The 6 Greatest Marketing Ads Of All Time (ft. Craig Clemens)
Greatest Marketing Lines In History - March 6, 2025 (29 days ago) • 48:28
Transcript:
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Shaan Puri | You're about to hear a podcast with a guy who does over a billion dollars a year in sales, and yet 99.9% of you have never heard of him. It's my friend Craig. He is the smartest marketing mind I know.
In this podcast, he talks about the three greatest lines in marketing history and breaks down why they work. He also discusses the ads he used in his business and how he took one business from zero to $127,000,000 in sales in year one. Enjoy this episode with Craig Clemens.
Craig, what's going on, man? We were just having a conversation out there, and you gave me this teaser that's unbelievable. You were like, "Well, you know the three greatest lines in the history of marketing." I had to put my finger up to your lips like, "We gotta record this." So we came in here for an emergency podcast.
Before you tell me the lines, I'll tell people who you are. Craig Clemens has created many things, but one of the things he created is Golden Hippo. It's a company you've never heard of, but it just crushes it. It's an e-commerce company, and you guys have done over a billion dollars in sales online.
So, whenever I say "a billion," I mean a billion a year. That's an important correction. Every time I talk to you, the marketing part of my brain just explodes. I get so much smarter, and you're one of my favorite people to talk to. Every time I learn from you, I can go do something in my business right away that's going to make more money. I always appreciate that.
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Craig Clemens | Look, if you're planning your marketing for the next year, I've got you covered. HubSpot just dropped their **State of Marketing** report. Every year, the team surveys and interviews over 1,200 marketers from around the world. They compile everyone's insights and turn it into one big report.
You can directly steal the strategy from big companies like **A16Z** and **Asana** and apply them to your own business. So, if you want it, check it out in the link below in the description.
Now, back to the show.
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Shaan Puri | You gave me the teaser: "The three greatest lines of marketing." What are they?
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Craig Clemens | Okay, so the greatest line in marketing history... If you Google it or ask ChatGPT, it is going to say a line different than what I was going to tell you.
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Shaan Puri | What would they say?
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Craig Clemens | I'm gonna tell you what they're gonna say in a minute. **Teaser** marketing is a lot about teasers because it is a very strong line and it's worthy of discussion.
But I'm gonna start with my favorite headline of all time, and that was written by a copywriter named **Gary Halbert**. The way it came about was that he was contracted by a woman named **Tova Borgnine**, who was the wife of movie star **Ernest Borgnine**.
Before our time, but apparently, if we went to our parents and grandparents and we said "Ernest Borgnine," they would be like, "Oh yes, he was a Brad Pitt type of the time." So, his wife wanted to come out with a perfume and she asked Gary to figure it out for her.
Gary didn't know the first thing about perfume, but he knew a ton about marketing. At the time, he was a legendary copywriter with many successes. So, he's brainstorming on what to do as he's walking through the mall one day, and he sees a kiosk where there are these little oils and things like that. Did you ever walk by that kiosk?
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Shaan Puri | Of course, there's always like a very smooth talker right there.
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Craig Clemens | Yeah, make your own perfume, right? So he goes up and he's like, "Hey, what are these creations of perfume? Do you make them yourself or whatever?" They say, "Oh yes, the essential oils are put together to make your own perfume."
He then asks, "Is there one of them that outsells all the rest?" They reply, "Oh yes, China Musk. China Musk is the best seller by far."
He says, "Why doesn't someone take China Musk, put it in a fancy bottle, and call it XYZ perfume?" They're like, "Well, that's a great idea. No one's ever done that."
He says, "Okay, give me some China Musk." So he takes the China Musk and walks over to the jeweler that he knows. He says, "Mister Jeweler, I would like you to put this in a fancy glass and gold bottle that is shaped like a 'T'."
He puts it in the bottle and then he sits on it for like three months. | |
Shaan Puri | k | |
Craig Clemens | Calls Tova Borgnine and he says, "Tova, I have spent the last three months traveling the world in search of the finest perfume. I think finally, after sampling literally thousands, I've discovered it. I want to bring it over to your house right now and have you smell it."
He brings it over, and she's just in awe of how great the China Musk smells. She decides she wants to launch it and wants to do the launch party at her friend Candy Spelling's boutique on Rodeo Drive. Candy is the wife of Aaron Spelling, the big producer. Gary says, "That is far too small. We are going to rent out the entire bottom floor of the Century Plaza Hotel."
She's hemming and hawing, saying, "How are we going to fill that with people?" But he says, "Trust me." So she actually strokes the check and rents out the entire bottom floor of the Century Plaza Hotel. Gary takes out a full-page ad in the LA Times. The headline reads, "This wife of a famous movie star swears under oath her new perfume does not contain an illegal sexual stimulant." That was the headline in big letters.
The subhead said, "And she is so confident in this, she's willing to prove it by giving away 10,000 sample bottles on this day at this time at the Century Plaza Hotel." They put up the ad, and you're thinking, will it work? Who knows? The phones at the Century Plaza Hotel just start ringing and ringing with people wanting to know about this event.
This kept going and going, and they realized it was going to be chaotic. So the fire department comes the day of the event and shuts down the street. They figure out a way to get all the cars in, and thousands and thousands of people show up and crowd into the lobby of the Century Plaza Hotel for this big reveal.
He has two in-shape gentlemen in tuxedos who get a briefcase, handcuff it to their wrist, and walk it in through the crowd. They bring it onto the stage, open it up, and inside are the 12 sapphires representing all 12 ingredients in Tova perfume. Tova auctions off each sapphire for charity, bringing in a few hundred thousand dollars.
