B (3:36)

Dude, nobody has.

A (3:37)

Nobody has iced coffee at these events. Thank you so much. And I'm feeling that, too. I've had plenty of it now. And we're ready to go. Oh, also, I meant to say this earlier, and someone just came up to me and was like, you need to tell people about Sangram's book because it's up front. This is not like a free promo like an ad or anything, but, like, he left a bunch of his books up here. If you want to grab them later. You should grab them. Don't do it right now. Yeah, take one now. Fuck it. Whatever. Yeah, go ahead. All right, so we got a nice little afternoon again. Like I said, we're never going to be sitting for that long hour and a half max at a time. Hey, I should have gave him my affiliate link. What the hell? Get you a dollar. One more. One more to go. You're welcome, Sangam. So we got a nice little afternoon planned for you here at Drive. We're gonna roll that into. I know a bunch of you are joining us on a. On a boat cruise tonight. We have a nice day tomorrow planned. Got a nice little afternoon, and I'm. I'm just having a. I'm having a good ass time. And I'm really happy to be here with y', all, so. Okay, our next speaker. This is the guy I talked about in my talk this morning. I have heard a lot of people give him undue credit. He didn't actually. I picked the name Exit 5. Okay. He is a genius. But he didn't pick the name. I did.

B (4:49)

But he helped.

A (4:50)

He talked me through it, which. He writes a popular newsletter that goes out to 150,000 marketers. And he's built one of the best swipe files out there. Anybody seen his site? Marketingexamples.com yeah. Oh, my gosh. Incredible. This man is a craftsman.

B (5:04)

He's here.

A (5:04)

He is hopped up on Celsius and caffeine. He's an incredible marketer, storyteller, copywriter. We've been online friends for a year. And no joke, this is the first time we've ever seen each other in person. I know it's for a fact. The first time he's been in Vermont. And so I'm super excited to be here. To kick off the afternoon session, please give it up for Mr. Harry Dry.

B (5:26)

I remember our house caught on fire. I'll never forget the look on my father's face as he gathered me up in his arms and raced to the burning building out of the pavement. Does anybody know who invented the can? Or in France in 1890, and things are not going well. Taxes are high. People are. They're unemployed and prices are up. And Louis, he should be running the country, but he's got a hobby. And it's not golf, it's lock picking. And his wife's not helping out too much easier. The people are saying, louis, nu navant plus de pas. We have no bread. And Marie Antoinette saying, qu' il mange de la plioche. Let them eat cake. So they get executed. This guy called Napoleon rocks up, and naturally he wants to take over the world. And he does a pretty good job. He marches to Spain, marches to Italy, marches to Russia. But he's got a problem. The Frenchmen, as they march, they get him really hungry. So Napoleon sets 14,000 francs reward for somebody to feed his army as they march. And you'd think this would be easy, but it wasn't. It took 15 years. And this guy called Nicolas Appert invents this thing where he heat sterilizes food in sealed containers. A year on, that becomes the can. Napoleon's delighted. Now, the can. Nobody's heard of it and you shouldn't have heard of it, but it's changed the world much more than we'd think. Like Arctic 1911. Amundsen makes his way to the South Pole and he only gets there because of canned food. Tragically, World War II and World War I, it would have been impossible to fight on that scale without canned food. 16 billion cans were eaten during the war. One more. Neil Armstrong goes to space. Apollo 11 is up there for eight days, and what's he eating up there? Heat sterilized food in sealed containers. Nicholas Appert's invention. Why should we care? Nobody knows about it. Films About World War II. 4900 films about the canvas. One canon industry in California. Titleless. Now, this is the part of the talk where I segue. If you can't wrap it, no one knows. But if you can't wrap it in a compelling narrative, nobody will give a shit. People think they make decisions on facts, they don't. They're just responding to the shape of a story. It's really hard to tell a story about a can. But Napoleon, well, these things are easy to tell. Stories about 2 million books are published each year. And authors, they write on Twitter. I'm incredibly proud that my new book is out now, available to order. Incredibly proud. My books out, available to order. Incredibly proud. My books are available to order. And I have a good friend, Sheehan, and here we are together in Tenerife. My brother's actually the real brains in the middle, but Shehan had the same problem. He's writing a book. It came out last week and my mum sees it in Waterstones. And I texted him, being like, we need to promote this. We need to promote this thing. You can't just write pre order. My books available to buy. So he sends me back. He used to work at McDonald's, straight after we were in university, he sends me back McDonald's comparison. I say to him, yeah, McDonald's and you outside Waterstones, which is a British bookstore, right? Three years, never stop dreaming. One line. So three years later, never stop dreaming. He puts on social media last week, three years later, never stopped dreaming. McDonald's to Waterstones. And 2 million people see it. Same point, if you can't wrap it in a narrative, nobody's going to care. People make decisions on. People think, they make decisions on facts. They don't. It's the shape of a story. Oh, we want B2B. I hear the crowd. I hear the crowd chanting, we want B2B. We want B2B. You didn't come to Burlington for cans and books. So let's talk about Asana last year. Last year, Asana spent $345 million in advertising, more than the GDP of the Cook Islands. What do they do with the money? They take out billboards saying, move, work forward. Any team, any project, any goal. A smarter way to work. Their social media is a lot better. Whoever's doing them. AI generation plus human intuition equals innovative work. I'm a responsible Brit. I would never claim that the state of Asana's writing has anything to do with the share price falling 90% in five years. I would do that. I'd never do that. Sarna. This is what I call the throw money and pray method. You raise twice the cash, you hire twice the staff, you spend twice as much on ads, and you cross your fingers, and that's Asana. Now, let me tell you about another project management company run by Jason Freed. I emailed Jason and he told me they spent $2 million on marketing every single year. And they got a similar number of paying customers to Asana. They don't spend £300 million on billboards which say, move, work forward. What Jason and David do, they wrote a book called Rework and it sold over a million copies and they got paid £10 million for the privilege. This is what I call the learn writing or learn storytelling approach. You want to grow twice as fast, you've got two choices. We throw money like a Sandra or we learn how to tell a story. I actually made an advert for Jason. This is storytelling. I haven't sent it to him yet, but it's called irony. Buying software to run your business from companies losing half a billion every single year. Asana -1.2 Atlassian Monday Smartsheet Basecamp's profitable. So that's storytelling.

