Hacking Advertising: How To Get World-Class Creative Without the World-Class Budget With Jon Sneider

Jon Sneider is the Founder, President, and Executive Producer of Wild Gravity, an award-winning creative production company. With more than 25 years of experience in marketing and advertising on the agency and client sides, he’s held senior roles at L.L.Bean, Microsoft, and Redfin. Jon is also the author of Hacking Advertising, which talks about building effective advertising campaigns.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:20] Jon Sneider reflects on managing a $20 million sales team at Bose while earning his MBA
[4:28] What Jon learned about advertising while managing digital campaigns for GM, AT&T, and L.L. Bean
[12:19] How Jon managed large budgets and navigated agency delays at Microsoft
[18:22] Why smaller vendors outperform large agencies in cost, speed, and advertising effectiveness
[30:49] The five metrics defining effective advertising
[38:12] Examples of memorable insurance campaigns
[44:50] How AI is disrupting the creative process and Wild Gravity’s AI plus human intelligence approach
[51:56] Jon talks about his Gen X childhood and how boredom fueled his creativity and career path
[56:32] The Picasso quote that inspires Wild Gravity’s disruptive approach to advertising

In this episode…

Many businesses still rely on large agencies to produce their advertising, only to face bloated costs, long timelines, and diluted creative. The traditional agency model often creates inefficiencies, with multiple vendors and layers of approval that hinder the process. How can companies deliver world-class ads without sacrificing quality?

Advertising veteran Jon Sneider has created an approach to challenge traditional advertising inefficiencies. He maintains that small, expert teams eliminate unnecessary hierarchies and deliver stronger results with less overhead. By focusing on breakthrough, brand and message recall, likability, and purchase intent, companies can create effective ads that scale industries. Additionally, combining AI with human expertise accelerates production while retaining high-performing creative.

In this week’s episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris hosts Jon Sneider, Founder, President, and Executive Producer of Wild Gravity, to talk about reinventing advertising for efficiency and impact. Jon shares examples from high-performing insurance campaigns, his experience managing sales teams and advertising budgets at large corporations, and how growing up before the internet fueled his creativity.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

“If you learn sales, that is going to help you, no matter what you do.”
“Focus group testing, universally, does not make the ads better. They make the ads more watered down.”
“Sometimes the directors don’t even want to talk to the agency when they get into production.”
“AI, depending on the tool and what you’re trying to create, will get you 40-80%.”
“Learn the rules as a professional to break them as an artist.”

Action Steps

Build smaller expert teams: Lean teams reduce layers of hierarchy and speed up decision-making, leading to stronger creative output. This approach avoids the inefficiencies of large agencies and delivers results more quickly.
Test ads directly in the market: Real performance data is far more valuable than focus groups or pretesting. By launching quickly and refining based on metrics, brands can save money and improve outcomes.
Focus on the five magic metrics: Breakthrough, brand/product recall, message recall, likability, and purchase intent form the foundation of effective advertising. Prioritizing these ensures ads not only capture attention but also drive measurable business results.
Integrate AI with human expertise: AI accelerates production but needs skilled professionals to polish outputs into world-class creative. Combining automation with “actual intelligence” prevents low-quality work and raises the creative bar.
Simplify messaging for clarity: Clear, compelling messages resonate more than complex or abstract claims. Strong messaging helps customers remember the product and act, ensuring ads connect directly with business goals.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:15

Hey everyone, I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond. As you up arrow your business and your personal life, most brands think they need a big ad agency to make world class advertising. Today's guest built his career proving that's not just wrong. It's costing you millions. Jon Sneider started his career at Bose managing a $20 million dollar sales team, while earning his MBA at night, he went on to run advertising for giants like Fidelity, L.L. Bean, Microsoft, Redfin, working with some of the most powerful agencies in the world. And then, after seeing the inefficiencies firsthand, 4 million budget, 13 week timelines, he decided to reinvent the system in 2017 he founded Wild Gravity, a creative production company that's now delivered world class ads for brands like Amazon, Coca Cola, Lego and the NFL. And he's just released a new book Hacking Advertising, how we learned to make ads without the agency and you can too, which lays out a playbook for creating breakthrough advertising faster, better and at a fraction of the cost. Jon Sneider, welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast,

Jon Sneider 1:22

William, thank you so much for having me here. I'm really thrilled to be here and really excited for this conversation. Yeah,

William Harris 1:27

and I want to give a quick shout out to to James Brackin IV at BookThinkers, for putting us in touch. James. Thank you for reaching out letting me know about Jon. This is gonna be a good conversation.

Jon Sneider 1:38

Yeah, James. I'd like to shout out James as well and all the people there over at BookThinkers, they've been a great partner.

William Harris 1:44

Yeah, that's good last interruption. And then we'll dig right into the good stuff. I do want to announce our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that IPO Ed, you can learn more on our website, at elumynt.com, which is spelled elumynt.com, okay, take me back to your early days at Bose. You're juggling an MBA at night, managing a $20 million sales team during the day. What was that season like? And how did you shape? How did it shape, how you think about pressure and leadership?

Jon Sneider 2:20

Yeah. So my time at Bose is interesting. It was kind of like my first real job after college and living the ski bum life for a little bit out in Telluride, Colorado. I finally moved back to the east coast, where I'm from, and I was kind of hell bent on getting a job at Bose, and I eventually did that after a lot of pursuit. And what was interesting is, and this is good for anybody who's trying to start their career and doesn't know where to start, is you can always start in sales. And sales is often the one job that you can get with little or limited experience. And it is also one of the greatest jobs to begin your career doing, if you learn sales that is going to help you, no matter what you do for the rest of your life. And so I had no idea that I would, you know, be any good at it, but it turned out that that I was. And what was great about Bose is they offered to pay for a couple classes at night while you were working there, and you had no obligation to work for Bose afterwards. And so while I was there, I pursued my MBA at night because I'd done one well at sales, I got promoted to a sales manager, and yeah, we did over $20 million a year with that sales team, and I would not trade that experience for anything. And then also, I think it speaks to my ability and willingness to grind. And grinding has been talked about, but I think the ability to grind is really the key to so many successful people's success.

William Harris 4:08

A lot of people talk about doing it. There's not as many people willing to go to get up and actually do it. So okay, so you moved from Bose into the agency world. You were leading some big accounts for brands like GM AT&T, Microsoft. And what did those years teach you about how advertising really works behind the curtains?

