How I’ve Sold $1 Billion In Products Online (A Marketing Masterclass w/ Craig Clemens)

all right I'm not jealous of many people on Earth but I think I'm jealous of Craig Clemens because not only has he built a successful billion dooll company with no outside investors but he has made hit after hit after hit and I asked him to come on the podcast he thought it was just going to be a normal episode but then when we started talking I realized that I wanted him to give me a master class and when he's giving it to me he's giving it to you which is to teach us the seven ways

that he as a marketer has sold over a billion dollars of products online he calls these the seven human hijacks and he goes through example after example of how great products and things that we take for granted like brushing your teeth or how people eat bacon for breakfast those weren't things people did back in the day it was guys like him marketers that Ed specific tactics in order to make those a thing and if you're an entrepreneur who's uh you know wants to be successful you need to be good at marketing you got to be

able to sell your product and is very rare to be able to sit with somebody like Craig who's actually one of the best to ever do it and ask him how did you do it I I feel lucky he's doing this he doesn't have to tell us these secrets like you know I think he's at that sweet spot where he's been running his company for 15 years he's been doing this for a long time he's s you know the company's super successful I don't feel like he has to like guard those Secrets anymore so I

told him to give them to us and I don't know about you but I've had professors in school I've took marketing classes but those were not people who have actually been in the game done it people have actually created category sold hundreds of millions of dollars of single products that a year ago nobody had ever heard of and so Craig tells the story of how others did it and at the end he tells a story about how he helped create the probiotics category if you ever had probiotics you can thank Craig because he was the

one who created uh that category and made it mainstream so enjoy this marketing master class on the seven human hijacks how marketers have hijacked your brain with Craig Clem what's up dude you uh I have this Theory now of guests who come on the podcast the more their video setup looks like they were either taking hostage or are like you know in some Motel somewhere uh the better the guest is we had bolog on and he was like white wall nothing in the room and he was just like you know at the time he didn't

have his like video setup like you know he was not on his home video setup and like the higher your IQ the worse your video setup and the opposite is true unfortunately for me which is the more HD and beautiful your video setup the less interesting things you usually have to say yes yes and the cool thing is you're like the real life madman you you you're an ad guy and a copywriter who translated those skills into a billion dollars of sales which is why when you were coming on this time we started talking and

we kind of realized that you have a master class in you so normally we hang out we just shoot the [ __ ] about business ideas but occasionally we just drop a knowledge bomb and the knowledge bomb is what we call a master class which is just let somebody do their thing for 30 minutes and the cool thing about this is you said you had given a talk internally to your your team to your company to pump them up and it sounded so dope that I just said can you just please do that on the

Pod and you you agreed and so my friend the floor is going to be yours I'm here when you need me I might chime in here and there but I'm really going to let you cook during this and uh let Craig Clemens do this master class so take it away so Sean did you brush your teeth this morning did you take an elevator or are you wearing sneaks right now any any yes one of three ain't bad one of three ain't bad bad okay well marketers created all of that marketers created so much of our

daily behavior that uh people that I tell these stories to don't even want to accept it and you know it's it's okay though I mean that's that's uh that's the case for everyone you're not alone so do you know who this guy is on the left here I do not but he looks very sophisticated who is that this is a this is a smart [ __ ] this is Sigman Freud oh and this gentleman on the right do you know who that is I'm guessing you don't I do not okay well this guy has changed

your life this guy is a man named Edward bernes he's often called the father of public relations and he is actually Sigman Freud's nephew so I don't know uh what exactly kind of kind of shirt you're wearing over there Sean or if you uh put some some style into it but this guy has his his hands and so much stuff that he he literally created consumerism so quick example before bernes people would buy clothes you know unless you were in like the the upper classes people would buy clothes to go to work um he's the

one who got together with a bunch of other people and they're like wait a second these work clothes people aren't buying enough of them if people use clothing for expression then people would buy more clothes and he got the expression uh vibe to go all the way down the line from anyone who could afford clothing to be buying more clothing and then buying more things when they came into season and this and that now it's people who don't have the means that buy buy buy more clothing they they can afford right well let me just

get into some of the the examples here and then you'll see that this guy was operating on a level that uh is is unfathomable so in this presentation I'm going to sh with you what I've discovered studying and creating marketing campaigns that have caused World change and I call them the seven human hijacks because when you use these seven things you are hijacking the lyic system of the brain and a human cannot help themselves but to pay attention and either respond or at least Lo L what you're going to do or say into their brain

and maybe they respond the next time but these seven hijacks I'm going to share each of them after I share these marketing campaigns and you're going to see how they repeat and not every campaign uses all seven but um you'll see that some of them are extremely powerful and then when you put them all together that's when you can really do this type of thing yourself so if you're watching this right now and you're excited about you possibly changing the world forever this is the recipe let's go our software is the worst have you heard

of HubSpot see most crms are a cobble together mess but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous I think I love our new CRM our software is the best HubSpot grow better okay one of the most interesting marketing campaigns of all time was created by a guy named Claude Hopkins so Claude Hopkins was approached by a a toothpaste company called pepsin and they said Claude we want to sell more of our toothpaste and he looked at the lay of the land and he realized there was a problem he said to pepson he said

Look only 5% of people brush their teeth on a daily basis so why are you even in this business that not a lot of uh people are taking part do you believe that Sean 1920s 95% of the women that you kiss are going to have terrible breath no one brushed their teeth back then and so Claude tells the the founders of pepid and he's like look if you guys really want to sell some toothpaste you're going to have to get people brushing their teeth and so he created this masterful ad campaign that built Pepsi it

into the the dominating toothpaste brand for for decades and this is the ad the ad says the film that discolors the whitest teeth and then he has you do a demonstration so do this with me Sean take the tip of your tongue put it over the the the fronts put it over those gold fronts you got under there okay do you feel that film there on your teeth yeah I kind of do kind of do so the ad goes on to say that brushing with pepsodent is going to remove that film and behind that film

is a movie star smile and it's so genius right because everybody wants that movie star Smile everybody has that film whether you just brushed your teeth five minutes ago or not then you feel that you're like oh shoot I got this film you know and then it talks about how pepid it is the way to get rid of that film so the result of this ad within a decade 85% of Americans didn't brush their teeth on a daily basis and pepid is still around today um they ran this ad campaign for I don't know 50