A (11:02)

Anybody ever seen Goodwill hunting? That's why I want to go. My guy's wicked smart.

B (11:09)

Let's try and learn how to do it. It's not going to be easy. I want you. If you remember one thing from this talk, do not remember this. This is my Storyteller starter pack. And It's. We need seven ARCs. You've got the LinkedIn entrepreneur and storyteller. Some of you are in the audience. I know you are. We believe coffee can change the World features, whatever. I think it's a little bit more simple than that. I wouldn't get bogged down in this story is what. I've given you some examples so far and every single one has the same cadence. I wanted to talk about my friend Sheen, so I introduced other writers who write on Twitter about pre ordering their books. I wanted to talk about Asana, so I introduced Basecamp. The foundation of every single story is conflict. If there's no conflict, no story. If you want to be a little bit more technical, you create an unresolved tension and then you kind of resolve it and you've got a story in there. Okay, a little challenge for you all. Here is his nine books. The Art of creative Thinking. Steal like an artist. The Creative Wound. Make brilliant work. The Art of Brainstorming. Unfair advantage. Find your artistic voice. The Art of Creativity. How to be an Artist. One book sold more than every single other one combined. What is it? Why steal like an artist? It's the only one with any kind of conflict in. There's no conflict when you say make brilliant work. It just exists. Right? Steal like an artist. Artists shouldn't be stealing. Like, they're like, honourable. You know, there's conflict. So I'm going to warm you up after lunch. Raphael Nadal style, Will your partner someone next to you. I want you to rewrite these with conflict, just to get the idea of introducing conflict into writing because it's really, really, really, really important. I think nearly all writing could benefit from more conflict. So you've got 20 seconds. Just 20 seconds with the person next to you. The cat sat on the mat. How could you introduce conflict to this line? Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. What do we got? Call out if you've got. If you've got something. Hey. Wonderful. The cat shadow on the mat, second row. Very good, very good. Any more for any more? One more. Is it the dog's hat or the cat? Sit on the dog. My guy, Eddie Schlader Backbones probably stole that from you. Eddie, to be honest now, like, how you want to think about conflict is. I got this from Luke Sullivan. I think Luke Sullivan's absolutely brilliant. He says, we've got a rectangle. All right, Draw a rectangle. Just put a line down the middle. And then you're looking for things which are diametrically opposed. So you've got a cat, you've got a dog. Hold that thought for the next one. You are a social media manager, YouTube company, and someone hands you this thumbnail. They've made this awesome Image generation where Usain Bolt runs 100 meters. Same principle, 20 seconds with the person next to you. How could you introduce conflict to this title? Go. Okay, enough, enough, enough. What do we got? Anyone got anything on it? Shout out. Back poster. Very good. Very good, sir. One more. Faster. I like it a little bit simpler. I feel like you guys are probably the better than the answer here. No, you say bolt versus cheetah and it's the real video. It's got 3.4 million views. There's actually only. This is a little bit of nerdy trivia for people who like writing. There's one YouTube channel in the universe with free videos and they all have over a million views. Usain Bolt. It's the same channel. Usain Bolt versus cheater. Usain Bolt versus normal person. Usain Bolt versus Kylin Mbappe. That's all you need to know about conflict. We're just suckers for it. One more. Just like that. My. My 20 year marriage is over. 20 seconds. Go, go, go. Rectangle, left, right. How could you introduce conflict? You're okay. I heard enough. I had enough. Well, I've got. I got one more here. What did you say? Add the Coldplay Council. What do you got? Sorry, Top rope. I just added the word again. Like, the answer is this is a real article. And how I would view this is good. Writing is a search for juxtaposition. So we have 20 year marriage and you have just. It was originally just like that. You want to. A little bit. You want to try and compare apples and apples. So 20 years is a time 10 seconds is a time 10 seconds. That ended my 20 year marriage. Last one. Once again, a YouTube video. I'm begging you to read fiction. And we have the count of Monte Cristo. To Kill a Mockingbird, Jack Kerouac on the road. Think about a rectangle you've got. Begging you to read fiction on the left. What could you put against it to make it more entertaining, more and more interesting? I'm begging you to read Joe Rogan. Yeah, I know. I like. You got something there. What do you got? Robert Greene. Hey, you know it. You know it. Very well done. A real video. And what competes with fiction? Non fiction. Yeah, I want to get your mind working like this a little bit more. I'm begging you to read fiction. Read this. The Count of Monte Cristo. Not this real, real video. We're gonna. We're gonna skip through that one. Oh, wait, I hear the chance. I hear the chance. We want B2B. We want. We want B2B. Okay, I'll give it to you. Advisory work for Ramp. And the founder, Eric, often messages me with drafts for me to kind of try and improve. And this time around, they were rewriting. Sorry. They were announcing a 13 billion valuation. And Eric sent me this. Our mission remains the same. To save you the customer time and money. It's a corporate card. Ramp, which saves companies time and money by eliminating busy work so your team can focus on what matters most. And it's all right. It's not bad at all. I sent to him back. I said, so today Ramp's reached an evaluation. 13 billion. I replied, how about today ramp reached a new valuation, 13 billion. We're not Steve Jobs or Wilbur Wright. We won't invent the next iPhone or flying machine. Now what do we have here? None of you know where this is going. This is unresolved tension. This is the point of this. This is conflict. And we continue. We're not Steve Jobs or Wilbur. We won't invent the next iPhone or flying machine. Our job is more modest. Save you time and money. So perhaps you can. You got the rectangle right. So we have on the left hand side. We're not the hero. We're not Steve Jobs or Wilbur. Right hand side, you are. It's how my mind often looks. And he posted it on social media and it did quite well. Quick recap. The first important thing, the one thing I want you to remember. Story is conflict. It's really. It's all you need to know. Story is conflict. Nearly all writing could benefit from more conflict. Glossier skin first, makeup second. I think it's a really good tagline for Instagram. One more. Got this from Keep Liar Nitro Swim School. Others do lessons. We teach swimming. It's not just we teach swimming like everyone else is saying. That's part one. Now part two, not a very good title. It's your story. Let's start with some definitions. Just so kind of on the same page. Positioning. April's going to talk about it tomorrow. Very simply, it's just we do this. We do X story is why we do X. Right? And the point of the story is to point at your position or make it make sense. That's the point of the story. Like a little arrow, like this. So I'm just going to show you this with a few examples. Loom. The position is video messaging for work. That's what it is. Story. Why Work's gone remote. But the way remote teams communicate sucks. Meetings are boring. Calls drag on. Emails lack personality. So the solution Video messaging for work. The position the story points at the positioning. It makes it make sense. One more example. I train marketers in writing. So my position, very simple. Where marketers learn copywriting. The job of the story is to make the positioning make sense. Positioning, storytelling, homepages, hooks, offers, ads, social CRO, email sales. It's all what? It's all writing. Marketers