Jon Sneider 4:28

Yeah. So from there, I got recruited to a company called Digitas, which was one of the largest and most prominent digital agencies in the early 2000s dating myself a little bit here, but back at that time, we were building websites, email marketing campaigns, Banner campaigns like very basic blocking and tackling functions for huge brands like General Motors and AT&T and Microsoft, like you said. And what was interesting. Then is, we're a bunch of kids, you know, in our 20s, leading these brands that were, you know, pretty old and established, especially, you know, GM and Pontiac and those brands and AT&T as well. And so we really had the chance to lead these people into a new channel, a new forum. And what's interesting about that in relation to the rest of my career, is that when you work at a digital agency, all of the production is done in house. The production is done with designers and coders, right? And so everything that you make for digital marketing you're doing the strategy, the concepting and the production execution and launching, contrasting that with my later experience, where I'd end up running broadcast advertising for Windows, for L.L. Bean and for Redfin, that was a big awakening moment for me, when I was like, Wait a second, the agency actually doesn't do the production when you're doing broadcast advertising. And because I had so much experience doing digital first, it really contrasted the two methods very well for me. I mean, it was starkly obvious the differences and the loss of efficiency when you're moving to more of a broadcast model.

William Harris 6:35

Yeah. And so that first one was that L.L. Bean like, what specifically, what did you see that you go scratch your head and say, this is, this is not right?

Jon Sneider 6:44

Yeah, it's a it's a funny story, because when I got hired there, my boss, who was the CMO at L.L. Bean in the interview process, I was like, Yeah, I've never done a TV commercial, but I figure it's just like doing any other project. And he was like, yeah, absolutely. He's like, you've run a lot of big projects, so this shouldn't be much different. And so when I first got there, I was tasked with finding a new agency of record, and ran a national search for a new agency. We ended up hiring GSD and m out of Austin. They're a phenomenal agency. They were doing southwest at the time, and other huge brands, and their pitch was fantastic, and that's a whole other story, but we came out with kind of the bones of the campaign from the pitch, and then immediately went into work in the broadcast spot. L.L. Bean does a single Christmas ad every year, and so we immediately went into production on that over the summer, and at one point, you know, we're getting pretty close to what we thought was, you know, pretty solid ad concept. And then we're like, they were like, Okay, well, now it's time to hire the production company and the director. And I was like, what? I was like, you know, because anybody that's in production knows that this is in broadcast production, knows that this is how it works. But I didn't, and I went into my went into my boss's office after that conference call, and I was like, hey, so the agency doesn't make the ad? And he was like, No. And I was like, Well, who makes the ad? He said, Well, the production company is going to shoot it. They do, you know, they hire the director and the producers, the line producers, all the gaffers, grips, craft, services, security, all of that is the production company does that. And then I was even talking to a creative on the account once, soon after that. He was like, Oh yeah, he goes. Sometimes the directors don't even want to talk to the agency when they get into production, right? It was like, yeah. It was like, You got to be shitting me. And so I went into I was talking to my boss still, and I was like, so we just spent three months with the agency working with 25 people, and they're not even gonna make the ad. He was like, well, they'll be there on set. I was like, okay, it turned out, you know, the production company and the director were pretty collaborative with the agency, and it wasn't like that type of atmosphere at all. But at first that was, like, the first thing where I was like, This really doesn't seem very efficient. And then, you know, that's not the end of it. Also, like, after the ad is shot, it goes to another company, which is the post production company that does all the editing, you know, the music selection, and, you know, all the fine tuning of the ad. And then it goes to a visual effects company, a VFX company, and they're going to do all the superimposed texts and, you know, captioning, and they're going to make everything. They're going to bring the magic. And certainly, if there's any effects that will happen with the VFX company as well. So that's if you're the client, that's four different vendors that you're using. And as you can imagine, like the more vendors that you use, and especially if you're working through an agency, you. You're creating this massive game of telephone, and as we know from the game telephone, that message can be lost or misinterpreted or just not come through clearly. So that was my first my first ad was my first kind of aha moment where I was like this just doesn't seem that efficient.

William Harris 10:20

Sure, I haven't played telephone in such a long time, but you've got me remembering that there was another version that we did that was similar. It was like, I think we called it Pictionary telephone. That's probably not the real name of it, but it was like, one time where it's like, you draw a picture, somebody would say what they saw, or you would tell the person next to you, like, what it was. They would draw a picture of that, then the person next to them would have to interpret that picture as a sentence, and say that to the next person, then that person would draw what they heard, and then picture, you know, words, you get to the end of this, and it's not even remotely close to what it was. And I think, to a point, this is what's happening, right? Somebody says, Hey, here's what this ad needs to look like they make and then, and then they say that, and then a production company says, Great, we're gonna turn that into a picture. And then they have some words, like, great, here's some words now on what we need the VFX to do. And then they turn that into their and so it's like, picture words, picture words, picture words. And that message, very inevitably, is going to get lost or muddied or watered in some way,

Jon Sneider 11:15

right? And 100% and then, you know, true to your example of Pictionary telephone, the finished ad looks a lot different than whatever you were concepting with the agency. Like we had this whole story. There's a dog, dog in it, and it was part of the whole story was that the dog is not getting attention as his family's getting ready for their big Christmas dinner. And you get to a 32nd version of that, and I was like, There's no way you see the dog for a few seconds like that. Part of the story didn't come through at all. And so, I mean, that's another thing, if you haven't been through it like all of the magic happens the edit and what you think you're going to be able to show and display and what actually can come through in a 32nd spot is a lot different.

William Harris 12:04

That's good. Okay, so then you end up you've told some stories about working at windows and some of their campaigns and budgets that were the hundreds and millions and timelines that dragged on forever, what were some of the most frustrating or eye opening moments from that experience then at Windows?

