How’s it going? I have been completely obsessed with the pricing on the secondary market for Knicks tickets here in NYC, and I admit I’m going to be a little sad when it’s over. I can’t imagine what other event in my lifetime will have tickets starting at $11,000 that does not involve either a political dinner or prostitutes. Or both.

Anyway, today we’ve got:

• Literally the most annoying word

• I’m sorry

• Maybe just keep it simple

And frankly even if you skip this week, at least watch the video at the end. It’s incredible.

Subscribe now

Share

A San Francisco Treat

From a Business Insider article about the ridiculous San Francisco housing market:

To quote Father John Misty: It’s literally not that.

(Here’s the thing: this is the type of stupid quote I would send to a couple of my friends who, I’m sure, do not care at all that someone is quoted saying “literally” when they definitely mean exactly the opposite. But I’ll be goddamned if I’m not going to send Gobbledy readers this quote - which, by the way, an editor (or AI or AIditor (tm) or whatever) at Business Insider approved either because they don’t care or because they were allowing Paul Hwang, San Francisco real estate agent, to be hung by his own petard, which is yet another reason you should never speak to the press, because while you’re thinking to yourself that this reporter is talking to you because you are brilliant - which you may be! - they are just as likely talking to you hoping you will say that a Ferrari is literally an apartment in Miami and then they will quote that verbatim, and you (Paul Hwang, San Francisco real estate agent), the same person who was not aware that “literally” means, y’know, “literally” and not, um, literally the opposite, will forward the article to friends (and real estate prospects) and say, “I, Paul Hwang, San Francisco real estate agent” have been featured in the prestigious Business Insider publication where they have highlighted my commentary on the housing market,” and the friends and prospects who have received this missive will be split between people who forward it to their own friends saying, “Paul is is certainly taking a liberty with his language” and people who say, “this Paul guy sure seems to understand the San Francisco real estate market and also I want a Ferrari apartment and I’m going to give him a call,” though I should mention that that first group - the recipients of the “Paul is is taking a liberty” email will also be split between those who “ha ha ha, literally” and those who don’t understand why they are being told this person is a dumbass, as they also want their Ferrari apartment, and if we do the math on that, 75% of people now think Paul Hwang, San Francisco real estate agent, is a genius observer of the market, so perhaps I am literally the dumbass for suggesting he should not have spoken with the press.)

Whew.

Subscribe now

Share

It does seem to be the hardest word (to stop using)

You know what’s a difficult job? Advertising copywriter. It’s always been challenging, certainly. But when I watch episodes of Mad Men (right after my wife asks me why I keep watching old episodes of Mad Men when there are so many new shows and can’t we just watch one of those shows, I will ask “what show?”

And she responds “I have to check my list”

And I say “the list of what?”

And she says “the list of shows people tell me to watch so I know what to watch”

And I ask what those shows are

And she says a bunch of things: “Betrayal. Fecund Mountain. Um, Julie liked Plastered. I think it was Julie. I forgot to write it down. The Boys in the Yard. Regret.”

(And it’s here that I’ll admit I just made those titles up because there are so many shows nowadays and I don’t know any of them,)

And I respond by asking “Where can watch any of those shows?

And she says “I don’t know, I hoped you would figure it out”

And generally I just respond by saying, “We don’t subscribe to Fulp or Queg or Skeezbox or Sculpty+ and so we can’t watch and I’ll just go back to these episodes of Mad Men.”

Anyhoo, Where was I? Oh yes, when I watch the episodes of Mad Men I’m reminded of just how much less there was to write back then. Nobody at Sterling Cooper had to write dozens and dozens and dozens of variations of headlines for social ads. And dozens.

The volume of copy you have to write as an advertising copywriter nowadays is quite incredible, so I want to be sure I’m being clear up front that I’m aware of how difficult this job is.

Now that I’ve been clear, I’d like to call out 1 weird copywriting trick that needs to stop:

(This last one really pissed me off because they could’ve gone with “We’re So Sorry We Cut Off Your Nuts” and then the copy is how they cut 40% off the price. What a missed opportunity.)

Yes, the fake apology ad is the absolute worst, and I understand if you’re a copywriter and someone made you do it. I get it - we’re all just trying to get paychecks to keep the lights on.

But I’m starting to think that maybe this isn’t a copywriting thing. Are AI tools suggesting this as a campaign strategy? Because this invasive kudzu of slop is everywhere:

And so forth.

It has to be AI suggesting it, no? How else would every one of these companies have literally (yes, literally) the exact same ad?

I’m sorry - We’re all better than this.

(Thanks to Gobbledy reader and former roommate Dan B. for sending me a couple of those and then forcing me down the sorry rabbit hole.)

Crunchy Granola Suite.AI

I don’t want to leave us with such a bad taste in our collective mouths (ew), so I thought it would be good to share an example of a website I thought did a really good job with messaging (no small feat).

Presenting, the website for AI notetaker Granola.ai.

You may remember from the seminal (heh) Gobbledy column “4 Ways to Fix Your Homepage Headline,” that if your homepage headline is lacking clarity, you can use the “We are an X thing for Y people” template. This forces you to announce your category and your target market. Granola does that quite nicely:

The AI notetaking space is - to say the least - crowded like a public bus in Delhi. Everyone coming to the site is looking for an AI notepad (because why else would they be on the site?). They just want to know if Granola will work for them.

But first, you want to assure the visitor that they are the type of person who would benefit from the product. They could say “it’s the AI tool for busy people,” but lots of different types of people are busy. The specificity of “people in back-to-back meetings” is great.

In the next block, they call out the primary features that differentiate Granola from other, similar products. I often see homepages that are a giant list of product features, but Granola focuses, instead, on the 3 that are most important:

Then in the blocks below this, they add a bit more detail around some of those features and their benefits.

Obviously, Granola is not a wildly complex, enterprise-changing, transformational platform. So if you work for a company that is a wildly complex, enterprise-changing, transformational platform, perhaps you might get pushback if you were to suggest you change your homepage to “we are an X thing for Y people” followed by 3 ways you’re different from the competition.

Except - the homepage exists to get your visitor to want to know more. It does not need to answer every question, it just needs to make the visitor know that they are in the right place and to want to continue to learn more.

Despite the zillion conversations I’ve had where people who work at wildly complex, enterprise-changing, transformational platforms tell me that I don’t understand and their buyers want a mishmosh of gobbledy to wade through to figure out what the technology can do, I am certain that you will convert more visitors if you were to take this template and apply it to your site.

In fact, I’ll add it to my list of fun (“fun”) activities for your team to do when you have your next virtual (?) offsite: copy the Granola model for your site, and see if it doesn’t make your website 50% more clear.

And if not, I’m sorry.

As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.

P.S. - I always say that, but truly today it is the best part. Because this 1970s British cabaret version of The Who’s Pinball Wizard is, and I mean this, the best most terrible and amazing thing I’ve ever seen. You might think you should only watch a little of it, but then you’ll miss the tap dancing.

(Again, thanks to Gobbledy reader and former roommate Dan B. for ruining my life with that. Also thanks to whoever commented on the video “Every once in a while, somebody does a cover of a song that is better than the original. This is not one of those times.”)

How’s it going?

Good to be back from vacation - I missed writing this.

So before we start, a couple of quick random notes:

First thing. If aliens come to earth right after the demise of humanity and ask to see one sentence from an article that suggests why our civilization fell apart, I would show them this sentence from an ESPN article about former Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel’s first MMA fight:

If you don’t know what Kick is, imagine a platform that streams the worst garbage imaginable, and then make it 1 billion times worse. So someone from that has created a company that arranges boxing (and, I guess, MMA?) matches where celebrities (or “celebrities”) fight against “content creators.” This is a job. I would pay 1 trillion gobbledybucks (tm) to watch Adin Ross explain this job to his grandmother.

Second, if I were to take the head of marketing job at Claire’s, the tween-focused jewelry and - as we say in Yiddish - chuzzerai monger, I would hope that the article in the Wall Street Journal did not describe me thusly:

Let me just say this up front: please don’t ever refer to me as “the tween whisperer.”

Today we’ve got:

• Food for getting fired

• Saying nothing is more challenging than you’d think

• A good ad

• Newsletters are fun

  Subscribe now

  Share Gobbledy

Enjoy Your Tar-Tar Sauce

Allow me to take a little detour, if you will (oh, you will.).

I suppose I could stop reading literally every single story written about the, um, changes that are taking place at CBS News. But why would I do that?

Have you ever worked at a company where they brought in new senior leadership? Like maybe everything was going along OK, but the board (or the President of the United States…but probably the board) was agitating for change.

So they bring someone in and that person is a bull in a china shop and makes a whole bunch of changes, and everyone who’s left is constantly sitting around whispering about how the new person is a moron and the people they are bringing in are also incompetent.

Now imagine that every single day every news outlet was writing about this.

Anyway, that’s why I’m obsessed with whatever-the-hell is going on at CBS.

I noted a little while back that I loved this tidbit from a New Yorker profile of new CBS News head Bari Weiss:

“She had donned a CBS baseball cap for her first editorial meeting and ended the session by telling the room, “Let’s do the fucking news!”

Let’s do the fucking news, indeed!

Anyway, she went and did the fucking news and as part of doing the fucking news, she fired a couple of 60 Minutes correspondents and replaced the executive producer with someone who does not have television experience.

This did not make the remaining staff at the newsmagazine particularly happy, and 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley shared his annoyance at a staff meeting, where he asked the new executive producer this question:

“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” the correspondent said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”…

“I care so deeply about this institution,” Mr. Bilton said, to which Mr. Pelley interrupted: “Oh, please.”

Oh please (also) indeed.

So if you’re the executive producer of the highest rated news show in television history, and your star correspondent is - very, very publicly - crapping all over you, you have a couple of options:

1. You tell Mr. Pelley that he is acting unprofessionally. This will make you feel better, because you need to show him who’s the boss (though, as we learned, it’s Angela). The downside is that everyone will hate you ever more (if that’s even possible.)

2. You ignore it and mention the baked goods you’ve brought for the staff.

The answer is, actually, both!

First, one of your co-workers tells Mr. Pelley to “stop being rude.” Because, let’s be honest, it’s best that that come from someone else.

And second, you finish the meeting by wishing everyone well:

“I just want to thank everyone for graciously being so welcoming,” Mr. Bilton said. “I look forward to talking to you in a one-on-one setting as these meetings are scheduled. And enjoy the bagels.”

I have been saying “Enjoy the bagels” to myself for 3 days. Because when a staff meeting goes very, very awry, how else are you doing to end it? Tell your big star to shut the hell up and grow a pair and just accept that there’s a new sheriff in town? No, no you’re not. You want everyone to like you, and the best way to do that is by foisting baked goods upon them.

(Editor’s Note: I wrote that on Monday. On Tuesday, the new executive producer, as you may have read, fired Scott Pelley. This makes me love “enjoy the bagels” even more. And is the second best food-related corporate threat since Mr. Burns agreed to give his employees more tartar sauce):

Transforming the Exceptional

Have you ever had to write a script for a product video? I’ve been doing some of that lately. And what I’ve learned is that it’s more challenging than I would have imagined. Actually, now that I think about it, I never really imagined that at all. Not a single daydream in all my years included me sitting at my computer thinking about how to write a script for a product video. My apologies.

Anyway, it’s actually quite difficult to write a quick video explaining what a product does. You don’t want to include too much detail, but just enough to get someone to want to learn more. It’s a bit of a balance.

But, thanks to Gobbledy reader Tim K., who sent me the video below, I now realize that writing a script for a product video that thoroughly explains the product is actually the second most difficult script to write.

The most difficult script to write is a script that has a bunch of words in it but says nothing at all…

Behold this video introducing Solstice, the result of a merger of two companies:

I know most of you won’t watch that, but here’s the script. It is truly remarkable in its ability to say literally nothing:

Solstice Advanced Materials is born from a unifying purpose: to propel our customers forward to set the pace of progress. Building on over a century of breakthroughs, and the collective wisdom of Honeywell and AlliedSignal, realized together with precision and an unwavering drive to transform the essential into the exceptional. Advancing science for smarter outcomes. Solstice Advanced Materials.

You think YOU can pull “transform the essential into the exceptional” out of your (or anyone else’s) ass? No, I don’t think you can.

I read a lot of gobbledy so I can share it with you all, but even I am impressed by the screenwriter’s ability to spin a cotton candy-like ball of nothing out of all those words. Bravo.

(Fun fact: AlliedSignal, which is apparently one of the companies that became Solstice, which, as we now know, is transforming the essential into the exceptional, was based in my hometown and was the name of my Little League team when I was 9. We won our division - in an incredible game against Burger King, as you likely remember - a feat I would later describe as transforming the essential into the exceptional. In its own way.)

Subscribe now

Share Gobbledy

A Really Good Ad

I guess I could write about how Canadian airline Air Transat created a campaign that used price anchoring to show how their airfares are actually quite reasonable. But sometimes I can just enjoy an ad for what it is. Air Transat ran a whole bunch of these ads across Canada. Really, really clever.

(Thanks to reader Matt M. for that. Matt M. probably also has the box score someplace for the AlliedSignal 1981 Little League victory.)

Super Nice Marketing

Companies will sometimes hire me to help them with their content, which makes me happy/proud, and the thing that every one of those companies says to me is, “we like the way you write, and we’d like to bring that voice into our marketing.”

And then I will write content for them that has the DNA of this very newsletter, and then I will get drafts back that strip all of that out of it, and someone will say, “what if we just say that we transform the essential into the exceptional?”

And we will have a conversation where I will attempt to convince the client that one way you can stand out in a crowded tech market is through your writing style. Here is the current Kalshi odds about how this conversation will turn out:

Even so, I am 10000% sure that it is much easier to stand out in a crowded market - not just in tech - by writing things people want to read about you than it is to create a product that is so much better than the competition that that differentiation on its own will drive people to buy your product.

And yet.

Anyway, I’m telling you this because there is a restaurant in my neighborhood called Super Nice Pizza that has been sending out a newsletter that is absolutely incredible, and couples it with a social media presence that shares the same voice, and I am slightly obsessed with the whole approach because why wouldn’t you try to stand out a bit in a crowded market by writing content that people - gasp! - actually want to read.

Here’s an Instagram post:

Oh my God I’m so freaking jealous.

The newsletter they sent this week referred back to a subject line from the previous newsletter that - it turns out - made no sense. Here’s what they wrote:

You are a generous and magnanimous person, full of grace and courage and kindness. I know this about you. It might seem like I couldn’t possibly know this about you, but the internet is full of information and I’ve googled you and that is what I found out. None of the bad things, all of the good things. Because that’s what the internet is good at remembering.

I am not good at remembering. Like how I sent you an email with a strange “buzzard god” subject but literally no explanation within. I forgot.

But now I’ve remembered and you are full of grace, ready to welcome an explanation at long last. Thank you for being you.

(You can read this week’s newsletter here).

This is a pizza restaurant. I open every newsletter - yes, I learn about their cocktail specials or whatever. But I want to hear what Dan (the guy who owns the place) is thinking about. And if I want to know what he’s thinking about, of course I’ll go there for dinner sometimes.

And yes, this absolutely applies to your software product. People will want to know more about your product if you are writing content that they want to read. Yes, that’s obvious. But apparently also it’s not.

(Thanks to reader/not-infrequent commenter Gary S. for sending me the Instagram post.)

Subscribe now

Share Gobbledy

As always, thanks for reading to the end. It’s the best part.

I’ve enjoyed speaking with all of you who have taken the time to click my Calendly link and set up time to chat. It’s been fun. If you want to say hello, or talk through a problem you’re working on, I’m here.

P.S. While we’re talking about 60 Minutes, here’s my favorite piece: Morley Safer’s travelogue of Belize, well before anyone had heard of it. As Safer starts the piece, “the good news from Belize is that there is no news in Belize.”

How’s it going? You may remember that the Gobbledy team is on vacation this week - though I really hope you have more important things to remember than that. Anyway, we’re on vacation this week, which means a Gobbledy Classic (tm) for your enjoyment.

Today - a wee, slight, miniscule bit of a departure…I wanted to talk a little more broadly about strategy. I found an article from 45 years ago that’s incredibly applicable today and I thought I’d share some thoughts about it (even if it is, in part, about selling adding machines.)

Share

Thriving as a Low Market Share Player…

Wanna go on a little trip? A little trip in the Gobbledy Time Machine (tm)?

That was rhetorical - we’re going on the goddamned trip in the time machine, whether you like it or not.

So something I’ve noticed about tech companies is that they tend to believe that tech businesses are completely different from businesses in other industries.

Or rather, that the typical strategies of those non-tech businesses do not apply to them.

We first saw this during the Web 1.0 days when every tech company said that profits don’t matter, and that as long as you grow - profits aside - you will be successful. Amazon spent many, many quarters telling Wall Street analysts that it’s OK they were losing money because they were investing in growing the business, and once the business reached scale, they would have such an operational advantage that nobody could compete with them, and they would be profitable.

That’s almost exactly what happened.*

(*Almost. Their core eCommerce business is barely profitable, but their AWS and advertising units are wildly profitable.)

In the 2.0 days (let’s call it 2010-2021), tech companies believed (correctly, it turns out) that we lived in a winner-take-all world, and if you grew fast enough (which was only possible because interest rates were basically zero, so capital was easily available), you could - it turns out - get scale without being profitable and still have what was considered a successful business (hi, Uber).

If you work for a tech company today (unless you work for an AI company - which maybe you do, I don’t know!, you do not have easy access to capital, so you cannot grow at all costs. That’s a bummer.

The other bummer is that you may be run by a person (and/or people and/or a board) who has/have never known anything EXCEPT grow-at-all-costs. The harsh reality is that the people running the company that you work for many not have ever had to run a company in the environment they’re in.

Which is why we busted out the time machine.

If there was a Gobbledy Book Club (tm), I would have us all read this seminal (heh heh, seminal) 1978 article from the Harvard Business Review titled “Strategies for Low Market Share Businesses.”

I know, snoozer! Amirite?

Why are we talking about that article? Because many, many (many!) tech companies are no longer the high-growth businesses they thought (or hoped) they’d be, and are instead actually low market share businesses, where they compete in a market where there’s a clear winner or two (maybe an oligopoly, like Salesforce and Hubspot in CRM) but there are a bunch of low market share competitors trailing them.

What’s helpful about the article is that the authors don’t dismiss these companies, and in their research they find that these smaller market share businesses can be profitable and successful, and they share four reasons for their success.

And I found those four reasons to be remarkably applicable to many of today’s tech companies:

1. “They carefully segment their markets.”

2. “They use research and development funds efficiently.”

3. “They think small.”

4. “Their chief executives’ influence is pervasive.”

Let’s dig into these a tiny bit…

Segment their markets

The authors suggest that successful low market share companies define their markets “in unique and creative ways” - segmenting, for example, by the level of service they offer, distribution channel, price-to-value ratio, etc.

But, most importantly, they must compete only in segments where their “strengths will be most highly valued and where its large competitors will be most unlikely to compete.” In other words, find a target market where your competition will let you win, but doing that will require re-thinking how you segment the marketplace.

As an example, the authors talk about long-defunct computer manufacturer Burroughs, which competed with market leader IBM by focusing entirely on the financial market, because it had deep roots in the (I’m not making this up) adding machine market.

Use R&D funds efficiently

Rather than spreading investment around on different products, successful small market share companies focus their investment dollars where competitors lag significantly. Again, this means focusing investment and letting go of markets and products where you cannot compete. I admit that this is difficult.

But in the article they quote an executive with Crown Cork and Seal (a company still around today as Crown Holdings) who says, “We are not truly pioneers…however, we do have tremendous skills in die forming and metal fabrication, and we can move to adapt to the customer’s needs faster than anyone else in the industry.”

They focused their investments in that area because they have expertise there (that others cannot touch), and it ties to a clear value proposition - it allows them to adapt to customer needs faster than anyone else.

Letting go of markets that you’re in can feel like a demoralizing retreat, but if assets are re-allocated into areas where you can leverage unique knowledge, it can create a competitive advantage that the market leader cannot touch.

Think small

The idea is that successful low market share companies are “content to remain small…and emphasize profits rather than sales growth or market share, and specialization rather than diversification.”

Because many tech companies take venture funding, it’s difficult to remain small and keep your investors happy.

But there are a giant pile of tech companies who find themselves with low market share and also low growth. That’s a mess.

To paraphrase comedian Nate (“books are the key to smart”) Bargatze, “small is the key to big.” For companies struggling with low market share, they may be better off shrinking their business and specializing, with the idea that if they can get enough of a smaller market, they’ll be able to re-start their growth from a healthier base.

They again give the example of Crown Cork, which had 50% of the oil can market (?) and decided to get out of it because they felt that new technologies in that market limited their long-term growth and they could get a higher return on capital by re-deploying those assets elsewhere in the company.

In a time when it is challenging-to-impossible to raise more funding (if you’re not an AI company), tech companies may need to think more like a manufacturer, and shrink when necessary to ensure that they are deploying their limited assets to a way that allows them to compete profitably in their market.

The CEO Is Highly Influential

You may remember the recent kerfuffle about “founder mode” - the idea that tech founders need to be micromanagers - as Paul Graham put it, “There are things founders can do that managers can’t, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.”