years something like that um and I'll tell you something interesting is is about 10 years in there was other companies trying to compete with pepan and they were using a similar ad campaign you know it's very common to Steel an ad campaign but they couldn't get the repeat orders and they did a a focus group and they found out that people love Pepsi because it had this like minty flavor that made their mouth tingle after they brushed with it and then the toothpaste companies the other ones started knocking that off and when people felt the

tingle then they would stick with other companies otherwise they'd try the other when they would feel wouldn't feel the tingle and they'd be like oh it's not actually working you know so they'd go right back to pepsin it so they they owned it for like 10 years and then it got actually competitive because then people were not only stealing their ads they were stealing uh you know their their secret of the tingle so one of the the human hijacks that Claude Hopkins used one he sold the dream of the movie star smile and you're going

to see this theme reoccurring throughout this presentation uh second he created a powerful demonstration that anyone could do and that's just rubbing your tongue over the the front of your teeth and then the next thing he did is he made it about them he made it about the potential user and this is a a big thing that uh a lot of companies mess up is they just talk about their own product and you know why they're so excited about it but they don't talk about why it's going to be exciting for the user and Claude

did a really great job of that sharing how it's going to give them that movie star smile so that's that's like the there's this diagram that I love that's like um I call it the Mario marketing I don't know who originally created this I saw it from that company buffer but I I don't know if they created it originally but it's little Mario um you know Mario when he's small then it's the fireflower and then when Mario gets the fireflower he's able to shoot Fireballs out of you know out of his hands he's running around

he's huge he can shoot fireballs and basically it says uh don't sell this the fireflower which is your product sell this which is the customer going from little Mario to being big Mario who can shoot Fireballs right and it's like that's what you want to sell is how the user will be more badass rather than all the features and uh facets about your product yes exactly so think about benefits what's the benefit what's in it for them you know these people are busy right now Sean I think people see something like 4,000 ads a day

and they did a study and it showed that the human brain has the um uh same int span as a goldfish is like less than you know uh uh the ability of a goldfish to pay attention so how do you grab their attention well you have to talk about something that's exciting to them something that keeps them up at night or something that they you know have a deep dream hope and desire for so I want to get back to that demonstration though where did Claud get the idea for this demonstration so 1854 there's a

guy named Otis and Otis gets into the elevator business and he didn't invent the elevator but he came up with a a breaking system for the elevator so back then people were afraid to use elevators because every once in a while just like today you hear about a car accident you'd hear about an elevator accident where you know people get on and the elevator falls down right so Otis creates his great braking system first year out he only sells three elevators the next year out he sells Seven elevators like no one cares you know he

doesn't doesn't uh have the ability to get the word out and then he meets this guy named PT Barnum and so everyone probably now knows uh PT Barnum one of the the greatest uh marketing and showmen of all time and PT baram says this is what we're going to do we're going to go to the Crystal Palace in New York City which was this big exhibition Hall and we're going to do a grand demonstration so Otis gets up there on this Elevator Shaft and he has his assistant get up there with an axe and so

he's standing on it the the elevator goes up the shaft just like it normally would in a building and he's like cut the cord Jimmy he goes boom but he cuts the first cord the elevator drops like just a little bit and then there's one more cord hanging and everyone's looking out they're like oh [ __ ] what's he gonna do you know this is the cord and then puts actually the second cord and the El only two feet and stops he's like all safe here gentlemen all safe those are like like famous words that

were published in the newspaper all safe here and it showed that Otis had invented a breaking system for elevators that worked so over the next decade he sold 2,000 elevators he got all the greatest commissions he did the the eiel tower the Empire State Building and even today if you look at your elevator I've found about half of the elev I get into have this little Otis logo is still crushing all my zippers all my zippers say YKK and all my elevators say Otis that's all those are the only two things I know yeah so

uh so that's the power of a great demonstration so what did what did Otis do the the powerful demonstration stands in people's minds and he also made it an event you know so what's greater about an event well one people are going to show up and two it's going to get covered by the newspaper but if you think about it on on a more Primal level have you ever heard the phrase Sean nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd no but I like that one of my favorite favorite sayings and it it just shows that

humans cannot resist an event you know if you're walking down the street and then you see like a big crowd of people and something's going on over there and there's a band or whatever it's like you got to see what what's going on it's just just natural and so if you make your advertising an event then people cannot not pay attention to it and then he also showed unquestionable proof using that demonstration and putting his own body on the elevator he didn't use a dummy he didn't use a monkey himself was on that elevator while

his assistant was was cutting the cords and so that's the type of unquestionable proof that lead people to go ahead and take take a uh Act to buy without questioning it and of course he made it about them he didn't get up there and show his fancy breaking system or how it worked you know he addressed the fear in everyone's mind that was about the safety of of getting on an elevator and he did it with the powerful demonstration so let show you uh let me show you something hold on all right do you know

this brand mini Katana have you seen them Craig I have not all right so I about to uh YouTube don't be alarmed this is inside here is a giant sword and um this company so this brand they sell these it's called mini Katana but it's actually humongous so they sell these swords now the problem with selling swords is that Google and Facebook don't let you do it you can't advertise weapons so how does an e-commerce brand work when you can't advertise weapons well what they did was they started they hired like 20 YouTubers and ticktockers

and they would have them do what you just described the powerful demonstration so they would take this they would take this sword and they would instead of saying you know why you need a sword because most people don't need a sword let's be honest uh instead of talking about how long it is or how sharp it is or whatever they would show that the sword could cut through a bullet that was fired at them so this video starts with a guy's holding the sword and there's a bullet aimed at him and he's going to try

to split it in half and uh then when he does it it's a powerful presentation about like how badass these swords are and they all of their marketing they'll take a steak you just see a steak plop down on a cutting board and then a giant sword cutting through it which is completely unnecessary but it is a powerful demonstration um and you know I I remember seeing those TED Talks where guys take a glass and they you know it's like here's dirty water would you drink this water it's like no way and then they put