Jon Sneider 12:19

Yeah. So after L.L. Bean, I was recruited to move out to Seattle to take a job at Microsoft running advertising for Windows. And Windows, at the time, was the big dog at Microsoft, read like the biggest budget, right? And so this was back in Windows, seven, windows, eight timelines. And Windows used to do these gigantic launches whenever there was a new version, and we had budgets that were in the hundreds of millions. When we did the windows eight launch, it was close to half a billion dollars in just in media, right? So massive, massive spends, and we had the most coveted agencies in the country. Literally, we had the agency of the decade as as coined by Ad Age, and we had the digital agency of the decade both working on our accounts. So literally, the most prominent agencies in the country, you know, perhaps the world. And they were great. We made some fantastic ads with them. They knew how to make things big. We launched in Times Square that year. It was the first time that more than 50% of the screens were synchronized. So it was really cool. We did some amazing stuff then and but the normal ad production schedule with the agency was essentially a 13 week process. We would concept about six to eight ads to shoot each ad just for the production would cost about 600 to $800,000 just to produce 1/32 ad. And so if you're doing six to eight of them, you're looking at, you know, over four to you know, four to $6 million for a campaign 13 weeks of time. It's a lot. And then what happens once you start running the ads is, first of all, there's a couple that nobody's in love with. Those are the dogs, and you end up not even running them. Then you'll end up running about six ads, and then very quickly, you'll see that out of the six, there's really only one or two that are performing. And it'll be a very short amount of time that you go from six to three to four to eventually just one or two ads that are pulling all of the weight. And if you think about that, where it's like, this is just for production, you know, you're, let's say, averaging $5 million for production, plus the agency fees and the agencies where. Were getting like 10s of millions of dollars at that time. Microsoft doesn't function like that anymore, but at the time, you know, the agency was getting 10s of millions of dollars as well. And for all of that work and all of that money to just end up with one or 2/32 ads is insane. Now also at this time, you know, I started in 2000 and I started 2009 at Windows. And, you know, Facebook and Twitter became a thing in 2007 right? So, very quickly, social media was evolving fast, and Apple, at the time, was virtually kicking us in the nuts like which with the Mac first PC thing was over, but it was the set the Siri campaign, and Siri was constantly making fun of, you know, PCs. And so I would go to the agency and I'd be like, hey, look, Apple just released this video, and we need to respond. It needs something in two weeks. And the agency literally said, we can have a statement of work to you

William Harris 16:05

in two weeks. Oh, no, you can't move that slow, right? And so

Jon Sneider 16:11

that obviously wasn't acceptable. It wasn't acceptable my boss. So I started to develop smaller vendors. I started working going straight to production companies and then working with these boutique agencies. And what I found was we could create killer killer work with those companies as well. It just required a lot more hand holding. So interestingly, you know, we were, we had a few ads that we just wanted to go to market with. And our agency of record was always had a very not invented here mentality, and they would never really just make exactly what we wanted. And so we went to this small agency and we said, we have this idea for three ads. Will you just make them? You know, they were thrilled. They were like, of course, we'll make them. We ended up producing with broken lizard, who was the comedy troupe that did Super Troopers, and a lot of other like that, right? They were incredibly fun to work with, as you can imagine, and very collaborative. And so we shot three ads with them for half a million dollars, so three ads for less than the cost of one ad that we would shoot with a big agency. And what happened was we tested those ads in our digital channels, and they performed better than the ads from the big agency in digital channels. Interesting. So then we lobbied, you know, we lobbied the powers that be at Microsoft and said, Hey, can we run this stuff on TV? And, you know, we were granted that, right? And it outperformed those spots on TV as well. And why do you think

William Harris 17:53

it performed better? Because I got it. Here's the thing, I've got a, there was a company that we were working with, and they brought in this big wig from, I think it was Adidas or something. It's like, I'm the big guy who knows what I'm talking about. And was like, give it a shot. Made some ads for this company they were working with, and they bombed, compared to, like, this stuff that we're paying somebody $1,000 for. And it's like, this is supposed to be like, Why? Why did your ads there the lower cost of why did those perform better?

Jon Sneider 18:22

Well, one is what we wrote was dead focused on metrics that were actually going to move the brand and move the business. A lot of time the agencies are making creative that's not really for the client, it's for the agency, the agency wants to make work that said that they can go look at how cool this was, and look at how many awards this got, not look how many computers it sold, right? And so the other thing that happens in big agency Productions is there's going to be a lot of testing, a lot of pre testing before you go into production, because production costs so much money, right? So there'll be surveys, there's going to be focus groups. We would literally find fly around the world doing focus group testing. And at the time, you know, there was no AI video. Then at the time, we would put together these things called animatics, and they're exactly what they sound like. It's not quite animation. It's kind of this janky, funky almost animation with, you know, with with VoiceOver. And so we would test these as if they were the finished ads, and get all this feedback from, you know, 12 people that had free time in the middle of the day and were motivated by a $50 American Express gift certificate, right? And so I remember one time saying in a meeting like, why are we listening to this 12 people that have no experience making ads, when there's 12 of us here in this room right now that are experts at making ads? Sure? Yeah, and you know, there's, there's various answers to that, but I think to a person, anybody that's been through that process, will tell you that focus group testing, universally, does not make the ads better. They make the ads more watered down. They offer the teeth out of the ads. For sure, and what happens is that everything that people loved about the ad concept in the pitch meeting ends up getting de toothed when it goes through focus group testing. So true. Yeah. So I think just so our contention then, and I still believe it is that the market never lies right. And the market, when you put things in market, it rarely aligns with what you learned in pre testing. And so at the time, my boss and I were like, Hey, did we just reinvent production here at Microsoft? Meaning like, what if we avoided all that? If production is so much cheaper, if you can do it for so much less money, then you can afford to just make the ads without doing any pre testing, test them in market, in digital, and then elevating the ones that perform to put on broadcast. And that was a really exciting moment for me and for our team then, because we were like, we're reinventing the way we go to market

William Harris 21:26

at Microsoft. So I love this concept. Let me play devil's advocate for a moment. Though. I've also worked with plenty of brands who hire a production company without talking to us. We are the ones who running the ads, right? So we don't make the ads, but we're running their ads, and we're the ones who know what's working with their their ad account, what's actually converting, what's not converting for them. And we get something, I'm like, it's beautiful, like, it's cinematography, like, it's wonderful. It's not going to convert, and we run it and it doesn't convert, right? And so, like, there's, there's, I can see why. Sometimes you would have the thought of, well, but I need to go with the agency so they can come up with this idea, that's the right idea, and then move that to a production company. If you, if you cut out that and you just go straight to production, do you risk, you know, something that's absolutely beautiful, that's even further detached from performance,

Jon Sneider 22:22

there's it puts a lot more of the responsibility on the marketers right. The marketers themselves need to know know what they're doing. And in our situation, my boss and I and members of my team all had significant agency experience. Anyway, sure, so we knew how to instruct the production companies. And looking back on that, I don't think we would have been successful at it if we didn't have that experience. And that led to another conversation, which was, hey, there's companies out there that obviously can move fast. They're production companies, but they don't have the sophistication and the brand knowledge that an agency person is going to have, right? The agencies are very good at what they do right? And they do add a lot of value. I don't want to seem like I'm just trashing on ad agencies, because I'm not right. That being said, the when you go to production and you don't have them, then it becomes your job as the client to do all that. And there's a lot of like, hey, we would never say it that that way, this isn't really on brand for us. You're using the wrong version of the logo. So we had conversations then, like, why isn't there a company that's kind of in the middle of that that's small and nimble and and production focused, but still has the sophistication of an agency to understand how to care for big brands and big corporations like

William Harris 24:07

that. Yeah. No, that makes a lot more sense, and I know that that's something you've told me before, is that you believe that small teams are better than large teams. Can you give me an example of where a small team being more nimble was able to outperform a large