spend 22,000 hours of their career writing. Spend a couple learning how to do it well. No one's trained them how to do it well. So copy. Where marketers learn copywriting. That's the position and the story makes it make sense. Last one, Pepper bras. Better fitting bras for aa, A and B cups. Story, your bra probably doesn't fit because it wasn't made for you. The industry designs around the 36C base. Then they apply that standard base to all sizes. That's why you get cup gaps. And then we got the position we designed just for a double A and B. If you just say we design just for aa, A and B, why? Well, the story explains it. Right. How do you do the story part? Well, let's start with story. Story is conflict. Now really, what does conflict need? It needs enemies. And there's free and only free enemies any company can have. The first one is, is direct competitors. So this would be Apple and Mac. For a vodka brand, it would be what other vodkas? So Stolenshire, where's the conflict? So direct competitor. The other vodkas. Most American vodkas seem Russian. Stolenshire is different. It is Russian. Okay. Second enemy, competing approaches. This is a different way of solving the same problem. So you could take the tube to work or you could cycle. They're competing approaches. You could take the tube to work or you could take the train. So this is an ad for the London Underground In I think 1960 something. Or take the Tube. Where's the conflict? The enemy is taxis. How slow they are. Finally, beliefs, Beliefs you stand against. You don't pull beliefs out your backside. They come from your product and they kind of point back at it as well. So for example, cruise self driving cars. Direct competitor would be other self driving cars. Competing approach would be human beings driving to work. And the belief for an enemy would be that humans are terrible drivers. We believe humans are terrible drivers. 42,795Americans were killed last year in car crashes. It's really easy to remember this. It's just A, B, C, A approaches, B beliefs, C competitors. Now the question is cool, but how do we know what our enemy is? And I think April Dunford has a question which really helps with this. I actually think this is the most important question in marketing. What are we actually competing against? So we had loom earlier. Meetings are boring. Calls drag on, emails lack personality. Why are we talking about meetings, calls and email? Because loom competes against emails, calls and email. Meetings, calls and email. I talked about copy. What am I competing against? I'm competing against the belief that marketers should not learn writing. That's the belief. I don't need to learn this. I do my job of why do I need to learn this? So that's the conflict. Do I really need to learn copywriting? Yeah, it's the. It's the most important skill in marketing. And finally, Pepper, very simple. What the bras compete against other bras. Direct competitor, the industry designed around a 36C base. That's why we're talking about the bra industry. Very quick recap. Your positioning is we do X. Your story is why we do X. Story is conflict. There's free enemies. You can create these conflicts from direct competitors, competing approaches, or beliefs you choose to stand against. How do you work these out? You ask. You start with April's question. What are we actually competing against? Okay, that's a very simple way of understanding story. Now let's talk about storytelling. Let me explain this. So positioning is we do X, story is Y. And the storytelling is getting inside the customer's head. So basic position, refreshingly simple. Project management. Here's the story. Modern work is messy. Documents are here, tasks are there. Your slack links about meetings. They're talking about this stuff because they compete against it. They're trying to reposition it. It's like sitting in a wind tunnel with different apps flying at you. And it's impossible to get any work done. It doesn't have to be this way. For nearly two decades, we've been refining Basecamp to be what, the simplest way to manage projects. Now let's talk about storytelling. All the different ways you tell the story, how you get it into the customer's head. Years ago, Basecamp ran a promoted tweet that said slack is a day long meeting with no agenda. That's storytelling. Okay, on their homepage, same thing. Storytelling. Dear V.P. of wasting my time, just let me do my job. Storytelling, free books, rework. It doesn't have to be crazy at work. Remote. Therefore basecamp. Okay, Andy Raskin. Find your company's version of six pack abs and you tell the story over and over again from different angles. So that's what you're trying to do you have a very simple story? And you tell it again and again and again and again. Now there's five. I've called them immutable. They're actually very mutable laws of storytelling. And we've talked about conflict. No conflict, no story. No people know story, no buts. And so's no story, no ordinary no story. If you start explaining, no story. And we're going to start off by seeing Mark Zuckerberg break them all with this. He wrote last month about personal superintelligence. And I'll pull out some highlights. In some ways, this will be a new era for humanity. Superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress. People have used our newfound productivity to achieve more than was previously possible. Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone. So we've got no people, no buts or sos, nothing ordinary. It's all highfaluting super intelligence. And it's the whole long explanation, the whole thing. It's one big explanation, the great explanation. Let's start with no people, no story, okay? Stories are about people. This sounds incredibly simple, but you won't believe how people forget it. I got given a brief at Ramp. Write an ad that shows that Ramp's development team are cutting edge. Now you get a brief like this. Like, the obvious thing to do is talk about how Ramp automates everything. Sprint cycles, coding languages. It's not very interesting. So I was in New York when I got set this task, and I went over to the development team and there was a bunch of them there, and there's this one guy called Calvin. And I was smiling, thinking about Calvin, and he was very odd. It was very odd. And he was very funny. And I just thought, let's talk about Calvin. So I came up with, want Calvin to file your expenses. I'll read you a couple of lines. Meet Calvin. So I got talking to him. At 11, he was fluent in Python. At 15, his code was running on the International space station. At 16, he dropped out of high school and was admitted into MIT. He graduated one and a half years early with a perfect GPA. At 17, he represented the United States, not in hockey and hacking. At 19, he was hired by Google. This is the conflict now. Now, you're probably wondering how a boy genius like Calvin ends up filing expenses for a living. Well, let me tell you. At 20, he joined ramp and he wrote the code that made filing an expense as easy as taking a photograph of a receipt. 80,000 expenses are now filed this way. I don't want to talk about automation story. If you want to get people's attention, you want to talk about people, real people. Again, it ended up doing quite well on LinkedIn. While I was at Ramp, I got another idea. I read a customer quote. Ramp is like getting out of a messy relationship and finding the one. I thought it was a really good quote, but I kind of wanted like, how can I bring this to life? Like, that's not really a story, right? Stories are about people. So I thought, how could we make. How could we turn that line into two people at the wedding day and ramp the engagement ring. Till death do us part again. Once again, they did quite well on social media. Rule free, no buts and so's no, no story. What I mean by this is this came from two south park writers and what they said when they're, when they write is if. When you stick your little story together, the word and is in between all these sentences, you haven't got a story. You've got a shopping list.