it into their filter and like their bottle filter and then they start to drink it I don't know who this was Bill Gates or something chugs in the water first right for for real yeah exactly they make it disgusting and then the whole crowd is gasping and like they could tell you how the filter works or they could show you that they're willing to drink the water through this filter that was like disgusting water and I still remember that was like 20 years ago I still remember that video because it's just you're right it hijacked

my brain yeah the The Knife Company they're genius any knife infomercial will do this where they'll be taking a knife and cutting a penny you know or like effortlessly slicing tomatoes through the air and you know who was uh the king of this was Dr Oz Dr Oz what did he do every episode of The Dr Oz Show is a marketing master class he advertised oh [ __ ] I'm sleeping on Dr Oz yeah he advertised these nutrients and I don't know if he had some type of deal with manufacturers or something like that but

he would advertise like um like Resveratrol or like um Garcinia camboia berries which were like weight loss but he wouldn't ever advertise a specific brand he would just talk about Garcinia camboia if you look one of the reasons it's hard to advertise supplements online is because Dr Oz would go and talk about Garcinia camboia or whatever Barry and then all these scammers would create websites uh selling Garcinia camboia on auto ship that you could never get out of you know you'd sign up website some would disappear but that thing would be docking your credit card

for years later you know whatever so Dr o one of the ones I remember is he'd go on there and he'd say this is your body and these balloons on it and then You' have like a mannequin with with balloons on it these balloons are the fat cells oh wow Ginia camboia is a miracle berry that works for any body type and then he take out a Pinn he'd be like this is the berry pop pop that's what Garcinia camboia does to the fat cells in your body and C man like a billion dollars of

Garcinia Cambodia we stole over the next few months mostly to these scammy Auto billing marketers it was it was wild and he did this with like five different berries over time and eventually he got pulled into Congress to testify and all this [ __ ] and like way lose he rolled with it cuz he was getting all these allegations that he was starting on one episode he goes uh he gets a camera crew behind him and he goes down to one of the companies that's selling the Garcinia camboia and he knocks in the door he's

got the camera behind him the founder comes out he's like hey I didn't give you permission to use my name and likeness to sell your garc camboia and like your autoing customers and this and that you know and he was like pretending that he was the the good guy but I don't know man I don't know if like India was lining his pockets or something before it happened but like this was so many berries and for so many years uh it it it's crazy man it was like billions of dollars a fraud happened because of

because of his show you know you know what I love about this is um a lot of the audience who listens to this and a lot of the people I know who are uh entrepreneurial or technical type engineering type people often so um rational and logical and like sort of analytical about the way that they want to about the way they see the world and so the idea that hey we're going to do this event with the the axe swinging at the the Rope or you know we're going to blow up these balloons and they'll

be like well that's not what the fat cell looks like that's way too big that's not to scale um you know like you have to almost you have to use the other part of your brain if you're going to do this you have to make something powerful visual dramatic and those are not skills that typically your kind of um operational or technical person is used to flexing and so what I love about this is these examples that give you inspiration to be able to like go use that other part of your brain you know if

you look at these we got the hijacks up here right from Otis Elevator all of these apply to what I just said about dog draw the event is that it's a TV show you know so that makes an event already the demonstration the unquestionable proof is him he's a doctor saying that this is going to work for you and then making it about them he said this is the miracle weight loss cure for all body types like those are almost his exact words and by the way you know who else does this amazingly well Elon

Elon who's the you know the scientist the hardcore engineer you know what he's brilliant at just yesterday the news was um there's the they're getting they're hyping cybertruck right now and you do did you see that news that came out which was that they unloaded a full magazine of some assault rifle at the door and so there's a bunch of holes in the door or like you could see where the bullet hit the door but didn't go through and so he's driving that car around and leaked that kind of the Tweet rumor that hey they

tested it this way and he did this at their onstage event too but it it [ __ ] up like he tried to take a sledgehammer and show how indestructible this was he swung the sledgehammer and then they like broke through the window and he's like oh [ __ ] that wasn't supposed to happen like this is supposed to be bulletproof but um he was trying to do that he was trying to you know PT Barnum uh you know their cyber truck which is which is really really cool to see yeah you know what was

another incredible success that I think was complete [ __ ] was the the Power Balance bracelet do you remember those it was like dude I was thinking about when you did the the tongue on the teeth that's the first thing I thought of where people used to say hey hold out your arms yeah and now watch how EAS I go on one foot watch how easily I could tip you over then you put this bracelet on it's just magic angle which way you press on the arm yeah recently and he was doing that with me

and I was like oh God am I getting schemed by this this chiropractor but yeah I think Power Balance actually got popped for that as they they deserved um but that was that was a a very effective technique even though it was you know unethical in that case yeah okay let's get into some uh so those those are last two are for good right we want people to brush their teeth we want elevators to be safe uh now let's talk about some evil campaigns all right so okay 1930s all the the men had come back

from the war you know and they gave them free cigarettes so like so many men were hooked on smoking that there was no room for growth so the cigarette company has come to Eddie BR a Lucky Strike in particular is who who came to him and they're like hey we need more customers he's like well you already got all the men but at that time Sean it was illegal for a woman to smoke in public it was literally [ __ ] illegal and there was like cafes in New York City where you know there's there's

stories of of like High Society women getting asked to leave and then women that could afford it would have like special smoking rooms in their homes that would you know that that really liked it because they weren't allowed to do it in public oh and I should add something too women didn't really want to smoke uh Mo for the most part you know they they weren't really pushing back against it yes it was illegal but it was also considered a ladylike it was a it was a man thing you know so he says to Lucky