Jon Sneider 24:23

team, yeah. I mean, certainly in that instance that I told you about at Microsoft was like, we had a much smaller team, and we're able to make something much more effective. But my, my entire company is molded that way. Now my company, while gravity counts, Microsoft, is one of their clients, along with Amazon, and we do work for Coke and Lego and the NFL and the NBA and a lot of other big brands. And there's only 10 of us here, and we go up against giant agencies all of the time and beat them. And what I believe is. That if there's small teams of seasoned professionals like everybody is an expert at what they do and everything, everybody has a discrete job function, meaning they don't overlap, right? There's a there's a writer, there's a designer, there's, you know, a director, a producer, like teams like that, they're not gonna overlap in Job functionality, and they all know what they're doing. So it doesn't take as much conversation, if you contrast that with a standard, traditional ad agency. Ad agencies have a lot of hierarchy, right? There's if you just think about account management teams, there's going to be assistant account executives and account exec, account supervisor, you know, an account director, a VP, account director, etc. That's a lot of people. And then it's similar, if you go down on the creative side as well. You know, there's going to be a VP, VP director, VP ACD, right? An ACD, a lead copywriter, lead designer, and junior copywriters and junior designers. And so when I was a client, I would ask our account people, and I would say, hey, look, we got to make this change. Like, let's say whatever it was, the computer needs to be blue instead of red, making something up because they're blue or red. But anyway, we would say, we have to make, make this switch. And the response I would get would be, well, we've got to run it up the chain.

William Harris 26:39

Yeah, I get it when, in that environment you have to, but Right? Very efficient.

Jon Sneider 26:44

Yeah. So the account people have to get it approved through their bosses. Go all the way up to the VP level, and then if the VP is approved it, it would go over to the creative team, and then it would go all the way down the chain. And then the designer might be like, Well, we did it this way for this reason, so we don't think it's a good idea to change it. And then it would come all the way back up, back over and back down. And that's you're losing a day there, at least, right? And so contrast that if you're working with a team of like, you know 10 to 20 people that are all know exactly what they're doing, and they don't have any senior people that they need to check in with, then that flows so much better. You lose, like, the whole game of telephone there. It's much, much more efficient. You

William Harris 27:31

rattled off a bunch of absolutely incredible companies. It's one of those ones. It's like, you know, stagger back every time you send out the company. It's like, oh no. It's, are you? What's that meme right with was, like, Ed McMahon, or, I don't remember who it was, right? Somebody from WWF race, like, it's like, Oh, so you have worked on some really fun commercials. What's one that stands out as being memorable to you? Either because the finished product of this commercial was just incredible, and you're like, I am so glad we made that commercial, or the process was just so fun or chaotic.

Jon Sneider 28:08

I had not planned the story, but you just evoke something when I was still at Windows on like it was like December 2 or third. We were in a meeting, and the CMO said, Well, what are we doing for New Year's ad? And we're like, Well, we haven't planned a New Year's ad. We don't typically do that. And he said, Well, I want, I want a New Year's ad and and it, it can't be like all the other New Year's ads. And that was, that was the entire brief, right? That's very brief, right? And so I went out to one of these production companies, obviously, for reasons that, you know, I couldn't go out to the big agency and ask, because they would no way be able to hit the timeline. And so there was a lot of interesting things that were going on at the time. And we made a, essentially a female empowerment ad, and we highlighted all these stories of women that had done extraordinary things that year, like Diana Nyad had swum across the English Channel. She was the first woman to do that. There was a bunch of like other other firsts that had happened that year. And we put this whole ad together with news clips and then voiceover. And we took we took pictures and we made kind of video, 2d moving images with them, and it turned into one of the most emotional ads that I have ever produced. I had a person come up to me and she was like, your ad made me cry. That's cool, yeah. And so that was really rewarding, because it was absolutely like an unheard of timeline to be able to produce something that's going to hit and to have it actually. Actually be not just successful, but, like, wildly successful was one of the most rewarding. You know, I love I've ever worked on.

William Harris 30:09

I love when you can do a commercial that hits on an emotion in a really good way. Love hilarious ones, like, like, who doesn't Right? Like, it's the easiest one to go to, but when you can move to one that actually, like, gets you in the heart, and you're like, oh, man, those are some of my favorites, and some of the ones that I think I feel last the most in my mind.

Jon Sneider 30:29

Well, for sure, anything, anytime you can evoke real emotion, that's something that's going to stick with

William Harris 30:34

you. So let's move into that. I want to talk about what actually makes a good ad. And so when you're talking now to these brands, and you're saying, we're going to make an ad that's better for you than the agency would in less time, what's going to make it a good ad? What are you looking for?

Jon Sneider 30:49

Yeah, well, there's a concept I talk about in my book, Hacking Advertising. It's the five magic metrics. And I was fortunate enough to work with some amazing metrics. People over over the years, worked with people directly at Nielsen Company, and you know, they're the ratings company and a lot of other firms like that. And if you're in the industry, you are going to get bombarded with all these different statistics and metrics that that people want you to focus on. And after going through the trenches for a long time, I realized that there's really only five metrics that you need to pay attention to if you want a successful ad. And the metrics are, one is breakthrough. And so if this was a like a Nielsen survey, they measure breakthrough with they'll say like, do you remember an ad last night where there was a caveman, and yes or no, right? And so breakthrough is, do you remember the ad? And then there's, do you remember what it was for, what product or brand it was for, right? And that, that is brand product recall. And then the next one is message recall. Do you remember what the message was? Were they saying it's on sale? Is it cheaper? Is it better? Does it do things that nobody else you know, none of your competitors can do, right? And then after that, it's likability. Is the fourth metric, and that's what it sounds like, did you like it? And then the fifth one is purchase intent, which is, do you plan to buy it? And so if you can hit on all five of those metrics, if you can breakthrough and people remember what the product does, remember what the message was and they liked it, your purchase intent is going to be very high. And at the end of the day, that's what we're all shooting for, right? We're trying to sell products here. We're not, you know, creating a piece of art.

William Harris 32:48

So how do you hit on those? Like, what's the process look like to be able to say, here's how we're going to make sure we hit on all five of those.