A (25:47)

This episode is brought to you by walnut. It's 2025. Something has to change based on how people buy today. Why are we pouring all of this effort into marketing just to hand prospects a PDF or push them behind a book, a demo wall? Come on. Today's buyers, just like you and me, we don't want to wait. We want to explore the product, see how it works and understand its value. Before booking a meeting with someone, I want you to show me the product. Come on. 70% of the B2B buying journey is already done before a sales rep is even contacted. So your buying experience needs to match. And that's where Walnut comes in. Walnut helps you put your product at the center of your marketing. They make it easy for marketers like you and me to embed interactive demos on the site, drop them in campaigns, or personalize them for sales in minutes. No engineers. Acquired love that is that. Is that called Vibe coding? Once a buyer is interested, they don't just want a one off walkthrough of your product. They want a place to actually evaluate, compare notes and make a decision that they feel confident in. So Walnut has deal rooms that make it easy for your internal champion to sell your product to their team. With interactive demos at the core, the result is fewer stall deals, fewer stalled deals, consistent buyer experiences and intent data that shows exactly what features are winning. That's why companies like Adobe, NetApp and more trust Walnut to shorten sales cycles, scale pre sales and drive millions in new pipeline. Want to see it for yourself Go check it out. Walnut IO, That's Walnut IO and they have a cool offer for you. They will actually build your first demo for free. So you can see how demos and deal rooms actually work. So you get to see the product, test it out. They're going to do it for free because we're sending you there from exit 5. So go to Walnut I.O. today and tell them that you heard about them from Exit 5.

B (27:30)

What you see between the sentences should be da da da da da. But. So I came to Burlington, but I nearly missed my flight, so I dashed through Terminal 6, that kind of thing. Okay, now you're going to see Family Guy do it really well here. Got it. We'll rob a train. Love it. All aboard. All right, everybody, this is it. Hey, where the hell is everybody? Oh, we haven't had a paying customer in Mons. Nobody rides a train anymore. Oh, well, for God's sake. Are you robbers? Yeah. Well, you could. You could take my wallet. My MasterCard's in there. Although to be honest, I'll probably just cancel it before you can use it, so.

A (28:17)

Oh.

B (28:20)

Give me that. Hole punch. Yeah. Is this your hole punch or the train companies? Well, that's. You know. What? You know, I gotta pay for that. That comes out of my paycheck if you take it. Oh, oh, really? Yeah. Well, I can't in all good conscience take that then. Oh.

A (28:36)

Oh, good.