This - like so many ideas - is not a new idea. The authors of this article say that the final characteristic of successful small market share companies is that their CEO is, as we would say today, in “founder mode.” As they put it, these CEOs “have all been described as extremely strong-willed individuals who are involved in almost all aspects of company operations.”

I will be the first to say that I find it difficult (to say the least) to work for this type of founder. However, when it comes to being a successful small market share company, it does not matter what I think (gasp!).

To be profitable when you only have single digit market share, your CEO needs to be hands-on. Much to your chagrin, probably…

Thanks for letting me chat a little strategy here - I know that for many of you working for companies that seem to be stagnating, it can feel like you’re the only company in that situation, and that the situation has never happened before. Hardly. Share that framework with your boss - assuming they’re willing to listen, it’s a good starting point for a conversation about how to re-focus the company when you’re not the leader in the market.

Subscribe now

Share Gobbledy

Jazz Band

OK, today was a little heavier than usual - sometimes ya gotta take a little medicine with the sugar or something something something. So let’s finish on a note that has nothing at all to do with marketing, but it’s my newsletter (for you! everything is for you!) and here we go:

Were you in jazz band in high school? When you read the phrase “high school jazz band” what pops into your head? Is it, “Oh yes, the guy I wanted to take me to the prom in high school was in jazz band, and that’s how I knew he was amazing?” Hm.

I was in jazz band. And I know how people felt about us jazz band types, and I’ve definitely come to terms with that and now that I’m an adult, I realize that those stereotypes don’t really reflect on me inasmuch as they reflect on my wife (Gobbledy reader Susan B., mother of Gobbledy reader Scarlett B.) who chose to marry a guy who was in jazz band. So who’s the sad high school loser now?

(Deep breath)

Oh yes, jazz band.

I’m not sure any of us in jazz band actually knew what a jazz band was supposed to sound like (which is why we didn’t much sound like one).

But now I know…

I recently came across this clip of drummer-and-owner-of-the-worlds-worst-hairpiece Buddy Rich performing on Johnny Carson’s show back in 1974. I had no idea this is what we were supposed to be reaching for. As a friend of mine said, “they look like an accounting firm decided to start a band.” True. But also, they’re absolutely incredible, and Rich mentions at the end that the band had just gotten the extremely complex music that day and you can see from his jubilation at the end when he high-fives the band, that he - arguably the greatest drummer in the world - is amazed by how good these guys are.

Enjoy…

As always, thanks for reading to the end (it’s the best part). If you want to chat about marketing challenges you’re having, or how you were in high school jazz band but people went to the prom with you anyway, here’s my Calendly link - I really enjoy chatting with readers.

Also, telling people about this newsletter is easy:

Share Gobbledy

How’s it going? I know that lots of us are heading off for a long weekend, so I hope you enjoy a little time away from marketing stuff.

In the meantime, a short open letter:

Dear Gobbledeers,

Please keep sending me weird programmatic ad placements.

Thank you,

The Management

(Thanks to Gobbledy reader Miata E., who clearly loves parties on yachts in Panama).

Share

Subscribe now

How to Call Something…Something Else (Part 1)

If you’re selling a luxury product, you may not have the ability to mess around with pricing. You’re probably sitting in your office all day lamenting this fact - “Oh,” you may be saying to your teammates, “do you know how easy it would be if we could just lower the price on these sweaters? Those doofuses over at Banana Republic have it easy! We have it, uh, not easy!”

Well, dear luxury marketers, I have discovered a hack for which you can thank me.

If you want to lower your price, but you do not want to encheapenate (tm) your brand, you just need to be careful about how you portray lowering the price.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a luxury real estate broker. Congrats - every luxury real estate broker I see online looks very happy and quite attractive. Like this:

I mean, that’s not AI but also sure it is? But it’s not. But like, obviously, it could be. Especially the open-shirted gentleman in the middle. And also the other open-shirted gentleman all the way on the left.

Anyway, let’s say you work for a luxury brokerage in New York City, and you are tasked with selling studio (?) apartments in a building that, wait for it, are priced at - you’re going to enjoy this - $1.695 million.

But imagine, for example, that you have scoured the city looking for buyers for a studio (?) apartment (again, that is an apartment with zero bedrooms) that costs $1,695,000 and you have simply struck out. No matter what you do, you find nobody who would like to exchange one million six hundred and ninety five thousand dollars and no cents for a 0-bedroom apartment.

It’s tough out there.

Certainly, though, you know that if you could just cut the price, folks will flock to your beautiful apartment building in a part of midtown you couldn’t pay me $1.695 million to live in.

Yet, you can’t cut the price, because cutting the price is what non-open-collared real estate brokers in, I don’t know, Akron do if they want to move the property. You are not that broker.

However, you are a luxury broker who reads this newsletter, so you know that there must be a way to let people know that you have reduced the price without saying that you have reduced the price. It’s quite a pickle, I know.

Which is why I wanted to share that this is the most spectacular way to describe a price cut that I’ve ever seen:

“FRESHLY PRICED!!!!”

How did I not come up with this???? How did someone else come up with this???? They’ve somehow discovered the secret hack that nobody wants you to know for how a luxury brand can lower its prices. It can PRICE SOMETHING FRESHLY!

Every once in a while I’m so jealous of someone’s marketing abilities.

Subscribe now

Share

How to Call Something…Something Else (Part 2)

I’ve mentioned here before that I’ve started (and been unable to finish) a Gobbledy-inspired book about marketing. Writing a book, I’ve learned, is very difficult.

Tho it doesn’t have to be! Right now I could upload 50 editions of this newsletter into Notebook LLM and - presto change-o - I’m pretty sure it would spit out a book-like series of words.

Of course (of course!) I would not do that.

Specifically, I would not do that because nobody has paid me a hefty advance to write a Gobbledy-inspired book about marketing.

If someone HAD paid me to write a Gobbledy-inspired book about marketing I can imagine a world where (like right now!) I am very busy with client work and writing a book is rather time-consuming and I would be tempted to dump 50 editions of this newsletter into Notebook LLM and let it go to town (“go to town” = “write the book for me.”)

I would be hesitant to do that, obviously, because I would have a crippling fear of being caught.

I would also have a crippling fear of having to come up with some apology once I am caught, and then having to do one of those influencer apology videos that starts with me solemnly saying, “hey guys…”

Except maybe I wouldn’t have to make an apology video at all. Maybe there’s a way I could just explain what happened without saying I had an AI tool write my book and my ass would be, as they say covered.

And that’s just what Steven Rosenbaum, the author of the book The Future of Truth did when he was caught using AI-generated quotes in his book (which must suggest that the future of truth is rather murky.) From the article:

“SYNTHETIC QUOTES!!!!!”

I certainly hope that Steven Rosenbaum, when he isn’t having AI tools creating synthetic quotes, is writing ad copy for luxury real estate companies, because “synthetic quotes” is the most amazing phrase I’ve heard since “freshly priced.”

It has to be the same person, right? There cannot be two geniuses working at that level at the same time. It would be like Lennon working in one part of Liverpool and McCartney working in a different part of Liverpool and them never meeting. This just can’t be.

I want Synthetic Quotes guy and Freshly Priced gal to get together. Let’s make this happen.

(Thanks to reader Stacey W. for that…)

How to Call Something…Something Else (Part 2)

I just wrote an obituary for Allbirds lamenting how they never understood their real value. Now, we have learned that “radical transparency” apparel company and-other-casualty-from-the-2010s-DTC-boom Everlane has sold out to, of course, “radical non-transparency” (tm) apparel company Shein.

It may be difficult to remember how novel Everlane’s “transparent” positioning was. When it first launched, it was part of a group of companies that required membership to make a purchase (this article from 2011 notes that Everlane is part of a group of highly personalized retail experience startups including, “JustFabulous, ShoeDazzle, BeachMint, BirchBox.”

(Two notes. First: Oops! Guess that model didn’t work. And second: How did every one of those companies end up with names where it’s two words squished together? And why did we think that was innovative?)

Everlane then morphed their positioning to one of “radical transparency” where they talked (either at length or ad nauseum) about their sourcing and their factories, and the importance of sustainability. And they did create a really interesting and innovative pricing page where they broke down what the product actually cost:

I worked at a clothing company at the time, and this information was a closely held trade secret. In a zillion years we wouldn’t have published this.

Except Everlane did.

They also came up with an innovative “pay sort of what you want” (not tm) gimmick on some sale items, where they gave you a choice of amounts to pay, and then told you which costs would be covered based on the amount you chose:

(If you hovered over the amount it would tell you what was covered by that price - in this case, $32 covered the cost of producing the item, but not shipping from the factory.)

Such an interesting idea from a messaging perspective. Everlane thought about “transparency” as a lane that they owned, and then expanded it to everything they did. And they understood that pricing should reflect that key message. Because pricing in software is generally opaque, companies don’t use it as one of the tools in their toolbox.

Which is a shame, because pricing is a powerful way to support your messaging (beyond “we’re the least expensive.”). I assumed when Everlane rolled this out that many others would follow suit. They did not, and I’ll add it to the giant list of things I’ve been wrong about.

What I was not wrong about was something I said all the time when I was at Hilfiger and direct-to-consumer apparel companies were a big deal: there’s no way these companies can be profitable. We knew their product costs, we knew their acquisition costs (because we also paid acquisition costs) and it was obvious that this model was a failure.

So perhaps it wasn’t a surprise when Everlane sold out to a company that stands for literally the opposite of everything it stood for. Or maybe they were radically transparent to the very end - sometimes you gotta pay back the investors.

But still, it made me a little sad.

Share

Subscribe now

As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.

The Gobbledy team is on vacation for the long weekend, so we’ll be back in 2 weeks with something new (eh, we’ll probably send something out next week. I don’t want you to miss us too much). Have a great holiday weekend!

How’s it going? Did you ever get something you wished for, then, well, not regretted it exactly, but came to realize that maybe you didn’t really think through the repercussions of the thing you wanted?

I know that makes no sense. What I’m saying is that you know how every week I say something like, “Hey, if you want some help with your messaging and positioning, let me know.” Well, some people let me know, and now I’m doing work, and that work is preventing me from putting the time I’d like into this newsletter this week. Tl;dr: I wanted you to hire me, then you did, and now I am too busy to write Gobbledy this week.

Fret not - I’ve written so-god-damned-much Gobbledy over the years that many of you haven’t even read a significant chunk of them. Your loss!

Except this week - enjoy a Gobbledy Classic (tm) about a great messaging equation…

Subscribe now

Share Gobbledy

The One Messaging Equation That Always Works

I have been listening to an amazing podcast called A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, which has a title that (I guess) is self explanatory. The podcast is remarkable for a number of reasons, not least of which the unbelievable amount of detail that Andrew Hickey, the host, puts into each episode (note: if a 4-part, 7-hour episode on a Beach Boys¹ song sounds terrible, then this podcast is not for you).

Hickey’s thesis about rock and roll is that nothing in rock and roll is every truly new. Everything in rock either rests on the foundation of music that came before it, or builds on adaptations to that music. Some day if we ever meet in person, I’m happy to bore you with more about this podcast.

“Nothing is ever truly new” is also a very effective messaging strategy if you work for a technology company. This may be counter-intuitive, as technology is all about advancements. But how we TALK about new technology is different…

A while back we discussed a company called Copy.ai that was trying to use the Play Bigger strategy of creating a brand new category, rather than rooting their product as an advancement of something that exists. My issue with this is that it leads to a bunch of gobbledy:



Copy.ai calls itself a “GTM AI Platform” (Oh, you’re wondering, “What’s a GTM AI Platform?” I’m glad you asked. Copy.ai, according to their website - and following the “Play Bigger” gobbledy-infused category creation playbook [PBGICCP] - says that a GTM AI Platform exists to “Infuse AI across your go-to-market engine with a single platform — not dozens of copilots and point solutions. Codify best practices, unify data, connect teams, and eliminate GTM bloat. Power all key GTM use cases and realize the full value of AI.” There ya go. You’re welcome, and I’m sorry.)

(I wasn’t planning on going off on a tangent here about Copy.ai, but their website is, even in an age where no AI-first company is able to competently explain what they do on their website, a dadaist mishmosh of gobbledy and the 1970s New York City Subway map:)

I believe the best messaging approach for a new technology is to root it in what already exists, and explain why it’s better. I love this example I’ve shared from the movie Blackberry:



There’s a scene in the movie where one of the founders is speaking with a skeptical exec from Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) about the Blackberry:

Bell Atlantic Guy: “Well, it’s definitely the world’s largest pager.”

Blackberry Guy: “No, it’s actually the world’s smallest email terminal.”

Nobody would want the first thing (a bad version of something they already have), and (almost) everybody would want the second thing (a better version of something they already have).

One of the issues I’ve had with most messaging I’ve seen from AI-first companies is that typically the message is something like “A pager, but now with AI.” As if AI, itself, is the benefit. Which maybe would be the case if there were some limitations about which companies could offer AI. But nearly every company can add AI to their product, so saying you have AI really explains nothing about it.

So I wanted to share an ancient example of how “It’s like this thing you like, but better in these specific ways” can serve as a template for companies struggling to talk about why people should care that their product now contains AI.

The example starts with a construction that any company can use to explain the benefit of your product:

“What if you had an X, but it could also Y”

Behold, an amazing ad for the 1963 Ford Econoline Van:

I can’t, in good conscience, bore you with both a history of the Beach Boys and a history of transport vans in the same newsletter, so just know that vans were a new-ish product in the United States in 1963.

(OK fine…Volkswagen created the van in the early 1950s as a kind of enclosed pickup truck to transport items. The passenger van - the one where you should not go a-knockin’ if it is a-rockin’ - didn’t come along until the early 1970s when Dodge introduced one).

So people who were buying a van in 1963 were likely replacing a pickup truck. Which is why it would make sense to say, “what if you had a pickup, but it could also…have better road visibility, carry more cargo, and keep that cargo secure…”

We often hear that software messaging shouldn’t focus on the functionality - it should only focus on the benefits.

But one of the things this ad does well is to focus on the functionality (we moved the cab forward) as a way to talk about the benefit (now you can see the road better). Talking about functionality isn’t the problem, not talking about WHY the functionality exists is the problem.

They continue with that structure in the smaller copy toward the bottom: “Shorter wheelbase means greater maneuverability!” Every feature they mention includes a benefit of having that feature.

I know that nobody ever does my fun (“fun”) exercises, but it would be fun (“fun”) to get your team together and take the Ford Econoline Van ad and fill it in for your product…(and keep those images, so it’ll be extra confusing…)

Share

If Price Is a Benefit, Tell People

I’ve mentioned Joanna Wiebe here a few times because she has amazing insight into great copywriting. She just put out a short video breaking down the copy on the website of a company called Icon (it’s 3 minutes - you should watch it).

I hadn’t heard of Icon, but it’s some sort of AI ad-creation thingy. Joanna goes through the whole website, but there was something at the top of the homepage that I thought was fascinating that I wanted to share:

“Get 10 products for just $399/month, replaces $2k-$30k/month”

I never, ever see pricing on software homepages, even if pricing is a differentiator.

Arizona iced tea puts “Great Buy 99 cents” on their cans because 99 cents² is the differentiator. It would be silly not to mention THEIR KEY SELLING POINT on the can at the point of sale, no?

For reasons I can’t quite understand, even if price IS a differentiator for a software product, it’s rarely marketed as a differentiator. And when it IS marketed as a differentiator, it’s done more to signal that a lower price would be for a smaller business (ie, it’s a signal that the product is for a small business, not an enterprise).

But if your product’s price represents significant value versus not using it, putting it at the top of the homepage would make a ton of sense.

Excellent work, Icon.

And the CA[I]t’s in the Cradle and the Silver Spoon…

Speaking of AI (?), there’s so much AI can do! Let’s see, we just talked about how you can create a bunch more ads, so that’s good. People are constantly posting about how it’s making them more efficient (though I never know what they’re doing with their new-found time…I guess they’re using it to find new AI tools to help them save time?). It can write things, which is helpful if you don’t want to write things. It can call your parents when you’re too lazy to call your parents. It can make hundreds of thousands of weird images of Trump saving orphans that you can then use to flood Facebook and make money. It can…

- Wait. Hol’ up. What was that other thing? About your parents?

What thing? About using it to create Trump-saving-orphans?

- No, about your parents.

Yeah, if you’re too busy or too lazy or can’t stand listening to them talk about what they did all day and then ask you what you did all day, you can have AI do it for you.

- You’re making that up.

I’m not making that up. Take a look.

But I mean, you COULD call your parents every day. You sorta just don’t want to?

This is a really interesting messaging challenge - inTouch has created an AI tool that will call up your parents and listen to them talk so you don’t have to do it. If you’re inTouch (the dystopian, I mean, innovative company that came up with this), you have a few ways to position this:

• Maybe you have a parent who has significant mental challenges, and just having any conversation is valuable, and this tool can do that. (“Stimulate the mind”)

• You have no interest in talking to your parents, but you feel guilty about that, but now you don’t have to feel guilty about it because this thing is calling your parents. (“Support emotional well-being”)

• You’re in the Peace Corps and you don’t have a phone, and this can solve that problem. (“Reassure and connect you.”)

• You really, really just don’t want to talk to them.

The people at inTouch - a product that is literally what Harry Chapin’s Cat’s in the Cradle is all about - have decided they are going to just throw all of those things out there and see what resonates.

The one that I enjoyed the most was this testimonial on their website:

My mom will literally not shut the f- up about “the old days” and I teach pilates, like, 3 times a week and absolutely do not have the time to listen to that crap about the old country. And now that I never have to talk to her, I feel more connected than ever!

I’m not sure why that made me so sad…

Share

Thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.

Oh, if your company would like to reach thousands and thousands of marketing folks, we should talk about advertising here. I’m at jared@sagelett.com.

And if you want to chat about not calling your parents or the Beach Boys, here’s my Calendly link. It’s free!

How’s it going? Can I just mention a quick non-marketing thing up front? I had to call the IRS about something (I’m probably not going to prison! Awesome!), and they:

a) picked up in a reasonable amount of time; and

b) were super helpful.

And speaking of people everyone hated but maybe you grudgingly appreciate under the right circumstances, today we’re going to talk about:

a) A great conference booth

b) Spirit Airlines

Let’s jump in!

Subscribe now

Share

…The Scuppered Was Bare

Do we talk quite a bit about the “money word” in marketing copy? Well yes, apparently, based on how many times “money word” came up when I searched past issues of Gobbledy.

Do I think we talk too often about money words? No I do not.

Which is why I’m going to share my favorite conference booth money word marketing copy (CBMWMC).

If you’ve ever worked on writing the copy for your booth (or the sign that stands next to your booth), you’ve likedly banged your head against a wall during that project as every single person in the company asked you to add something to the copy that’s on the booth.

Thank you, you might say to that person, I appreciate the input, but the copy on the booth should just make someone want to stop and chat and learn more. It should not make them take out their glasses and take notes about every conceivable thing your product does that’s listed on the sign.

Now, I actually completely understand the instinct to write every single thing the product does on the sign.

But allow me to ask you:

a) Are you a marketing person?

b) Have you ever worked a conference booth?

c) Did you wonder which felony you committed that would have led to such a punishment as standing at a booth in a Sheraton in Orlando for 12 hours a day for 3 straight days?

I know that’s how I have felt standing at a booth.

But the other overwhelming feeling I’ve had is this:

I’m standing there. In the booth. The conference session lets out and people start pouring into the expo hall where the booth is located.

And I’m hoping. No, I’m praying. I’m silently begging. Please, please, please do not come by and asking me what Fluzzio.ai does.

Please.

If you have ever had to work a booth, and someone has come up to you - which, mind you, is literally - literally! - the reason you have a booth there in the first place - and asked you what your company does, you may understand that feeling of your heart stopping and wanting to vomit slightly.

I know that salespeople get some level of enjoyment (?) or satisfaction (?) or anticipation (??) out of having this conversation. And they’re good at it - “we’re an X thingy for Y people…tell me a bit about your business so I can give you a better idea of how we work with companies like yours and also here’s a pair of socks with our logo and a ticket to come to our happy hour.”

But that is not ever how I felt in the booth.

I felt like, “if I just click my heels 3 times, I will become invisible, and then nobody will ask me anything, and I will not have to have a conversation with them.”

Well, that’s another reason why your booth copy is so dense - because marketing people like me are hoping that the copy just answers every question that the person walking by in the Sheraton Orlando South has so they do not have to ask you anything.

Am I the only one who has felt this?

Like I can picture standing there, and someone walks by, and then sorta catch my eye, and obviously my immediate thought is, “aw, they think I’m cute” and then I realize they absolutely do not think I’m cute, they think I’m standing here representing this company and that they may want to learn more about this company and I’m going to have to be the person to teach them a bit more about the company.

But it’s that moment where they catch my eye, and I’m looking at them, and I’m silently begging them to continue walking past the booth, that I can picture in my head.

Also, the silent begging never works.

This should not prevent you from having better signage. Marketer anxiety is a poor excuse for unclear messaging (tm).

One way to add clarity to your messaging, of course, is to add what we call a “money word” - a word that jumps out at the reader and stops them in their tracks and gets them to want to learn more, so you don’t have to write a small treatise on your booth.