Jon Sneider 32:57

There's tactics within each of those. Like, breakthrough is a lot of people know about breakthrough now, because of social media, everybody knows you have to start with a compelling hook and that you need to capture people's attention in the first one to three seconds. And because of that, we are overwhelmed now with ads that breakthrough. There's so many ads that breakthrough, right? And so that's the one that people hit on the most. And the people often drop the ball at the in the other metrics. And there's certain tactics you do like to remember what the brand is. You know, people were like, you've got to say the brand of the first five seconds, you've got to say it at least three to five times. You've got to say it this many times at the end of the ad and things, things like that, to get you to remember what the brand is. Message recall. Also, it requires a lot of repetition, but it also has to be compelling. The message has to be compelling for you to want to pay attention to it. Likability is obviously a very, very ephemeral metric, right? Do people like things or not? That might very well come down to the director, or how much emotion you're trying to shoot for in the ad, or are you going to make it funny things like that, and then purchase intent really is something that is dictated by how well you've hit the other metrics.

William Harris 34:34

When I was going to ask you which one you think we over index on in D to C, and you basically answered that it's probably going to be the first one which, what was it breakthrough in D to C? A lot of times in the digital world, we like to call it thumb stop ratio, right? It's like, basically, it's like, you're scrolling through, did you stop their thumb from moving? It's like, okay, that's the breakthrough for us. It has gotten wild, to your point. It's gotten. In chaotically wild, and you see people doing things where, you know, it's like has nothing to do with the video at all, right, right? And it's hilarious, but it has nothing to do with the ad. But you got the breakthrough, and so, but then to transition from the breakthrough, I do feel like that's where I think so much of the drop off happens is transitioning from that breakthrough into the brand product recall. And so aside from just saying the name or things like, are there other tips or tricks that people can use to make sure that they transition well, for that breakthrough to actually getting into that

Jon Sneider 35:32

Yeah, well, let me highlight that through some examples. I like to use the insurance industry a lot, for sure, as an example, for a couple reasons. One is they trend, they spend an enormous amount of media, of dollars on media, right? And then the other is, they have a very undifferentiated product. It's not sexy at all, right, right? And so a company that nails it every time and has been nailing it probably for the last 15 or 20 years is Geico, right? Yes, Geico. It's like, do those ads breakthrough? It's like, well, that caveman campaign is probably 15 years old now, just itself, and people still remember it, right? The camel hump day ad. There's the ads with the gecko. You know, there's all of these GEICO ads that people remember because they breakthrough in a very humorous type of way, right? And then it's like, Well, do you remember what it was for? You're like, yeah, they say GEICO about 50 times in every ad, yes, I remember it was for, right? And then it's, do you remember what their message was? And it's like, who doesn't remember that? It's save 50% or more on their insurance, right? It's not just the way that they repeat it. They even make fun of themselves in some ads for how much they repeat it. But it's that the message itself is very compelling, right? And it's, do you like those ads? Like people love those ads, right? We still talk about them. And then it's, would you plan to buy it? Do you have purchase intent? And it's like, Who among us hasn't checked the website or called the 800 number to see if we could say 15% or more?

William Harris 37:19

Because it's compelling. Like you said, it's easy to remember 15% like they kept it simple, right? Not like, Hey, we're going to do this, this, this, this, this, one thing, one thing. Make it simple. And then you everyone wants to say 15% very few of us don't. Very few of us are in a position. We're like, Nah, saving 15% on something doesn't sound like a good idea. It's interesting. You brought up the insurance industry, because I feel like there are other ones that have done a great job too. Geico was the one that I remember, at least, growing up, watching it first and being like, I don't need insurance. I'm like, 12, but like, these are hilarious, and I at least like watching those commercials. But then I felt like other ones caught on and started doing well, like all states mayhem did really well. And I it's like, I really appreciate that. It's, I feel like it's got a good thumb stop ratio. I was going to call it that. Why do you think that insurance does as well as they do?

Jon Sneider 38:12

Yeah, I mean, insurance just comes down to dollars. They just sure, the insurance industry just makes so much money, sure, I won't get into the the the ethics of that at this point. But, yeah, I mean, if you think about other insurance companies, I think Allstate does do very well with the mayhem thing, and you remember that. But then the message is kind of, you remember it? It's four, yes, I may have, I guess you know, it's connected to Allstate in a loose way, right? And then the message is, protect you from Mayhem. Well, then I start to get lost. I'm like, what does that actually mean? And how is that different from any other insurance company? And then, do I like them? Yeah, I like, I like those ads. I do. And then are you going to switch? Well, insurance is tough, you know, like, it takes a lot to switch insurance, so it's hard to move the needle there. And I think other insurance companies are similar in that way. Like, if you look at Liberty Mutual, Liberty Mutual has been running a campaign with Doug and LIMU emu forever. And if you think about it, that it's like, do you remember an ad with Doug, you know, a character named Doug and alimu emu? And you're like, Yeah, I remember that. Do you remember who was for? And you're like, oh, LIMU, liberty, mutual, yeah, I guess, I guess I remember who, who it's for. A lot of people wouldn't make that connection.

William Harris 39:38

I didn't remember till you just said that, right?

Jon Sneider 39:41

Yeah, right. And so, yeah, I remember that it's Liberty Mutual. They also do the libertybirdy one that's kind of funny, right? And then do you remember what the message is?

William Harris 39:54

No, and the message is

Jon Sneider 39:57

only pay for what you need. Mm. And is that compelling? Like, I don't even know exactly what they're talking about. I guess you're implying that I'm paying for things that I don't need with my other insurance company. I'm not sure if that's true or not, right? And then it's, you know, do I like them? They're fine, right? I don't love them. Like, I love GEICO ads. And then do you plan to buy it? Or, you know, again, like, insurance is a hard thing to move people from, probably not a lot of purchase intent or driven through those ads. And you can see the way it carries through, like, flow from progressive and, you know, Jake from State Farm and all those things, yeah. A lot of those ads are memorable. We remember what the brand is, but they often insurance. A lot fumbles on the message, yeah. And then you know, after that you're, you're not going to hit very high on purchase intent.

William Harris 40:59

It's a clarity thing, right? Like we always talk about how clarity is king, and if it gets like you said, I didn't even think about that, but it's like, protected from Mayhem. Wait, what's mayhem? What types of things does it protect me from? Like you start to get like, it's not as clear as, say, 15% or more, right? That's a very clear message, right? But that brings a hurdle to this, because it's difficult to say we're more expensive. But here's why, right? Yes, I mean, it's very easy to say, Hey, say 50% like, like, that is the message. It's very easy to be clear about like, Hey, you can save money with us. It's a very easy thing, sure. How do you how do you try to create that clarity for an elevated brand where the message is not simply save money,

Jon Sneider 41:46

yeah. Well, I mean, I think the premium example is Apple, right? Apple did a phenomenal job of, you know, breaking through. You Very Much. Know who the brand is, of course, right? You know what the product is, and Apple did a great job of evoking using all these lifestyle images, and these this imagery that made it very aspirational. And Apple would never say our products are more expensive, but they portray it in a light that is very it's aspirational. You're like, if I have this, then I will have arrived. And that's, you know, for a long time, that's what the iPhone was. And, you know, still to this day, you know, people carry a lot of feel they have more stature if they have an iPhone versus an Android. Like, people still get trash for having green bubbles. I know because I have a pixel.

