“It's way easier to train a comedian to be a marketer than it is to train a marketer to be funny.”
My First Million · Startups & Venture · October 2026
The guest was asked how he gets a breakthrough ad out of a few days away with a team. He said he shuts the writers in a cabin with the lawyers and everyone else who has to sign off until there is an approved script, so that it can't be watered down over months of email. This line is what he says he learned building his ad agency.
Transcript
experience. And then we created the concept with her, as I said, I think we can build something. So I brought back in Joel, the same guy who wrote on the other one. And we sat there for three or four days and wrote out the Poopere ad and had the concept between us of we need to get a British girl. We're going to put her on a toilet. We're going to have all these juxtapositions where you've got this British girl that's cute. She's sitting on toilet and she's talking about pooping, which is totally just out of left field.
Right. Hey, can I ask you, you go for three days and you come out with this incredible ad that transforms the trajectory of the business. Basically, you make the brand. The brand happens. You know, that was a fork in the road moment. I think the trajectory was going one way and then you shifted it. Yep. And we all want to do that. I've so many times have take the team. We're going to get away. We're going to figure this out. We're going to do, we're going to make some magic happen. And sometimes you do and sometimes you don't. But I'm always winging it when I go in there. I have no idea how I'm supposed to be doing this kind of three, four day camp to find a breakthrough. What do you do to increase the odds of a breakthrough? I'm assuming, you know, you pick the right people. That's a big part of it. But what else? What do you do?
Well, I think getting up in a cabin and locking everybody in with the attorneys, the business leaders, everybody who has to sign off, every stakeholder is inside that room and they can't leave until we get a signed contract that says we can go put into production. That helps. Because one is if they can be with the creatives, then the creatives can pitch them and they know that they're on the same team because you're talking face to face. You can go back and forth for months and neuter a script by email. Right. Or you can just get in a cabin for two or three days and come out with something everybody's happy with or excited about. In the marketing world, I learned very quickly when we were building the Harmon Brothers ad agency that it's way easier to train a comedian to be a marketer than it is to train a marketer to be funny.
Right.
And so we would build the structure of an ad and you have to have your problem, your solution, your three elements and your credibility, et cetera, and your calls to action. You have to have this formula, which we lay out. I think we laid it out pretty well in pooped gold. And then at the end, End of that process of getting the structure there, then the comedians come in and they build out the humor and the premise. And so getting comedians is always like as a marketer, I think if you want to be a creative marketer, comedians are critical to the infrastructure of a marketing company because they come out of left field. You just have to have somebody who understands well enough the formula. So, for example, I would always tell comedians: if your joke doesn't add to the message, which is way harder to do, and if it just comes out of left field, you just have to kill it. It either adds to the message or it doesn't work. And so, if you notice in squatty potty poopery, purple mattress, every joke brings you a little closer to understanding what that product is and why you want to use it.
And you, do you, do you come in with a pretty solid idea? Or you just start off with a bunch of sticky notes on the wall? Do you have a process that you learned how to kind of like facilitate the creative flow of a bunch of creative people?
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