Strike he's like look you know you got to you got to get the women smoking so what was going on at the time was the women's Rights Movement you know so women were out in the streets marching about you know wanting the right to vote and and Bern is capitalized on that so the big social event of the day kind of like the Oscars of today was the Easter Parade which would go down Fifth Avenue and all the reporters would be standing on the sidelines and so bernes organized a float and he called up all

of the the socialites and debutants like the Paris Hill and Kim Kardashians of the day and he got them all to go on this float and they're cruising down Fifth Avenue the parades happening you know when they get to the corner where all the reporters were the women do uh go into their stocking they pull out cigarettes put them in their mouths and light them up so imagine you know Paris and uh Chloe and all the Kardashians and even all the Jenners on one float they all just start blazing up right and the repor like

what is going on here this is this is obscene you know women aren't supposed to do this bernes and his crew went around to the reporters and they said oh no no no they're not smoking they are declaring their rights with these torches of Freedom oh wow and so the newspapers ran with that they're like you know uh women uh present torches of freedom to show that they are equal with men and they can smoke too and so turned it into a movement and if you think about smoking to this day if you think about

a women uh a woman who smokes um I think about bit older than you Sean but I think of like Kate Moss and like the you know sexy model smoking now it might be considered gross for a woman to smoke again you know anyone to smoke I don't really know what the kids these days are thinking but yeah we you know you think like some like badass badass woman and you remember that old movies with Audrey heurn you know that famous scene I think it's breakfast at Tiffy where she's puffing that long cigarette you know

so yeah completely change the world there that's amazing I had never heard that story um uh but I love that that's like a combination of you got the event you have kind of newsjacking which was jumping on uh to an existing Trend but then also um the the just the copyrighting of the the words there of you know these aren't cigarettes these are torches of Freedom that's really really powerful yeah the plants if you like that plant strategy Ryan Holliday wrote a great book called trust me I'm lying and he talks about all these phrases

that he planted in the the heads of these reporters when he was promoting things like uh Tucker Max books and and you know wild stuff back there so there's a new lesson in here uh new hijack so to speak and that is help them Rebel or feel Superior so people have this tendency in them they want to go against the grain they want to show that they are not one of the sheep you know they want to show that they are not going to bow down to the the mainstream pressure or Society standards things like

that you know and this is a really powerful concept that you're going to see appear throughout uh some of the the other demonstrations here but that's that's what ber has allowed them to do is is Rebel and and maybe even feel superior to the rest because they're they're leading the charge right okay keep going by the way I'm loving this so keep going all right so berne's had a problem Lucky Strike uh did this big campaign to get women to start smoking and they did start smoking but they didn't smoke Lucky Strikes because if you

remember boop boop boop see the Lucky Strike package there Sean what color is the main color it's Green Well green was a very undesirable color back in those days it was considered an ugly color and so Bernay got all these women smoking but lucky is like what the [ __ ] bernes they're not smoking Lucky Strikes so he has to come up with something new so he goes back to his his debutants and and socialites and as they say here women of prominence and they create the first ever Gala green ball at the Waldorf Hotel

in New York City and the magazine started following around the Kardashians of the day to see what type of outfits they were going to wear that were styled in green and women started bringing green Decor into their homes and it just became a a big thing and the gala happens and the women are photographed and their exotic green outfits and it it became the most fashionable color within one year going from the the ugliest color the most fashionable color and Lucky Strike without even trying became the number one selling brand Sig regets for women because

they subconsciously wanted that green box holy [ __ ] wow is one of the hijacks by the way using people of prominence or you didn't you don't include that in the in the hijacks unquestionable proof that falls under unquestionable proof it's a great question but yes when we humans see someone as they just said in the New York Times article someone of prominence doing something we automatically assume it's been we automatically assume it's okay and we automatically have something in us that makes us want to do that maybe it's from when we were all in

trib and you know if the chief is doing something then you do it too who knows but that's that's unquestionable proof you know so uh you know he made an event where this unquestionable proof happened and also there was this force that that they wanted to rebel against you know these celebrities are like oh I'm cool enough where I can wear green and it'll look good you know you know I heard this other other thing Sean today so how old are you are you public with your age yeah yeah I'm 35 35 okay I'm 44

so when you think of emojis what do you think about when I think of emojis yeah like who do you think uses emojis I would have said like teenagers teens and tweens uh but I think but then I see people in India like my auntie my aunts and and my aunts are crazy about about emojis yes I would have thought the same so my my buddy is a a dad the two teenagers he said they will not use emojis because they think emojis are something adults use they do not want to be associated with the

adults so kids these days they don't use emojis they'll just use like different text characters and things like that so you've probably seen these little like one to two or sorry two to three character terms that they use like tbh or like you know it stands for to be honest or F FR which means like for real you know they use those type of things to separate themselves from the adults you know people want to push back it's a it's a natural human instinct yeah when um when Snapchat came out was getting really popular one

of the things that uh I remember in Silicon Valley all the like product genius blogger guys were like yeah you know what what snapshat should do is make it easier to use because look at this like uh at the time like you know to use those face filters you had to like there was no button on the screen you had to just hold down on your face for 3 seconds like a magic trick like like a secret door that you didn't know that nobody else knew about um or even just in signing up there was

like all these like funky ways to do it and um and then the people I think one of the guys at Snapchat came out was like look it's intentional we want you know you know you baby proof medicine we're we're Boomer proofing this app like the way that this is going to become really popular amongst young people is that we don't make it easy for older people to get in and figure out how this whole thing works and we want to make it easy for one friend to tell another the secret on how to do

something so that they feel like they're in on it with with them and it's like a word of mouth virality of how do you do that exactly it's like once your parents and your grandma got on Facebook it wasn't cool anymore you know right and then everyone went to Instagram and now you know Uncle Bob's on Instagram and it's just like L you know so every go Tik Tok right and we'll see if something comes next you know I think the the moms are well moms are definitely a big group on Tik Tok now um

I don't know if like I don't know are you on Tik Tok I'm I'm not I I have like a I got to admit I I love Tik Tok even though you know it's my lucky strike I know I know I probably shouldn't be be smoking that Tik Tok every night but I do well you know Tik Tok is crack it is digital crack very well-designed digital crack so don't blame yourself people say that but like when I think when they say that they mean avoid it and I'm like wait cracks like isn't crack supposed

to be like the greatest experience when people do it and then I open up Tik Tok and I start swiping yeah well you know actually speaking of drugs funny enough there's another Rebellion I'm seeing in in my Community against alcohol right now and and I remember in my 20s that it was all about the alcohol you know if you didn't show up uh if you should up a party empty-handed you know it's like not cool I've gone to parties now with a bottle and they'd be like oh this is a non-alcoholic party can you go