William Harris 42:49

Oh, yeah, that's like, that's a really good point of those five metrics that you're looking at tracking. What's the one that is underutilized. The most of those five that you're like this, please level up this. This is where you guys need to focus more on.

Jon Sneider 43:08

I think message recall, and I think, and I think that, I think that messaging overall, is one of the hardest things to do in marketing, and it's a lot of it's something that often falls down. And I know that when I was on the advertising side, we would get briefed about the product, and you would be like, Okay, well, like, what's the message here? Like, is this gonna save consumers a ton of money? Is it faster, lighter? You know, faster, lighter, cheaper. You know, what is it? And that is, that's always the message with tech ads, if you pay attention, they're always faster, lighter and more powerful than they've ever been before. And sometimes they layer in a security message as well,

William Harris 43:57

longer battery, more megapixels, like right? It's something else besides that. Now,

Jon Sneider 44:02

that's exactly right. And so Microsoft would index on those things, and Apple would, you know, evoke a lifestyle, right? And so they would hit on the emotional benefits so much more. And then also keep going back to Windows, but also at the time, like, there weren't a lot of claims that you could make about a Windows device, about why it was better than a PC. I mean, they're much more competitive now in terms of machine power, but back then it was, you know, they were better,

William Harris 44:34

sure, right? Sure. That makes it difficult. I want to talk a little bit about AI, because I think it's a very interesting thing. Now it's changing a lot of stuff, especially even in advertising. How are you seeing AI impact the creative process? Well,

Jon Sneider 44:50

it's a hard time to be in creative field, in in the advertising industry, and one of the impacts of AI is. Not just that. There is a another way to produce moving images, right? It kind of devalues the creative it devalues the creative process a lot. And I'm in a lot of forums with a lot of different creative people, and people are feeling that, and budgets have changed a lot. You know, corporations like Microsoft don't spend that type of money on agencies and production, and AI is simply a part of that. Now, we are also doing a lot of work at my company building ads with AI and, you know, the way I perceive it is, it's just another storytelling device. And does it mean that we're not doing stuff with live action shoots and animated screens? No, we're still doing that, and that's going to be a requirement for a long time. You cannot make a Microsoft ad right now with AI, because it just doesn't have that level of detail that you need to produce a commercial for something like that, for sure. I guess, coincidentally, we're working on an insurance project right now for an insurance company, and it's a lot easier to produce that stuff with AI, because there's less of a there's not a product where I have to capture every detail, right? It's more of the, you know, moving those other needles of, you know, breaking through. Can I break through with a disaster? Yeah, that's pretty easy. And then all the other things I can create, passively, at least with AI generated models and actors.

William Harris 46:51

I feel like, in my experience, I find that AI hasn't saved me time in a lot of areas, if anything, maybe even costs me more time. Maybe I'll take something and I will ask, maybe chat GPT to write something, and then I might take that to Gemini, Google Gemini, and say, okay, you know, can you fact check this and rewrite it? Then, you know, making sure. Then I'll take it to grok, and, you know, take it to like, you know, the crazy mode. And it's like, Hey, can you make this really wild, right? And then I'll take it the clot. I'm like, Okay, how can you actually just clean this up and make it eloquent, right? And so maybe it was a 30 minute task, and now I'm just spending 50 minutes doing it, but I'm using four different tools, and the output, though, is a level up, but I still think that that's true for most of what I'm seeing is that AI is increasing the level of output that I could get otherwise, but it's, it's not replacing, it's not replacing the time. And I would say, you know, from a creative standpoint, still, to man, those inputs matter so much, and what, what you're going to get out of using an AI tool, and what I'm going to get out of using that same AI tool are wildly different because you have the right words and ideas to express to it what you want that outcome to be.

Jon Sneider 48:05

Yeah. So I think you hit on a very salient point, which is, AI, never gets you all the way there. AI, depending on the tool and what you're trying to create, will get you 40 to 80% of the way there, and then it takes a skilled human being to make it something that's ready for prime time. Like, I will use AI to help me write. It's interesting that used all these AI tools to to evolve what the other AI tool did, and they're all better at certain things. Like, I think Claude is a much better writer than ChatGPT. So I tend to use blog to help me with writing, but then I'm going to take it and I'm going to spend the time and edit it and reword it and make sure that it actually really sounds like me and things like that. And so with writing, that's pretty easy task. Once you get into image generation, like the more processing power something takes for the for the computer or the cloud, right, the more the longer it's going to take. And if you're getting an image that you know took a minute or two to generate, versus a second with writing then, and it's not right, then it takes a lot more work to get that to something that is right. And so sometimes I, I equate it to like a slot machine, like you put in all the inputs, and then you pull the lever, and then you're hoping, you're like, come on, come up. Aces, right? So, and sometimes it does and then, but more often than not, it's just off in some way, like whether you know the person has six fingers or not, or like, something spelled wrong, which still drives me crazy. I'm like, How can you misspell something? But you know something's just wrong. And then when you move into video. Yeah, then that's like, that's even more processing power. It takes even longer, and so it takes even more work to get that completely right. And it's never, it's never completely right. So our approach is, is we're calling ai plus AI, which is artificial intelligence plus actual intelligence. Like, yes, we're going to use AI to get to a good place, but I have a team of visual effects artists downstairs, and they're going to take it and make it something that's ready for prime time. And I think a lot of people are missing that step now, and there's a lot of, you know, AI slop, right? For sure, a lot of AI garbage. And it's because people are not doing that last step. They're just taking whatever, you know, whatever the machine gave them, and acting like, you know, it's, it's a final finished piece when that's ready for prime time when it's not. And so the key, I think, is, if you're creating something with AI, you need to a be, still, be an expert in that field, to give it to the proper inputs. And then you also need expertise in whatever, whatever it is, whether, if it's a writing thing, you need expertise in writing. If it's visual, you need, you need to be an expert in image manipulation. And if it's a piece of video, then you need, you know, visual effects artists and editors and people that can take that, that those raw elements, and reconstruct it in a way that does make it a a world class piece of work.