I was at an event last week, and this British ERP company called Khaos Control was there and they had this sign, which stopped me in my tracks:

SCUPPERED!!!

Oh man. Oh man oh man. I’m going to need a moment. I’ll be right back.

[ ]

OK, I’m back.

When I said before that a great money word should stop you in your tracks, I meant that figuratively. In this case, it worked literally. I stopped walking and asked them what “scuppered” meant. And the gentleman with whom I chatted was a little confused, because it is a Britishism that every British person knows means “screwed up.” And while everyone from England knows that, this person originally from NEW England did not.

But I did know that it made me want to know more. And if I may put on my junior-year-in-college-English-major-guy hat, I also love the alliteration of “Sick” “Scuppered” and “SKU.”

And they picked one differentiator - they’re an ERP “with unlimited SKUs.”

I’m sure they do more than that, but the sign is there to get you to have a conversation, not answer every question. And it worked, because I then asked them what Khaos Control does.

I know I have said this a few times - but if you can get your team together and look at your homepage (or conference booth) and change just ONE word to be the money word, what would it be? And would it come anywhere close to being as good as “Scuppered”? Good luck.

Subscribe now

Share

Spirit Pun Goes Here (Wrote Every Headline Writer This Week)

This week you will read more takes than you could possibly want about the demise of Spirit Airlines. Which is, of course, why I will give you one more take, from a marketing perspective.

(If you are, like me, an airline nerd, I recommend reading Brett Snyder’s post-mortem, which is the best of the “what happened here” wrap ups that I’ve read. Tl;dr: Covid drove up their costs, competitors introduced Basic Economy, and they could not shrink their way to profitability. Merging with JetBlue would not have changed the outcome. I’m happy to discuss this in the comments if people want.)

First, I want to share one Spirit Airlines story:

Years ago my family was flying to Florida on Spirit Airlines and as people are boarding, one of the pilots walks out of the cockpit and down the aisle. The plane had been cleaned, but not well.

And one of the things about the Spirit planes was that, at least in NYC, they would fly back and forth to Florida. Which means there are often many, many children on these planes.

And because Americans are complete animals, they give their children goldfish and teddy grahams, which the children then drop on the ground, and the parents do not pick them up.

When the pilot walked past us, he saw on the floor a pile of child snack detritus and he calls over a gate agent, who was helping to board the plane. He says to her, “Under no circumstances will I fly a dirty plane.”

Now, at the time I thought to myself, “what difference does it make whether there are crumbs on the floor of the plane?” And then I thought, “Wait, will we crash if there are crumbs on the floor of the plane?”

But I’ve thought a bunch about that moment, and longtime Gobbledy readers may remember an early issue titled, “The Subtle Art of Giving a Shit,” where I argued that caring about quality matters more than anything else when it comes to marketing (this has taken on a whole new meaning with AI, where quantity is so easy to produce, but quality has somehow become even more difficult.)

The pilot just gave a shit. And it made me think about the importance of giving a shit at work.

As I mentioned, Spirit Airlines did not go out of business because of a marketing problem, but I believe that they missed the opportunity to communicate the value they provided in the same way that many software companies struggle to communicate the value they provide.

Spirit’s marketing message was primarily about how they have low fares.

Well, that was their message when they weren’t talking about Anthony Weiner’s demise:

Or, uh, MILFs:

Or, um, this:

(I was thinking about copywrtier who crafted, “We’ve been waiting to hit 69 planes for years. It’s our favorite number - ever since we were twelve and found that magazine under our brother’s bed.” I’m sure they were cracking themselves up. That person works somewhere else now. Where? Did the person who wrote “a cockpit that’s in your face” move on to a copywriting job at, I dunno, Eileen Fisher where they are now writing, “The grey tunic is the perfect wrap whether you’re heading to your mahjong game or or to play canasta. Or both! A comforting hug that every unmarried aunt will love!” What job does that person have now????)

Anyway, so when they weren’t talking about THOSE things, they were talking about low fares.

But what stuck out to me in the online discourse around Spirit is that people didn’t talk about the cheap fares. They talked about how it allowed them to see family that they otherwise wouldn’t have seen. They talked about being a divorced dad and being able to see his kids more often. They talked about being able to have a long distance relationship. They probably talked about having a long distance relationship with a dad who wasn’t yet divorced but is now divorced because of that relationship.

Spirit wasn’t about cheap tickets. It was about making travel possible.

Creating messaging about that would not have saved the airline. They had structural challenges in the industry that were probably unfixable.

But it’s a great lesson for those of us in software, where most of the time - when we’re not having MILF sales, of course - we’re very focused on what we’re selling (the category, some technical description of how what we’re doing is somewhat different than one of our competitors) rather than the benefit a customer will get from buying the product.

And if you’re in a category where everyone is talking about HOW, then you can actually differentiate on the benefit by showing that you understand - in detail - the benefits of using your product.

I’ve been sharing this old IBM typewriter ad in my messaging cohorts as a wonderful example of how showing an understanding of the minute details of how someone would benefit from your product can help you differentiate in a sea of sameness:

It reads:

[Before the IBM electric, much of the day was] “spent on peripheral matters that have always been a necessary but unproductive part of the typing process. Like erasing errors. Backspacing to put in an underscore. Counting characters in order to center a line…Such tasks require little talent. In fact, they are a costly and frustrating waste of talent…More of the routine work of typing is now done by the typewriter, allowing the secretary to exercise skill and judgment…”

I love the detail of how this fancy new typewriter would benefit someone - it eliminates tasks like “erasing errors” and “backspacing to put in an underscore” and “counting characters in order to center a line.”

Sure, you can always say that your product makes someone “more productive.” But doesn’t it say so much more when you note that it will eliminate “counting characters in order to center a line?”

For your product - what is your equivalent of “counting characters in order to center a line?”

Oh Spirit - I’ll really miss your $25 fares to Detroit.

Subscribe now

Share Gobbledy

As always, thanks for reading to the end. It’s the best part.

P.S. If you have not been reading about the JP Morgan sexual harassment lawsuit, I have a little quiz to find out if you should:

Question 1: Did you find that Spirit ad up above about MILFs to be amusing?

If so, you will probably enjoy this article.

How’s it going?

I had a little debate with myself earlier this week, and I’d like your input:

I have a lot of work right now. That’s great! Having work is great. In fact, here’s a little secret. Can I tell you a little secret? I’m going to tell you a little secret:

This newsletter - this very newsletter - was invented (by me) as a way to get projects sent my way. Yes, yes. Young guys in the years 1956-2026 started rock and roll bands as a way to meet ladies. Old guys in the years 2021-2026 started newsletters to get work projects.

Sometimes this newsletter is more successful in that regard (regard = projects) than other times, but right now: success.

What that means is - if you want to hire me, start thinking about a project in July or August, because that’s when I’ll be available to help you re-do your homepage so it actually makes sense.

But it also means that this week I have not been able to allot my normally allotted time to writing Gobbledy.

So, I had 2 options:

1. I could run a Gobbledy Classic (tm), which is always great. Obviously. I mean, it’s a classic. But I always sorta feel bad doing that outside of holiday weeks. Or

2. Send you a fresh, new Gobbledy, but maybe a little less fleshed out.

I’m going with number 2, which is to say, here are a few things I was thinking about that I normally would have turned into a coherent (and hilarious!) 1,800 words, but instead you’re getting Gobbledy Raw, which sounds like it should require age verification in 32 states, but does not.

Thanks for your flexibility.

Subscribe now

Share Gobbledy

An Actual Clear Bit of Advertising

One of the challenges I hear from companies frequently is that it’s difficult for them to explain in their marketing materials who, exactly, their product is for.

Years ago I shared what I thought was the best example of how to handle this problem.

Wang, a company that made word processors, had a challenge: they had a new product (a word processor) that was, back in the early 1980s, a better version of a typewriter.

Now, virtually every office had a typewriter, so the addressable market was large. That is good. But they couldn’t just go out and say, “every company on earth needs one of these things right now” because that type of hyperbole wouldn’t be invented until ChatGPT was released.

So they did something that seems super obvious but was quite brilliant:

They put out an ad that spelled out exactly what types of companies need a word processor. In fact, that was the headline: “3 types of companies that don’t realize how much they need a Wang Word Processor”:

Obvious and really smart.

So bravo to email marketing company ActiveCampaign for this ad they’re running, which explains exactly who should buy their product:

If there were a Gobbledy Awards, I would have an award for “Clearest Messaging of the Year” and this would be nominated. Except I won’t have that because, y’know, laziness, etc. But if I did, I definitely would nominate this - email marketing is a crowded space. This is such a smart way to communicate who should buy their product.

Share Gobbledy

A(i)s You Like It…

If you are not following the trial of Elon Musk suing OpenAI, you are missing out. Well, sort of. You are missing out if you would like to hear two people who think they are God’s gift to humanity argue in public over which one of them is actually God’s gift to humanity.

Musk and Sam Altman have a very public beef going back to the formation of OpenAI, which has morphed into the tech equivalent of the beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Except both of these guys are Drake.

Anyway, one of the filings in the case - which is mentioned in roughly every article about it - says that “the perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions,” which has led nearly every article to liken this drama to a Shakespearean play.

And I always think to myself, The Two Douchebags of Verona.

Subscribe now

Marital Workflows

New York Magazine has a great piece this week where the author sets up AI tool OpenClaw and then laments that he can’t figure out anything to build. He talks about how people encourage him to use OpenClaw to automate his personal workflows and then realizes he doesn’t have any personal workflows that need automating.

I know I let you in on a little secret earlier, but can I let you in on another little secret?

I also don’t have any workflows. I don’t really have any workflows at work, and I certainly don’t have any workflows in my non-work.

And if I did have workflows in my personal life that needed “an AI chief of staff” to do them, then, uh, what would I be doing?

And even if you said to me, “But you’ll have your time freed up to do more of the things you like doing!”

But mostly I like hanging out with my wife and friends (and kids when they’re home - which they will be soon!). And if I didn’t do the mundane stuff, literally what would my wife and I talk about?

I mean, literally. Are you married? Are you talking to your spouse about something other than:

• How the call with the insurance company unfolded

• How the call with the credit card company unfolded

• Who was supposed to get the doctor’s appointment scheduled

• Whether one of us took the composting downstairs and, during that errand, did we run into anyone in the basement who was also dropping off their composting

• When we were dropping the composting in the basement did we remember to sign up for the washing machines in the laundry room because our building is still acting like it is March 28, 2020, and forcing everyone to sign up for washer and dryers even though - as far as I can tell, and despite what it currently says on the electronic signage that sits on New York City police cars - we no longer have to stay 6 feet apart to keep us all safe

• Did we pick up the yogurt, because we’re out

• Did we drop that one return off at UPS and the other at Whole Foods and the other at the FedEx place and the other at the post office and did we remember which QR code went with which of those packages and also that the FedEx place across the street requires a label on the box and if you have a QR code for FedEx you have to go down to the FedEx place on 95th Street

So even if OpenClaw could do all of those things, do I even WANT to know what my wife and I would be left talking about?

An Open Letter to Glean

Dear Glean,

This diagram on your homepage does not scream “centralized” nor “quickly:”

Also, Glean, I want to give you credit where it is due for putting a stake in the ground and declaring:

Good. Clear value - though I would suggest they say “saves at least 80 hours per user” rather than “up to,” because “up to” feels weird. Does it mean 1 person saved 110 hours? Does it mean there is literally no possible way to save more than 110 hours per user per year?

But then right below that you have this testimonial:

“Glean saves 2-3 hours of time a week, but I know it’s saving me a lot more time than that…”

3 hours a week times 52 weeks a year equals 156 hours. That is more than the 110 hours mentioned above it.

“But I know it’s saving me a lot more time than that…”

Which is fine, but why did Glean tout “110 hours” if that’s not the right number of hours?

And yes, I’m being petty and annoying. But, as we’ve been saying here since day 1, numbers can be powerful when repeated. If it saves 110 hours, then say it saves a 110 hours. Don’t say it saves 110 hours, but it also saves 2-3 hours a week and also it saves more than that (and that doesn’t count where it says it saves 36 hours of onboarding, which may or may not be included in the 110 hours, since that only happens once and not every year).

I’ve told the story before of Geico’s tagline “15 minutes will save you 15% on your car insurance.” In short, they found that the phone call actually took 8 minutes, but when they asked potential customers about the tagline, nobody believed that it only took 8 minutes. So they just decided 15 minutes sounded fair. And the actual savings was 18%, but they thought 18% sounded weird, so they just lowered it to 15% to have the parallel with the 15 minutes.

Geico thought about owning “15” for marketing purposes, and they never undermined that by saying “you might save 17% and it could just take 11 minutes.” They own “15.”

Glean - and all of the rest of you software companies - could own a number (110 hours!) if only you didn’t feel the need to undermine it.

Subscribe now

As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.

P.S. I know that nowadays when we think about the President of the United States, we have very specific things we think. Roughly 42% of us think one set of things, while 51% of us think something else, and yet 7% aren’t really sure what to think (????)

But put those things aside - try to remember in the beforetimes what a PoTUS spent his time doing. Probably stuff like speaking to leaders of other countries and members of Congress.

I’m sure that’s what Lyndon Johnson did. But Lyndon Johnson also liked to purchase his own pants (Gobbledy reader and frequent commenter and reader of all of Robert Caro’s biographies of LBJ already knew that).

And in this incredible and real (yet incredible) recording, Johnson calls up member of the Haggar family (of Haggar pants fame) and tells him that he would like to order more pants. Then he explains some specific adjustments he would like to make about the pants and - either you know this story and are already chuckling to yourself or you do not and also do not care - one of those adjustments is to make the area “in the crotch where your nuts hang…it’s always a little too tight.”

So, with that intro - here’s the recording:

We’ve wrapped up our final Gobbledy Messaging Cohort for now - it’s been so much fun working through everyone’s messaging challenges. I’m absolutely swamped with client work (that’s a good thing!) so it’ll be another couple of months til we can hold our next cohort. But if you’re interested, fill out this quick form and I’ll make sure to tell you when the next group meets.

Today we’ve got:

• Headlines

• All press is good press, except when it’s not

• A copywriting legend

Share

Subscribe now

Touching Headlines

Maybe we should start with something a little out of our normal gobbledy just to mix things up. A marriage has got to stay fresh somehow, no?

And not to sound like a 1990s Jay Leno bit, but I did want to start by sharing a couple of random headlines:

First, it’s rare to read a headline that is true both as written, and as the opposite as it’s written:

Also he thought he was also touchable until he’s wasn’t.

And last, I really thought we’d gotten past the “I hope my programmatic ad doesn’t end up next to some upsetting content” part of digital marketing. But, nope!

Really doesn’t align with Princess Cruises’ “Love Boat” positioning. (Though kind of aligns with what I imagine Carnival’s positioning to be.)

Maybe - Just Maybe - Not All Press Is Good Press

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a tech startup, must be in want of an article in the New York Times.

I’ve had my share (and quite possibly, your share) of marketing conversations with tech founders, and when I ask them what they think marketing success looks like, they inevitably mention that it would be absolutely amazing if the NY Times or Wall Street Journal wrote an article about them.

Now, my normal response to this was either:

a) Sure, let’s pay a PR firm $18,000 a month and cross our fingers; or

b) Whoa, sloowwwwww down there Mr. Startup Guy. Let’s chat for a moment:

Guy: OK.

Me: What do you think the Times should write about?

Guy: They should write about us.

Me: Well, yes. But what should they write?

Guy: That we’re solving the problem of how to buy mittens online using AI.

Me: Have you actually ever read a newspaper?

Guy: What’s a newspaper?

And….scene!

The problem usually is that there’s no hook for the reporter. And with no hook, there’s no story.

But what if you DID have a hook? Well, then now we’re talking!

Nowadays, the hook should probably be about AI. You may or may not have noticed, but this is a topic oft-discussed in today’s newspapers. Really.

Hm, but there are an awful lot of stories about AI. Why here’s one in the NY Times about OpenAI…they must be thrilled. Let’s see skim through it…Florida….investigation into OpenAI…murders at Florida State University.

Oh, well see - that’s not good. As much as you want a story about your company in the Times, you definitely don’t want the story about you to include the words, “The company said it’s not responsible for the killings.”

OK, but there are other hooks. You may remember that - speaking of OpenAI! - its founder said that he bet his friends that there will soon be a 1-person company worth $1 billion because they’re using lots of AI tools (and - just to be clear - not using any of them to commit atrocities at any state universities).

(Incidentally - the easiest way for him to win this bet would be for Sam Altman to take $1 billion of his own dollars and say, “I have a company and it now has $1 billion in cash in the bank. If anyone would like to buy it, you will get the name and $1 billion in cash. The cost is $1 billion.” He’d win the bet!)

Anyway, the 1-person $1 billion company is a good hook! If you happen to be the 1 person working in the company that’s worth $1 billion, you should definitely let the NY Times know, because I’m sure that although they’re dripping in AI-related pitch slop like they’re Carrie at the prom, they would be somewhat intrigued by your pitch.

So you would call up the Times and say, “Hi, you may remember that whole thing about the 1-person $1 billion startup. Well, good news, I’m your guy, because I’ve got a $1 billion startup and also I’m the only guy.”

While I cannot guarantee you’ll get a story out of this, I can tell you that they will asking you some follow up questions. One of those follow up questions will be, “Thanks for calling. May I ask what the company does?”

Here’s where it gets tricky.

If I were running a 1-man $1 billion rare peacock smuggling operation, regardless of my desire for publicity, I may determine that getting a story published in a newspaper with significant readership may cause scrutiny of my avian piracy business, which, in turn, might cause me to no longer have an avian piracy business. That would be bad.

So maybe I’d say, “I’m in the import-export business,” and then I would hang up quickly.

But what if you were running an online business of some sort? Maybe you’re in that business so deeply that you don’t recognize that some of the aspects of that business may be construed by more priggish readers as, perhaps, unsavory.

That absolutely should NOT stop you from having the conversation with the reporter. Why the hell should YOU care what those readers think about your business? Let them go out and start a 1-person $1 billion business and show that OpenAI guy that he’s right.

Perfect. So you chat with the reporter:

Reporter: “Thanks for agreeing to talk. Tell me a bit about this business of yours.”

You: “I’m so excited that you want to chat about my business, and I will confirm for you that my business is a $1 billion 1-person business but also I’m a guy who’s on the up-and-up so let me clarify something up front and that something is that sometimes my brother also helps me with this business, so while it is a 1-person $1 billion business, and I am the only full-time employee of this business, my brother sometimes helps.”

Reporter: “Well, I appreciate you being up front about that. Could you tell me a bit about what this business does.”

You: “I’m so glad you asked that. My business is in the health care field.”

Reporter: “I’m going to need a little more than that.”

You: “Oh, I’m happy to give more detail…”

Anyway, the founder of a healthcare startup called Medvi did, in fact, speak with a reporter from the Times about his 1-person (part-time brother excluded) $1 billion company which either, depending on how you want to look at it:

a) was basically a lead gen engine for telehealth doctors who will prescribe GLP-1s; or

b) was a guy using fraudulent and likely illegal tactics, including creating hundreds of fake Facebook profiles for doctors that didn’t exist, and making up testimonials and so forth, to drive leads to telehealth doctors.

Now, you may ask how I know this, and the answer is quite simple: he told the reporter all of this.

In like the 91st paragraph it mentions that their website was using fake before and after photos, and fake doctors, as well as logos of publications that did not actually recommend the company. Oops!

But the tone of the article is positive - like, look at what one person can do, if they just have a dream, work hard, ignore roughly every single law that’s ever been in place to stop fraudulent advertising, and then use AI.

The best part, though, is that at the end of the article, after it mentions that the founder has donated money to a cat rescue organization, it includes this incredible Editor’s Note:

After this article was published, many readers noted that Medvi was facing legal and regulatory actions for its business practices. Our piece should have included that information to give readers a fuller picture of the scrutiny that the company was facing. We have updated the article to note a warning letter from the F.D.A. and a pending class action lawsuit accusing Medvi of violating California’s anti-spam law.

“Many readers noted”

I always like to offer a little marketing strategy, and my advice here is - if you are running a $1 billion fraud, regardless of the number of employees you have, do not call up a reporter and tell them about it, even if you really, really want the New York Times to write about your company.

(If you’d like to read more about this ridiculous company, Techdirt has a really good piece on it.)

Share

It’s Not Just Crappy Writing. It’s an Affront to My Brain…

This article in The State of Brand talks about a Barron’s article (that I don’t have access to, and thus can’t share) that examined earnings releases from public companies to see if they could see any patterns.

One pattern they found was that in Q4 of 2025, 73 different public companies had financial statements or press releases that used the AI-powered “It’s not X. It’s Y” construction. 73! They note:

Progressive’s shareholder letter stated that its purpose was “not just a statement; it’s a guiding principle that shapes everything we do.” Citizens Financial Group framed growth in its private banking franchise as “not just a win for the private bank, it’s a win for the entire enterprise.” Synopsys insisted engineering AI’s future was “not just a software challenge, it’s a physics challenge.” Royal Caribbean called disruptive technology “not just a tool, it’s a capability.” A.O. Smith said sustainability was “not just a goal, it’s a core part of who we are.”

