The Day You Become a Better Storyteller with Harry Dry (Founder of Marketing Examples)

This episode is brought to you by Paramark. Look, it's November 2026, planning, we're already here, somehow we're already here, the holidays are coming, it's planning season, budgets are being built, and you know the stuff that you're doing right now is going to decide how next year is going to play out. Somehow they expect you to plan for the next year, it's hard, but you got to do it. And you can't make smart budgeting calls if you're just guessing with what's working. They're still planning next year's marketing strategy based on the wrong data because of things like broken attribution and a misleading gut feel if the data is wrong and you're making decisions off of that, it's going to be a challenging year. That's exactly where Paramark comes in. They can help you replace the guesswork with actual insight backed by over $2 billion in analyzed marketing data. They figured out exactly what drives incremental growth, and that's the name of the game in marketing across every channel, like LinkedIn, Metta, TikTok, Google, CTV, even out of home. And right now, they're doing something crazy. They wanted to do a crazy offer for this podcast, this is not hyperbole, this is real. They want to do a one-to-one private consultation with Pernav, their CEO, and Sam, their CMO, both who have led marketing teams at companies like Dropbox, Adobe, Microsoft, Shutterfly, they're doing this now and building Paramark. I know them both well, and they're actually smart guys with strong opinions in this space about attribution and measurement. So they're going to give you a 45-minute strategy session. They'll help you measure the real impact of every marketing dollar you spend. They'll pull insights from your current media mix and design a 2026 roadmap that's rooted in data, not gut, like how do I get this? Can I need some of this insight? This is an amazing offer, and it is real. They're going to really sit down with you and walk through your business and help you get more insight on what you should be doing in 2026. So go check it out. If you want to future-proof your marketing strategy for next year, don't miss out on this offer. Go and grab your spot right now, pull over on the side of the road, stop your run, do whatever you're doing, go to paramark.com/brand-consult, that's paramark.com/brand-consult. Brand-consult, we'll link it in here in case you can't understand the words coming out of my mouth. Hey, it's Dave Quicknope. Before we get into this episode, this is a recording from Drive 2025, our annual event here at Exit 5. This was recorded live in Burlington, Vermont, at Hula as part of our event, and we'd love to have you at next year's event. We're bringing it back to Vermont, Stowe, Vermont. You can go to exit5.com/drive to get more information, put your name on the waitlist, and maybe make it to next year's event. But we're bringing the audio recordings from these sessions to you live, well, recorded on the podcast, because we thought it would be a fun way to show you the stuff we talk about at Drive and give you a sense of what it was like if you didn't get to be there, and if you were there, then you get to now re-listen and maybe take notes again. So this is one of the sessions from Drive. Go and check it out, get tickets, put your name on the waitlist for next year at exit5.com/drive. If anybody's ever done an event before, this is the hardest transition ever after lunch slot, and that's why I put Harry here, I'm super excited for this. But just thank you. Today's been so fun already. I'm buzzing. I don't know if it's because I had six cups of cold brew. Where's my guy Jeff Porter at? Jeff, I'm from New England. I'm from Western Mass. I can say, "Nobody has iced coffee at these events. Thank you so much." And I'm feeling that too. I've had plenty of it now, and we're ready to go. Oh, also, I meant to say this earlier, and someone just came up to me and was like, "You need to tell people about Sanger's book because it's up front. This is not like a free promo, like an ad or anything, but he left a bunch of his books up here. If you want to grab them later, you should grab them." Don't do it right now. Yeah. Take one now. Fuck it. Whatever. Yeah. Go ahead. All right. So, we got a nice little afternoon. Again, like I said, we're never going to be sitting for that long, hour and a half max at a time. Hey. I should have gave him my affiliate link. What the hell? Did you a dollar? One more. One more to go. You're welcome, Sangram. So, we got a nice little afternoon plan for you here at Drive. We're going to roll that into, I know a bunch of you are joining us on a boat cruise tonight. We have a nice day tomorrow planned, got a nice little afternoon, and I'm having a good ass time, and I'm really happy to be here with you all. Okay. Our next speaker is the guy I talked about in my talk this morning. I have heard a lot of people give him undue credit. He didn't actually, I picked the name Exit 5. He is a genius, but he didn't pick the name. I did, but he helped me talk me through it, which is great. He writes a popular newsletter that goes out to 150,000 marketers, and he's built one of the best swipe files out there. Anybody seen his site, marketingexamples.com? Yeah. Oh my gosh. Incredible. This man is a craftsman. He's here. He has hopped up on Celsius and caffeine. He's an incredible marketer, storyteller, copywriter. We've been online friends for a year, and no joke, this is the first time we've ever seen each other in person. I know it's for a fact the first time he's been in Vermont, and so I'm super excited to be here to kick off the afternoon