William Harris 51:35

I want to talk about who is Jon Sneider. I want to get to know the human being, the the AI, the actual intelligence behind this. Tell me about your childhood and how you think helped shape you to be the person who's able to come up with this idea and run this

Jon Sneider 51:56

you know, I'm a Gen X er, and as such, you know, we were the latchkey kids, meaning you'd come home, your parents come home from school, your parents were still at work. You'd find that, find the key under the mat, or under the rock, or wherever you hit it, come in, you know, make your own snack, and then you were kind of on your own to create your own fun. There was, you know, TV was limited. Video games were, like, the first Atari consoles were coming out when, when I was a kid, and so we spent a lot of time on our own, like creating our own stuff and making up our own fun. And like, we did stuff. We're into skateboarding, so we, you know, we made our own ramps, ramps at the time. We don't tell anybody what. We stole wood from construction sites, and we did everything that we could to make things happen for ourselves and my friends and I, my one of my friends had a video camera, and we make funny movies, just entertainer entertain ourselves. One of my friends broke his ankle skateboarding, and then he was on crutches. And then during that time, we realized that you could flip the crutches upside down and use them as stilts and and then we're like, wow, you know, you can even hop on one of them. And then the then the crutches started breaking. So then we started taking multiple crutches and making these reinforced crutches. And then we're like, you can hop down this hill. And we're like, made these, like, ski trails on the hill behind my friend's house. And there's something about being bored. Yeah, that inspires creativity. And kids are not bored anymore. There's no downtime. And when my kids were, you know, my kids are still growing up, when they're like, Dad, I'm bored. I'm like, That's great. The most creative stuff happens from out of boredom. And so I think just, you know, I was lucky enough to have a bunch of friends that were creative, and we were all into creating our things and creating art to make ourselves like laugh and just entertain ourselves. And I think because of that, you know, I had that kind of gumption, and I was very into creativity as a, you know, not just a device, but something to aspire to, for something to guide my life. And creativity was always a guiding force. And I think just because I grew up that way, and, you know, had the fortune to have the right, right friend group, and my parents were also very encouraging, even though they're, you know, both working job, working jobs. You know, they're very encouraging for that type of stuff. And I think because I grew up that way and was responsible for my own entertainment and creativity became a. You know, a lifeline for me. I think that's kind of what inspired, you know, all the things that I do

William Harris 55:05

now. I love the reminiscing that you have here, because it brought me back to a lot of my own child. I'm a zenial, I guess, if you would call it, if you allow this middle generation, but I'm a Zeni who probably identifies more as Gen X, and you just described so much my own childhood. I remember making ramps out of wood, right? It's like, whatever we can find wood and bricks and set it up and doing all kinds of crazy stunts and breaking lots of bones and making dumb videos. And there was a girl I remember we would make. Her name is Christy Williams. I'll just go and say her name. I don't think she would mind, but she was, she made Oprah Winfrey. And so it's like, but like, BB guests on her show, Oprah Winfrey, and it was, I just, like, dumb stuff, but it was like, you are allowed to get bored, and then that boredom led to just wild creativity. And I do think that that's missing, and I don't know how to make that happen again. I wish there was a way, but I think it's an important piece of just life.

Jon Sneider 56:00

Yeah, yeah, it's really hard to reconstruct it, especially when there's so many options for entertainment. And, you know, we carry those devices in our pockets, it's just so hard to, you know, recreate it again. And I think we're seeing the effects of it. That's, that's a whole nother conversation we could have.

William Harris 56:18

Yeah, it really is. You take some inspiration from another creative genius, Pablo Picasso. There's a quote that you told me about that I really love. What's this quote from Pablo and why? Why does this matter

Jon Sneider 56:32

to you? I've got a lot of Pablo Picasso quotes that I love, but one of, one of my favorites is learn the you need to learn the rules as a professional to break them as an artist, and that resonates so well for me, because our company, while gravity is disrupting or is a disrupter in the advertising industry, but we couldn't have done it if everybody on this team, if my co founder and I didn't have deep experience doing it the traditional way, because we learned how to do it the traditional way and became professionals that way, we were able to learn and see what was broken about the industry and what was not working right, and so we weren't able To break the rules until we learned the rules. And one thing about Pablo Picasso, which I think a lot of people don't know, like, I went to the Picasso Museum when I was 19, and one of the things that was really interesting to me was that he was a great realist painter.

William Harris 57:39

Really, I didn't know that about

Jon Sneider 57:41

him. Yeah, if you look at his early work, it was realist, and he was an exceptional realism painter. And he didn't start doing, you know, Cubism and all of the modern art stuff until after that. And so he really did. He really embodies that. He learned the rules as a professional before he broke them like an artist, and that's one of my favorites. It really, really resonates with me, and really, like has been the guiding force of my

William Harris 58:08

career. Yeah, I'm gonna rant about modern art a little bit, because that might be why I like Pablo Picasso, because it's, in my opinion, I look at his work and I'm like, This feels like true genius, like I can see what he's doing. I have been to the, you know, modern art museums where it's like, crayon, construction paper. I'm like, I swear that was a three year old. Like, this was not a professional artist that did this. There's the reality is, I probably just don't get it, and that's fair, but there's definitely some art that I don't get. But when I look at something like that, it looks like somebody who truly understood the rules and decided to break them and just the slightest ways that make you go, huh? Yeah, that's interesting.

Jon Sneider 58:46

Yeah, I think that's so true with Picasso. Like, there's a reason he was one of the few artists to actually achieve fame during his lifetime, sure, and became like a pop culture icon,

William Harris 58:58

yeah? You know, there's another quote that you and I were talking about the other day that I liked, and I don't remember who it was by, but something like, tactics are more important than strategy.

Jon Sneider 59:08

Yeah, I believe that a lot as well. And General George S Patton from, I think he was, became famous in the Korean War. He has a lot of quotes that basically are like, good tactics can save even the worst strategy, and bad tactics can spoil even the best strategy. And I've seen this a million times where the strategy may or may not be great, but it's really the tactical decisions that you're going to make in executing the project. They're going to make it, make it great or not great. It's really the tactical decisions when you're executing that are going to be more. That will have more of an effect on the relative success of any given project. And I find that all the time, and I find that ad agencies in particular tend to over index on strategy. There's been dozens and dozens of times that I would sit in agency pitch meetings, and they will have 20 to 30 strategy slides before they got to the creative concepts. And in my head the whole time, I was like, just show me the creative, right? And then, because I was like, once you show me the creative, I'll tell you if it's on strategy or not. Yeah, right. And so it's so much time to convince you that something is on strategy, and then you see the creative, and it's just, you know, it might be just, you know, lukewarm, mediocre creative. And you're like, I didn't, I didn't need the 20 strategy slides to get there. Like, it doesn't matter how good the straight the strategy was, if the creatives not good,