We all work in marketing, yes? We should be excited by this. If your competitors are using AI to suck all the life out of their writing (it’s not just writing. It’s a communications flywheel), that opens a gigantic door (it’s not just a door. it’s a portal) for you to use great writing to tell your story (not just your story. It’s your foundation.). They’ve handed you a gift (it’s not just a gift. It’s a present.). Open the gift.

In Memoriam

Gobbledy reader Feather H. mentioned to me recently that her uncle Fayette Hickox had recently passed away, and that I would have enjoyed knowing him. Fayette was a marketing copy writer, but also wrote for The Paris Review and Vanity Fair, which as far as I can tell would make him my writing hero. And, like me, he also worked for Tommy Hilfiger (before my time), and it’s quite disappointing our paths didn’t cross, considering his amazing career.

The NY Times wrote an article about him in 1998, specifically about how all the copy that goes on the labels of perfume have to go through a zillion rounds of approvals, and how that sucks the life out of them. Except for when Fayette - whom the author calls “the poet of the pump bottle” - wrote the labels: (apologies for the long quote, but I loved it):

With such constraints, it is no wonder that labels generally have all the spontaneity of a Pravda account of a Politburo session during the height of the Stalin trials. But occasionally a voice pierces the early gray light of the bathroom, and the somnambulant reader is suddenly brought up short by a turn of phrase.

For instance: ‘’Power cleanser excavates deep-down grime, debris and pollution. Flash-foam with enzymatic action purges pores and hair shafts of dirt and oil.’‘ The action verbs ‘’excavates’‘ and ‘’purges’‘ and the surprising choice of the noun ‘’debris’‘ set apart this label for Lab Series for Men Lift Off! Power Wash. A cleanser described as a piece of heavy machinery is enough to make you pick up the phone and ask to speak to the anonymous poet of the pump bottle.

When confronted, Fayette Hickox, executive director for copy advertising at Aramis (label writers are never called label writers), is evasive at first. The main objective, especially when talking to men, is to keep the message simple, he says. ‘’The last thing you want a person to think is that someone wrote this.’‘ But after some warming up, Hickox concedes that the Lift Off! copy may have been one of his finer moments, especially his choice of the verb excavating. ‘’It’s so dumb it’s brilliant. It makes you rethink without having to think too much.’‘

“Flash-foam with enzymatic action purges pores…”

All of us who have ever written marketing copy will have a shiver of recognition at “the last thing you want a person to think is that someone wrote this” while at the same time hoping that someone - anyone - appreciated that one word you quietly slipped into the copy just for yourself.

You’re not alone :)

Subscribe now

As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.

And though I don’t say it every week, I love hearing from readers. If you’re reading this in email, you can reply directly to it and I’ll get it. If not, I’m at jared@sagelett.com.

How’s it going? For those of you who work from home - is there anything sadder than lunch? I was just thinking I need to figure out what to make for lunch, and my options were dumping a can of tuna on top of a pre-packaged salad, or peanut butter and jelly. I know office workers complain about the slop bowl industrial complex (tm), but there are days where I’d be excited for that.

Anyway, today we’ve got:

• Adverbs used badly

• 2 homepages that are interesting

• Making it shitty

Subscribe now

Share Gobbledy

That’s Not How You Use That Word

One of the rules I gave myself for writing Gobbledy is “no punching down.” If there’s a small company, and they do something goofy, don’t make fun of them.

It is here that I will note that is a difficult rule to stick to.

I’m sharing this because the homepage headline I’m about to present comes from a company that isn’t huge - yet is big enough to know better - but I decided the company name wasn’t important and this more served as a warning.

Here’s the homepage headline and offending subhead:

Now, I have a very simple question:

What in the name of all that is right and holy is “RADICALLY” doing at the end of that?

What is it modifying?

And more importantly, WHY DIDN’T ANYONE CARE ENOUGH TO FIX IT????

Maintain radically? I don’t think that’s what they meant.

Radically building? No.

Radically cheaper? That doesn’t really make sense.

What is it modifying??????

Did you know that there are people who write copy for a living? Like, that’s their profession. They can come up with words that reflect the message that you want to send to your prospects and customers. It’s remarkable.

Now whoever wrote RADICALLY on that subhead may object to this criticism and say that they are, in fact, blameless. Perhaps it is the fault of the American public school system and their decision some years ago to move away from teaching the basics of grammar and instead focus on, uh, well I’m not quite sure.

For those of us who were under the age of, say, 12 in the 1970s, we didn’t have to rely on the public school system because we relied on television to teach us everything we needed.

In this case, if the RADICALLY author were 8 years old in 1979, they might have rolled out of bed on a Saturday morning and learned how to use an adverb from Schoolhouse Rock:

An entire generation learned grammar, math and civics from cartoons with catchy songs. Lolly Lolly Lolly, get your adverbs here…

(The song is even better than you remember, btw.)

Anyway, my point is - in a world where someone could write a 3 minute song that clearly explained how an adverb is used correctly, why would any company put up with poor grammar on its website?

Someone needs to change that subhead. Radically.

Share

The Future of Websites Is The Past (of Websites)

With that unpleasantness out of the way, I thought it would be fun (“fun”) this week to share a couple of homepages that are a good reminder that if you so choose, you don’t need to have the same basic homepage as everyone else.

Today’s first example comes from Forward Studios, an email marketing agency focused on B2B distributors.

Now, it certainly would’ve been easy enough for them to say, “We are an email agency for B2B distributors” as their homepage headline, because that would’ve been (radically) clear.

But instead they created a homepage that resembles an email inbox:

It’s clickable! The different email messages reinforce their key value props. And instead of a nav bar at the top they made the different email folders on the left the nav, and when you click on them, the “emails” in the inbox are telling a story about what they do.

Instead of “contact us” you can send them an email through the email tool they built on the website.

Seriously - go play with it. How brilliant is that?

Also, I’ve met the founder, Kyler Nixon, who is - in addition to being a genuinely nice human being - someone who cares deeply about email marketing. So when you go to his company’s website, it’s pretty clear that they care deeply about email marketing. They almost don’t even need the normal blah blah blah where they have to convince you that they have clients and care about email. If you really cared about email, you’d build a website that looks like an email inbox.

As we once talked about here, if you ever find yourself in a pickle where you need to sound like a smart person, you should say, apropos of nothing, “Well, as Marshall McLuhan said, ‘The medium is the message.’”

I would suggest that after you say that you keep speaking and pray to God that nobody asks you any follow ups, because let’s be honest - neither of us knows who Marshall McLuhan is, and we’re not exactly sure what that quote means, but we’re pretty certain Ezra Klein said it once or twice so obviously it sounds smart.

Anyway, NOW I know what means! The medium here is, in fact, the message. And the message is, “we love email so much that email is the best way for us to tell you that.” Or kinda something like that.

Kyle’s company is, I’m pretty sure, a team of maybe 2 people, and they were able to come up with something that brilliant. I’m sure your team of, uh, more than 2 can also spend some time brainstorming how your website medium could be your message. Let me know how that goes.

Subscribe now

Make It Shitty

Before we get to the second example, a little palate cleanser:

The Norwegian Consumer Council (a consumer protection agency in the country) created a fantastic video talking about the idea of enshittification (author Cory Doctorow’s concept that digital products will always get shittier as time goes on, because the profit motive drives increasingly worse customer experience).

The premise is that there is one guy whose job it is to “make things shitty.” He started as the guy who made one leg of your table slightly shorter than the others, then decided he could really scale his business by focusing on the internet. It’s smart and funny and such a great awareness campaign.

Watch it - you’ll be jealous.

Windows 2026

Great homepage #2: Posthog

Posthog is a developer tool of some sort (I’m not a developer, clearly, so I don’t even exactly understand what they do. I’m sure you could ask your favorite LLM, and your favorite LLM can tell you that you are absofuckinglutely brilliant for asking that question. But also, you really are.)

Lonnnnnnggggg time Gobbledy readers may remember Posthog from the Gobbledy Classic (tm) where I said they had the best pricing page I’ve ever seen:

“Please help our conversion rate.” Hahahahahahha.

That was from a couple of years ago, and Posthog has really leaned into the Windows 2000-esque marketing concept. Like really really. Their homepage today:

Yes, it’s an old Windows-style desktop. It has a homepage-type thing embedded into there so you can get the basic info. (Also the icon on the bottom left allows you to switch to a regular website mode).

But the whole thing is basically a joke aimed at their target market (the joke being, the juxtaposition between our AI-forward products and the desktop from 2000 creates an amusing bit of humor).

Yes, you can demonstrate that you are a tool for developers by saying, “we are a tool for developers” or having one of those blocks of code that developer-focused products put on their homepage.

But why not bond over something your target market can relate to? Again, the medium, as someone who was pretending to be smart once told me, is the message.

Low IQ Marketing Ideas

I should probably just mention this at the top of every issue - if I come across a bit of marketing where they’ve taken something bad about their product and turned it into a positive, I’m going to share it here. It is my favorite marketing strategy, and it isn’t used enough, and if you hate Gobbledy, please let me know why and I’ll absolutely put it on my landing page and also please don’t do that I have very, very thin skin and it will send me into a spiral from which I will not recover.

You may remember that when Business Insider wrote an article with the headline, “Everyone hates Workday. It creates mountains of busywork for everyone. So why does half of the Fortune 500 use it?” I suggested they put it on their homepage:

Of course, they did not.

You might think there would be limits to my love of this strategy, but as I am about to share, there are no limits.

It pains me to even mention this here, but you may remember that about a week ago, the person who is currently the President of the United States said some mean things about people who had previously supported him. I know, that does not narrow it down.

But one of those people sensed an opportunity to enrich his already enriched pockets, and embraced the President’s feedback about him and then used it to sell hats.

Behold:

Yeah, I know. It makes me sad, too.

As always, thanks for reading to the end. Whew, that ended on a depressing note.

P.S. I can’t end on a depressing note. Were you as enthralled by the moon mission as we were here at Gobbledy HQ? Watching it made me go down the moon landing rabbit hole, and I wanted to share this 60 Minutes interview with Neil Armstrong. The guy landed on the moon, so I feel like maybe he has some perspective that could be helpful.

And he does - it’s worth watching the whole thing, but in it Ed Bradley asks him how he balanced being an astronaut with the other parts of his life. His answer: “The one thing I regret was that my work required an enormous amount of my time and a lot of travel. And I didn’t get to spend the kind of time I would have liked with my family as they were growing up.”

He went to the moon. To. The. Moon. And he looks back and thinks, “I should’ve spent more time with my family.”

Well, if that isn’t a helpful way to think about your career, then I really don’t know what is. Enjoy the interview.

How’s it going?

First of all, my apologies to everyone who did not go to the University of Michigan but knows people who did. I’m sure the was an annoying week.

For the rest of us, go blue!

Today we’ve got:

• A solution to your PR troubles

• I give Grammarly’s CEO some credit (he probably doesn’t deserve)

• Which airline should you fly if you have a lot of girlfriends (1973 edition)

Share

Subscribe now

OpenAIiiiiiiii not again :(

I want to just clear something up:

I don’t like writing about OpenAI any more than you like reading about it. I have so much beef with them (for another time), yet - has another company had more success with using PR to get their story out there? They’ve done such incredible (also, literally, not credible) work massaging the press to tell their story they want it to be told. Just a few examples we’ve written about here:

• Publicizing that Meta was offering $100 million to poach OpenAI’s engineers, which served as a helluva recruiting tool (“come work with engineers who are so brilliant they’re worth $100 million”) and as a way to tell investors what a great investment OpenAI is, (“don’t forget to include the value of our employees when you write that term sheet.”)

• Their whole pitch about “you need to invest in us, because it’s the only way we’ll save humanity.”)

• Positioning the trillion dollars required to build OpenAI against the (more than a trillion dollars?) it takes to raise the global population of human babies.

But the vibe has shifted pretty quickly against OpenAI for a host of reasons, and now they find themselves in the position where every time their founder opens his mouth, bad things happen (most recent bad thing: a New Yorker article that, among many other things, shares the text from a memo written by a board member just prior to Sam Altman’s firing, and which includes this: “One of the memos, about Altman, begins with a list headed “Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of . . .” The first item is “Lying.””)

So to sum up the current state of affairs, OpenAI understands the power of the press to shape a narrative. It has used that power to tell its story in the way that it likes to tell its story (we started as a humble non-profit, because we believe that AI is too powerful to be left to the hands of for-profit companies, also we need a trillion dollars, etc), and also has now seen that same power turned against it (the company’s founder is a liar, it’s in cahoots with the government to allow for domestic spying and war stuff, and also Anthropic is kicking its butt).

As I like to ask here - what would you do in this situation?

Keep in mind - the company recently publicly railed against its habit of going on “side quests,” and in response to that, they made the (difficult?) decision to shut down their slop factory app (Sora) and also to abandon their dream of creating an “adult” chatbot that would’ve helped lonely men shift their attention away from sports betting and manosphere podcasts and toward chatting dirty with a robot.

One of the options would just be to go heads down and say to your team, “We’re just going to focus. This is the year of focus, and we’re going to focus on getting to core product to be incredible. We’re under enormous pressure from Anthropic, and clearly they’ve struck a nerve, and my goal is to make sure our product is so much better for our users that people will switch back to ChatGPT as quickly as they switched away from us when Claude Code was released. Given that, I’m going keep out of the press for a bit and just show that I’m working. Yes, maybe I give an interview or two about how I’m putting on headphones and setting aside coding (or whatever engineers do nowadays) hours 3 days a week to show that we are product builders. But that’s it - we are in focus mode.”

The other option would be to try to take complete control of the narrative, and by “complete” control, I mean buy a media company and use that to tell our story, “side quests” be damned.

And of course, that is exactly what they did. You may have seen that OpenAI is buying TBPN, a cross between CNBC and ESPN for the Silicon Valley set. If you haven’t seen their show, it’s a 3-hour daily livestream featuring boosterish interviews with Silicon Valley startup exec types.

I loved this bit from the press release:

“One thing that’s become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us. We’re not a typical company.”

I’ve never read a press release that says, “we’re just a regular bunch of joes, so we bought Fluzzio.ai to help keep us humble.”

Also, “the standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us” definitely means, “no matter what we say, the press is continuing to shit on us, so f- that.”

Imagine, if you will, that the New York Yankees, in addition to being the most hated team in sports, is also not a “typical company,” decided to buy ESPN. Maybe that would feel a little alarming. But also, genius?

Think about the company you work for - wouldn’t YOU want to own a publication that a bunch of people in your field already read? I bet you could finally find a home for all those press releases everyone ignores.

There’s been a bunch of “what are those idiots doing over there” articles about this acquisition (mostly because of the “side quest” thing), but owning your own media outlet is hardly a sidequest. And while almost everything OpenAI does kinda makes me a little nuts, this is brilliant.

Now, does anyone want to tell Grammarly to buy this newsletter? I’ll write whatever they want.

Share

Subscribe now

Stupid Autocorrect

Speaking of Grammarly…

You may have seen the story about how Grammarly, the writing uh helper (?) tool rolled out a feature that purported to help you update your writing so that it sounded like some well-known writers out there. It was a story because Grammarly neglected to get permission from those writers to use their names in the product.

Oops!

(Grammarly, help me re-write that sentence so it sounds like Homer Simpson).

D’oh!

If you don’t work at a tech company, you’re probably wondering how in the world this possibly could happen. Like if you work at Nike, it’s not like you would ever introduce a shoe and say, “we’re so excited to introduce the Caitlin Clark Air, it’s going to make you play basketball just like Caitlin Clark. Everyone buy these Caitlin Clarks” and then like 2 days later Caitlin Clark publishes an op-ed in the New York Times that says, “Nike never asked for permission to use my name.” That wouldn’t happen.

But in tech - hooey, break things and ask forgiveness and apologize and Section 230 and whatever.

Well, if you actually want to know how it happened, you should read this fascinating interview that the CEO of Grammarly’s parent company did with The Verge about this feature (the person who wrote the article also had their name used without permission.)

I absolutely give the CEO credit for sitting down and just taking the heat for this situation. Bravo.

But not too much bravo, because it’s actually quite incredible that they introduced this feature and that nobody said, “this is going to cause a whole bunch of problems.” And a chunk of the interview is the CEO trying to explain how it was even possible that the team shipped this product and that nobody called it out (basically, he said they thought they were offering a feature that could be helpful to people - we were thinking of our users!).

If you’re interested in crisis management and communications, the interview is a must-read. You can see how the CEO is trying to get his points across (this wasn’t an illegal product, it was a poor product. It’s not impersonating anyone because we didn’t pretend it was you.) Even in the face of the writer asking incredibly challenging questions (“If you use my likeness, how much should you have to pay me?”) he stuck to his guns.

A fascinating read…

Big 707 Set to Go…on a Date

Since the very first issue of Gobbledy, we have spoken about David Ogilvy’s maxim that “the positioning must be decided before the advertising is created.” Which is to say - if you don’t understand what your product is, who it’s for, and why it’s better than the competition, then you are going to have a very difficult time creating a message that resonates with your target buyer.

I’ve always thought to myself that if you understand your positioning, there’s almost no way you could come up with bad marketing.

But then I remembered a very early Gobbledy issue where we talked about Axe body spray and how their positioning was “scent for guys who think that women will have sex with them if they wear the stuff.” And then they put out this bit of subtle advertising:

Ok then.

I had forgotten about that until I was sent a 1973 ad from Delta Air Lines.

In the early 1970s, airlines knew that their customers were, frequently, men. And let’s think about some things that men liked back in the 1970s.

Based on my knowledge of Beach Boys songs, I can tell you that men liked girls. Not like in the Jeffrey Epstein way, but in the “I wish we all could be California” way.

And with this incredibly insightful piece of research, airline positioning was hatched. Specifically, many airlines adopted the same positioning: we’re the airline for men who like to ogle attractive women. (Very insightful.)

Braniff embraced this idea with a campaign they launched in 1966 called “The Air Strip” which was based on the fact that their stewardesses would change their uniforms during the flight. (Guys really don’t require much to get excited.). I’m pretty sure this ad wouldn’t pass muster today:

They also ran print ads like this one:

Both the commercial and the ad copy includes the line “even an air hostess should look like a girl.”

Southwest also thought their air hostesses should look like a girl. Specifically, a girl in hot pants and boots:

Not to be outdone, National Airlines ran a rather suggestive campaign called “Fly Me” featuring flight attendants and the really amazing copy, “we’re people, we’re airplanes, we’re an airline.”

Also, “I’m Jo. Fly me.”

Since we’re here, this is the TV commercial version of that:

So Delta had to do their positioning homework, and because the “let’s show guys pretty women” approach had been taken, they had to think long and hard. Hm, they thought to themselves, if guys want to fly an airline who have pretty stewardesses because they think that maybe - just maybe! - they’ll end up sleeping with one/some of them, aren’t there also guys who want to fly around the country and sleep with different women?

Brilliant!

If you want pretty stewardesses, by all means fly Southwest or National or Braniff. But if you’re someone who actually wants to sleep with pretty women, we’re your airline. Behold:

Also - and this is the part I don’t really even understand - this is actually an ad for 50% off military standby fares, for some reason? Maybe you got back from Vietnam, and you were previously stationed in Chicago, Miami, LA, San Francisco, NYC and Dallas and you left behind girlfriends near bases in all of those cities, but how - on your military salary - can you possibly afford to visit all of them? Good news - Delta’s got you covered.

(Thanks to Gobbledy reader Gary S., who wants me to let Wendy S. know that the only city he has a girl in is New York City.)

Subscribe now

Share Gobbledy

As always, thanks for reading to the end. It’s the best part.

And thank you so much to all of you who have become paid subscribers, simply because you want to support this project (because there are really no other benefits). It means a lot.

P.S. - Your Michigan friends will be even more annoying if we win the Frozen Four this weekend. Go blue!

How’s it going? Today we’re going to talk about Allbirds - if you hadn’t seen, they were sold to American Exchange Group (a company that licenses other brands) for $39 million, a 99% haircut from their highest valuation a few years back.

What happened there was as much a positioning problem as anything else (though, of course, there wasn’t just one thing that went wrong.). They made a good product, but ran a terrible business.

Also - quick reminder we have one spot open in the Gobbledy Messaging Cohort that starts Tuesday, April 7th. Sign up here (or email me with questions).

Anyway - hag sameach and happy Easter.

Subscribe now

Share

Fly, little bird

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to remember a true friend. A soul that brought comfort when our soles were ailing. When life pounded us, it provided a soft landing. It sheepishly wrapped our tootsies in wool, while others offered nothing but stiff leather.

Oh Allbirds, how did we lose you so soon?

I remember when we first met. In fact, I wrote about it here in this very newsletter:

One of my favorite unexpected positioning opportunities is how founders dress.

If you wanted to go out to Silicon Valley and raise some cash money back in the early 2010’s, you may have untied that tie, put on a hoodie, and then flown to San Francisco and asked guys* for $75 million.

(*Yeah, they weren’t ALL guys, but also they were all guys.)

Those guys weren’t wearing hoodies. They were wearing Allbirds. The guys giving out the $75 million wore Allbirds to suggest/imply that they’re guys who don’t JUST care about tech, they also care about how they look, and also maybe (?) they invested in Allbirds, and look how well rounded and smart they were for that!**

(**Until recently.)