B (28:37)

Thank you. Yeah, no, I'm. I'm a working man myself. No, it's tough out there. I just. It's tough. It is. Anyway. All right, well, can you stop this thing so we can get off? No. I mean, I'd love to, but it stops at the pre designated stops, you know. Okay, so. But. And so what driver story. So you have these sentences and you have but so in between. Now you'll see this. With this, Peter goes to rob a train, but no one's on the train. But the guard doesn't even mind being robbed. He's going to offer his card, but they'll say he says he'll cancel it. So Peter steals the hole punch, but the guard says it's going to cost him a lot of money. So Peter decides to not rob the train. So he asks to get off, but he can't get off. And it's this constant sort of but so, but so which keeps your interest. Okay, number four. No ordinary no story. It's easier to make something small feel big than the other way around. So a very simple graph here. We've got big at the top and small at the Bottom. And you're a company like Google, it's very easy to brag about stuff like 10 billion searches. That feels really big. But it's much easier to start small with one search and then you can make that feel big. And you'll see this here with this advertisement. Oh, you start small. So I think my favorite part of the ad is when he types long distance relationship. Then he backspaces it and he types jobs in Paris. You want to continuously be trying to add conflict to things. Jobs in Paris. No, he's questioning himself. One more. This one's actually quite emotional. I'm being serious. Basically this guy called Warren Zevon who hopefully some of you know, and he sadly died from pancreatic cancer. And he on his last album, his last ever song was about his wife. And he's telling his wife like what's gonna be like when he's gone. And he's not talking about grief, he's talking about cleaning the house. And the song lyric is, sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house, maybe you'll think of me and smile. And it's actually probably my favorite song lyric of all time. Because he's not trying to make it big, he's trying to make it small. And that's what stories are about. Right? I'm bringing you back to B2B now. Ramp, our favorite company. We walk around the New York office. Everybody keeps talking about these billions of hours they save. And I'm like, that's not great. It's really impressive and it's going to win you some big deals. But it's not going to take off. Everyone claims these big numbers. So we were doing a sales deck and this guy Jack was like, let's not start with billions of hours. Let's start with something customers do every single day. They buy a cup of coffee. So we set up this slide. How much does a coffee cost? $5. Every single employee at your company is going to expense a cup of coffee at one point. You think it costs $5. The real cost of a $5 coffee. Employee uploads and tags the expense. That's three minutes. Manager stops what they were doing to approve. One minute. Finance hunts for the expense. Four minutes double checks it. One minute matches receipt. Finance. Finance finally approves, reconciles cost of a $5 cup of coffee is free. Employees 4 interruptions. 13 minutes. It's a little bit more impactful than just bragging about billions. Final immutable brackets. Very mutable law. If you start explaining, no story. Spare me the explanation. Give Me an example. Every time you explain something, backspace it and just write an example. I'm not kidding. So goodwill hunting. Dave referenced it earlier. He's sitting on the bench with Will. What does he say? He says, this is Robin Williams talking to Matt Damon. He says, love's an active commitment, Will. It's the choice to value someone else's well being as much as your own. No, Robin Williams doesn't say that on the bench. That's that you don't explain love. He said, you wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months because the doctors could see in your eyes the terms visiting hours don't apply. You give an example. You're trying to explain to me. Just give an example. It's all I've done today. Last little story. And it's the. I crossed the Atlantic Ocean three times in my life. This is the third. And I'm going to tell you about the first time. It was two years ago. I was in the Bahamas and with my friends, we were having dinner and there's this guy there, and he was really interested. He was talking about schools in America and he's got this, like, AI school thing going on in America. And I didn't know who he was. And then my friend nudges me and he's like, you know, that guy is like one of the richest people in the world. I didn't know. And it's not something to particularly brag about, but anyhow, the kind of level of money where I'm not going to mention his name, but you could probably work it out. So I said to him, how are you going to get parents to pick your schools instead of, like, the ones you send your kids to right now? And he was the kind of guy who just looked at me dead in the eyes and he said it wasn't even arrogant. He said, I know more about the problem with the education system in America than anybody in America. And I believed him. And I think when we talk about storytelling, how to get better at stories, we get really bogged down in, like, in technique. Really what you want to do if you want to tell a good story is you want to have a story to tell. And how you do that is you want to know more about the problem with your category than anybody else in the category or anyone else in America. And honestly, the rest will take care of itself. You're like a dog with a bone, and the problem's the bone. All right. You should know so much about your category. You could write a Book on it. That's the test. You actually want to get better at storytelling? Stop reading books. Write one. The title is we do it this way. Our company does it this way because. So drift conversational marketing. Mr. Gerhardt's name is on the front. Him and David cancel conversational Marketing. Therefore drift the canine Cocomiga effect, a breakthrough to healing your dog's gut with super fats. That's the story of the book. Therefore Yumworth the roasting tin. Therefore Biotin. This isn't about the book, actually. It's about putting your ideas into words. That's how you know. You only know you've got a good idea when you start writing it down. People say basecamp are good at storytelling, and I agree. I think they are. But the guys who run the company have written, like, over 100 essays on Project management. It's not surprising. And then everyone's like, oh, we can't do it. You haven't. When was the last time you wrote an essay about your product? You could give Zuckerberg's essay, ironically personal superintelligence to the best storyteller in the world, and they couldn't do anything with it because he's got nothing to say in the first place. John Ruskin to be taught to write. But what is the use if you've got nothing to say in the absence of knowledge? This is Bob Levinson. You will be doomed to rely more and more on adjectives. Always a mistake. So you came to Burlington. Probably not, but perhaps you wanted to learn a little bit about storytelling. Well, there's no secret. If you want a secret, fill up your water bottle before you start hiking. What I'm going to leave with is just like, it's honestly this simple. Forget arcs and whatnot. Just know your shit. I'm being serious when I say that. Like when the chap on the Bahamas told me he knows more about the problem with the education system in America. I spent the next couple of years trying to understand more about the problem with my industry advertising than anybody in America. I'm not sure. I'm probably a long way off, but that's. It's meat. It gives me meat to come on, come up here and talk about. Finally, I'm just going to take you a little peek behind the curtain. It's called if any writer was totally honest, this is what their work looks like. And I was writing a story about my business where I train marketers to write. And I'll read it to you, and then I'll tell you where it Came from, perhaps to try and inspire you a little bit, to write essays, to read books. Close your eyes. Can you tell me an ad you remember from last week? I'm trying to explain the problem with the advertising industry or how companies do marketing. Close your eyes. Can you tell me an ad you remember from last week? It's the decade of slop, mushy and flavourless, from lunch lady Doris Ladle to your homepage. We gum together the same abstract verbs, nouns, adjectives in different combinations and call it copywriting. Imagine spending $100 million a year on advertising to tell me, move work forward. Smash your marketing goals. Drive business value with sustainability data. Do you know what any of these companies do? Do you remember any of their drivel? Writing is a skill. You don't have it, you learn it. That's why I made this. Now it's a story, right? But, like, I didn't just. I didn't write it. First line. Close your. Close your eyes. Can you tell me an ad you remember from last week? On the plane, I looked at this and I started thinking how, subconsciously, where. Where it all came from. John Long, the problem with the advertising industry in a nutshell. How many current ads can you remember in 10 seconds? That's what inspired the first line. Second little bit. We gum together the same abstract verbs, nouns, adjectives and different combinations and call it copywriting. We gum them together. That's George Orwell. As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have been set in order by somebody else. The third little bit. Drive business value with sustainability data. That's Dave Harland. I saw it on social media. Wonderful copywriter a few months ago. $3.6 trillion. Why do we bother? And he's screenshotted Microsoft's adverts drive business value with sustainability data. And finally, the end. Writing's a skill. You don't have it, you learn it. This was Ty Nassi Coates writing in the Atlantic. One of my students insisted that whereas in math you could practise and get better, in writing, you either had it or you didn't. I told her that writing was more like math than she suspected. I suppose my point, if I have one, is if you spend time doing the work, when it's time to sit behind your keyboard, it will all work out. And if you haven't spent any time to actually do the Work and understand your problem in the category. When it's time to sit behind the keyboard, you'll just gum together verbs and adjectives like Mark Zuckerberg. Final summary. You can't wrap it in a compelling narrative. Nobody cares. Right? Positioning. We do this story. Why we do this storytelling, how you get it in the customer's head in one word. Stories, conflict. Where does that conflict come from? You need enemies, direct competitors, competing approaches, beliefs. A, B, C. No conflict. No story, no people. No story, no buts. That shows no story. Nothing ordinary. No story. If you start explaining. No story. And one little thing to take away, perhaps. I know more about the problem with my category, my product, than anybody in America. And honestly, you'll be fine. Thank you very much for listening.