put that back in your car it's like push back you know um how figure out some Camy yeah exactly okay last campaign I'm going to share with you about uh Eddie Bern's is the Great American breakfast so early in the you know 19th century uh 20th century breakfast was like some coffee and and maybe a roll or some oatmeal or something like that right no one actually had like a actual hearty breakfast and Beachnut bacon comes to bir and they're like hey we want to sell more bacon he's like well people are eating bacon usually

for dinner sometimes for lunch there's another meal here we can take advantage of so bernes goes to uh his his OnStaff doctor or actually no it was it was a it was Beach that's OnStaff doctor and he says hey Doc would you agree that a hearty breakfast containing bacon would be the best way to start your day and the doctor is like oh of course I agree with you do you think some of your doctor friends would agree so he has him write 5,000 letters to doctors Across the Nation saying hey I think bacen is

the healthiest breakfast and people should be eating a heartier breakfast do you agree 4,500 doctors wrote back and they're like yes I agree that makes perfect sense they didn't turn this into an ad campaign but what they did do is they shared that result with all of the newspapers and so newspapers started publishing headlines doctors agree a hearty breakfast containing bacon is the best way to store energy to last throughout your workday and but that's how people started eating eating bacon for breakfast and you know all the all the bacon companies started going crazy because

it became a breakfast thing wow so what are we doing here there we're selling the dream you know of of a breakfast that's going to give you more energy to get throughout your day you know so that's making it about them as well the unquestionable proof 45 100 doctors can't be wrong right and then there's even a little bit of a um feeling Superior here because if your buddy is over there eating a roll you're like hey Sean got something to tell you about that roll man it's not as hearty is this your bacon right

so it Taps into all these these same psychological hijacks you keep seeing them over and over Okay so let's take a step back now uh a couple decades to the 19 1910s orange juice now I grew up in the ' 80s and my mom had us drink orange juice every day for vitamin C was this a thing Sean when when you were a kid totally totally orange juice is when I was a kid orange juice is good for you it's vitamin C which is you know good for your immunity this is what I was told

and uh drank a lot of sugar because of that yeah so orange juice actually has a same amount of sugar as a Coca-Cola so orange juice you know it's it's glucose or something I don't know it's a different kind of sugar but it ain't good for you so this was all the the result of a a marketing man named Albert Lasker who was probably the uh the man responsible for more consumer change um in the early 1900s than anyone Claud Hopkins pepson Claude actually worked with Albert he was his top copywriter and prior to Claude

coming on board Albert was contacted by the California growers association they're like Al Albert we got so many oranges here in California we them to cut down trees because they overproduce and then we need to get rid of them and it brings the bugs and all that stuff you know how can we sell more oranges and I looked at the L of land and all these orange growers were competing against each other trying to say like we have the best orange we have the best orange or whatever he goes okay first of all you guys

are all teaming up and so he teamed them all up together and he put them under one brand name and he called it Sunkissed which I think is a pretty genius name yes and then as he's he's meeting with him he notices that what the The Growers would do for their kids as a as a as a special treat is they'd take that orange and they they'd squeeze it into a cup and they'd give their kids little little shots of the juice he's like ah wait a second how many oranges did it take to make

that juice and they're like oh you know three or four or whatever so we thought what if if we could make that mainstream because the juice tasted really good and so he had a uh engineer invented this device that you could you know cheap plastic device that you can put an orange on and then he created this campaign talking about how oranges have all these vitamins in them and you know will help you get more of your nutrients from food tying orange juice to meals so you think about oh well I want to get the

nutrients in this food so I want to drink orange juice with it and then you have this campaign where you buy box oranges and you send in your your proof of purchase and they send you this juicer thing so it was like you get something for free and created orange juice and so what is he doing he's selling the dream of getting the more nutrients from your food the uh um unquestionable proof you know if you if you go and actually read that ad there was like you know doctors recommend and and things like that

um he made it about them because it's showing them that they can get some benefit here and then here's a new hijack that's appearing for the first time um actually maybe I mean I guess it would apply to toothpaste but uh Change Daily Behavior if you can change someone's daily Behavior you can create something big so two modern examples of this Bulletproof Coffee are you familiar with Bulletproof Coffee uh I'm just familiar with it from the surface level but yeah tell me tell me about you know what do you know what it is it's like

the butter coffee or the oil coffee MCT oil coffee is that what it is so you walk into any Starbucks in the country They don't serve Bulletproof Coffee but they know what it is everyone knows what it is and the genius that that Dave asey had was he changed the behavior of these of of people that were already doing something he kind of like like intercepted their coffee it's an additive to your coffee rather than a new new Behavior so so now he's he's changing the existing Behavior yes changing the existing behavior and so there's

a there's a book called The Miracle morning and it talk uh talks about the power of journaling every day so you buy this book called The Miracle morning and then you do this specific journal every day right long after you read the book and I met the author of that Hal Elrod and he told me something that that stuck with me I thought was fascinating he said when was the last time you recommended a book and I was like well I was just read this book on gangas Khan you know I've been telling all my

friends about it or whatever he's like when were you telling them about it I was like well I was telling them about it when I was reading it he said okay well most people recommend books during the the time they're reading that book and then they go and they read the next book right now I'm reading elon's biography it's great that's why I just told you about that Sean I'm literally in the middle of it you know I can tell you what book I read last month or last year people talk about the things they're

doing now so if you change their daily Behavior like Hal did with getting people to journal in the morning they they talk about it all the time so that book has sold hundreds of thousands of copies or maybe even Millions by now um because this is 10 years ago he told me this because people are doing this Behavior every day and so they're talking about it every day like oh what' you do today I just did my morning uh Miracle journaling like oh what's that you know so long after the book is through so if

you change daily Behavior it has a a viral effect that is Untouchable by anything else love that okay so let's get to some more modern examples the 1970s Sean do you know who this guy is um no some some Runner I don't know who it is okay so this this guy's before our time but uh gentleman's name Steve Prefontaine and Prefontaine was uh best comparison I can think of is like the Michael Phelps of his time you know no one was really thinking about swimming until Michael Phelps came around who was such a dominant athlete

from the USA you know so everyone wanted to get behind him so Prefontaine was that guy for running and Prefontaine had all these great quotes like Mohamad Al Ali he's like you know yeah someone can beat me but if you're going to beat me you g to have to bleed you know and he's like if you don't run until you until you feel like you're going to you're going to die you're not honoring your gift you know so he had all these great quotes he was a great media figure he won every college record from