Those were crazy times, back in the mid-2010s. It’s hard to even remember, but just 10 years ago there were venture capital firms who thought that a company that made shoes out of wool was worth $4 billion on $277 million in revenue. That was funny.

Y’know what else was funny? It raised more than $250 million in venture funding. $250 million. To sell shoes. Hardy har har.

Oh I remember how excited you were when you raised that. In fact in your press release announcing the deal you said something that maybe should have caught our eye:

“Despite the retail industry’s unprecedented challenges, the size of Allbirds’s Series E is an indication of investors’ continued enthusiasm for its stakeholder-centric business model that produces products that are better for consumers and the environment.”

DESPITE THE RETAIL INDUSTRY’S UNPRECEDENTED CHALLENGES????

Oh, Allbirds. We loved you so much that you thought your soft, woolen shoes somehow were immune to every other retail company’s “unprecedented challenges.”

That naïveté - that youthful optimism - is one of the reasons we loved you so much.

Well, that and that well, goddammit - I promised myself I wouldn’t cry - your shoes were so freaking soft.

You had articles written about you that said things like, “Allbirds is not merely an apparel company today. It has now become a materials innovation company disrupting how clothes are made.”

Unfortunately that was a bunch of bullshit. Positioning yourself as a “materials innovation company” was goofy late 2010s ridiculousness. But that didn’t matter - you WERE a shoe company. And a damned good one, at that.

Allbirds, you remember that I’m a runner, and after going for a long run, I would come home and shower and put on - you remember - my Allbirds. Because it was like wearing no shoes at all. And aren’t no shoes the best kind of shoes?

And you appealed to so many, Allbirds! So many!

Yes, you were on the feet of all those west coast venture guys. They wanted to show that they don’t just care about software. They care about textile technology! Any doofus can invest in a new personalization platform (and all the doofuses did!), but it takes a certain kind of doofus to invest in shoes. Shoes that are also technology.

But then you were on the feet of the east coast venture guys - all the guys who wanted to show that east coast venture guys take a back seat to no other coast’s venture guys! Sure, they showed up on east coast venture guys’ feet like 9 months after they were on the feet of west coast venture guys, just like how Madonna bracelets showed up on the wrists of New Jersey junior high school girls in 1983 roughly 9 months after they appeared on the wrists of New York City teens sneaking into Danceteria.

Then those tech guys on both coasts went to visit their parents and their parents would ask about you - “what is up with those funny-looking shoes?” they would ask, while wearing their own moderately comfortable New Balance.

“Oh these?”, you would say, “everyone in tech is wearing them, they’re incredibly comfortable.”

And your dad would respond, “I want comfortable shoes! What store sells them?”

And you would say, “None! No stores sell them!”

And he would say, “How is it a business if no stores sell them?”

And you would say, “How do you not understand Direct-to-Consumer??? You just buy them online.”

And he would say, “Can you show me how to do that?”

And you would say - after thinking about what it would take to show your dad how to buy something online in 2015 - “I’ll just buy them for you.”

And he would thank you! Profusely!

As my father-in-law did! He has the biggest, most, uh, uniquely shaped feet I’ve ever seen. And he suffers from some sort of hammer toe situation (HIPPA laws, be damned here), which kind of makes me want to vomit, but also made me think of you, Allbirds.

And rather than try to show him how to purchase Allbirds himself - because God knows life is too short for that - I just bought him a pair. And what father-in-law would not be thrilled that his son-in-law bought him the most comfortable pair of shoes he ever wore in his life (even counting his pre-hammer toe days!).

Oh Allbirds, this is what is so hard to talk about. If you hadn’t raised $250 million from people who thought you could somehow triple your revenue every single year for eternity, you could have had such an amazing business.

You were so loved. So, so loved.

You could have just kept introducing new colors. And collaborations. And drops. And new packaging. And distribute in new, fun places.

But no.

You had to fly so, so, so close to the sun. You had to keep growing.

You had to open 21 stores in 2020 and had 58 open just 2 years later. Do you know how much it costs to open that many stores?

And you had to expand your product line. You introduced Tree Dasher running shoes, because you thought you were an athletic shoe brand for some reason. And the running shoes you made weren’t good enough to be actual running shoes. And nobody believed you were a running shoe company. In fact, all successful running shoe companies started as running shoe companies and then expanded out. You - you optimistic, naive fool, you thought you could do that backwards.

Oh Allbirds - you never realized the love people had for you. You never appreciated that you weren’t Nike or Hoka. You were Ugg. You were a comfort shoe that could offer a handful of styles for the rest of eternity, combining quirky style, with an amazing use of wool and extraordinary comfort.

Or why - in the words all those tech investors would have understood - didn’t you “create a category” (vomit) and be the world’s best Recovery Shoe? The shoes you wear AFTER you go for a run. Why?

Why didn’t you realize you were loved?

Why did you think you were an apparel company? Why did you have to introduce leggings? Or jackets? There are Allbirds puffers. Puffers! Why puffers??? Why????

Hiking shoes?

Trail running shoes?

You never appreciated your own beauty, Allbirds.

You never looked in the mirror, and saw what you were - the world’s most comfortable shoe.

You had to hang around with that fast crowd. That crowd that pushed and pushed and pushed.

Those weren’t your real friends. Your real friends have hammer toes. And sore feet from running. And blisters but still need to put something on their feet to walk outside. And something to wear on vacation when you’re going to walk more than you ever did before.

And yeah, some of those people aren’t the most beautiful. Or have perfect bodies. Or are older than 24.

But there’s something to be said for loving those who love you.

And oh, Allbirds. You were loved.

See you on the other side, Allbirds.

Share

Subscribe now

As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.

P.S. - If you’d like to bore anyone at your seder, feel free to share this Gobbledy Classic (tm) about how Maxwell House haggadahs ended up at your seder table.

How’s it going? If you went to Michigan, you’re probably pretty thrilled that your #1 men’s basketball team, #2 women’s basketball team, and #1 men’s hockey team are all playing this weekend in their respective tournaments. Go blue!

We’ve got our next Gobbledy Messaging Cohort starting tomorrow (March 25th) with 1 space open if you’d like to join, and another starting April 7th. 3 sessions, tons of content, great frameworks for homepage messaging. $500. Sign up here.

Today, we’ve got:

Yes, we’re just talking about prediction market, not-a-gambling-site-but-also-please-wager-on-the-outcome-of-sports company Kalshi and a really interesting positioning conundrum they’ve found themselves in.

Share Gobbledy

Subscribe now

What Would You Do: Kalshi Edition

We haven’t played a game of “What Would You Do” in a while, so let’s bust it out today. Maestro, play the WWYD theme music.

[…..]

[…..]

Oh right, we don’t have theme music in a newsletter. Could you maybe hum a little theme song to yourself?

[…..]

While you’re doing that, a whole bunch of years ago we wrote about Schaefer Beer (one of my favorite positioning stories - they positioned as the beer for people who like to drink a LOT of beer in one sitting) and I shared a very very 1970s commercial they ran with Edd Kalehoff playing the Schaefer Beer jingle on a Moog synthesizer. I’m mentioning it here because Kalehoff wrote - among so many other TV music compositions - the theme to the Price Is Right and most (all?) of the music cues that played when they showed prizes. You can waste/enjoy the next hour of your life listening to those here. Also, imagine how difficult that job was?

Producer: “Hey Edd, we need you to write a piece of music that’s 30 seconds long that will get a contestant excited about the possibility of winning a grandfather clock.”

Edd: “Does the contestant want a grandfather clock?”

Producer: “Absolutely not.”

Anyway, here’s the Schaefer commercial:

Sorry, we got distracted there. We were about to play a game.

Here’s the scenario:

You have just gotten a new job, and for that - congrats! You got through the AI resume screener, the AI-generated application, the video screener, the virtual interview, the interview with the CEO, the interview with the 9 team members, the interview with the 2 board members, the 3 weeks of not hearing anything from anyone, the sudden call out of the blue from the company asking if you could come in to the office (it’s in Sacramento and you are in Philadelphia) tomorrow for 5 in-person interviews, the 30-day plan, the 60-day plan, the 90-day plan, the 30-60-90 day plan group presentation, the ghosting, the not hearing again for 2 weeks, the assuming they gave the job to someone else, the call asking you to do a Zoom tomorrow where you’ll present your 18-month demand gen plan to the entire company, then the offer, then the being flabbergasted that the offer was nothing like what they said it would be, the confusion when they tell you that that actually wasn’t the offer for you, the receiving of the correct offer, the questions you had about the value of the options that are in the offer, the being flummoxed about the “Fluzzio.ai equity calculator,” the giving up on playing with the “Fluzzio.ai equity calculator,” and the signing of the offer without even bothering to look at it because you’ve been out of work for 8 months.

And now you are the Chief Marketing Officer of Kalshi.

If you are not familiar with Kalshi, it is what is legally known as a “designated contract market” and what is colloquially known as a “prediction market.” Both of those things mean that people can place contracts on “binary outcomes” of various events. For example, “will the high temperature in Phoenix hit 108 degrees on Tuesday?” or “Will the incredibly annoying and overrated movie Marty Supreme win Best Picture at the Oscars?” People can then enter into a contract with another user on the platform (basically) on “yes” or “no.”

Last year, Kalshi expanded into sports betting. Well, close. Kalshi began allowing contracts on the outcome of sports events. Whereas FanDuel and DraftKings take bets on sporting events, Kalshi merely handles the contract between people on the platform. They do not take the bet - they just make the market and process the transaction. And as such, they are governed by US securities law (like a stock market), not by laws covering gambling.

If you are a normal person, you are thinking to yourself, “that sure sounds an awful lot like sports betting.” And just this week, a Arizona sued Kalshi for running an illegal sports betting business while Nevada got Kalshi shut down for sports “contracts” in the state.

But you are not a normal person - you are the CMO. And as CMO it is your job to both get the public (and legislators) to accept that Kalshi is a great place to wager (er, “contract”?) on the outcome of basketball games, and at the same time convince lawmakers that you’re not doing anything illegal.

So, what would you do?

I’ll give you 3 options, and you can decide what you would’ve done (or guess what they actually did. I don’t really care - there won’t be a grade. Actually, sorry. There will be a grade. But good news, you can drop the lowest grade in the semester. But bad news, this is the only grade you’ll get. So if you drop the grade, you’ll get an incomplete, and then you’ll have to re-take this again next semester. Except - and don’t tell anyone - you can take this class at the community college 15 minutes from here and that will count. But don’t say that I told you that.)

Option 1: Don’t mention sports betting at all. Come up with a cutesy campaign around “predictions” and how if you think you have a crystal ball you can make a living using that crystal ball. Or whatever. You run a campaign that has nothing to do with sports - because sports bettors are very aware that you exist - and everything to do with owning “predictions.” Also, Jason Momoa stars in the ads.

Option 2: Declare victory. Meaning, you will absolutely 1000% own sports betting. Screw it, if you just pretend this isn’t a gray area of some sort (there are so many shades of gray), and just say “we’re the leader in sports betting,” then what is there to argue about? Or, better yet, let’s call it option 2b: you re-position “sports betting” as “sports predictions.” Predicting sports isn’t illegal. Nobody really talked about predicting sports before, they talked about sports betting; you can own this category!

(Side note: for those of you under the age of 40, in the 1970s CBS had a guy on their NFL pregame show named - er, nicknamed - Jimmy the Greek who “predicted” or “picked” the scores of upcoming games. Sports gambling and sports predicting and sports picking and sports contracts and sports whatever were all very illegal at that point, and it’s one of those insane 1970s things that despite the illegality of sports whatevering, CBS hired a gentleman to come on and - with a wink - predict the scores of the games for no particular reason. Also, “Jimmy the Greek.” I’m not sure any sports show would, today, have Julio the Puerto Rican picking games. Even if that’s legal. OK Barstool Sports absolutely would. My bad.)

Option 3: Run a campaign that explains the nuances of why you’re a predictions platform and not a gambling site, and hope that by explaining the details, that no lawmakers will ban your from offering your product in their state.

Now, before we get to the answer, these are all positioning options that they have. They can position themselves against “bar conversations” - like, “hey, what do you think the low temperature will be next Tuesday? I bet you a beer it’s below 30 degrees.” Or they can position themselves against gambling websites. Or they can position themselves against gambling websites, but suggesting the way in which you gamble is more enjoyable in some way.

Positioning is interesting.

Anyway, they’ve gone with Option 3. And they’re running an fascinating campaign that is saying, “you can’t shut us down, we don’t do anything illegal.” Which is true! True-ish!

Here are the 5 ads they’re running:

I think that “We don’t offer death markets” is just, I dunno…bravo. Because when I see that I think either:

“What are death markets?”

or

A bet on “Will there be regime change in Iran before March 31st” is not a death market, but also it’s not not a death market?

I also can appreciate, “We operate under U.S. law,” though maybe every company could say that?

I offered 3 options up above, but I think option 1 - come up with a campaign about “predictions” (or some other concept) - is probably their best bet. I’m thinking about other products that are legal but some think should not be legal. Cigarettes, for example. Back when it was legal to advertise them, we saw 3 successful ways to position the product:

Way 1: Camel’s “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette” approach. Which is - “if this product were bad, why would doctors be smoking it?” For Kalshi, this would be something like a celebrity endorser - “if this product were bad, why is Sabrina Carpenter telling me to use it?”

Way 2: The Marlboro Man. The Marlboro Man represented freedom and rugged masculinity. The product was positioned as a way to show that you embrace freedom and are a real man. That may sound goofy in today’s world, but lordy was it successful. The choice to smoke was a choice for freedom. In Kalshi world, this would require messaging like, “Bet where YOU choose…”

Way 3: Virginia Slims. Basically Marlboro, but for women. Smoking Virginia Slims represented how a modern, liberated and free woman showed that she was modern, liberated and free. This would be an interesting approach for Kalshi - could they show that modern women who is informed enough about sports betting would always choose Kalshi.

And now that you’ve read all of that about Kalshi, it may - may! - not surprise you that their founder posted the video below on Twitter/X. Because I care about you, I will tell you in advance it is their board members - for reasons I cannot even begin to imagine - doing pushups outside on the street after their board meeting.

I know we just went through that entire thought exercise about how this company might position themselves, the real answer is that they’re the company whose founder approved a campaign that says they do not allow you to bet on people being killed, and also thinks that posting a video of the board doing* pushups somehow reflects positively on their company.

(*doing = attempting to do)

My bet? You’re glad you don’t work there.

Subscribe now

Share Gobbledy

As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.

Friendly reminder about the upcoming Gobbledy Messaging Cohorts. More here.

P.S. Somehow I’ve never heard of the drummer Jonathan Moffett (he played with Michael Jackson). This video of him performing Smooth Criminal is absolutely incredible. I always assumed a drum machine was playing the part. His precision is ridiculous - and listen for how he leaves space in there. He’s not a guy who has to bang away constantly. Really remarkable.

How’s it going?

Quick thing before we start today: The next Gobbledy Messaging Cohort starts on Thursday, March 26th at noon Eastern. 3 1-hour sessions, plus 2 1:1’s with me to work through your homepage messaging challenges. As one member of the last cohort told me, “It’s so hard to turn the lens on your self…I loved getting a structure and framework for my messaging.” Plus, it’s $500. Either reply to this email, or fill out this extremely quick form to sign up.

This week we’ve got:

• A great name if you get in trouble with the government

• Two ways of looking at a social media strategy

• If you respond to gobbledy, you’re a bad worker (probably)

Share

Subscribe now

Xeljanz Is a Real Drug

I’m not generally a contrarian, but I am absolutely a contrarian when it comes to company names. The contrary part is that I do not think that the name of your company matters at all.

I do think it’s super fun to come up with company names. Spronk.ai. There, I just made that up. You can have it for $325,000. I promise it’s rooted in customer research. And also a spronk was a mythical bird that the native people of Papua New Guinea used to admire because it soared above all the other birds.

I just made that up too.

A few years back I wrote about the success of convenience stores Kum & Go and Loaf ‘n Jug, as well as the sporting goods retailer Dicks, as examples of businesses that succeeded despite having what could perhaps be called names-that-might-have-other-interpretations (NTMHOI).

(Aside #1: Imagine the branding agency heading into that convenience store pitch and said, “We’ve spoken with hundreds of your customers, and we believe we have two names for your company that reflect the heritage and mission of your business. The first is Iowa Gas & Snack. It reflects your Iowa roots, while letting tired travelers know that they can quickly fuel up both their car and their bodies. The second is focused on your core truck stop business. It’s called Kum & Go. I’ll let those sink in for a moment…”)

(Aside #2: When I was growing up, a favorite joke around our parts was, “Did you hear that Stop ‘n’ Shop and A&P are merging? They’re going to call it Stop ‘n’ P.” I didn’t say it was a good joke. But wow, did 9-year old me love that. [It is here that I will say that if you are a sensitive type that you should just skip to the next paragraph.]. Which is why I was just laughing to myself about the Kum & Go and Loaf ‘n Jug merging to form the Kum Jug. Also, I’m sorry. I’ll stay for detention after class.)

So I generally think that the name of your company doesn’t matter as much as you think it’s going to matter.

But this is not always true. Sometimes the name does matter. Here are two examples:

If you are a drug company, and you want to make sure that nobody can remember your arthritis drug’s name, and also you play in a Scrabble league where you are allowed to use drug names to score big points, then you might name your product Xeljanz. Rolls off the tongue.

The other time your name matters is if you’re creating it exclusively in the hopes that one day the US government will seize your product and have to warn consumers not to purchase your product while using your name repeatedly because you are 13 and are in it for the lolz.

To wit:

You can read the FDA release here. (But why would you?). Also, do not ask your doctor if Big Penis (bigpenisivaub) is right for you.

Share

Subscribe now

Your Social Media Strategy

I’ve mentioned here before that marketing is simple in one way, and that one way is that you actually always have two choices for your marketing strategy:

1. Do something new

2. Do something you’ve done before

As a new CMO, you’re not going to come in and say, “Hey, remember that campaign you ran a few years ago that was great? We should just go back and do that because it worked well and reflected our brand.” No. No you won’t. You’ll try to do something new.

(Actually, there’s a third option, which is “do something you’ve done before, but in a new way.” The current Burger King marketing strategy involves bringing back the guts of the “Have It Your Way’ campaign of the 1970s and modernizing it. It’s a good compromise for an aspiring CMO).

But today I wanted to mention that you actually have two other options.

Well, it’s more like you have a whole other way of looking at your choices. Yes, doing something new or doing something you’ve done before is one choice you can make.

But we’ve learned that the other option is an axis that has “play it safe” on one end and “go completely nuts” on the other end.

“Play it safe” can encompass the options of “doing something new” and “doing something you’ve never done before,” provided the “something you’ve never done” is something you’ve done before someplace else (which is to say, something you’ve done before).

I’m mentioning all this because I’ve seen that companies generally consider “PR” (and its more annoying cousin, “social media strategy”) to be on the “play it safe” axis.

You’ve done it 100 times, you don’t have much competition, you can get your story out there. Nobody gets fired for doing PR (and/or its more annoying cousin.)

The challenge, though, is that actually you have SO much competition. Not just competition vying to get reporters to write about you, but competition vying for attention on social media.

And if you play it safe, you are going to have a helluva time breaking through the noise.

So likely you have to go nuts.

I’m telling you this because - and I really cannot believe I am writing about Cluely again - you should watch this incredible video from their founder responding to some article that appeared in Techcrunch. If you don’t know, Cluely is a stupid AI assistant whose CEO Roy Lee has done a masterful job of generating press by saying crazy things:

It’s him yelling at Techcrunch for 1 minute and 52 seconds. For example: “Do you know that you have more mentions of Roy Lee on your website than fucking Jeffrey Epstein?” And so forth.

You really should watch the whole thing, it’s amazing.

The next time you’re in a meeting about your social media strategy, and someone mentions how you could repurpose some press release and turn it into a “We’re excited to announce” LinkedIn post, please note that in a crowded market, going nuts may just be a better option if you actually want attention.

But you don’t actually have to go nuts. What works on social media is authenticity (duh) and sometimes that’s about going nuts and sometimes, well, not.

You may not be familiar with US Mobile - it’s a cellular company and one of their main differentiators is that it lets you switch between different carriers (ie, you can be on Verizon, T-Mobile or AT&T depending on the coverage area you’re in). (They’re my cell company because they’re also really cheap and I’ve found their customer service to be pretty good).

Anyway, their CEO is active on Reddit (specifically on the r/USMobile subreddit) and this week posted about the company’s re-branding:

In the post he discussed how they hired an agency to create new ads, and that ultimately they were unhappy with the ads and never ran them. He then posted those ads on YouTube and shared a link asking if people agreed with his assessment of the commercials.

He also shared ideas for new logos and brand identity and asked for feedback on that.

This is such an interesting approach. You may work for a CEO whom you have to beg to post on LinkedIn. If you’re in that situation, having a social media strategy that relies on authentic communication and making yourself available will absolutely fail. There is no convincing a CEO that they should do this if they do not already believe in it.

However, if they DO believe in the benefits of authenticity and frequency on social media, it’s worth reading through how US Mobile’s CEO interacts with people on Reddit. He has clearly decided that whatever number of hours a week he’s spending on the platform comes out the other side in increased revenue and/or loyalty.