The next day, the phone rang with unsolicited offers from Macy's, Robinson's May, all the department stores at the time, Barney's, Saks, etc. It was the best-selling perfume in the world that year and went on for many, many years. I think now you'll find it at CVS behind the photo counter or something like that, but it still exists. Wow! So look for the Tova perfume.
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Shaan Puri | That's amazing! So, you love that headline. If we break it down, it was "Wife of Famous Movie Star."
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Craig Clemens | Yes, social proof right there.
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Shaan Puri | Social proof, not using her name.
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Craig Clemens | Yes, swear some curiosity... which famous movie star is a star?
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Shaan Puri | Exactly. So, curiosity and social proof. Then it was "swears under oath," which is like stakes drama, right? Or how would you describe it? Is that what you would call it?
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Craig Clemens | Yes.
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Shaan Puri | And then, the new perfume does not contain sexual stimulants, which is kind of an inversion, right? It's like that implies this must be amazing. Okay, so I need...
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Craig Clemens | To come up with a name for this because my favorite part of the headline is the last part.
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Shaan Puri | Mhmm. | |
Craig Clemens | And it's like the secret marketing embed or some shit like that. You know, it's like the hidden secret message that even the reader doesn't know they're receiving. But when you read that, you're like, "Wait, okay, it doesn't contain an illegal sexual stimulant. Does it contain a legal one? Like, what is in this fucking thing?"
You know, I always wanted to rip that headline and do it for like a new taco stand or something. I think it's universal that you could be like, "New restaurant owner swears on her oath his tacos do not contain an illegal addictive stimulant. He's willing to give away a thousand free tacos to prove that there's nothing weird in here and they're just that good."
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Shaan Puri | They're just that good. Actually, that's a great ending to it too.
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Craig Clemens | Yeah.
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Shaan Puri | And then you had actually the sort of the offer or the call to action, which was giving away so many samples at this time and this place.
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Craig Clemens | Exactly! It's proof that this is going to work. You know, a risk-free offer. You're going to get this for free, right? And if you don't like it, who cares? It's removing all the risk and making it really easy to go get it. | |
Shaan Puri | Have you ever done a remix of that headline? Have you?
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Craig Clemens | I haven't... I had a roommate who was going to open a taco stand. She didn't know I was doing it. I came up with a name too. It was going to be in San Diego. It was going to be called "Burro Baratras," so like drunken donkeys.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, I... | |
Craig Clemens | I think it would kill it, man! If anyone out there, if you're watching this, and you want to start a taco stand together, you gotta have a good recipe. But I'm in, man! I'll do all the marketing for your taco stand, and you have to name it "Burro Barrage." And I get free tacos for life!
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Shaan Puri | Let's go.
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Craig Clemens | That can be amazing, but no, I haven't. You know, ever since I heard about this, which was very early in my marketing career, I've been obsessed with marketing embeds.
About the same time this came out, I think in the nineties or something like that, before I was in marketing, another marketing embed hit the world. I think this is one of the greatest lines in marketing history.
And that is, Sean, I'm sure this is something you can personally relate to: "If you get an erection lasting longer than four hours, call a physician immediately."
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Shaan Puri | So, I mean, we've all... | |
Craig Clemens | Heard it? Yeah, we've all heard it. It's the ad of every Viagra commercial. If you're a guy that's having trouble getting it up, you're thinking about this and you're like, "Fuck, this could actually be a four-hour erection." I'll be happy with four minutes, man. You know? It's such a great line.
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Shaan Puri | So, you think that... I always heard that at the end of any info, you know, pharma commercial.
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Craig Clemens | Yes.
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Shaan Puri | Like, you may... side effects may include nausea, vomiting, blah blah blah.
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Craig Clemens | Yeah.
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Shaan Puri | I kind of thought it was like that, but actually you're right. I don't think that was the mandated side effects. I think that was an embed.
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Craig Clemens | Maybe... I mean, it could have been true, but also, you know, it shows a way to workshop things in a way that could be positive.
Like the nausea thing for something else. It could be like, you know, if you're...
Oh, here's something: I literally got stem cell treatments last week. The doctor, after he shoots me up, tells me, "Hey, you're gonna have swelling tonight and extreme pain, and that's great! That means it's working."
I was like, "Oh, interesting."
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Shaan Puri | Change the meaning. | |
Craig Clemens | You know, yeah. When I started swelling, I was *howling*, man. It was like the most pain I've ever been in, and actually, I was literally howling.
Okay, I was like, "Well, at least it's *working*." You know, my knee's gonna heal.
So yeah, there is a lot of value in being able to turn positives into negatives. Joe Sugarman was a master of this too. He used to sell a lot of devices. Do you know Joe Sugarman? I've heard of him.
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Shaan Puri | The name, but... | |
Craig Clemens | Blue blocker sunglasses. So, we can talk about Joe Sugarman for a hot minute because he is one... is that?
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Shaan Puri | A real name, by the way, or is that kind of like a...?
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Craig Clemens | Man, his real name is one of the greatest legends in marketing history. Everyone should read Sugarman and study what he did.
But before he did the Blue Blocker infomercial, which was one of the biggest infomercials at the time, he would create these devices. He had one of the early air purifiers. Back then, the way the technology was... you think of an air purifier now, what do you think of? You think of something in the corner.
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Shaan Puri | Slick box in the corner of... | |
Craig Clemens | The room, like... | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, this one was.
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Craig Clemens | In the nineties or something like that, it had to have this crazy, weird wire coil on top of it to grab all the negative stuff out of the air. It was very ugly, and his ad attacked that head-on. He said, "You know, the coil that removes the toxins."