like 500 meter up to 2,000 meter Prefontaine was the man and Nike was just coming up that actually just started like making their going from being at a distributor making their own shoe and fortunately Prefontaine was in Oregon so were they and they got him to to wear their shoes and it was a a big thing because the unquestionable proof now you've got pre Fontaine the top runner in the country wearing Nike shoes um tragically Prefontaine passed in a car accident before he could go and and honor his Olympic Glory but before he did that

he really put Nike on the map because you know running was his thing running what's the one accessory that you need shoes and so this was such a big deal um that it actually Chang the entire industry so so prior to Prefontaine Prefontaine was around in like the 70s right um if you read Phil Knight's book he talks about if you went jogging in like the 40s 50s or 60s people were like throwing bottles at you from your car because they're just like mad they're like what is this idiot doing you know he's in the

road or whatever and it was just like really hated upon and pre Fontaine comes along and running actually comes cool again and so Nike got to ride that that tailwind and then what also happened is is back then the people were wearing shoes that were like uh you know kind of like the loafer or work shoe or or whatever like pretty basic shoes and people wanted to rebel against that rebel against the shoes that their dad was wearing and so they started wearing these athletic shoes these running shoes as a part of their daily attire

to make a statement that like I'm rebelling and I'm superior and it changed the entire shoe market now athletic shoes are probably the best selling shoe and only a tiny percent of them are warn for athletic activities and then it all started in the in the 70s with with pre Fontaine and then of course Nike had the amazing campaign with Jordan which was more unquestionable proof you know making them feel super because they got the best basketball shoe and sell the dream that they're going to be able to fly Like Mike so that was a

a world changing campaign that not a lot of people think about when they put on their kicks every morning you know you know one of those that's I feel like is happening right now in a small way um so you remember like I don't know 10 years ago or something like that those Vibram Five Finger shoes were like getting popular do you remember those yeah so like you would see one and you'd be like what is this person wearing a foot glove like what is this thing and then they would immediately go into the spiel

about why this is better for you and like how they do whatever and I think this is like I I've seen this a lot now there's um a popular YouTuber or or Instagram guy called knees over toes guy and he's basically like it's like a rebellion he's like have any of you ever been told when you're working out like don't let your knee go over your toe when you're squatting because it's bad form he's like [ __ ] like um I had all these knee surgeries nobody could tell me how to fix it I fixed

it myself because I started training that way specifically so it's like a rebellion against the fitness industry then he's like a rebellion against Nike cuz now Nike's the big bad like the incumbent and so he's like uh Nike shoes are like wearing high heels um you you know you shouldn't have uh these like huge heeled shoes you should have low Drop flat shoes basically and so he came out with his own shoe but also there's just like a bunch of these Brands now that are kind of like uh flat more like you're walking barefoot uh

barefoot shoes like you're walking on on the ground and it's funny that like now Nike is the big kind of status quo that they want to rebel against and point out why why you shouldn't be wearing Nike shoes because of this other reason do 5,000 doctors agree that the Nike uh you know cushion is actually bad for you so yeah so uh you know big one was uh MacBook launched this ad that was called 1984 and it aired during the Super Bowl and it it uh was a big Rebellion against IBM everyone was using these

ibms and MacBook came out and they're like we're the new thing you know and I think I got the idea from this Volkswagen ad right here so Volkswagen when they came out I think it was uh in the 60s all those cars were huge you know you think of like the 60 uh7 Chevys you know these huge cars that you couldn't get into a parking spot and had all this extra stuff on them that you didn't need they came out with this think small campaign that absolutely crushed it and it was like the the Hipster

statement at the time was to to drive a VW bug you know and made it one of the bestselling cars um there's another ad that just came out from someone who's a master of this that's Trump so this is another video that that I would suggest you play if you can because it's really fascinating and they show Hillary talking about how the Trump people ha have to be deprogrammed have you seen this ad it just came out like two days ago no I haven't seen it so what what is it with Trump taking a commanding

lead and bomic hurting American families genius Hillary Clinton has come up with a way for Biden to win there needs to be of formal deprogramming of the cult members formal deprogramming of the cult members deprogram deprogramming mult members a brilliant plan and here's what that would look like heay attention Joe Biden will defeat him is the answer this did not happen Biden has done an amazing job amazing job but there's one small problem the basket of deplorables deplorables Deora deplorables working Americans aren't idiots and they know who's on their side to American workers watching their

take home pay shrink and watching inflation destroy their family and their lives to all of you I have your back I'm Donald J Trump and I approve this message wow that's so well done I mean love him or hate him that the man is a master marketer and he just rallies his base to to rebel against uh you know the the in um incumbents what's the word the the elites the kind of the status quo yeah do you think uh like in this case do you think Trump has input on any of that or this

is just they hire some Ad Agency that does these things like is he the master marketer or he's hiring Master marketers I mean he he he makes the sound bites you know that sound bite I think was live from a speech that they plugged it at least it looks like it was and you know a lot of times these speech writers they think about that so there's a famous uh um speech Bama did yes we can do you remember that speech yep yep of course that was a huge one when when the speech writer first

presented Obama with yes we can Obama didn't like it he didn't want to give that speech he thought it was too basic he's like I don't want to repeat the same thing over and over you know the the audience deserves something more intelligent and they had to convinced him to do this yes we can speech and present it as a rally cry and finally like okay fine you know it goes out and gives a speech and that's sound bite man I think it was uh will I am turn that into that music video that went

crazy you know right it's just uh a really powerful sound bite and and I find that the best politicians end up speaking in sound bites makes Trump so effective at what he's doing the Blogger Scott Adams if anybody wants to kind go deeper on this the Blogger Scott Adams who created Dilbert he when Trump was running in 2016 and nobody thought he would win Scott Adams was one of the first people I saw that came out and was like of not only can he win he will win in a landslide which is what exact which