I would put this idea on the “safe” end of the “safe/nuts” spectrum. Both the Cluely and US Mobile examples come across as authentic - authentically nuts and authentically sane. But the common element is that their CEO believes that authenticity → [something] → profits.

I’ve had the battle where I’ve tried to convince a CEO to be more authentic and available on social media, but they were not interested. Which is fine. But I’ve also banged my head against that wall before realizing that it was a waste of time - there’s no convincing someone that Reddit or LinkedIn or whatever equals profits if they, themselves, don’t believe it.

Jargon Vs. “Corporate Bullshit”

I have found my favorite academic study, and now I will share it with you.

There was a period in my life where I thought I might enjoy being a professor. I went to speak to a professor of mine about that, and he said, “you should only become a professor if you can’t imagine doing anything else.” Frankly, I could not imagine doing anything else - not because I could only imagine being a professor, but because I couldn’t imagine being anything. So perhaps I misunderstood what he was saying. In any case, I am not a professor.

But I have now discovered that there is a professor at Cornell who studies - wait for it - gobbledy. Well, he doesn’t call it gobbledy, I call it gobbledy. He calls it “corporate bullshit” (Though he SHOULD call it gobbledy).

Cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell published, “The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes” in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

In that study, he makes a distinction between jargon (shorthand for technical language that can actually be useful in communication) and “corporate bullshit” which he defines as “a semantically empty and often confusing style of communication in organizational contexts that leverages abstruse corporate buzzwords and jargon in a functionally misleading way.” In other words, it’s gobbledy - a mixture of jargon and buzzwords that are meant to be misleading.

The author adds, “corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”

He ran a study where he made up some fun gobbledy and then showed it to people and asked for their reactions (I’m very much paraphrasing here). A couple of theexamples he used: “We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing” and “By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence.”

Excellent gobbledy right there.

What he found was that people who responded to gobbledy in a positive way also exhibited traits that you would likely not want from your workforce. From the study:

“Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and “visionary,” but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making.”

Which is to say, people who believe gobbledy tend to think their idiot bosses are geniuses, and they are also really bad at making decisions.

All the more reason to join the Gobbledy Marketing Cohort :)

As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.

P.S. This Instagram post about “AI Agent Workflows” really resonated (thanks to reader Jenn S.):

How’s it going? I have spent the past week working with a client on an event, and therefore all of my time has been spent on the event and 0 of my time has been spent on Gobbledy. Which, frankly, makes me sad. But also makes me happy because I’m sharing one of my favorite pieces about how a series of good decisions can lead to a terrible outcome. This is important now because as people start thinking about how to integrate AI into their business, they are looking at their processes in detail. And often they’re finding that each step in the process was well-intentioned, but the outcome was terrible. I call this situation The Fish in the Cowboy Hat. I hope you enjoy. (Also share - I think more people should know about this…)

Before that - We have 2 upcoming Gobbledy Messaging Cohorts with spots still open (one begins March 26th and one begins April 7th). As a reminder, it’s 3 live 1-hour sessions plus 2 1:1s with me where I’ll share templates for homepage messaging, positioning strategies, and a couple of dozen examples of amazing marketing that you can steal. All for $500. If you have team members who have not yet learned the art of messaging, this will be an incredible jump start. Sign up here.

This week: The fish in the cowboy hat.

Share

Subscribe now

The Fish in the Cowboy Hat

Because I am a middle aged (but I look great!) Upper West Sider, I, of course, listen to the Ezra Klein podcast (because all of us Upper West Side guys think we could’ve been Ezra if we had just made some different choices in our lives, but we were never going to make those choices, and now we’re just a bunch of middle aged Upper West Siders listening to Ezra KIein.)

On a recent podcast, Ezra is talking with journalist Jerusalem Demsas about the struggle for blue states to build infrastructure.

As part of that chat, he talked about a bathroom that some community members wanted to build at a park in California. And it turns out that building that bathroom will take several years and cost $1.7 million.

Here’s what Ezra says about the project (apologies for the length, but the length gets at my point):

Why does installing a public restroom cost so much? As the answer unspools, I would not call it an explanation, but a description of process:

Construction costs are very high in San Francisco, and you have to pay a higher wage for work being done in the city. And there are like 7 or 8 or 9 different agencies that need to sign off on this.

And it has to go through a design review.

And then we have to do a feedback meeting with the local community to make sure they like the design. And then a million things pile on from that.

You can pass laws to make this move faster, but do you really want to exempt installing a toilet from passing an environmental review?

When you follow the line of trying to build things, you end up seeing a process that doesn’t seem to make anybody happy. And yet at no point did this end with them reforming the process.

And probably if you asked the people who complained about the cost and time to build the bathroom: “Do you want there to be a rule in the city that the city has to have a public notice when it’s going to do development, they would say ‘yes.’”

So that’s a little story I wanted to share: A bathroom costs $1.7 million and several years and everyone thinks that’s stupid, but everyone also thinks that every step of the way makes total sense.

[This is on one level the foundation of the Abundance movement and the focus of the book on abundance that Klein wrote - why do communities that have good intentions for building more end up building less.]

Of course you want public input. Of course you want workers to be paid well. Of course you want an environmental review of a new sewer in a park.

Every step is smart, but the outcome is dumb.

This situation may sound familiar to you, but there is no term for it.

Well, there was no term for it until I started calling it the Fish in the Cowboy Hat.

Here’s Why It’s the Fish in the Cowboy Hat

You should watch this video and then come back to this newsletter. (My apologies, there’s no YouTube link and that DailyMotion (??) link won’t embed.)

Yes, that’s Bert and Ernie discussing why there is a goldfish swimming in Bert’s cowboy hat. If you didn’t watch the video (I know you didn’t), here’s the transcript:

(Ernie is trying to put a pot on Bert’s head.)

Bert: Why should I put that pot on my head?

Ernie: I’ll tell you Bert, a little while ago I accidentally broke the cookie jar.

Bert: Oh Ernie, you didn’t. Well alright, you broke the cookie jar. What does it have to do with that pot there?

Ernie: Well I had to put the cookie somewhere. I broke the cookie jar so I had to put the cookie into the sugar bowl.

Bert: But if you put the cookies in the sugar bowl, where did you put the sugar?

Ernie: Well, I put the sugar into the flower pot.

Bert: Oh great, where did you put the flower that was growing there?

Ernie: I had to plant the flower there in this milk bottle. Nicely planted, I watered it and everything.

Bert: (Increasingly exasperated) Now where is the milk?

Ernie: I’ll show you, Bert. I put the milk in the soda bottle.

Bert: I’m trying to be patient, but where is the soda?

Ernie: It wasn’t easy, but I put the soda in the fish bowl.

Bert: This is crazy! Where is the fish?

Ernie: I put the fish into the cowboy hat.

Bert: Ernie! Ernie! That is MY cowboy hat.

Ernie: So?

Bert: You put the fish in it. What will I wear when I want to play cowboy?

(Ernie puts the original pot on Bert’s head) Ernie: Ride ‘em cowboy!

I used to have conversations like this over and over when I was working in eCommerce at Tommy Hilfiger.

Me: Why does it take 4 weeks to get a product live on the site?

Person: Well, when it gets received at the distribution center, they have to check each item against the manifest. And if the item isn’t on the manifest, they have to call the shipper, and if the shipper isn’t available on the phone, it takes 48 hours to get a call, and if they have to add an item that isn’t in the manifest, they have to call the developer to add it to Websphere, and if you manually add it to Websphere, it needs to be added by a project manager, and our project manager only works 20 hours a week to save costs, so when she adds it to the project, that can take 48 hours, and then it’s added to the developer queue and it can’t really be sped up because we limited the number of developer hours to save costs, and if we skip that project ahead in the queue, then the promo won’t go live on time and there’s revenue associated with that, so we don’t want to bump it off, so it’ll just have to wait, and once the product is uploaded it needs to be QA’d, but the QA team is also smaller than we need because we’re trying to save costs, so it’ll go in their queue….etc….

We would have conversations like that all the time. “Why is such and such like that?” And then there would be 11 different reasons, all of which were reasonable, that led to an outcome that was completely unreasonable.

Sometimes when you’re not happy with the outcomes of a project, you can do a little root cause analysis, and you can fix that root cause - ah, we need to hire another person in the warehouse! (or whatever).

But sometimes the root cause is 11 different root causes, all of which aren’t a problem at all - in fact, all of which are actually the right answer to the issue you’re facing at that exact step in the process. But the outcome is ridiculous - it would be 1 month to get a product live, or it could be that a toilet costs $1.7 million and takes 2 years.

These are both a fish in a cowboy hat.

Or if you work in software marketing: Why does the homepage have gobbledy on it? Because everyone agrees you should get input from the product team, because they know the product. And from the sales team, because they’re having conversations with prospects (allegedly) every day. And of course from customer success, because they’re talking with people who actually use the product. And of course that guy (natch) on the Board who sold a company and made a zillion dollars, so obviously he knows what should be on the homepage. And we once sold to a company based in Zambia, so we should mention that we’re international, and we should mention that non-profits love us, and we should mention that every size team at every type of company buys from us, etc etc etc.

Every individual part of that is reasonable. And yet the outcome is unreasonable. A fish in a cowboy hat.

I don’t have a profound answer to a fish in a cowboy hat problem. I thought my first book would be called “The Fish in the Cowboy Hat” and be all about how to handle these. Except I never really had an answer, and now I care more about gobbledy than about fish in cowboy hats.

But I wanted to make sure - sorry Tanisha and Alex and all the others who have asked me to stop saying “fish in the cowboy hat” - you also know about a fish in a cowboy hat, and you start annoying your coworkers with it.

Share

Subscribe now

As always, thanks for reading to the end, it’s the best part. I hope to see you at an upcoming Gobbledy Messaging Cohort. I promise it’ll give you a full set of tools to improve your messaging. More here.

How’s it going?

One quick Editor’s Note from last week’s newsletter:

You likely have no memory that we were discussing a viral essay, and of that viral essay I wrote, “I’m guessing that someone in your life shared this with you at some point in the last week. Also, I’m guessing that the person who shared this with you is someone you don’t like very much.”

Well ha ha, my friend and Gobbledy reader Keir B. actually sent the essay to me, and then he texted me asking why I don’t like him, and I certainly didn’t want to make it seem like I did not like him because he sent me that article. I do not like him for several other reasons. Thank you for allowing me to clear that up.

End of Editor’s Note.

Onward…

The Gobbledy Messaging Cohorts are in full swing and we’ve got a couple more coming up in March and April for you to choose from. You’ll get:

• Three 1-hour sessions with the small cohort

• Two 1:1 meetings with me

• A roadmap for tighter positioning

• 5 frameworks for homepage headlines

• More than a dozen ideas for sharpening your messaging

• Personalized feedback on your new homepage copy

That’s all for $500. I know, that seems wrong. It’s not - I want as many people to have great messaging as possible.

Maybe you’ve got teammates who would like a jumpstart on understanding messaging? Or maybe people on your team who are earlier in their career who would benefit from learning best practices so they can use them when they’re working at your company?

Interested? Sign up here.

In the newsletter today we’ve got:

1. The first time, ever I saw your hamburger

2. That’s not coffee, it’s customized energy

Subscribe now

Share

The Product of Social Media

I’m going to confess something here:

I am not a social media guy. I do not read it for fun. I do not read it for work. I do not read it in a house. I do not read it with a mouse. I do not read it here or there. I do not read it anywhere.

One of the challenges of not being on social media is that I do not know what is happening each day with Punch the Monkey.

One of the other challenges is that I do not really speak the language of any of the social media platforms.

Yes, I could conceivably post something tomorrow on Instagram. But it would feel like your weird offline uncle posting something. (Gobbledy: Your Weird Offline Uncle. Of Newsletters.)

Every social media platform develops its own written and visual language. I am fascinated with this idea - why do so many LinkedIn posts all sound similar? (I mean even before ChatGPT started spitting out LinkedIn posts that all sounded similar, it is basing that output on the zillions of posts that sounded similar). If I were born into a family with multiple generations of wealth, I could imagine going and getting a Ph.D. in Linguistics and studying how social networks develop their own dialects. Alas, I was not and I will not.

Anyway, what I’m saying is that if you do not spend time on a social media platform and suddenly you start posting there, it will be obvious to anyone watching that you are not a “native” speaker of that platform, as it would be obvious to anyone in Mexico that Spanish is not my first language when I ask them where the biblioteca is and I have a befuddled look on my face when they respond.

(Just a side note - when you learn a new language, why is “where is the library” one of the first things they teach you to say? Like you barely know any words at all in Spanish, so how will the library be useful? It might literally be the least useful place in all of Mexico for you at that point. They really should teach you, “Donde esta the English language bookstore?”)

Where was I? Oh yes, lack of social media fluency.

This becomes a very real work challenge if your CEO comes to you and says, “Hey, I’m not on Instagram, but can you help me make some videos that I can post there so I can seem like a normal regular person?”

Sure, you might say to your boss, who, I forgot to mention, is the CEO of McDonald’s.

You might suggest that the CEO watch a bunch of videos on Instagram so they can get a feel for what “normal” feels like on Instagram.

You might have a discussion about McDonald’s and what McDonald’s really stands for - how do people relate to McDonald’s? What’s the feeling they get when they walk into a McDonald’s?

You might remind them of my favorite piece of McDonald’s corporate marketing lore, which may not even be true anymore but I’ll share it anyway - that the company wanted to be viewed as “a trusted friend.” That if you were driving down the highway at night and you wanted something to eat, you would go to McDonald’s because you would be greeted when you got there, that you knew exactly what would be on the menu, and that the bathrooms would be clean. McDonald’s sold consistency and familiarity.

You might also remind the CEO of the McDonaldland Cinematic Universe (not TM), and the characters they created that stood for the ideals of the company - Ronald McDonald bringing joy; the Hamburgler reminding people that the burgers were so good that someone would steal them; Grimace reminding you that if you ate too much you would become a giant purple blob (that can’t be right.)

The good news, then, is that despite his unfamiliarity with the platform, your CEO is now armed with enough information to create videos that reflect a company that wants to be friendly, joyful, and neighborly while offering familiar comfort foods.

Your CEO will then completely ignore all of that and make this video:

Please go watch that. Please. I’ll wait for you right here.

Alright. You’re welcome.

Have I watched that 10 times? Yes I have.

First, if your brand stands for “friendly, joyful, neighborly” your CEO should never have a consumer-facing video where he’s in an office, which is the opposite of friendly, joyful and neighborly. It makes it look like McDonald’s is like any other soulless company. For God’s sake, he’s about to eat food - he should be in a, well, hm, maybe, I dunno, a McDonald’s restaurant somewhere.

A little story:

When I was younger, I really liked Vienna Fingers cookies:

In their ads, the Keebler elves lived in trees where they manufactured cookies. The brand existed within a universe where cookies (that weren’t as good as Oreos) were baked by tiny elves that lived in trees in a forest.

Keebler would never put out any bit of marketing where regular people are sitting in a WeWork someplace and brainstorming cookie ideas. The Keebler universe exists entirely in a forest.

Remember when we talked about the concept of the “money word” - the one word that jumps out, pulls the reader in, and encapsulates the idea that you’re putting forward?

Now, what’s the opposite of the “money word?” Because in that video when the CEO of McDonald’s says, “I love this product,” I think to myself, “yowee, ‘product’ really is not the right word there.”

And when he pretends (?) to struggle with how to hold - and then take a bite of - the hamburger, it makes it seem like perhaps - and I know this can’t be right - that he has neither eaten nor ever seen a hamburger prior to this moment.

Is it fun to dump on sub-par corporate marketing? No, not really. But it illustrates a bigger point - every channel has its place in the mix. But every channel isn’t right for every marketing strategy.

Authentic representations of your brand are great in social channels. Your CEO talking about a new hamburger while sitting and pretending to eat lunch in his office is great for CNBC - your investors want to know that your CEO is working so hard that he can’t even leave his office to scarf down a sandwich.

Or maybe McDonald’s just has some clown running their social media marketing. Dunno.

(Thanks to Gobbledy reader and former roommate Scarlett B. for sharing the video. Go ‘gate.)

Energy Bros

The WSJ published an interview with the Chief Marketing Officer of coffee-and-assorted-drink purveyor Dutch Bros, that included a tidbit I wanted to share:

I always get a little choked up when I read something where a marketing exec is being super clear about their company’s marketing strategy. (Yes, I’m a little emotional about marketing.)

The interview featured this exchange:

WSJ: The energy-drink business is getting increasingly competitive, with Starbucks, McDonald’s and other bigger brands moving in. How are you trying to keep your edge?

(CMO) TANA DAVILA: I see us as the creators of customizable, made-to-order energy. It evolved from guests coming and wanting to add flavors to energy drinks. Over time, we’ve built our own proprietary energy-drink brand, Rebel. We flavor it, we let you add whatever toppings you want. The energy market is growing at a faster rate than coffee, so we are very well positioned to continue to lead.

Dutch Bros, it goes without saying (though I’m saying it, which I shouldn’t have, as it goes without saying, yet here I am) is in a crowded market.

(It is here where I would insert my short clip from 30 Rock where Dennis is telling Liz about his business: “One word: Coffee. One problem: where do you get it? You get it at my coffee vending machine. 38th & 6th in the basement of the K-Mart. You just go downstairs, you get the key from David and BOOM! You plug in the machine.” Except no clip of this exists online, which, given the amount of piracy that is readily available and powering the world’s most (currently) valuable tech companies, is shocking.)

You may scoff at the slight marketing speak of “creators of customizable, made-to-order energy” but could that apply to Starbucks*? I don’t think so, even though Starbucks does allow - and (to a point) encourages customization.

(*I would applaud Starbucks for using “The Starbucks Coffee Company” in their ads, as a way of stressing that their roots are in coffee. Except they appear to have stopped using that phrase. I liked it - when you’re competing with Dunkin - who removed “donuts” from their own name - and Dutch Bros - who are selling energy - it was a way to remind people that they are the one major coffee place that is actually rooted in selling coffee. Oh well.)

Burger King competed with McDonald’s for ages using the slogan “Have It Your Way,” with the message that you can customize your meal at Burger King in a way that you could not at McDonald’s (even if this were not exactly true - most McDonald’s would get you a burger without a pickle if you asked.)

Large companies in a crowded market need a high concept way to differentiate themselves - “customizable” is easily understood. You can imagine a software company using “easy” as a high concept way to differentiate themselves from a big competitor. “We sell an easy way for companies to connect with customers” is a reasonable way to describe a CRM system.

The Dutch Bros example is so good because it shows that they have thought about their positioning - they aren’t addressing the Starbucks drinker, they’re addressing the energy drink drinker.

How are they better than grabbing a Red Bull? It’s customizable, so you get what you want, it’s not sitting in a fridge somewhere (made-to-order), and there’s no trade-off to the benefit (energy).

They only got there because they did the positioning work - what are they, who are they for, and in what way are they different.

When we’ve talked about homepage headlines, one of the options I’ve recommended is “We are a ___ company for ___ people.” If Dutch Bros were a software company, they could use that positioning to have a headline that says, “We are a customizable made-to-order energy company for people on-the-go”

Clear, no? There’s no reason your own messaging can’t be equally clear.

Share

Subscribe now

As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.

If you want to join a Gobbledy Messaging Cohort, sign up here.

Interested in reaching 3000+ marketing execs to tell them about your product? Let’s chat about advertising - I’m at jared@sagelett.com

P.S. I loved this story about two coworkers at a Dim Sum place in NYC. The NY Times has done an amazing job finding the emotional resonance in stories of people working in the restaurant industry.

How’s it going? I’ve been at the eTail conference with a client this week, and I was pretty shocked how many people were there. (Shocked that there were so many, not shocked that there were so few. Just to clarify.). Also shocking was how little has changed since I first went to this conference 15 years ago - I led panels on Personalization and on A/B Testing, and I’m fairly certain that in 2010 I led panels on Personalization and A/B Testing. Though this time people said “AI” quite a bit.

In any case, because I was wrapped up in conferencetown, I was going to send out a Gobbledy Classic (tm) today. But over the past week or two a couple of articles about the future of AI were published that I wanted to talk about.

Specifically, I wanted to call out that whenever we read a “viral article” about AI, it is important to think about the motivations of the person writing that article. In a hype cycle, separate from whether there are underlying benefits to what is being hyped, the people doing the hyping tend to have a selfish reason for doing that hyping. That’s what I want to talk about today.

Share Gobbledy

Subscribe now

But first - the inaugural Gobbledy Messaging Cohort is next week (and full), but we’ll launch another cohort at the end of March. The GMC is comprised of 3 one-hour sessions with your cohort where we’ll discuss best practices for homepage messaging, do a few fun exercises, and share our new messaging based on best practices. Plus, you’ll get 2 30-minute 1:1 sessions with me to work through your messaging challenges. All for $500. What a bargain. If you’re interested, fill out this quick form and I’ll get back to you when the new dates are set.

OK, so tell me if this resonates with you:

I am intrigued by the AI tools we’ve seen released recently - especially Claude Code, which has re-awakened a long-latent interest in building stuff online. At some point I couldn’t keep up with coding and learning new coding skills, so I gave up. I tinkered where I could (mostly with Wordpress), but there was a limit to what I could actually create.