So instead of having this ugly thing in your house, you're like, "Oh, you see that coil in your life? That's the coil that's pulling the toxins out of the air." I forget what his exact headline was on that, but it was turning these negatives into positives. Okay, so...
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Shaan Puri | Are we on number two, or was that number two? No.
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Craig Clemens | That was number two.
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Shaan Puri | Okay.
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Craig Clemens | Oh, okay, okay. So maybe there's going to be five... four? I don't know how many we said there were going to be.
Yeah, okay, a shout out to another one I just remembered that's really big. When infomercials first aired, the call to action was "Please call now, operators are standing by." Do you remember?
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Shaan Puri | Yes, I've heard that.
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Craig Clemens | These infomercials.
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Shaan Puri | Times, yep. | |
Craig Clemens | Yes, there was a woman and a man. I wish I could remember her name, but it was a female copywriter who created this, and it changed the entire world of infomercials. I think it changed the entire world of selling.
She changed that line to, "Please call now. If you get a busy signal, please call again." If you think of the picture in your mind, you know, of operators just standing there waiting for the phone to ring, no one's buying this thing.
"Call now! You probably get a busy signal. Please keep calling. Please keep trying." You know, the offer is going to stay around for this many minutes. Please keep trying to call.
It just gives the image of their phones flying in the room and everyone's trying to place their orders. It's like high demand, and you know, it gets you excited. When you get through and you hear that person answer, you're relieved. You're like, "Oh, I got through!"
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Shaan Puri | Through right. | |
Craig Clemens | I'm gonna get the special offer. Is the special offer still available? Yes, it is still available.
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Shaan Puri | Right. | |
Craig Clemens | Right, right. It's like that feeling of relief. So that was a big line. I'll give a shout out to that one.
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Shaan Puri | We did a similar one for my company. Let's say, on a normal day, when we launch a product, it would be awesome if, say, 800 people bought the thing right when it launches, like in the first ten minutes or so.
I'm trying to think about how to drum up excitement or whatever. Part of the team's first instinct is, "Do we discount?" No, no, we're not going to discount that. That's going to have the opposite effect, probably.
Do we offer a free gift with purchase or some kind of limited-time bonus for the first people through the door? Okay, I think we're on the right track.
We did something similar where I, as the founder, sent a personal note. It was like an unstyled email, and it was basically an apology in advance. We expect this to sell so quickly. I know that many of you are going to be upset.
So, as a make-good, I give you my word that for the next one, we're going to have more. But for this one, it's just going to be chaos, and I know that.
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Craig Clemens | Scarcity | |
Shaan Puri | I'm already worried about it. Yes, and immediately we had our biggest day, which we had never had. You know, 800 would have been a great day, and then all of a sudden it was like 2,800, just by apologizing in advance because we embedded the... instead of saying, "Come get it."
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Craig Clemens | Yes.
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Shaan Puri | We were like, "We're so sorry."
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Craig Clemens | Yes.
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Shaan Puri | You're probably not going to get it. Yes, and that just... that reversal really worked.
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Craig Clemens | **Embedded marketing**—that's a book waiting to be written.
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Shaan Puri | We've brainstormed three books now in the last eighteen months that someone should write. We want to write these.
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Craig Clemens | Yeah, yeah. | |
Shaan Puri | Which is happening. | |
Craig Clemens | Yeah, and actually, you and I have been casually talking about writing a book. Maybe we need some people out there to pressure us.
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Shaan Puri | us us | |
Craig Clemens | To pressure us and motivate us, you will.
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Shaan Puri | Read the YouTube comments.
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Craig Clemens | One day we should... yeah, we should do this. So let us know below if you want to see this book.
Alright, okay, number three... number three or four? I can't remember which one. Which one are they eating? The dogs?
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Shaan Puri | Eating the cats.
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Craig Clemens | They're eating the pets of the people who live there. I have that song in my head now too, you know? They're talking about...
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Shaan Puri | Please don't eat my dog! They're eating the dog food.
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Craig Clemens | This line was said to have lost Trump the debate and possibly the election. However, what happened over the following week, in my opinion, won him the debate and possibly the election.
That line about the **20,000 immigrants** who had been legally migrated to Springfield, Ohio—a town of 58,000—was torn apart by fact-checkers and every news station in the world. These **20,000 legal migrants** in this town of 60,000 are not eating dogs; they are not eating cats. That is complete **BS**. Let me say it again: these **20,000 migrants** that were moved into this little town of 60,000 people probably didn't vote to have them moved in. They probably didn't know they were coming in. Maybe some of them wanted them; maybe some of them didn't.
But they are not eating dogs; they are not eating cats. What does it say to the entire world? Yes, large amounts of immigration—whether it's legal or illegal—are happening in small towns in places like Springfield, Ohio.
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Shaan Puri | Right. | |
Craig Clemens | I had never known this was happening. You know, some people want that and some people don't. Trump's base, and a lot of moderates, don't want the small town that they live in, or their parents live in, or where they grew up, to have such a huge change in population demographics, in the style of how businesses are run, etc.
It spread that message worldwide that, wow, there really is a lot of immigration happening. Yeah, some people thought it was great and some people didn't, but it got that message out. Because before that, you hear about, you know, the number was always different, right?
There's 8 million people that came in under Biden; there's 20 million people that came in under Biden. This is a big number. Can you visualize 8 million people? I can't.
Yeah, but I can visualize 20,000. I've been to a football game; it's just 20,000 in the stadium. And I can visualize 58,000, and I can put the simple math together that that's one third, you know, of the population. And that is a change. So it paints a picture.