session. Please give it up for Mr. Harry Dry. I remember when I was a little girl, our house caught on fire. I'll never forget the look on my father's face as he gathered me up in his arms and raised to the burning building out of the pavement. Does anybody know who invented the camp? We're in France in 1890, and things are not going well. These are high people, they're unemployed, and the prices are up, and Louis, he should be running the country, but he's got a hobby, and it's not golf, it's look-ficking. And his wife's not helping out too much easier than the people are saying, "Louis, nous n'avons plus de patte, we have no bread," and Marie Antoinette saying, "Kille monge de la blioche, let me cake." So they get executed, this guy called Napoleon rocks up, and naturally he wants to take over the world, and he does a pretty good job. He marches to Spain, marches to Italy, marches to Russia, but he's got a problem. The Frenchman, as they march, they get him really hungry. So Napoleon sets a 14,000 francs reward for somebody to feed his army as they march. And you'd think this would be easy, but it wasn't. It took 15 years, and this guy called Nicolas Appare, invents this thing where he sterilizes food in sealed containers. A year on, that becomes the camp. Napoleon's delighted. Now the can, nobody's heard of it, and you shouldn't have heard of it, but it's changed the world much more than we'd think. Like, Arctic, 1911, adminsen makes his way to the South Pole, and he only gets there because of canned food. Tragically, World War II and World War I, like, it would have been impossible to fight on that scale without canned food. About 60 billion cans were eaten during the war. One more. Neil Armstrong goes to space, the Apollo 11's up there for eight days, and what's he eating up there? He sterilized food in sealed containers, Nicolas Appare's invention. Why should we care? Nobody knows about it. Films about World War II, 4,900, films about the can, one. Can and Industry in California, title-less. Now this is the part of the talk where I segue, if you can't wrap it, well, like, no one knows about the can, if you can't wrap it in a compelling narrative, nobody will give a shit. People think they make decisions on facts, they don't, they're just responding to the shape of the story. It's really hard to tell a story about a can, but Napoleon, well, these things are easy to tell, stories about two million books are published each year. And authors, they write on Twitter, I'm incredibly proud that my new book is out now, available to order. I'm incredibly proud, my book's out, available to order, incredibly proud, my book's out, available to order. And I have a good friend, Sheehan, and here we are together in Tenerife. My brother's actually the real brains in the middle, like, he's, but Sheehan had the same problem. He's writing a book, it came out last week, and my mom sees it in Waterstones, and I texted him being like, we need to promote this, we need to promote this thing. You can't just write pre-order my books available to buy. So he sends me back, he used to work at McDonald's straight after we were in university, he sends me back, McDonald's comparison, I say to him, yeah, McDonald's and you outside Waterstones, which is a British bookstore, right? Three years, never stop dreaming, one line. So three years later, never stop dreaming. He put some social media last week, three years later, never stop dreaming. McDonald's, two Waterstones, and two million people see it. Same point, if you can't wrap it in a narrative, nobody's going to care. People make decisions on, people think they make decisions on facts, they don't. It's the shape of a story, oh, we want B2B, I hear the crowd, I hear the crowd chanting, we want B2B, we want B2B. You didn't come to Burlington for cans and books. So let's talk about Asana. Last year, last year, Asana spent $445 million in advertising, more than the GDP of the Cook Islands. What do they do with the money? They take our billboards, so they move work forward, any team, any project, any goal, it's a smarter way to work. Their social media is a lot better, whoever's doing AI generation plus human intuition equals innovative work. I'm a responsible Brit, I would never, I would never claim that the state of Asana's writing has anything to do with the share price falling 90% in five years. I would never do that, I'd never do that. Asana, this is what I call the throw money and pray method. You raise twice the cash, you hire twice the staff. You spend twice as much on ads, and you cross your fingers, and that's Asana. Now, let me tell you about another project management company, run by Jason Freed. I emailed Jason, and he told me they spent $2 million on marketing every single year, and they got a similar number of paying customers to Asana. They don't spend 300 million pounds on billboards, which say move work forward. What Jason and David do, they wrote a book called Rework, and it sold over a million copies and they got paid 10 million pounds for the privilege. This is what I call the learn writing or learn storytelling approach. You want to grow twice as fast, you've got two choices. We throw money like Asana, we learn how to tell a story. I actually made an advert for Jason, this is storytelling. I haven't sent it to him yet, but it's called irony. Buying software to run your business from companies losing half a billion every single year. Asana minus 1.2, Atlas in Monday Smartsheet, Basecamps profitable. So that's storytelling. Anybody ever seen Goodwill Hunting this moment ago? My guy's wicked smart. Let's try and learn how to do it. It's not going to be easy. If you remember one thing from this