Until Claude Code. It is a remarkable tool - I was able to build a completely functional eCommerce site in about a day and a half for $20. This was an insane proposition 4 months ago, but now it can be done. A friend showed me a recipe website he built that was better than any other recipe site I’ve seen. It took him 3 days.

It is clear that AI tools will have a very real impact on the world around us. (Perhaps duh.)

I am telling you that because I cannot think of a time where I have struggled to balance two ideas: one is that something has very real implications for us, and the other is that the discourse around that something is so ridiculous.

First, I should just stop writing about OpenAI’s Sam Altman, because everything he says really pisses me off, but also he is such a master pitchman for his product that I can’t look away. Also, to clarify - his product is not ChatGPT; his product is “raising money for OpenAI.”

His product requires raising roughly a zillion dollars, and to raise a zillion dollars you need to envision a world that is unlike the world we have now. Because if you say, “we need more money to build a somewhat better thing than we have now,” there are limits to how much money people will give you, because the people who have that money have models for how to think about investing in things that are slightly better than the things we have now.

So he has to pitch a world that is unlike the world we live in now - which is why I mentioned OpenAI’s warning to investors that if the company is successful they may not see a return on their investment because money will no longer exist. Love it.

But Altman has also done a brilliant job of positioning - if you need to raise a zillion dollars, it’s going to be a tough case to make that you need a zillion dollars to compete with, say, Amazon. Because those investors will have some sort of model for how much it will cost to compete with Amazon.

Also, when you go to raise a zillion dollars - some of which will be used in ways that may - MAY - impact, y’know, the earth - you might get pushback from people about why you’re raising a zillion dollars in ways that may negatively impact, y’know, the earth.

But Altman’s response to this pushback this week was absolutely brilliant and also when I decided I’m no longer going to write about the stuff he says here because it’s just pissing me off so much. Here’s his response to questions about the impact of the zillion dollars:

“One of the things that is always unfair, in this comparison, is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an A.I. model… but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like twenty years of life, and all of the food you eat during that time, before you get smart.”

On the one hand, positioning your business against “training humans” is so brilliant I might start crying right now. If you need a zillion dollars, saying that you need a zillion dollars because we’re trying to put humans out of business and raising humans is expensive (diapers, college tuition, cupcakes, piano lessons), well of-freaking-course you need a zillion dollars! You don’t need a zillion dollars because competing with Anthropic is expensive. You need a zillion dollars because piano lessons are expensive and multiply that by like 7 billion people and yeah, you can see where the costs add up!

Ugh.

(Also, please indulge me for a moment while I act like a little bitch: Here is a quote from Altman: “In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company…”

Things I hate so much about that:

“Little group chat”

“My tech CEO friends” - is it ONLY CEOs in this chat? Was that on purpose? And do you - as a normal person - refer to any group of your friends by their job titles? If they were actually your friends wouldn’t you say “I was on a group text with my friends?” And THAT is what they are betting on?)

Ugh again.

On to the essays:

The first one I wanted to talk about is called “Something Big Is Happening” and if you’re reading this newsletter right now, I’m guessing that someone in your life shared this with you at some point in the last week. Also, I’m guessing that the person who shared this with you is someone you don’t like very much.

The gist of the article is that the author works in (and, ahem, invests in) AI companies, and because he loves his friends and family so much he needs to tell them something. And that something is that AI’s impact on humanity has already happened and we’re already too late to stop it and I’m only sharing this because I love you.

The brilliant writerly turn he makes in the essay is that he compares AI to Covid, in that when Covid showed up in the US in March of 2020, it was already too late to stop it. And, similarly, blah blah blah AI.

The brilliant part is that we all remember Covid and we all remember that once that fox was inside our collective henhouse there was nothing we could do about it. And I will suggest that the reason this essay was read and shared by millions of people is because that is actually great framing (great for getting people to share it, not great because it makes sense).

His recommendation for dealing with AI’s massive impact on humanity? Why, it’s to use AI more!

“[Try] Using it. Every day, try to get it to do something new... something you haven’t tried before, something you’re not sure it can handle. Try a new tool. Give it a harder problem. One hour a day, every day. If you do this for the next six months, you will understand what’s coming better than 99% of the people around you.”

Yes, the guy who has “spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space” says that AI is massively impactful, absolutely incredible, and will change our lives if only we spend all of our time and money on it! How selfless!

I wish I had come up with this, but here’s my favorite response to this essay:

Key takeaway: Beware of self-promotion disguised as a life advice.

The second essay was a delightful 7,000 word (?) thought-experiment-cum-doom-porn titled “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” written by a financial research firm that lays out what the economy may look like in 2028 if AI plays out the way some people have suggested (tl;dr: it ain’t good.)

The essay is thoughtful and makes a boatload of assumptions about how things will play out in softwareland (badly), but I can understand why this essay broke out of the confines of financial online discourse and landed in the broader AI discourse.

The article was written under the banner of “Citrini Research,” but was co-authored by two people.

One of those people has the number 1 selling financial newsletter on Substack. For $999 a year he will sell you investment advice. If you tell people the economy is about to collapse in a once-in-a-lifetime way, they might be more interested in learning how they can profit off of that collapse by, for example, purchasing a $999 subscription for your investment advice newsletter.

(Note to all of the content marketers who read Gobbledy: this is probably the best piece of content marketing I’ve ever seen, maybe except for the Bible.)

The second author of the essay told Bloomberg, “We generally have a set of shorts out against businesses that we think are going to be disrupted by AI.”

So the guy who has a bunch of bets that the economy will collapse because of AI co-wrote a piece that said, “we think the economy will collapse because of AI.”

You will also not be shocked to hear that there was zero disclosure in the essay that the essay about the collapse of the economy was co-written by someone who has made financial bets that the economy will collapse. Oops!

Key takeaway: Beware of self-promotion disguised as doom porn.

Share Gobbledy

Subscribe now

As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.

P.S. If you would like to cleanse your palate and read about life in San Francisco during the AI boom, I can recommend this wonderful piece from Harper’s called “Child’s Play.” (Thanks to reader Ben K. for sharing). It’s a little bit about gobbledy, a little bit about the startup Cluely, and a little bit about the craziness that’s unique to San Francisco. I loved this:

I saw a billboard that read: no one cares about your product. make them. unify: transform growth into a science. A man paced in front of the advertisement, chanting to himself. “This . . . is . . . necessary! This . . . is . . . necessary!” On each “necessary” he swung his arms up in exaltation. He was, I noticed, holding an alarmingly large baby-pink pocketknife.

How’s it going?

First - I have one spot left for the Homepage Messaging Cohort I’m running on March 3rd, 6th and 13th at noon Eastern. It’s 3 1-hour sessions, plus 2 check-ins with me in between. We’ll be going over homepage messaging strategies & best practices, with lots of examples of what works, and then we’ll collectively help each other improve our own homepage messaging. All that for $500.

If this sounds interesting to you, fill out this incredibly quick form (name, email, company) - and I’ll get back to you with details.

This week, we’ve got:

• Winnie the Pooh

• How not to market a baby product

• A computer from the future from the past

Share

Subscribe now

Pooh-Poohing My Use of Language

First, a correction from last week:

I wrote that a “commercial really hones in on so many of the strategies we’ve discussed…” and Gobbledy reader and man-with-too-much-time-on-his-hands William J. noted that “hone in” is incorrect and that the expression is that you “home in” on something. He is correct, and I was incorrect. I also appreciate that he would not accept my excuses (“everyone says “hone”; native speakers can’t make language mistakes; nobody likes a grammar corrector, etc).

I also wanted to return to my, um, dumping (?) on the “Will Shat” Raisin Bran commercial (always giving the readers what they absolutely have not asked for). I was thinking about the commercial, uh, right after I ate breakfast and, uh, had a few quiet, solitary minutes for contemplating.

I was a little conflicted when I thought back on the commercial. One of my favorite stupid, scatological commercials ever was this ridiculous Kmart ad touting their new ship-from-store functionality back in the day:

It’s people in a Kmart talking about how they can “ship my pants” right there in the store.

Why, I was thinking to myself, did Will Shat bother me but “ship my pants” is total genius?

Here’s the answer, and I think it’s useful if you want to push the boundaries of taste in your marketing:

Will Shat is gross and stupid because the commercial is about the act that is referred to as shitting. “Shat” is actually referring to that thing. Ew.

“Ship my pants” is funny because you can ship your pants. Yes, of course the joke is that it sounds like you’re saying something else. But if Kmart had introduced a thing where they allowed incontinent folks to take a fresh pair of pants off the rack and ship their soiled pants home* then this would be a gross, stupid ad.

(*Maybe KMart should’ve tried this.)

So my Gobbledy Rule of Puerile Humor (GRoPH) is that you can say something that is of questionable taste, as long as it is not actually referring to the thing that is questionable.

Also, I have a rule for myself here at Gobbledy: “No complaints without solutions.” And I realize I neglected to offer a solution to the Raisin Bran commercial. Here it is:

You’re welcome.

A Three-for-All…

Speaking of commercials of questionable taste…

Long-time gobbledeers may remember the worst (“best”) commercial I’ve ever shared: a 1975 Love’s Baby Soft ad that rested on the idea that a baby has soft skin, therefore (?) a woman would like to have soft skin, and (therefore) women who have soft skin feel good about themselves, and (therefore) men will find them attractive, and (therefore) you should tell women that if they use your product, they will look like a “baby that grew up very sexy” (not my words. at all).

Behold, Love’s Baby Soft (I warned you):

Yeah, I’m really sorry.

The GRoPH Baby Corollary is this: Do not juxtapose baby stuff and sex stuff. Like ever. I don’t think it is impossible to pull off (though I don’t actually have any ideas for how you could pull that off), but I am sure that your company will not pull it off and it will be a mess.

To wit:

A company called Frida Baby has pushed the limits of the GRoPH Baby Corollary with their advertising and packaging, and (you’re welcome) I’m now going to share it with you.

(This is also one of those “people are very angry online!” stories where I heard about it because a few articles were published that said, “people are very angry online!” which I usually dismiss because people are always angry online.)

So, let’s take a look and see what we think. Here’s an Instagram post they made for a 3-in-1 thermometer (the “3” being rectal, oral and under-the-arm):

An imagine of a thermometer next to a baby’s butt and the copy “This is the closest your husband’s gonna get to a threesome.”

Hm.

Hm.

Like, that’s not offensive to me because it’s a thermometer for babies, it’s offensive to me as a marketer. Because if you’re reading that, your brain has to go:

“Hah, my husband’s not going to get a threesome.”

“Wait, what are the ‘3’ that this is even referring to?”

“Rectal, underarm and oral?????”

“But like it’s a thermometer for babies.”

“And the image is a thermometer about to be stuck in a baby’s butt.”

“Gross.”

Also, let’s be honest, you just had a baby so a threesome - rectal, underarm, oral or otherwise - is probably out of the question right now, thermometer or no thermometer.

Onward.

Example number 2 - also a baby thermometer:

“How about a quickie?”

Hm.

Hm.

Verdict? Offended as a marketer. Again, your brain has to go:

“How about a quickie? Oh, that’s cute - a little play on words. I wonder what’s ‘quick’ about it?”

“Oh for f’s sake, it’s a quick-reading baby thermometer????”

Ew.

Incidentally, this is also a 3-in-1 thermometer, but in this case the “3” is ear, forehead and “touchless.”

I wonder how they decided between “How about a quickie?” and my suggestions, “the only ‘aural’ your husband is gonna get” or “break open fore head” or “your husband won’t be happy it’s touchless…but he’s probably used to that by now.”

Ew, it’s just weird!

Let’s see, what else they got?

Ah, a humidifier for you baby’s room:

Barf.

Until recently, the “meet the team” page on their website had pictures of the 3 people responsible for this - the “director of packaging,” “VP of marketing strategy” and the “packaging operations manager” who came up with this stuff.

You will not be shocked to hear that all 3 are men (who, after having their name dragged into every story about these packages, are probably wishing they were in the Epstein files so they could at least change the subject.). Also the company has now deleted the “meet the team” page - which was the closest we were going to get to a threesome.

Crush to Judgment

Just a quick reminder that if your website - especially if you’re an AI-native sales outreach something something - mentions that it will help you “crush sales,” that dozens of other companies also say that they help you “crush sales.”

So maybe, y’know, don’t say “crush sales.”

(Though since nobody is talking about helping marketers “crush MQLs” you could use that. But please don’t.)

Also - why are “sales” “quotas” and “targets” the only things that get “crushed” in a business? (OK fine, maybe you can “crush” the competition...)

Sales gets to crush things. Marketing doesn’t get to crush anything. Open rates are never crushed. Click rates - not crushed. Downloads? Not crushed. Webinar attendees? Un-crushed. Oranges? Crushed, but only in certain sodas and REM songs. Scans of name tags at the booth at a conference? Not crushed.

Anyway - if you sell to sales, don’t say that your product with help them “crush” anything. Everyone else is already saying it.

Share

Subscribe now

The Computer of the Future…Is Here

I’ve mentioned a few times the idea that “shamelessness in the most powerful moat” - which is to say, that for PR purposes, the crazier things are that you say, the harder it is for the competition to get their own story out there, because it will pale in comparison to your story.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman is a master of this, and each time he opens his mouth (or, in this case I’m about to share, writes something down), it’s masterful.

OpenAI’s corporate website until recently included this blurb about investing in the company:

“It would be wise to view any investment in [the company] in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.”

One of the risks of investing, they’re saying, is that if we are successful, money no longer exist. Money. May no longer exist.

Any investor who sees that, and then sees your pitch deck that says, “if successful, chatbots may reduce your customer service costs by 17%” will be unimpressed. Even if you upped that number to 23%.

Shamelessness has a first cousin called “exaggeration” and exaggeration also has a place in marketing, though it works best when the exaggeration is ridiculous.

I loved this ad from 1969 Neiman Marcus catalog for a Honeywell Kitchen Computer:

Please note that the $10,600 price tag also includes a two week programming course (because that incredibly amazingly designed computer is not Claude Code compatible) so you can get the recipes from the book into the computer.

Apparently Neiman Marcus sold zero of these computers, but clearly that was not the point (though given that Neiman’s repeated bankruptcies suggest that maybe they sold zero of other items as well). For Honeywell, the maker of that computer (which was a Honeywell 316 - a minicomputer that had been selling well for non-kitchen purposes), it put a stake in the ground for what the future could look like (and, it turns out, did look like).

And it made the point that Honeywell was already thinking about the future in ways you could not even imagine (just as OpenAI is thinking about a world without money…except for the money its founder has squirreled away creating a bunker in New Zealand).

I’ve often worked with companies where they want to show that they’re on the cutting edge of whatever industry they’re in, and to do that they’ll talk about how they’re building for 24 months from now. And that’s all fine. But to make an impact, you have to imagine a world 20 years from now and show how you’re a part of it.

Subscribe now

As always, thanks for reading to the end. It’s the best part.

P.S. First, most of you will not care about this at all. Which is true of all of my P.S.’s. But especially this one:

I know that people like to use LinkedIn to brag about their media appearances, but I will use my newsletter to brag that in today’s episode of the Bill Simmons Podcast, Bill talked about my suggestion I sent to him that to end NBA tanking they should add a “ping pong ball of death,” where the draft lottery includes one ping pong ball that, if it is chosen, means that your team will pick last in the first round. Of all the ideas I’ve had in my life (and many of you have read plenty of them here), this is the best idea I’ve ever had. And I’m glad someone else recognized its brilliance :)

How’s it going? I hope you’re not named in the Epstein files (or if you are, that it’s you saying something like, “Hey, stop emailing me!”)

I mentioned last week that I’m going to be running a virtual homepage messaging cohort. I’ve had enough interest that I’m ready to announce that we’ll have the first cohort start on Tuesday, March 3rd. We’ll have a maximum of 5 people, and we’ll meet 3 times as a group for 45-60 minutes over the course of 2 weeks (likely March 3rd, 6th and 13th). During the sessions I’ll share best practices for writing a homepage, and in between you’d have short assignments to work on sections of the homepage. And as part of it you’d get 2 sessions 1:1 with me to go over and hone what you’ve written. The cost will be $500 (it will be even more helpful if multiple folks come from your team.)

If this sounds interesting to you, fill out this incredibly quick form (name, email, company) - you’re not signing up for anything right now…and I’ll get back to you with details.

Moving on…

Today we’ve got:
- A really good idea to improve your logo block.
- 3 marketing lessons from 3 Super Bowl ads (wow, did I hate one of them)
- A story from my childhood

Share

Subscribe now

Sometimes More Is More, Logo Edition

I have long lamented the sad, under-appreciated website logo block.

Every company wants to show off the customers they have, and for some reason the convention has been to put 4 or 5 logos in a row with basically no context:

We’ve talked about a few ways to make those logos more impactful.

I like website translation platform Motionpoint’s idea of listing the number of years that the client has been working with you:

Usergems (“The AI Command Center for outbound and ABM”…also WTF?) has a clever logo block where they list which logos have a case study available so you can learn more about them:

Finally, influencer marketing tool Traackr used to have a great logo block where they had a mini case study for each logo. Of course, after I wrote about it they changed their homepage and removed it, which seems to be the fate suffered by nearly every suggestion I make (pity party over).

I really like how the headline mentions the benefits, it’s got a quick quote from the client CMO, and there’s a little blurb about the outcome. Really nicely done. Until they removed it :(

Those are 3 good ideas for your logo block, but I wanted to share another (even easier!) idea from AI customer service something something company Sierra.

If the idea of the logo block is to give prospects confidence that your company is:

a) real; and
b) has clients who are similar to them

then really the best way to do that would be to just list the logos of a whole bunch of your clients. Which is what Sierra does on their site:

There’s more below that, but that’s enough newsletter real estate to take up. If every other company is trying to convince your prospects that they have lots of great clients by placing 4 logos on their page, the easiest way to counteract that is to put 25 logos on your own homepage. That’s a great use of real estate, and oddly I’d never seen this approach before. Well done.

Subscribe now

Share

Somewhat more than zero of you said you were curious what I thought of the Super Bowl ads this year. And because Gobbledy is here to give somewhat more than zero of you exactly what you want, here are - 3 days later than you would’ve wanted them - my thoughts on the Super Bowl of advertising:

The Oops I Crapped My Pants Award Goes To:

Raisin Bran!

I had the sound turned down when this ad came on, but I turned toward the TV and saw 94 (!) year old William Shatner with the words “Will Shat, Bran Ambassador” next to him. And this is what went through my head:

“Oh dear God, please tell me they are not making a joke about how bran makes you poop.”

That’s when I turned the volume up.

And there was a series of shit jokes based on “Will Shat.”

They are selling a food product. A food product traditionally associated with breakfast. And a smiling sun holding 2 scoops of raisins. And the way they decided to sell you this product was to joke about shitting for 90 seconds.

And it’s not like this ad just happened - poof! - out of thin air. No. There were meetings. And in those meetings someone said, “We need to make raisin bran edgier, and really lean into the fact that bran makes you poop.”

And someone responded, “Interesting, please say more about Raisin Bran really leaning into making you poop.”

And the first person responded, “I’m so glad you asked. When I think about eating cereal and pooping, you know what immediately - immediately! - comes into my head?”

[On edge of his seat] “No! But I need to know.”

“An old man. An old man who has a name such that, if we change it a bit, will, through some tortured jokes, evoke the idea that the bran contained therein is so powerful that you will, quite literally, shit yourself.”

“By God, you’re on to something!”

“I know. Now let’s go have 27 more meetings where nobody will disagree with this idea…”

“Perfect - but hurry, because if the Rice Krispies team finds out about this, they’ll rush out an ad with Snap, Crackle and Poop…and then we’ll be shit out of luck.”

“I see what you did there! Brilliant!”

Ugh.

The Pause That Refreshes

I’m hardly the first person to mention that the ads for Claude touting their lack of ads (in response to ChatGPT’s imminent rollout of ads) were funny and called out a differentiator really clearly. Excellent work.

This is my favorite of the group of commercials they released:

I’ve written a bunch of times that “Specific + Clever = Winner” - that it’s not enough for marketing to just be clever; there has to be a level of specificity that adds a real resonance to the message.

In each ad, the person representing the AI tool answers each question asked of him with an enthusiastic, “absolutely!” (or “absolutely not!” when that’s the correct answer), which made me laugh every time I watched this.

But it was the slight pause before answer that makes this ad work so well. Because that’s what makes the viewer understand that the professor (in this case) is a stand-in for an AI tool. It’s just long enough for the viewer to register what the joke is here. The specificity of that pause holds the whole thing together so the ad doesn’t require exposition about what is happening.

There was a second good marketing lesson that this ad elicited:

OpenAI's Sam Altman responded to Anthropic's ad on Twitter with a tone-deaf essay about how the ad is misleading blah blah blah blah.

Here's some executive comms advice to keep tucked away for the future:

If a competitor calls you out in an amusing way, you have 2 choices:

1) Ignore it.
2) Respond in an equally lighthearted, amusing way.

Responding to humor with seriousness backfires 100% of the time. He really shat the bed (as it were.)