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Shaan Puri | Did you read Scott Adams when he was running the first time? Scott Adams, the creator of *Dilbert*, was one of the first people back in 2016 when Trump first came out. If you remember, you get...
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Craig Clemens | The first speech followed much.
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Shaan Puri | He was like, "They're bringing their rapists. They're bringing their killers across the border." And it was like, "Whoa, whoa." That was my first exposure to... it's like I saw this TikTok the other day of an African tribe drinking a Fanta for the first time and they're like, "You..."
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Craig Clemens | They don't even know how to. | |
Shaan Puri | Get to it! They're like biting the lid off and then they drink a Fanta, and they're like, "Oh my... what is this?"
Yes, that was Trump. That was the reaction to Trump the first time. Scott Adams came out and he was like, "Oh, not only is this not a joke, I think he's gonna win." He goes, "I've been trained, basically, like I think he's like a hypnotist. I've looked at how you communicate with people, not sort of overtly, but like the subtext of what's being said and how effective that is at planting messages."
He called them **linguistic kill shots**. He goes, "Trump has these linguistic kill shots where he just labels something or he brings their attention to it in an extreme way."
So, like with the eating the dogs or the cats, it's like instead of arguing about the migration, you're now arguing, "Are the migrants eating dogs and cats?" which forces you to first accept the migrant. But if he never said that, you have to debate the migrant.
He was talking about when Jeb Bush was the favorite at the time because it's the Bush dynasty—the father, the brother, and now it's gonna be Jeb. He just called him **Low Energy Jeb** and he labeled him that. No matter what Jeb did, if he was just being Jeb, he was kind of low energy looking. If he suddenly got vivacious, Trump would be like, "Good job, Jeb! You're doing it!"
So Jeb couldn't win. He tied him up and neither path was viable. He just had to remove this sticker off him. Nobody in politics was doing that to each other, right? **Crooked Hillary**—he was just coming up with these linguistic kill shots where visual words, every time you saw the person, that's what you saw.
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Craig Clemens | Yes.
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Shaan Puri | And Scott called that out pretty early on. Whether, again, it's natural—that's just how he is—or it's strategic, I have no idea. | |
Craig Clemens | But I... | |
Shaan Puri | It's pretty clear that that is an effective way of communicating that he does.
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Craig Clemens | Yes, he's a showman, like with the McDonald's thing.
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Shaan Puri | Right. | |
Craig Clemens | When he went to work at McDonald's, a lot of people didn't know why he was going there. Then they found out, "Oh, Kamala has a questionable history." It's in debate whether or not she worked at McDonald's.
You know, he did something else where he was interviewed at a conference and he said, "I think Kamala is Black now. I thought she was Indian." Everyone's like, "Trump's a racist, blah blah blah."
It's interesting because when he says these things, it kind of does make him look bad in a way. It does, in a way, make him look like a schoolyard bully, right? But it's effective, right? It's weird, right?
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, he creates the frames that then you have to participate in.
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Craig Clemens | Yeah, and the garbage truck... He did the same thing when Joe Biden called his supporters "garbage." He went and got in a garbage truck. He's like, "I'm gonna milk this moment."
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Shaan Puri | Okay.
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Craig Clemens | And make sure that I dominate the news cycle. That was the really interesting thing I realized in this election. You could feel in the news cycle who was winning, and then you could track it on PolyMarket.
So, like, the news cycle—whoever had something positive, their odds would go up on PolyMarket. Then Trump did the rally at Madison Square Garden, and he had Tony Hinchcliffe do the diss about the Puerto Ricans. The PolyMarket starts going down, and Kamala is owning the news cycle.
Then Biden says something garbage, and it goes back to Trump’s favor. The garbage truck and Trump’s odds go up. It was wild to see these two things tracking.
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Shaan Puri | So, let's do another one of the greatest lines.
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Craig Clemens | Okay, so now we can go to the ChatGPT line. What would they say?
It really is something that everyone knows about, but not a lot of people know where it came from. You'll know the line instantly when I say this: in the 1940s, only about 10% of brides got a diamond engagement ring. De Beers Diamonds had an interesting run. They were quite popular in the early 1900s as a flex—not as a wedding ring, but in other jewelry, like on a lapel, or in necklaces and earrings.
Then the Depression happened around the same time as diamond mining got really good, leading to an oversupply of diamonds. People were losing money. We should also talk about Joseph Duveen, the greatest art dealer of all time, because he invented the American art market. People were spending money on art and things like that, taking more away from that luxury sector to go into another one.
It was a female copywriter, Frances Garrity, who was at an agency that De Beers hired. The story goes that she was frustrated, saying, "I don't know her last penny or something." One night, she was working on this campaign and couldn't think of anything. Then she woke up in the middle of the night with the line, "A diamond is forever."
What is interesting is that this was the tie-in to engagement. Before that, the engagement ring would be like a plain gold band. Sometimes it would be more like an offering, such as a cow or land, or things like that.
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Shaan Puri | An engagement is temporary anyway. By definition, an engagement is a temporary period of time.
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Craig Clemens | So, that's true.
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Shaan Puri | Diamonds are forever. Yes, it's like an exact contrast to that.
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Craig Clemens | Yes, and it's an embed because it then shows that if someone doesn't present a diamond, maybe they're not in it forever. Right? Right. And what woman wants a half commitment?
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Shaan Puri | Right. | |
Craig Clemens | Ladies out there, do you want a half commitment from your man? You know, so he...
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Shaan Puri | And from what I remember reading about this, they went to Hollywood and they basically were giving directors diamonds.
They said, "In the key moment, in the climax moment where the man professes his love, he's gotta give her a diamond ring."