is what happened and he explained he goes Trump has verbal kill shots um you know he has these phrases that he'll say about opponents where he'll be like um low energy Jeb Bush and then you can never look at Jeb again and see anything but low energy and Jeb's so offended by it that he feeds the energy into that uh like you know he starts to be flustered by it and then he starts to try to up his energy and then Trump Pat him on the head be like well at least you're trying now Jeb

yeah that's good you're trying to pick up your energy I like that and he would just destroy candidates with like you know crooked Hillary um you know and he would just just brand people in a one shot kill with with with these phrases and even the one you that video you just showed that kind of I have your back like you know he he's very very good at just repeating simple messages and and branding himself one way and and positioning himself against the others the other way all right so the 80s here's a a Force

for good so did you know uh Sean the phrase uh have one for the road do you know where that came from no but now that I think about it kind of a [ __ ] up phrase huh so I would think that the the worst use of that phrase would be go and have one and then go drive but it actually meant take a beer in your car and drink it while driving away from uh wherever you're going right so drunk driving was out of control and a c uh uh campaign was created friends

don't let friends drive drunk and it had three things to do drive your friend home have your friend sleep over or call a cab you know and this cut drunk driving in half it it it was something like a 40 to 50% uh drunk driving decrease when this started going around that's like U Craig if I say the phrase this is your brain on drugs what do you think of yeah you think of that fried egg a powerful demonstration right an egg hitting a frying pan sizzling like and that was how long ago that was

like it had to been I was a kid like I was that was 20 plus years ago and it still has hijacked my brain where if I if I see an egg I think about drugs or if I hear this is your brain on drugs I hear the egg right like uh that that is so powerful how that worked these powerful demonstrations are Unforgettable you'll never look at a sword and not think about the sword slicing through the bullet yeah there's something about it that that really sticks in in the human mind maybe it's a

way we are taught how to learn you know uh I have a I have a daughter now and she's learning physics not the way I think of physics and it's not something I thought but you know you have kids too you see how they learn the way blocks fit together and gravity and all of this you know it teaches you a lot about how the human brain learns and if you think about what these demonstrations are they're they're really physics demonstrations so it's like that's how we've been learning since age zero you know and and

right we need that foundational physics to survive and you really notice it in babies like they need to know that if they're crawling and there's something here that it's going to hurt if they hit it like it's so basic but the kids don't know that they actually have to learn that you know and you think about I I always always like why don't we remember anything before we're 5 years old and I think it's because the brain is optimizing to learn physics I think the physics are just so important you just like we don't need

memory right now physics are like fundamentals man if you don't know physics you're gonna [ __ ] die like just you know walking down the street right right so it's all physics I think these are like new physics lessons that that we find really fascinating um you know what else people are really interested in is these uh they call them ASMR videos oh% soothing things that are happening we did this as an ad for my Ecom brand so I was watching Tik toks and there's these Tik toks that are these soothing ASMR things the ones

that uh I was watching were like a bottle there there's a bottle filled with Sands or Mar sand or marble marbles so I think it Marbles and it would they would roll the glass bottle down a set of cement stairs so you hear like the clink rolling like a glass bottle rolling sound then you hear the clink as it hits the stair and then by the second or third stair it cracks and then you hear marbles bouncing like in synchronicity like down the stairs and for some reason these view these videos always have like 10

million 10 million views on them just because they're like oddly satisfying to watch and people just love that combination of the visual plus the sound and so we took that and we remixed that with our product basically we we we integrated it in with our product so that the video starts with that rolling thing and then we just sort of hijack the video and show our product upon the smash and way more people watch that than if we just start with our product even though it's a complete bait and switch that's interesting yeah I mean

if you go up to someone on the street and be like hey do you love physics do you want to study Physics like no but that's actually not the truth humans love physics we all love physics we're obsessed with physics and it starts at a zero so interesting so yeah so this this uh add to prevent drunk driving did the you know all these these same things and it worked so okay so here's a a modern story so 2010 when we were were starting golden hippo my brother comes to me and he says hey have

you you heard of probiotics and and I hadn't and I was like what are those and he he says well you know you got all these bacteria in you and I was like okay what do you mean he's like you know your microbiome I'm like what's that you know he goes on to tell me that you know you you take these probiotics which are good beneficial bacteria supposed to do something right so I take them and I started having a lot more regular poops I don't know who what I was eating before but they started

working and I was like why why is this affecting me I'm a pretty healthy guy I'm in pretty good shape um this is this is actually helping me out and I started looking into it and I realized that all of these Foods I was eating that I thought were healthy because they said uh low fat or whatever on them had sugars or artificial sweeteners or things like that pumped into them from the food companies and they were on the name on the labels under different names so you don't know what they are you know like

super Gros or um right you know agave nectar things like that you know like you you and it could say zero sugars on the label but the ingredients have these substitutes yeah yeah but it's got Agave it's got corn syrup it's got like you know natural fruit juices you know all those things are are sugars and so I started digging into this and there was some shady stuff man there was some some experiments done where like like you know the suar companies would would pay a farmer to uh uh you know food is very expensive

for livestock and and Farmers always dreamed that they could give their livestock sugar instead of food and they they'd be able to use that as a nutrient so they could stop this big food expense and like they do that they try it and the cows would all die you know and then they try to okay well let's take the food and let's add sugar and see what happens and then the cows would still die you and then they they bury the studies right and the the artificial sweder things were even worse so there was a

company uh GD surl that invented uh artificial sweetener called aspartame it's now known as neutr site what a lot of people don't know is when they he came up with this artificial sweetener they knew it'd be a billion dollar product um because the sweetener Market had already been built out they started testing it on lab animals and that lab animals were growing tumors and the scientists got popped for the first time ever that um the government filed criminal charges against a company for falsifying studies because the scientists were cutting the tumors out of the animals

and sewing them back up and saying oh no tumors here and they got caught doing that wow and so I found out about all this and I was just like completely mystified and so I wrote this presentation about this and I talked about probiotics and how a way to combat the artificial sweeteners and sugars that are being pumped into your foods that it'd be impossible for you to uh discover them all you know is to add good bacteria because those um you know the bad bacteria growth that that happens because of all this consumption that