A (39:36)

We got questions. We're gonna hang out. That was. That was excellent. I want to kick off the first question, then let's take. This is amazing. Thank you. So on the, like, you gotta know your shit thing, right? This comes up a lot, I think, with us in the room as marketers, it's like, a lot of times you're not all of us are fortunate enough to be able to, like, pick a company as a marketer and go work for a company where the founder knows the industry and cares a lot about the product. Right. And so a lot of times we're asked to basically put lipstick on a pig. In some ways. Do you believe that we can, like, the people in this room, as marketers, can we be the person that forces that inside of the company to, like, make the founder know the shit?

B (40:17)

Yeah, it's a good question, Dave. I got an. Actually, I got a funny answer. So these two ads I made for Ramp. I said that I was given a brief. I'm going to just quickly flash back to them. It wasn't actually true. I just added that in because it kind of just tied together the story. I didn't get a brief. Let me just find them quick. I was in the New York office, and they kind of told me to do some work. And honestly, I didn't really do the work. And I just met this guy called Calvin, and I was like, this is. This is going to be good. And I started writing it, and I just texted the founder, and then three hours later, he put it on social media. And it did pretty well. You got to. I think you got to take matters into your own hands. This other one, I didn't get asked to do it. I just. I just kind of did it because I wanted to. And again, it did quite well on Social media, and I think force it by, like, do the work and then just text it. And if. If they keep saying no, maybe get another job and then I have more.

A (41:02)

This is my event also. I'm going to ask you questions on my own. This is an interesting role with Ramp. So, like your B2B thing, this is a cool example. And I think the Ramp thing is like, okay, they're a B2B company. They work with Harry to write these cool ads like that. That's. These don't look like the ads I see in my LinkedIn feed. Right. I think that is an interesting example. Is the goal, like, you create this ad and you. You guys post it on LinkedIn and that's the ad. Or do they actually, like, run these as ads? Is there a distribution? Because I'm like, I want that Calvin ad everywhere. Are they actually doing distribution on this ad too? Or is like, you write these kind of pithy things for them and it is what it is.