They embedded it in Hollywood movies by literally bribing the directors.
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Craig Clemens | Yes.
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Shaan Puri | In order for them to show that, you're watching the movie and that's now become... that now influences culture. I guess that's how you do it. The big romantic gesture is to literally get down on one knee and hand her a gold, you know, a diamond ring.
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Craig Clemens | Yes.
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Shaan Puri | That became... he used kind of top-down influence also to do it right. And then scarcity, right? Because they limit the supply. So all the core marketing things, you know, influence, social proof, that frame, "Diamonds are forever," scarcity... they kind of use all of it.
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Craig Clemens | Yes, and now there's this big debate going on between lab-grown diamonds and mined diamonds. Have you heard of this?
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Shaan Puri | It's fascinating.
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Craig Clemens | Because I think they're 10% or 20% of the price or something like that.
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Shaan Puri | They're... it's probably price control of the.
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Craig Clemens | Company that I'm on. | |
Shaan Puri | 50 to 80% cheaper. It's the exact same rock. You could look at them under a microscope. In fact, it could be argued it's more...
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Craig Clemens | Perfect practitioner, right? | |
Shaan Puri | It's a more perfect thing. You can get a big rock for this, but then the smartest thing that I guess De Beers did was recognize a big problem. They're like, "Okay, if there are lab-grown diamonds that don't have these social issues with mining, like blood diamond type of stuff..."
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Craig Clemens | Yes.
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Shaan Puri | And it's just as good, if not better. This is a problem.
So what they did, the genius of their business strategy, was they got into the lab-grown business and just flooded the market with cheap lab-grown diamonds. They lowered the price intentionally.
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Craig Clemens | Like crappy ones. | |
Shaan Puri | Good diamond, good labrum diamonds, but they just lowered the price so much more.
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Craig Clemens | Mhmm. | |
Shaan Puri | That then, in the consumer's mind, became a perception of, "Oh wow, like..."
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Craig Clemens | Yeah.
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Shaan Puri | If it was just like 20% less or something like that, it might actually be more competitive.
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Craig Clemens | Mhmm. | |
Shaan Puri | They made it so much cheaper that they took away the...
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Craig Clemens | The value, the perceived value, the prestige.
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Shaan Puri | Of the diamond doing that. | |
Craig Clemens | I didn't know that.
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Shaan Puri | They were involved in that process. Pretty crazy.
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Craig Clemens | Funnier. | |
Shaan Puri | You put me on to an incredible marketer, Gary Bencivenga, who I had never heard of. He has this little example, a little exercise, that I love and want to share.
I don't know if you remember this from learning his stuff, but he gives this example of kids going fishing. It's like a lemonade stand type of example. So, the kids go to the fishing area and they want to sell bait; they want to sell worms.
One kid basically has a sign that says, "Worms for sale, 99¢" or whatever, right? They go there, but not many sales happen, so they come back home. Luckily, the neighbor is a copywriter. The story goes that the neighbor says, "Hey, you know, why don't we level this up?"
He goes on to explain the first lesson of marketing: **you don't sell the product, you sell the benefit.** So, they change their pitch to, "Buy these worms, catch more fish." They go back on day two and sell a little bit more with the new tagline, "These worms will help you catch more fish." Now they have a benefit.
Then they come back and ask, "Hey, what else you got? How can we make even more?" The neighbor suggests they go to the next level. He asks, "Well, why do these worms catch more fish?" I think it's David Ogilvy who has this great quote about the importance of understanding the reason why in marketing.
He emphasizes that there should be no other way to sell this besides that. It's crazy if you don't use that approach. So, the kids go out and think, "Well, why do our worms catch more fish?" They realize it's because these are local worms from the local soil.
What they discover is that fish prefer worms from their local soil, and those worms are more attractive to them than the imported ones you find on the shelves. They start selling more.
This example just shows how to layer on these master marketing techniques. I love that example.
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Craig Clemens | End with, like, "you know, buy two cans of local worms, get a free bobber" or... | |
Shaan Puri | Something like that, like an offer. So he's going to juice it with an offer. I think maybe I'm mixing up two of the stories, but he did a kind of sensational headline too, which was: "Local fishermen accused of cheating because he catches the most fish reveals his simple secret."
Right? Then it's like, "Oh, we gotta know!" Because there's a guy who catches way more fish than everybody else. People accused him of, you know, using nets and other methods. No, no, no, he's just fishing like the rest of us, but he uses the local worms.
So, like, he gets to the best of it. Yeah, I love Gary's persuasion formula. He's got this very, very simple thing, and it sounds like when you first read it, you're like, "Oh, okay, I didn't get anything revolutionary." Then I go look at my ads, and I'm like, "Okay, I'm not doing any of these things."
Then you start doing them, and your OS starts going up. So he's got the five P's. The first one is **Problem**. So what's the problem that the person has? He says, "No problem, no sale." You can't sell someone something that they don't need.
For example, "Here, have some Advil." "I'm not hurting. Why would I want your Advil?" Yes, so **Problem**. Then the next one is **Promise**. So what's the promised benefit that this product is going to give you?
Then there's **Proof** that it works. Then there's **Proposition**, which is your offer. I call the last P **Product** because he talks about the Cracker Jack secret. He mentions how in a box of Cracker Jacks, they always had a gift at the bottom.
He's like, "You know, even if you give someone the Cracker Jacks and then they're hungry right now or whatever, I've never seen somebody just throw it away and not get the little gift out of the bottom."
So you want to have the Cracker Jack secret in your ad, basically. That was his thing. Then you can juice them up, right?