William Harris 1:01:03

do we do that? Because we're trying to convince the client, our customer, that what we're saying is is good, or, like, are we just trying to convince them, or do we do it to make them feel like they got their money's worth? Like, what do you think the thing is behind this? Because I've seen this myself as well, where it seems like you go through all this and you're like, but you get to the end result, you're like, but this is not good. And this other one is really good. And I don't have the words to say why it's really good, but it's really good, and this one is not and you gave me all these words, but like,

Jon Sneider 1:01:33

yeah, no, I think it's, I think it's both the reasons that you said, they want to agencies. Want to convince you that they were really smart, sure, right? And that this was really thoughtful work. And having been behind the scenes, I'll tell you a lot of times the strategy and the creative were developed at the same time, sure. So then they back into the strategy, right? But yeah, they want to convince you that they were super smart, that they made all these creative, creative decisions for a certain reason. And sometimes, you know, sometimes that is true. And they want to convince you that there's more value in the stuff, even if you might not see it right away. And then a lot of times, you know, the agencies, again, are doing stuff for their best interests. The agencies operate on billable hours, and the more hours that they can bill to the client, the more they're going to make. And strategy is one of the best ways to do that. If they can bill you for strategy, for a lot of stuff that's awesome for them, because there's no hard costs. These are people that they've already paid for, right? They have salaries, and if they can bill out all the strategy people, that's fantastic. ROI for the agency, yeah.

William Harris 1:02:59

Every time I've interviewed somebody who's creative and doing production and things like that, that also seem to like entertainment in that form, TVs, movies, etc, you're no exception to that. There's a lot of movies that you like. You told me, though that Pulp Fiction is probably your favorite film. Why?

Jon Sneider 1:03:20

What I love about Pulp Fiction, and there's a lot to love, and kind of all my favorite movies, is they kind of invert the rules of storytelling. And I'm a big believer, you know, it's kind of back to the Picasso quote, right? There's you've got to understand the rules before you break the rules, right? And there are rules to narrative, and the those rules are so old that the ancient Greeks wrote about them, right? They taught us about catharsis and building tension and breaking tension. And they also developed the paradigm that we still use today, which is the five act play and almost every movie and novel and every story that we consumed, you know, follows the rules of the five act play, which is one, it's the first act. The first act is, we're introduced to the character and introduced to the conflict that they are battling. And then in act two, they are going to overcome this, the strategy, right? They're going to overcome the conflict, right? And you're like, oh, wow, these, this is incredible. They've beaten them. Huge relief and tension. And then, and then act three, right? It looks like things are going to be be all right? And then in Act Four, the conflict comes back bigger than ever, so big that you think the character might be dead or there's no way they can survive this, right? And then act five is they overcome that hurdle at the end, seeming the seemingly impossible hurdle, right? And that's kind of how. Every story works in the in the story arc of a five act play. And so what's so great about Pulp Fiction? And you can, you can. You can not do this as a storyteller. You can choose to avoid those rules, but people aren't going to like it like it's not going to resonate with people, because our minds have been trained to absorb stories in that way over 1000s of years, right? But what Pulp Fiction does, which is so amazing, is they tell the story inside out, right? It's, it's a middle out story, and you have to be an incredible master storyteller to pull this off, which Quentin Tarantino is, and if he wasn't such a master, that would fall flat and it wouldn't resonate that way. And similarly, I also love the was it Memento is the story that's told backwards. And I love the movie adaptation, which is adaptation of another story. And they tell the rules of storytelling during the movie, and then the movie changes as they're talking about the rules for constructing a movie, which I just think is so brilliant and so meta.

William Harris 1:06:17

I love that, and it reminds me of so I'm less of a movie person, although I appreciate movies, but music, like, that's what I do. I play a lot of music, and I play a lot of instruments, and the song that, what you just said, reminded me of, is Blues Traveler. Oh, I can't remember the name of the song, but it's like, it doesn't matter what I say. Do you know this song? Yeah, it doesn't matter what I say, right? It's like the whole song. He's like, it doesn't matter what I say, as long as I sing with inflection. You know you're gonna break your resolve. You're gonna end up listening to it, because the hook will bring you back. And it's like the whole song, he's just making fun of you. And I love that. And that is to your point, like, that's this idea of, like, creative geniuses that can take things, flip them upside down, and that's great.

Jon Sneider 1:07:03

You know, what's so interesting about that in terms of song structures? Because, you know, most songs are, you know, first chorus, first chorus, bridge, right? First chorus, right? And there's a lot of songs now that are, put it, put it out now without a bridge, right? There's a lot of modern pop music that has no bridge, and I heard actually sting talking about this. And he was like, it takes out so much of the tension. It like, you know, the bridge. He was like, it's often like a reinforcing of the tension, or there's a short tension release, like, you've been building tension, you release it with a bridge, and then you get back into it, and, you know, I think, you know, there's a lot of reasons why a lot of the popular music just doesn't hit like music that we grew up with, and I think that's one of the reasons, and they're ignoring one of the facets of the way that songs work for us.

William Harris 1:07:59

Yeah, not just songs of storytelling. Like you said, it almost feels like that's like that's like the third act. The bridge is like the third act where you're like, hey, maybe everything's gonna be okay. I guess we're okay, okay. And then it's no, it's coming back with a vengeance, like, but we're missing that in the in the story now of this song, yeah, absolutely. This has been a lot of fun talking to you, Jon. I feel like I've learned more about storytelling in general, and your dog. Wait, what's his name? My dog likes it. Yeah. Lola likes it. Okay, so, Lola, she's not ready for it to end. She wants to keep going. But if people wanted to work with you, follow you or read your book. Like, what's the best for them? To get in touch. Stay in touch. Yeah.

Jon Sneider 1:08:41

Number one go to hackingadvertising.com. Hackingadvertising.com has the link to my book, which I talk extensively about the five magic metrics. I talk about the insurance examples and things like that. And most importantly, I teach everybody how that they can make world class advertising and marketing creative without an agency. They can save a ton of money. If you're in a big corporation, you could literally save millions. If you're a smaller company, you can make millions and fight with the big dogs without having to go through a huge expense. And so that's the primary way, if you want to, there's links for this on that site. But if you want to work with our company, it's Wild Gravity. And we're at wildgravity.net and then I am @JonSneider on most of the socials, which is Jon Sneider. But you don't have to remember any of that. Just remember hackingadvertising.com, and you can find the rest.

William Harris 1:09:41

We'll put all those links in the show notes, though, too. So if you did hear it, you want to jump right to the one you want to go to. That's good. Jon, it was very nice having you on the show. I appreciate you sharing your time and your wisdom with us.

Jon Sneider 1:09:51

Such a fun conversation. William, really appreciate it.

William Harris 1:09:56

Yeah. Well, you take care and Lola as well, and everyone for listening. Have a great rest of your day. All right, thanks so much.

Outro 1:10:02

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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