B (41:37)

I think it's a good question. I think there's two things. So short answer is right now, none of these ads have ever been in, like, a mainstream publication. I always ask them, but I talk to mainly the founders of the company, and they're probably too busy. They kind of tell me that they might, and they end up not being. The second point is perhaps more interesting, is like, these things were getting like 500,000 views on LinkedIn. I do think that, like, I don't know how many people are reading the Atlantic, but how Eric put it to me was like, we'll just test it on LinkedIn. Three hours later, it's on LinkedIn. Bam. If it works, let's put it in the Atlantic. He didn't. But that's how they talk. And I think that's a good way of doing things like idea, social media. Test if it's good. Next. Hi, I'm. I'm Michael. That was great. Thank you. So I feel like for the last 10 years, everywhere I've been, it's gotten harder and harder and harder to convince leadership that this is something that's worth spending money on early and spending money and resources on early at a company, especially when you're 10, 20, 30 employees, just to bring someone like you in or to basically take marketing resources and put it towards storytelling. I'm wondering if you have stories, anecdotes, examples of people that have done a really good job of that, or any tips or just any thoughts on that. How do we get that done faster and make that more important to CEOs in particular to doing this earlier and not waiting until the last minute and then scrambling and realizing we have no story. You think they're too cautious. That's essentially. You think that leadership's just. We don't want. We're too cautious to. I honestly think that the way I think about it is they're thinking about like their Maslow's hierarchy of needs and they're thinking this is at the top. Right. We're going to crawl, walk, run as a company when it comes to our marketing and our coming up with our story, like our quote unquote story of us is at the top. Like, that's not something that we have to worry about right now. It seems like this, this squishy feel good story of us is really not something we have to figure out. Well, do you do sales? Does the company do sales? Of course. So April's got a book called Sales Pitch. Your story is very similar to your sales pitch. You get on the call and you've got to explain, like, why pick you instead of the other alternatives? If the company is doing sales, there will be some semblance of a story there. Like it's not something which just like you posted on LinkedIn and it exists. No, like every single company has one. Most of them just like it's kind of pretty simple or doesn't exist at all. So like if you're trying to bring storytelling into a company, start with the sales deck. We did that with the coffee Thing we did for Ramp was like, we got to change how we talk about and introduce this business. So we change the sales deck. I think that it's ever present like any, any ad you do, either it says move work forward and there's no kind of like there's nothing more to it or there is something more to it. Like this is. It's your homepage should be telling somewhat of a story. Like it's not something which just doesn't exist. Like it does exist already, if that made any sense. It does. I like starting with sales. I think that's a great recommendation.

A (44:30)

Or like do the marketing yourself. Show them 10 examples of 10, 10 great companies and be like, show me which one of these won without having a good story.

B (44:37)

Yeah, Basecamp is a really good example. Like they are punching above their weight by so much in the project management space. There is. Right. There's so many huge, huge companies which the same thing. And these guys are the only profitable one because of how good they are at explaining why project management should be. Simple question. At the back. Hey, Harry, that was great. I've always felt like good copy dies by committee. When too many people get in, they have feedback. It gets sanded down. Sanded down.

A (45:02)

How do you avoid that problem?

B (45:04)

It's a great question. So when I. When I do do, how do I avoid the problem? I think there's an ad by David Abbott, right? And yeah, I think he pitches this ad where there's a suspended vehicle. He's doing an ad for Volvo. And the committee is like, we can't put a baby underneath the car. And Abbott's like, yeah, probably right. Bad idea. Go again. And then the committee says, we can't put. I think it's like a grandmother or. No, it's the welder underneath the car. And he's like, the welder doesn't want to do it. Bad idea. Abbott says, all right, whatever. I'll go under the car. And he's the writer. And the header line is something like, if the welding is not strong enough, the car will fall on me. Take matters into your own hands, like I've always thought. And this is again, trite advice. Just be too kind of. You want to be too good to be ignored. Like, this is it. I'm going to live or die by my own ideas. When I work for Ramp, they have a really good policy, which is the idea is yours. No one's going to f U C K with it. If it goes wrong, it's also on you. And I quite like that as a principle like autonomy. If it goes wrong, the buck does stop with you. But that allows someone perhaps like slightly more junior to. To take on responsibility. Honestly, I used to work as a web developer six years ago for a. And they got me doing marketing and I was shut down. I was stifled. I couldn't break out. It's not easy. I think it's also your job. There's a lot of CMOs in the audience to identify someone who has got it and give them a chance and say, yeah, let's run with that. Hey, Harry. My name's Derek Schmolland and I am really intrigued about that. But so concept, theoretically, I think it makes a lot of sense. Add your butts and so's. I've actually got some advice to kind.

A (46:35)

Of remove those words.

B (46:36)

Filler words might be the term from the actual copywriting. So with that context, my question is, do you have any guidance on how. How many times or how often you actually use but. And so in the copywriting itself. Great question. I'm really glad you mentioned that. Because I probably wasn't clear. This stuff's implicit, not explicit. So I'm not saying write between your sentences, but. And so I did a whole speech with so many buts and so's, but I didn't say the words very much. This is more a principle of but changes the direction, so advances the story. You're not writing the words, it's just between. It's between the lines. You see that it's between the lines. It's not in the lines. Great question anymore.

A (47:17)

Oh, we got one in the back.

B (47:18)

Sorry, back in the cab.

A (47:20)

Yes. I'm not coming over there. You can shout it out.

B (47:25)

Big fan of your work, always support. So it's a really good question. I think the biggest problem is genuinely. And this sounds silly, but I think it's. I think it's believing in your own ideas. So I think creativity is genuinely far less important than conviction. If you believe in the damn thing, you'll make it, you'll get there with it. And the problem with AI is it kind of gives you a bunch of ideas and honestly, sometimes they're pretty good. But do you actually believe in it? The problem with Mark. So Mark, like Mark's long letter, he didn't have the conviction to say anything. And you kind of got to put your head on the parapet and be like, we think this. And I think it's. Sorry. It's really. It's like the AI is not going to do that for you. It's kind of got to come from within a bit. I think the best use case I've seen for it is I take a homepage and I say. I drag the writing from the homepage in and I say to it, underline or flag any cliches, abstract verbs, abstract nouns. And it comes back with a lot of lines which are not particularly good. I think it's very good at identifying what's not very good. To be honest with you. What's not very good is cliche. Like, it's the stuff you hear before. Like, if you. If you write something on a homepage and it hasn't been said before, chances are it's. It's quite good. And most homepages are not that. Move work forward. That could be any company. So I could tell you, and it would tell you that move work forward is not very good. I think it would struggle to have the courage to put something there and be like, yeah, this is what we think.