So those are the P's. Then he's got the U's. If you stack those together, he literally has a formula where it's like: **Urgent Problem** (that's 25 points), **Unique Promise** (that's another 25 points), **Unquestionable Proof** (another 25), **User-Friendly Proposition** (that's the last 25), and then the Cracker Jack secret is the bonus 20 points.
If you stack that whole thing together, you get to 120.
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Craig Clemens | **Love it! Amazing, amazing!**
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Shaan Puri | So good! Who are the other admins that you liked? Let's do that first. You were telling me about an admin that I don't... I've never heard of, or a marketing... | |
Craig Clemens | Yeah, so I actually studied non-admin now because I think I've gone through all the admin. We talked about Edward Bernays the last time I was on your show, but the guy I've been really geeking out on is actually an art dealer.
Okay, Edward Bernays was a PR guy, and Joseph Duveen is known as the greatest art dealer of all time. Duveen's run was around 1880 or '90; I think he died in 1935. He came from a family that had a shop selling porcelain goods and tapestries in London, England. They were pretty well established and sold to the Queen and things like that. You know, they were the go-to place.
These tapestries and ceramics would sell for like $3,000 to $5,000, which I think in that day's money is maybe like six figures or something around there. He noticed as a teenager that fine artwork at certain times was selling for like $75,000.
So, his uncle and father, who owned the shop, brought him to New York when he was 15 years old to do some business. He sneaks out from them, goes to Fifth Avenue, and leases a little warehouse with an upstairs and a downstairs. He comes back and says, "Dad, Uncle, I got us a shop."
Actually, I should preface this by saying I don't think being 15 years old then was like being 15 years old now. I think being 15 years old then meant you were in the real world, you know? You were going to get your stuff started.
I think it was George Washington who led his first caravan of soldiers at like 18 or something, and he'd been a surveyor and a scout since he was about 15 years old. Duveen was a hustler from an early age. He books this thing in New York because he has this realization when he's there: Americans, for really the first time, have tons of money.
This is when Rockefeller was coming up and J.P. Morgan, during the Industrial Revolution. Europeans have tons of art, and Americans have tons of money. So, in Europe, you'd go to the duke's house, right? The duke would have his family portraits up. There were no photographers, so you'd have to have a painter catalog Grandma or... | |
Shaan Puri | Right. | |
Craig Clemens | Grandma as a baby or whatever, so it would be on the wall and it would be like a Raphael painting of Grandma, right? Because Raphael was the portrait guy at the time. I don't know if it was specifically Raphael, but people like that, or Gainsborough, or you know, some of the people that are now the biggest artists in human history were just flooding the walls of the duke's house.
These dukes, like anyone else, would go bust sometimes and they'd be looking for money. So, Devine, in his first big deal, went to this duke. The duke was kind of broke and he said, "Yeah, I'll figure out how to get $3,000,000 for your entire art collection." At that time, that was like $300,000,000 or something. I don't know, huge!
But he bought the duke's entire art collection, which included some of these old masters, Rembrandts and things like that. He brought it to America and he started shilling it. His sales methods were just unbelievable.
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Shaan Puri | What was he doing? How did he do it?
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Craig Clemens | So, I mean, some of these had some prestige. But like, the first thing he does as he gets this painting, I think it was Gainsborough's *Little Blue Boy*. It's been a year since I read the book, sure, but he acquires it and makes this huge deal that this great institutional landmark of London is coming to the United States.
When it arrives, he arranges to have all the reporters waiting on the deck. He has no airplane, so he takes the cruise liner over. All the reporters are waiting there. It comes in, and now it's on American soil. It's going to be presented at this amazing spa, you know, and he builds the gravitas around this artwork.
Then he has a pool that he decides is going to be the buyer pool. They don't know it yet, but he's talking to people like Henry Frick, Andrew Mellon, and John Rockefeller about this thing coming. They'd be like, "Is this going to be for sale? The crown jewel of London for sale? Are you kidding me? No, absolutely not at any price. But if you want to make an offer, I could bring it to someone, but it's not for sale."
So, he'd bring this thing, and then he sold it for like $225,000, which was record-shattering at the moment. You know, it's in every newspaper in the world that this painting sold for this much money to this person. Through a couple of these things, he creates the American art market.
He has all of these industrial revolution titans, right? You know all the names: Rockefeller, Mellon, Morgan, Vanderbilt. So, all these people become his clients, and his sales methods are just like next level, man.
There's a story of, I think it was a guy who made a fortune in California in the oil business. He comes to Devine's in New York and wants to buy art. This guy is like a new money guy, and he's not really in the New York clique. He brings him to the shop, and he has the guy show up at the time he says, and Devine takes ninety minutes.
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Shaan Puri | To show up.
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Craig Clemens | Leaves him waiting there for ninety minutes. Finally, he gets the guy and he's like, "Okay, come on upstairs with me."
He walks him into this corridor and there are five stunning paintings. He walks him past them and says, "I'm gonna show you some of the things in the back."
The guy's like, "Wait, wait, wait! What about these paintings?"
He's like, "Sir, those paintings are reserved for Mister Mellon. Come this way; we need to get you something that will be more suitable for your collection. Tell me again what's in your collection."
"Oh, I have not heard of any of those artists. That's cute. Let me show you a nice starter work."
He's like, "Well, what about the pieces? How much is Mister Mellon paying you?"
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Shaan Puri | Making him feel small.
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Craig Clemens | How much is he paying you? You'd think that he would do this as a favor, but he really didn't sell the guy the paintings for Mr. Mellon. He made him buy the starter piece. I was like, "I can work on one of those."
Then he'd come a few months later and be like, "Look, you know, I think I might be able to wrangle one of those paintings loose from Mr. Mellon, but the price is going to be outrageous."
