopefully create something just as iconic and cool as gut milk. Please subscribe anywhere you listen to your podcast, whether that's Apple, Spotify, anywhere you listen, subscribe, leave a review or a comment, and definitely let us know if there's any ads you want us to talk about, any subjects particularly that interest you that you have questions about. And I'm so excited to continue this really fun adventure with you guys. Sam.