A (49:01)

Oh, yeah, we got more. I just want to build on, like. I think the. My note was like, the little exercise on conflict, like, that was super fun. How often do you do that at work, though? Like, never.

B (49:13)

We.

A (49:13)

All the time.

B (49:14)

Yeah.

A (49:14)

We don't ever, like, have fun thinking like that. And that is the difference there, right? And I think, like, okay, just because it is B2B. Look at all the B2B examples. Manufacturing, HR, Finance, whatever it is, those are still people. Those people still have challenges and problems at work. And so, like, I think the RAMP example is a good one. I would love to go back. I'm thinking about shit.

B (49:34)

We should.

A (49:34)

We need to fix our website. You know, like, all of the ways you can bring that in there. I love that framework, and I think we're all getting a lot of the same generic output from AI. But those are the types of ways. And, you know, when you're around, there's a million different ideas to riff on. Just. Just on that. So it was awesome.

B (49:48)

Yeah.

A (49:49)

You want to shout it out? Oh, we'll do that one after. That's.

B (49:59)

Yeah, yeah, no, go ahead.

A (50:01)

What's so special about ram?

B (50:02)

Cool question. Like, I. I had no. I didn't want to work. I do a few hours a week for them. Right. So I'm not a huge employee, but I do know the guys who run it quite well. And I'll give you the story of how they hired me, which kind of answered the question, because that's a little bit arrogant. But, like, Kareem's the other CEO, him and Eric, and they just. He sent about 16 DMs to me on Twitter, and I didn't. I didn't reply to any of them because I didn't follow the guy. They just kind of came up. And then I get emails from people at the company we want to work. They're persistent as hell at finding the right people. There's a great piece of advice I got from my friend George, and he says, when you're trying to work something out, don't think, how do I do it? Think who. So we're trying to solve a problem. Most people go on Internet and be like, how do I solve the problem? If it's a big problem, think who. So let's say you're trying to, I don't know, do sales, right? Who is the best person to solve our sales? And you find the person. The second thing on ramp, which is if anyone knows the company, you'll probably know is they work through it really quick. So, like, the story when Eric. I sent him the ad and he puts it up in two hours, in one, it's that's how they do things. Like, they just swing and if they miss, they miss. It's fine. You move on. They. They are fast as hell. And it's. Yeah. Also. Sorry, one more thing. I was there and every employee is working so hard, and I was shocked. I was like, why are you working so hard for this company? Every employee loves the company. They've all got equity. And I think there's this little smart thing they did there where, like, people, the employees are getting paid very well because of equity. And it made me rethink. Like when I joined, they said to me, I said, I don't want equity. I just want to get paid and get out of here. They forced me to have equity. They were like, we actually want you to give a shit. And it kind of worked.

A (51:35)

Imagine there's another hand over there somewhere. I swear.

B (51:38)

No, sorry. Yeah. Hi. I'll try to be loud. Okay. What if. If your customer. If you're like doing B2B to C, right? If your story for how your product affects customer is amazing, but your person buying the product close enough to the customer to connect with that, how would you. I don't know. Yeah, I got like, the story that's going to help, like, the person immediately who needs the solution with, like the best story, which is ultimately the outcome that they are. That's a really good question. I don't have a good answer to be really on. I'm going to think and I'll. I'm not sure if anyone in the room has experienced that. If anyone else is doing B2B2C and they've come across it, I. I don't know. Sorry. I'm going to think later today, I should say I'm. I'm hanging around. I'm not hanging around. I mean, I'm going to be loving the events for the next couple of days. So hopefully I chat to as many of you as I can and I'm going to come back.

A (52:38)

Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the next number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning ideas, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100 free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exit5.com and I will see you you over there in the community.

B (53:50)

Hey.

A (53:51)

This episode is brought to you by our friends@customerio. Do you remember? I'm old enough to remember this. You remember when a personalized message meant slapping someone's first name into an email? Hello David or hello Gerhardt? Yeah. Well, those days are long gone in marketing. AI has raised the bar for lifecycle marketing because now you can deliver smarter context aware communication that actually feels personal and you can do it at scale without hiring five more content people. Personalization today doesn't just mean using my name. It actually means having context about any previous interactions. But the problem here happens because even though this sounds great in theory, most teams aren't actually doing it. They're stuck with broken reporting, siloed data and outdated stacks. It's often easier just to keep doing things the way you've always done them, right? Isn't that kind of the the norm? Default to the status quo? So customer IO, they did a survey on this. They surveyed 600 marketers just like you and me to figure out what's actually working and what's broken. And this is what we call life cycle marketing. And they detailed how the best teams are actually solving these problems. The report breaks down 2025 priorities, where budgets are moving and how to tame the measurement mess. Real world examples from brands like Notion and Monarch Money that use AI personalization experiments and understanding the next chapter of AI what's on marketers Wishlist right now and how Customer Journ can get smarter, not just faster. It's packed with examples, data and strategies you can put to work right now if you want to get smarter about lifecycle marketing. This is a great free resource. So go check it out. You can get it@customerio exit 5 and you'll learn how to build lifecycle marketing that keeps up with today's expectations. That's customer IO, exit 5.