Duveen's saying was, "When you overpay for the priceless, you're getting it cheap." That was his quote that he propagated, which is kind of like "Diamonds are forever."
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Shaan Puri | Exactly.
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Craig Clemens | And so, he's got all these embeds that he does in just his everyday behavior. You know, like putting people in tears and things like that, and propagating the saying that "overpaying for the priceless is like the best financial move you can make." The things he does are just next level.
I mean, on the sell side, it's crazy. He's so relentless. He would go on cruise liners, and back then, the boat from London to New York was the big thing. It had different levels, and your deck chair was like your baller spot, right?
So, he'd go in there, and the way he met Andrew Mellon is he greased the staffer to seat him next to Mr. Mellon. When he gets there, he finds out that Mr. Mellon is a recluse who doesn't like going outside and only stays in his room. He's so mad that he greased so much to get the deck chair.
But what he does is he starts kind of stalking the elevator. He times it to get in the elevator at the same time Andrew Mellon gets in. He was like, "How do you do, sir?"
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Shaan Puri | What do you do? What's the pitch?
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Craig Clemens | What's the intent of your travels to London? Mr. Mellon is like, "Oh, I'm here on business. How about yourself?" And he's like, "No, you know, having brunch at the Duke of Carnegie's home. Not sure what else." He just drops something like that.
Then, you know, they ask, "Where else are you going on your travels?" And he's like, "Oh, you're the person who founded this..." I forget what Mellon did, "steal" or something.
He asks, "Would you like to join me for brunch at the Duke's house?" And he's like, "Oh, sure! I would love to meet," because royalty was the thing, you know? Duveen really did have these connections.
So, he brings Mellon to brunch at the Duke's house. When you go to a Duke's house, the Dukes have art on all the walls, and it's from all of these old masters. You're like, "Oh, if I want to become a dynasty like these royal families that are dynastic families, I need to do what they do." That means having these old master paintings on my wall.
He sells Mellon so well that he becomes a top client of his. When you become a top client of Duveen's, you're no longer allowed to use your own architect as a rule for him getting you the great pictures. You have to use his architect to design your house for optimal viewing to give these pictures justice. Otherwise, "I'm sorry, Mr. Mellon, but this picture cannot be in your collection because it does not need to be showcased in a side room or something like that."
He would have his architects design their apartments with very little windows and huge wall space—way more wall space than they would ever need. Then he ran into an issue: the people just didn't buy enough real estate to hold all the paintings. This wasn't like crypto art where you can store it on a wall, you know? You gotta have walls to put it on.
So, he started convincing them to open museums. The National Gallery in Washington is founded by Andrew Mellon at the urging of Joseph Duveen. He said, "The key to your immortality is building this gallery and having your work live on beyond you in it." And we're gonna build it 30,000 square feet.
So, he does this. Mellon builds the National Gallery, and then Duveen's able to sell him way more art, you know, stock up all those walls and all of his houses and stuff like that.
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Shaan Puri | Right. | |
Craig Clemens | Mellon passes on, and then I think it was Henry Frick, his next big client. He said, "You know, Mr. Frick, if you really want to achieve immortality, you could add on to the National Gallery a bigger wing than Mr. Mellon made, right? And stack it with your art." And he did! He *fucking* did! He bought all this art from Duveen.
I mean, the guy was so ruthless. Another one of my favorite Duveen tricks was when he'd be at Andrew Mellon's house. There were a couple of other competing dealers, you know? He'd ride the horse and carriage over there; it's not like a car. He'd grease the staff to tell him if they found out that another art dealer was going to their house.
So he'd find out when the competitor was going to Mr. Mellon's house, and he would show up on the same day. He'd be like, "Just passing through the Hamptons, you know? Oh, hello, Mr. Pirie! Fancy seeing you there. I was just visiting my client." He would go and just sit there all day. You can't reschedule the meeting because that person probably traveled several days to get there. It was just relentless, man.
And that's actually... I know you have a lot of young kids in your audience, and I did an experiment recently. I was at a mastermind where everyone paid $250 to attend.
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Shaan Puri | Wow.
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Craig Clemens | And I asked them, I said, "You know, I'm just curious about this room. You guys are all established people. How many of you in your youth had some sort of sales job that required you to be relentless, like 200 phone calls a day or knocking on doors?" Almost all the room raised their hand. I think it's something that really shapes them. Did you ever have a job like that?
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Shaan Puri | I don't think I had that kind of experience. I've noticed the same thing, but like, you know, we've talked to a lot of Mormons who go on missions.
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Craig Clemens | Oh, that's the best!
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Shaan Puri | Dude, you spent two years in complete solitude, isolation, not talking to your family, selling Jesus to, you know, whoever, right? You're selling religion to people who didn't necessarily ask for it. You're knocking on doors, facing tons of rejection, and day after day, you carried on. That is such a formative experience.
My uncle told me one thing about how he used to sell textbooks door to door. There were a couple of big textbook companies in America that operated that way. We recently had another person on the podcast; we've had several guests with the same job, which is door-to-door sales, whether it's textbooks, knives, or whatever it was.
Yeah, the hit rate on those is really high. Brian Johnson, who was going to be here at the event, I was just watching his documentary. Same thing—his first job was door-to-door credit card processing sales. | |
Craig Clemens | I was a telemarketer for credit card processing sales.
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Shaan Puri | Oh, you were too amazing! So, he... he rejection, rejection. I figured out how to sell. I figured out how to carry on in the face of rejection. I got numb to rejection and just started to see it like my uncle told me.