A Little More-On

Apropos of very little, my favorite joke from 5th grade:

A little moron and a big moron are standing at the edge of a cliff. The big moron falls off, and the little moron does not. Why?

Because he was a little more on.

I’m not sure the Jesus, He Gets Us ad titled “Is there more to life than more” was the most enjoyable ad from the game, but it was the best example of what you can do if you truly understand the customer pain your product is trying to alleviate.

Let’s break this down a bit - (and yes, it’s all a little uncomfortable to talk about a marketing campaign where the product is “Jesus,” but I know we can handle it.)

Who is the customer for the product being presented here? I’ll assume it’s “people who are unsatisfied with their life in some way.”

Great. One of the overarching insights of this campaign is that Jesus’ teachings are applicable to the modern world.

I’m Jewish, and one of the challenges that Reform (and to an extent, Conservative) Jewish congregations have faced is that people have increasingly found yoga and other exercise classes to be reasonable substitutes for the community and mental wellbeing that houses of worship have offered in the past.

(If you want to hear more about this, check out my podcast interview with Rabbi Eric Solomon about how synagogues think about marketing to new members.)

One of the struggles American Judiasm has had (and I don’t really want to get into this in a big way, but…) is that it hasn’t really been able to articulate what problem it is a solution to. (Put aside the bigger challenge that there isn’t one group pushing “Judaism” in the way that there is apparently one group that has funded a massive marketing campaign for “Jesus.”)

The Jesus, He Gets Us campaign has been so fascinating because it has focused on showing how the product is relevant for today’s consumer. And this particular commercial really hones in on so many of the strategies we’ve discussed in Gobbledy over the years.

In particular, finding an “enemy.” In this case, the “enemy” is the never-ending desire for “more.” And the ad does a particularly good job of showing all of the ways that “more” impacts our lives. Plus, the direction includes a bunch of shots that are off-kilter, or spinning, or in whatever way making you feel disoriented. The impact is that “more” is a never-ending roller coaster ride that you want to get off of.

And the product they’re selling is how you get off. Brilliant.

It’s really worth watching what they do in the ad - “more” is such a clever enemy. If you can unlock your company’s “more,” every bit of marketing you do going forward will be more impactful.

Subscribe now

Share

As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.

P.S. A little story: In the 1970s and early ‘80s the Playboy corporation owned a resort in northwestern New Jersey called The Playboy Club and Resort at Great Gorge. In 1981 or so, my father was hired to be a cameraman for a boxing match being held at the resort, and for reasons lost to history, he (and definitely not my mother) thought it would be a fun (“fun”) idea to bring their 9, 7, and 5 year old children along for a weekend at The Playboy Club and Resort at Great Gorge.

I have 2 vague memories of this trip. First is that my then-5-year old sister asked why everyone was dressed up as a bunny. The second is that my mother was less-than-thrilled about the choice to bring her 9, 7, and 5 year old children to a weekend at The Playboy Club and Resort and may have voiced her displeasure more than once.

I will now share a promotional video starring Hugh Hefner’s longtime girlfriend Barbi Benton singing a song about going to said resort. Please do not blame me if you spend the rest of the day singing “My Country Place.”

One shocking thing to note about that completely-safe-for-work video is that there is a shot of children frolicking by the pool. I’ve looked closely, and I am none of those children, which means that OTHER people ALSO thought taking their young children to The Playboy Club and Resort at Great Gorge was an excellent idea. Also, frankly, that is a very weird bit of positioning on the part of the Playboy Corporation. Also also, it does solve one of the mysteries of my childhood as to why the 5 of us spent a weekend there.

Anyway, I thought about that trip when I saw this headline in the Wall St. Journal:

I’m sure it made sense at the time.

How’s it going?

Question for you:

I’m thinking about running a virtual homepage messaging cohort. The idea would be that a group of 5 people would meet 3-4 times for 45-60 minutes over the course of 2 weeks. During the sessions I’d share best practices for writing a homepage, and in between you’d have short assignments to work on sections of the homepage. And as part of it you’d get 2 sessions 1:1 with me to go over and hone what you’ve written. The cost would be $500.

I’m trying to gauge whether people would be interested in this - the idea is that it’s a super hands-on experience at a reasonable price, and you’d have a well-honed draft of a homepage when you’re done.

If this sounds interesting to you, could you fill out this incredibly quick form (name, email, company) - you’re not signing up for anything right now…I’m just trying to figure out whether there’s interest in doing something like this.

OK, moving on. Today we’ve got:

• Don’t help.

• Don’t light your mascot on fire.

Subscribe now

Share Gobbledy

Mother’s Little Helper

May I share a little annoyance with the gobbledeers?

Yes? Great, thanks so much!

(If you answered no, skip to page 253 to find out if The Searcher is able to slay the wicked Voltor the Hungry in the Castle Bolfenstein).

I cannot explain how many times I read on a software homepage that the product “helps” you do something.

To wit:

“Helps” weakens the message. It takes away from the power of the product.

Your 4-year old “helps” you make brownies, in that she is not helping at all and likely making more work for you (though it’s wonderful! I wish I still had a 4-year old with whom I could make brownies).

I’ve shared this ages ago, but I wanted to re-share this quote from former MTV News host Tabitha Soren talking about music journalist and MTV personality Kurt Loder:

“Kurt knew every bit of music history. His musicology was just such a gift for me to learn from. Never mind his writing experience. He always said, “Tabitha, you can’t use ‘seems.’ It either is or it isn’t.””

It either is or it isn’t.

Either your product does something or it doesn’t do something. It does not help.

In the case of construction software company Beam (whom I picked on in the image above), they should change their copy from:

“Beam’s easy-to-learn software and AI assistant help contractors stay organized, win more jobs, and boost profits.”

to

“Contractors choose Beam to win more jobs and stay better organized.”

If you have “helps” on your website, take a few minutes and flip that sentence around to tell readers why companies like them choose your product, and the benefits they receive from using it.

(Reading Gobbledy makes your messaging stronger…it doesn’t help you write better messages, y’know?)

Subscribe now

Share

The Memories of a Coal Miner’s Mascot

Oh, do I love mascots.

If you’ve been reading Gobbledy for longer than, oh, six weeks, you’ve read me singing the praises of creating a mascot for your company.

I know. I know. We live in the “age of AI” (as every software company webinar and every tech conference session will tell you.) But we’ve always lived in the age of mascots. Well, at least I have.

So let me introduce to you, after spending $1.5 million with Landor Associates and literally hundreds of interviews with subscribers and prospective subscribers, the newest member of the Gobbledy family, Gobb!

That’s not what I wanted to write about.

I love mascots because in a crowded market they’re an easy shorthand for people to remember you. And because virtually every software market is now a very crowded market I have not understood why software companies are so adverse to using a mascot.

This is a real mystery for me. Every company complains about how difficult it is to stand out. Sadly, THIS is how you stand out!

Also this:

Yeah, it’s sad - that’s what works.

OK, I got worked up. My apologies.

So one of the reasons to use a mascot is to give your brand an identity in a crowded market where consumers have a bunch of choices. The Marlboro Man, Tony the Tiger, Ronald McDonald - those all help consumers remember the feelings they get when they interact with the company, and drive choice when there are a bunch of choices presented.

But that’s not the only reason.

If you have a product that has a less-than-sparkling reputation in the marketplace, a mascot is a way, perhaps, to soften that blow.

You may be familiar with the pesticide DDT.

If you are not familiar with DDT, just know that it was banned in the US in 1972 because of “increased cancer risks, and nervous system toxicity, especially in utero.” Oops!

But before that, they got ahead of their less-than-stellar reputation when they ran this ad:

Would a singing apple really represent a product that causes cancer? Of course not! What kind of an apple is that????

Also a singing potato. Certainly a singing potato would only represent goodness. Or being buried in dirt underground. Oh wait…

If you’re under the age of 40, it might seem impossible to imagine that a cigarette company would use this strategy. But you’re underestimating cigarette companies. We old folks remember that Camel cigarettes used the mascot Joe Camel to make cigarettes more appealing to young people. Oops again!

Yes, maybe we look back on that and say, “you have got to be kidding me…but also do they come in menthol? ” But also it moved the conversation away from “everyone knows this product will kill you” to “where can I get a Joe Camel t-shirt?” Like literally that’s how powerful a mascot can be - everyone agrees the product is bad for you, but the mascot steers the conversation toward “however, you can look like the kind of person [or dromedary] who rides a motorcycle if you use this product.”

So before I share why I’m telling you all this, we’re all adults here, right? (because what child would sit and read this?).

I’d like to be able to mention something about a campaign the current administration is running without it becoming a whole thing about the members of the current administration. There are so many places you can go to talk about that. This isn’t one of them.

So, regardless of how you feel about said administration…

Let’s imagine you have taken a job working for the US government’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE). And then after you take the job you learn that the OSMRE is the governmental office that oversees coal mining.

And then you think to yourself, “we still have coal mining?”

And then another voice in your head says, “of course we still have coal mining. All you liberal big city folks have no idea how real Americans live.”

And then you think, “Oh, there you go again with the whole ‘real Americans’ thing. I think I’ve had just about enough of that. There’s no red America, there’s no blue America, there’s…”

And your other voice responds, “Oh yeah - quoting Barack HUSSEIN Obama is really making a great case that you’re not out of touch with America. Go cry your liberal tears somewhere else.”

And then you think, “I probably need to stop working alone in my house all day.”

And the other voice responds, “You’re not alone, you’re listening to the Ben Shapiro Show.”

Regardless, you’ve got this new marketing job at the OSMRE and you’re tasked with improving the image of coal among the American public. This administration (again, shush!) believes in investing in coal, so there’s going to be investment in coal.

You’re in your fancy new OSMRE marketing job - how would you start to try to let Americans know that maybe coal doesn’t have the negative connotations that they think it has, while making those who feel good about coal feel (somehow?) even better about coal.

Well, as we always say about marketing, you’ve got options:

Option 1: Have the POTUS or other high-ranking official do a whistlestop tour of coal country and show how the investments in coal are paying economic dividends for the happy people of, for example, West Virginia.

Option 2: Have your Secretary of the Interior (who oversees OSMRE) go on the Sunday shows and talk about the investments the country is making in coal and then ignore the questions the host of the Sunday show asks you about why you’re investing in coal instead of renewable energy.

Option 3: Ensure that the White House press secretary is well briefed on coal so that when a reporter asks her about it she mocks them and calls them names. (Hey, me, we said no politics!)

Option 4: Create a mascot named Coalie to represent the cute, cuddly landscape of coal country and to make everyone feel great about coal.

This is partly a trick question - you can do a couple of these (and I would definitely suggest Option 3), but also you’d choose Option 4: Coalie is adorable:

Damn, he’s cute.

And yet.

If we go back to the smiling DDT apple, the apple was smiling because DDT was protecting it from the terrible bugs who wanted to eat it (I mean, yes, at the expense of the health of generations of people who lived anywhere near it…but still).

Coalie is coal and coal is useful when you throw it into a furnace (no! not Coalie! Cooaallllieeeeee!!!!!).

That’s my one piece of advice about creating a mascot - make sure that the adorable mascot you create would not be incinerated if it were used as directed.

Unless, of course, you’re the Cluckin’ Chicken. “The pieces of me get flame broiled!”

Subscribe now

As always, thanks for reading to the end it’s the best part…

P.S. - We hit 3,000 Gobbledy subscribers today! That’s a huge milestone for the newsletter - I barely know 4 people outside of my family, so that leaves 2,996 of you whom I don’t know personally who have joined this silly community of readers. It means a lot to me, thank you. And if you enjoy this, please share it with someone. They’ll enjoy it too (and if they don’t, just let me know and I’ll yell at them, like I’m the press secretary).

How’s it going?

Since this is, ostensibly, a newsletter about positioning, I thought I could deliberate publicly about how to position this issue of the newsletter:

One way I could position today’s newsletter is that I was traveling for the past few days and I’m traveling for the next few days and I’ve been busy with actual work that someone (gasp!) pays me to do and so I haven’t had the opportunity to set aside my normal time to write Gobbledy. So I’ve gone through a bunch of past issues and pulled out all the times I suggested a fun (“fun”) activity for your team to do because I didn’t have time for new content.

Orrrrrrrrr….

I could position this as a way to offer my readers an amazing opportunity to learn a whole bunch of different activities they can do with their marketing teams that will be fun (“fun”) and also help make your product’s messaging clearer.

I say we go with the second option.

Today: 5 Fun (“Fun”) exercises to do with your marketing team.

Subscribe now

Share

Exercise #1: Turn Your Shortcoming into a Benefit

In an early issue of Gobbledy, we talked about how one of the keys to Warby Parker’s early success was that they constantly talked about how massive global eyewaker maker Luxottica was single-handedly responsible for making your glasses cost $600 when they should actually cost $95. Every bit of PR they did included talking about how Luxottica was responsible for making glasses ridiculously expensive. They were the enemy.

Here’s your fun (“fun”) exercise - Ask your team: Who is your enemy? Who’s your Luxottica? It doesn’t have to be a company. It can be an idea (“doing things manually” is an effective enemy, for example).

Being comfortable narrowing down your target market (and letting go of non-target markets), and then telling them why you’re better than the enemy. You don’t have to be better than everyone.

(Just a note — you will get pushback on the “narrowing down your target market” part. Letting go of non-target markets is very, very uncomfortable for your sales team, even though letting go will make the sales process easier. You will be blamed for any slips in revenue, because you narrowed the number of targets. And because you work in marketing. And part of our job in marketing is to be blamed. Except for you. You’re doing a great job. Keep up the good work! I wish you the best of luck.)

Every shortcoming you have can be re-cast as a, uh, longcoming(?).

Missing some of the sophisticated features of your more mature competitors? Maybe you go with “Easy implementation” or “For XXX who want to focus on revenue, not implementation” or “Everything you need, with none of the fluff”. Whatever.

Or maybe it’s the opposite - you have all the features, but going live is complex. Maybe you need an expensive team of system implementers to get up and running? You could go with - “Backed by an army of experts.”

Don’t have integrations with some of the software your prospects use? “The platform chosen by 4 out of 5 companies that use XXXX software” (that you do integrate with).

Your shortcomings could be the key to becoming the next Warby Parker. Of software.

Exercise #2: You’re One Word Away…

I’ve mentioned how a friend’s poetry professor used to talk about the “money word” in a poem - the word that does much of the heavy lifting and draws attention to a key theme (or, y’know, whatever).

Behold this email from Chirp, a purveyor of some sort of massage table that helps relieve back pain:

Read that copy. What’s the money word?

No, not “to.” That’s not the money word. What in God’s name is wrong with you?

It’s “annihilate.” The product they’re introducing will “annihilate your back pain.”

It’s a great bit of copywriting, and it’s something you can steal if you’d like to, ahem, annihilate the boring in your copy.

Here’s a tagline that AI somethingsomething Instabase uses on their homepage:

“Unlock the potential of your enterprise data with AI.”

But you know who also uses that phrase? Lots of companies:

What could be the money word here?

How about:

“UNCORK the potential of your enterprise data with AI”

“LIBERATE the potential of your enterprise data with AI”

“UNCHAIN the potential of your enterprise data with AI”

“EXPLODE the potential of your enterprise data with AI”

“UNSHACKLE the potential of your enterprise data with AI”

Your homepage headline or subhead should have a money word that you can own.

Here’s the fun (“fun”) exercise: Gather the marketing team around. No - first, send a calendar invite for 10 minutes from now. Have the meeting title be “Team Update.” Or “Marketing Changes.” Watch how nervous they all are. Ha ha ha. That’s hilarious.

Then when they arrive, give them a little “Hey guys, you may be wondering why I gathered you here with only 10 minutes’ notice.”

Hoo boy, won’t they be relieved when you tell them you just want to do a little exercise.

Anyway, ask them to brainstorm a change to 1 word in your homepage headline or subhead. Just 1. They’ll be pleasantly surprised that you didn’t quit and they weren’t being let go. Suddenly doing a little work seems fun! You’re a good boss.

I promise there’ll be a word that they come up with (besides the word where they describe you as an “asshole”) that is a giant leap better than what’s on your page now.

Exercise #3: There’s One Reason You’re Better

I was so happy when I saw this ad from apparel brand Fabletics because the headline expressed the product’s core benefit so clearly:

If you were a dude who plays golf and was in the market for pants, and you were wondering why you should buy Fabletics pants instead of pants sold by another schmatta hawker like - for example - Lululemon, I think saying that the pants are “like Lulu but a third of the price” is pretty brilliant.

Here’s the fun (“fun”) exercise - what’s the most obvious way your product is better than your biggest competitor, and don’t worry about whether anyone cares about that reason. How is it different? Now, mock up your homepage where “Like Salesforce, but our font is larger” and see how clear and obvious it is on your site.

Now, go show it to people internally. You did that? Great. Now, die a little inside every time you have that conversation because everyone is going to tell you a hundred things you forgot to put in there.

Now it’s time to go back to your desk and reconsider why you got into marketing in the first place. But you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re right.

Exercise #4: The Brand Voice You’ve Always Wanted

As my friend and sometime-Gobbledy reader JVC once said about losing weight, “it’s simple, but it’s not easy.”

Which is also how I’d describe marketing for software companies, except that it’s simple, but we make it mindblowingly not-easy by generally trying to do anything that would make us look any different from any of our competitors.

This is how I think of software marketing:

Anyway, if you’re thinking to yourself, “I’d love for us not to look and sound exactly like every one of our competitors, but I just don’t know how to do that,” you’ve come to the right place. Or at least you’ve come to A place, which is really the first step.

Here’s the fun (“fun”) exercise I’ll suggest that will help you figure out where to start:

Take any page on your website that’s not the homepage, and then change it into the voice that you always wished your brand had.

One of the things we talk about here sometimes is that every touchpoint you have should sound like your brand voice. We talked about one of my favorite examples of this back in the early days of Gobbledy where I shared an order confirmation from “multi collagen peptide” (?) provider Vitauthority that’s so great, I’m going to put it right here:

Every touchpoint should be that good.

Which is why as a marketer you have SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES to have your brand voice come through. But almost no companies bother to do that. And sure, I’ll gladly help you with your homepage (hit me up at jared@sagelett.com - also, please don’t say “hit me up”), but it’s easier to start somewhere that’s less visible.

You could start on your Pricing page, for example.

And specifically as an example, I wanted to share the pricing page from testing tool Posthog.

The top part of the page is a regular pricing page, but if you keep scrolling you get this:

“If nothing else has sold you on PostHog, hopefully these classic marketing tactics will.” Love it. The little hog on the bottom right saying, “Please help our conversion rate.” Amazing. “Act now and get $0 off your order.” All of it, brilliant.

I’ve worked a couple of places where someone has said something like, “Developers don’t like to be sold to. Just give them information.” Which I mean, sure? But one way you “don’t sell to” someone is to tell them you’re selling to them. Which PostHog has done here in just an incredible fashion. I’m jealous.

You don’t have to wallow in jealousy - tell your team they have the freedom to try a new voice on an existing page and watch the creativity flow.

Exercise 5: What If You Had an X, But It Could Y…

I wanted to share an ancient example of how “It’s like this thing you like, but better in these specific ways” can serve as a template for companies struggling to talk about why people should care that their product now contains AI.

The example starts with a construction that any company can use to explain the benefit of your product:

“What if you had an X, but it could also Y”

Behold, an amazing ad for the 1963 Ford Econoline Van:

I can’t, in good conscience, bore you with a history of vans in the United States, so just know that vans were a new-ish product in the United States in 1963.

(OK fine…Volkswagen created the van in the early 1950s as a kind of enclosed pickup truck to transport items. The passenger van - the one where you should not go a-knockin’ if it is a-rockin’ - didn’t come along until the early 1970s when Dodge introduced one).

So people who were buying a van in 1963 were likely replacing a pickup truck. Which is why it would make sense to say, “what if you had a pickup, but it could also…have better road visibility, carry more cargo, and keep that cargo secure…”

We often hear that software messaging shouldn’t focus on the functionality - it should only focus on the benefits.

But one of the things this ad does well is to focus on the functionality (we moved the cab forward) as a way to talk about the benefit (now you can see the road better). Talking about functionality isn’t the problem, not talking about WHY the functionality exists is the problem.

They continue with that structure in the smaller copy toward the bottom: “Shorter wheelbase means greater maneuverability!” Every feature they mention includes a benefit of having that feature.

Here’s the final fun (“fun”) exercise: get your team together and take the Ford Econoline Van ad and fill it in for your product…(and keep those images, so it’ll be extra confusing…). When I first published this I had a Gobbledy reader write me a few weeks later to tell me they did this with their team and it was really useful. (And yes, I was shocked someone took my suggestion.)

Subscribe now

Share

Thanks for reading to the end, it’s the best part. I really do hope you do 1 (all 5?) of the exercises with your team. I’ve always found that my teams like to do something that was a little different than the normal day-to-day stuff, and (usually?) they enjoyed working as a team. This accomplishes both. Let me know how it goes.

P.S. - This has nothing at all to do with marketing, but I just read an incredible book by journalist Brian Goldstone called There’s No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. It follows 5 families in Atlanta as they struggle to hold jobs and keep a roof over their heads. It is not a light romp. But if this topic is at all interesting to you, it’s a really fascinating look at how people can work multiple jobs and still struggle with homelessness.