makes the bad bacteria get really frothy um need to be offset by good bacteria and so I put this video together and it went absolutely bananas so uh it was seen by probably uh you know 100 million people it's hard to track uh but um the last we checked there was over 100 million and this is in a period of about four months Joe Rogan tweeted it out and someone wrote they're like Hey Joe do you realize this is a actually an advertisement for a probiotic and he wrote back oh yeah you know I didn't

see that till the end I tweeted out before I I got to the end of the video but you should go watch it or something like that you know um and it it created the biggest uh probiotic brand in the world at the time and it was because of this Ed educational component showing people that the your food supply is messed up and you have something called a microbiome that's getting affected by your food supply and one way to Aid that is with with probiotics and so if you look at the Google transl we didn't

have in the 20s you know I'm sure if we could do this for Google for the 20s and look at like you know uh cigarettes right you see like the big spike after the the uh Easter Day Parade right um or VW Bug you'd see the big spike uh after the uh the think small campaign well we have this now so if you look at probiotics you know probiotics were gaining some steam here and here's where um our ad comes online is uh Keybiotics was our brand so look at the general Spike and probiotics okay

so what what happened there well you can see basically the day we get kicked off of Google and it goes down and uh you see the trend line line goes down too um but then you see it it it goes back up again and you know this is what we launched our next probiotic brand perfect biotics uh you know did did okay it wasn't the the huge Banger of success that that Keybiotics was but fear not met a guy named Dr gundry in 2016 we launched the brand with him and look at look at these

Spike wies look at the probiotic Spike lines compared with with the term gundry and the reason syn gundry and some days is when the the campaigns would be running really strong you know the the videoos running running a lot that's where the the searches would go crazy and that was because Dr gundry is out there with with our educational presentations talking about the microbiome and talking about probiotics and prebiotics and really just educating the world on this stuff and you know we didn't bring probiotics to America or or anything like that uh but I like

to think we were probably a company that taught more people than anyone about the microbiome and now you know the probiotic Trends uh you know keeps keeps going and I think it just keeps going uh up and to the right if you if you find the the current data you know and by now the uh Market has changed you know I talked about uh I did a Twitter thread a ways back I talked about the three stages of a product market so there's Clueless which is when you need to create uh the the the marketing

wave because your your Market knows nothing about the the product right so back then when I started no one knew anything about probiotics so if I just said like hey here's probiotics try them out no one would have cared but I started with something they did care about was was like hey is your digestion messed up are you having irregularity at the bathroom well here's the reason why and then the next stage of the market is um is curious where someone's probably heard the term probiotics and and you can jump R and so while my

ads in 2013 2014 were starting with Digestive Health I had an ad in 2018 I believe it was and the headline was doctor says throw your probiotics in the trash and enough people knew about probiotics by then they were like oh that's wait wait I heard these are good for you you know right and then you click on it and it goes on to talk about how most probiotics don't have enough strains of Po see and also you know prebiotics are important and this and that you know so that's just knowing the market where it

was and and where you need to jump in and then the next level the uh Market is is saturation and that's kind of where the probiotics Market is now I'm not launching new probiotics uh you know every time I go to conference someone comes up to me they're like hey I'm launching a probiotic I me good luck you know it's it's pretty commoditized by now but there's still some that have have broken through with with strong campaigns amazing and so see these are the seven High Jacks I'll read them out here so number one make

it about them so that's make it about the customer and the benefits that they're going to get number two make it an event that's the um you know nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd um then number three is a powerful demonstration so that's the PT Barum that's the elevator uh with the axe that's the sword cutting through the bullet um that's the drinking dirty water um show unquestionable proof so that's using experts like doctors or uh influencers Plus um you know like you said he was willing to be in the elevator while the thing

was cut you know that's a demonstration of proof five change a daily behavior and I think this was change an existing daily behavior um is that right or is it change any daily Behavior I mean it could it could be either you know okay so and so this is like bulletproof getting you to add something into your coffee something you already doing or like breakfast uh having a hearty breakfast as the start of your day versus you know just a c coffee in in a in a bread roll yeah so he hijacked Dave hijacked the

daily behavior and what we did with probiotics is we change the daily Behavior we uh encourage them to take something every day so then six is sell the dream that's the the movie star smile that's underneath that film if only you would start brushing your teeth or this is uh Craig pooping regularly because he now takes uh you know probiotics prebiotics that's the dream and then number seven is help them um uh be a rebel or feel Superior and so that's you know be able to to stick a middle finger to the man whoever the

man is whether it's Nike or it's uh you know women not having equal rights or whatever um give them the tools and the badge to to feel like they're Superior and uh in a rebellion a part of a rebellion that's right amazing well said well said you're you're uh good student yeah well this is I mean the stuff that's in here is um I guess like this is rare in two ways number one I took marketing classes in college and I had marketing professors none of my marketing professors had ever done what you did they

never created a category they never did a billion dollars in sales they never sat there and crafted um you know even this presentation when we talked three days ago it was going to be like marketing throughout the decades no and you were like no that's not going to be the title I got to think of something good you come back with seven seven human hijacks how marketers have hijacked your brain and I'm like oh God just seeing you go from two days ago with no title or a shitty working title to like a really strong

title is seeing somebody in action or hearing you what you did with the the probiotics market so number one the opportunity to have a teacher who's actually a master of the game is so rare so obviously I'm sitting up in my seat I'm paying attention number two any one of these like I'm thinking as you were talking my brain was like having almost a hard time listening cuz I'm firing ideas for any of my companies on like oh a powerful demonstration how could we show this in a way that's exaggerated and would would would almost

be kind of shocking or add some drama to what we're doing versus just saying the feature or saying it's good like now how could we like do do a powerful demonstration that would give people unquestionable proof right so I couldn't even like stop my brain from moving while I'm doing this now that's I don't know that's the entrepreneur in me but I think there's a lot of people who are listening that are like that that like if you paid attention to this even one of these hijacks could like literally like change the trajectory of your

company so anyways I appreciate you putting this together this is kind of a this is amazing to me um I don't know how other people going to feel about this but like as as the only student in the room right now I was uh you know I'm pumped about this this is this is great well I I appreciate the kind words and you know if they as they say if you can change the life of just one person right then your job is complete so I'll take it all right well you did it this has

been a master class uh for sure so thanks for thanks everyone for watching that's the pod [Music] h