He goes, "You know how I..." I asked him, "How many did you actually sell? You're selling text messages in a day, knocking on a hundred doors. How many do you actually sell?"
You're walking through the hot Atlanta neighborhoods, sweating, and he's like, "Oh, you know, like one or two or three would be like an amazing day."
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Craig Clemens | Yeah.
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Shaan Puri | And I was. | |
Craig Clemens | Like, I wasn't telemarketing too. It's about 200 calls. A **shitty day** is one sale; **five sales** is an amazing day, right?
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Shaan Puri | Which is just like, even if you hear those numbers, go actually do something hard where 97 times out of a hundred you just get slammed in the face.
He goes, "The way I did it was very simple. I just did the math and I realized I have to knock on a hundred doors to get the two sales." So actually, I don't just count the revenue from the two yeses; I just assign a price to every no.
So he's like, "A no is worth $50. Every time I collect a no, alright, that was a $50. I wasn't just coming up with a zero. I wasn't coming up empty every time."
It was a psychological trick that allowed me to see the no's still as progression because I'm just getting closer to that yes. You know, the one out of a hundred or two out of a hundred that are going to happen.
I've actually used that in fundraising, for example, where it's like, "Alright, I'm raising funds for a company." When investors reject your company, it's a very personal thing.
What ends up happening is people don't raise money, and then you ask them, "Well, how many calls did you make? How many meetings have you had?" They just have a funnel problem. It's like, "You guys haven't had enough conversations because you're afraid of rejection or you're avoiding rejection, or you tasted some rejection and it scared you off."
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Craig Clemens | Yeah. | |
Shaan Puri | But it's a numbers game. The way to do it is to put a dollar value even on those. Yes, I like that method.
I was going to ask you one last thing: What's the best way to get great at writing ads? If I wanted to go from, you know, okay to good or good to great?
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Craig Clemens | What do? | |
Shaan Puri | What do I do? I do a lot of it. I'm assuming practice is a big part of it, but is there a better way to practice versus...? | |
Craig Clemens | This is funny, man. You have to be studying ads. So right now, we're at a...
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Shaan Puri | We're at an event. Yeah, an event we call it **Hoop Group** now.
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Craig Clemens | I met this guy from Hoop Group, a high-level group, and he has a 13 million subscriber YouTube channel. I asked him, "What's your channel?" As I went to type it in, there were like five people behind me. They typed it in and saw the ad pop up. They were like, "Come on, Craig, you don't subscribe to YouTube, right? You can't afford the $50 or whatever."
And I'm like, "Are you kidding me? An advertising guy is going to turn off the ads?"
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Shaan Puri | Right. | |
Craig Clemens | I still don't have YouTube topics to get the ads on purpose. I would watch the ads all day long if I could because I need to know what the lay of the land looks like. One of my best friends disrupted it.
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Shaan Puri | Who's a great marketer and has probably personally made, I don't know, $200,000,000? His business is all just Facebook ads, but that's like his take-home amount that he's probably made. He switched his gender and age on Facebook, so he's a 45-year-old woman. I was like, "Why does it..." | |
Craig Clemens | Say, "I have a 40." | |
Shaan Puri | Does it say you're a 45-year-old woman? And he was like, "So I could see the ads, dummy." Yeah, why would I want to see the ads of a 28-year-old dude or whatever?
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Craig Clemens | You know. | |
Shaan Puri | That would be terrible.
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Craig Clemens | Yeah.
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Shaan Puri | I'm... I know who I need to sell to. This is the golden customer. I need to have my Facebook showing me what they're seeing.
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Craig Clemens | Absolutely, I. | |
Shaan Puri | Wow, that's genius.
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Craig Clemens | Yeah, and then I also hang out in a lot of biohacker circles. I find the things that people are doing at Burning Man and on Venice Beach, and when they catch fire in these little circles.
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Shaan Puri | Right. | |
Craig Clemens | You can tell they're ready to go mainstream.
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Shaan Puri | I like it.
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Craig Clemens | You know, sometimes I get on the trend and sometimes I don't. Like mushrooms was one of them, and you know, that's a massive category now. I think our mushroom supplement with Gundry MD's...
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Shaan Puri | Right. | |
Craig Clemens | Sells okay, but it's not like a category creator.
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Shaan Puri | The mushroom coffee did really well. Really well, right? Like the Mud Water type, there's...
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Craig Clemens | A few that have done enough... Four Sigmatic is owned by a friend of mine. It's a great brand, and I take those products myself.
Yeah, there are a few mushroom brands that are amazing. Sometimes you catch it, and you can, as I say, create the wave. Sometimes you're riding the existing wave.
I think too many people start businesses trying to ride the white water. You know, there's a supplement company—I won't say the name—but they launched with an epic celebrity. Then the product looks like every other product out there, and it's out of business now. They had this great celebrity who was certainly a "scroll stopper," as I like to say, but they're offering a product that everyone else has too.
People could just learn about it from the celebrity, then go on Amazon and buy a cheaper one. You gotta get things that are unique, and that's why the probiotics were so great in 2014. I don't have a probiotic now that's doing big numbers like that because probiotics have become commoditized. | |
Shaan Puri | Craig, amazing as always. Thank you. | |
Craig Clemens | Thank you for... | |
Shaan Puri | Doing it impromptu. | |
Craig Clemens | I'll look at Craig.
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Shaan Puri | On Twitter, Craig Clement. Yeah, this is the impromptu. We're having our conversation here; we just moved it over with the microphone. So, thanks for doing that.
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Craig Clemens | I always love chatting with you.
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Shaan Puri | Alright, let's get back to it.
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Craig Clemens | Alright, see you.
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