talk, do not remember this. This is my storyteller starter pack, and we need seven arcs. You've got the LinkedIn entrepreneur and storyteller. Some of you are in the audience, I know you are. We believe coffee can change the world, features, whatever. I think it's a little bit more simple than that, I wouldn't get bogged down in this. Story is what? I've given you some examples so far, and every single one has the same cadence. I wanted to talk about my friend Sheehan, so I introduced other writers who wrote right on Twitter about pre-ordering their books. I wanted to talk about Asana, so I introduced Basecamp. The foundation of every single story is conflict, if there's no conflict, no story. If you want to be a little bit more technical, you're unresolved, you create an unresolved tension, and then you kind of resolve it, and you've got a story in there, okay? A little challenge for you all. Here is his nine books. The art of creative thinking, steal like an artist. The creative wound, make brilliant work. The art of brainstorming, unfair advantage, find your artistic voice. The art of creativity, how to be an artist. One book, sold more than every single other one combined. What is it? Why? Steal like an artist. It's the only one with any kind of conflict in. There's no conflict when you say make brilliant work, it just exists, right? They're like an artist. Artists shouldn't be stealing like they're like honorable, you know? There's conflict. So I'm going to warm you up after lunch, Raphael and the Dahl style, with your partner, someone next to you. I want you to rewrite these with conflict, just to get the idea of introducing conflict into writing, because it's really, really, really, really important. I think nearly all writing could benefit from more conflict. So you've got 20 seconds, just 20 seconds with the person next to you. The cat sat on the mat. How could you introduce conflict to this lamp? Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, what have we got? Cool out, if you've got it, if you've got it to me. Hey, wonderful, the cat sat on the mat, second row. Very good. Very good. Any more for anymore? One more. Is it the dog sat or the cat sat on the dog mat? My guy, Eddie Slater, back post. Probably stole that from you, Eddie, to be honest. Now like, how you want to think about conflict is, I got this from Luke Sullivan. I think Luke Sullivan was absolutely brilliant. He says, you've got a rectangle, all right, draw a rectangle, just put a line down the middle, and then you're looking for things which are diametrically opposed. So you've got a cat, you've got a dog. Hold that fort for the next one. You are a social media manager, YouTube company, and someone hands you this thumbnail. They've made this awesome image generation where Usain Bolt runs 100 meters. Same principle, 20 seconds with the person next to you, how could you introduce conflict to this title? Go. Okay. Enough, enough, enough. What do we got? Anyone got anything on it? Shout out. Back post there. Very good. Very good. So one more. Faster than you are. Faster. I like it. A little bit simpler. I feel like you guys are probably the better of the answer here. No. You say, "Bolt versus Cheetah." It's the real video. It's got 3.4 million views. Especially only, this is a little bit of nerdy trivia for people who like writing. There's one YouTube channel in the universe with free videos and they all have over a million views. Usain Bolt is the same channel. Usain Bolt versus Cheetah, Usain Bolt versus normal person, Usain Bolt versus Kalina Mbappe. That's all you need to know about conflict. We're just suckers for it. One more. Just like that, my 20 year marriage is over. 20 seconds. Go, go, go. Rectangle. Left, right. How could you introduce conflict? You're being asked. Okay, I had enough. I had enough. Well, I've got one more here. What did you say? At the Coldplay Concert. At the Coldplay Concert. What do you got? Sorry, top row. I just added the word again. Again. Again, the answer is a real article. How I would view this is a good writing is a search for juxtaposition. So we have 20 year marriage and you have just, it was originally just like that. You want a little bit, I don't know if this is, you want to try and compare apples and apples. So 20 years is a time. 10 seconds is a time. 10 seconds that ended my 20 year marriage. Last one. Once again, a YouTube video. I'm begging you to read fiction. And we have the counter Monte Cristo, Tequila Mockenberg, Jack Kerouac on the road. Think about a rectangle. You've got begging you to read fiction on the left. What could you put against it to make it more entertaining, more and more interesting? I'm begging you to read Joe Rogan. Yeah. I know I like, you got something there. What do you got? Robert Green. Hey, you know it. You know it. Very well done. A real video. And what competes with fiction, non-fiction. I want to get your mind working like this a little bit more. I'm begging you to read fiction. Read bits, the counter Monte Cristo, not this. Real video. We're going to skip for that one. Oh, I hear the chance. I hear the chance. We want B2B. We want B2B. Okay. I'll give it to you. We work for Ramp and the founder, Eric, often messages me with drafts for me to kind of try and improve. And this time around, they were rewriting, they were announcing a 13 billion valuation and Eric sent me this. Our mission remains the same to save you the customer time and money. It's a corporate card ramp which saves companies time and money by eliminating busy work so your team can focus on what matters most. And it's all right. It's not bad at all. I sent to him back. I said, today, so today Ramp's reached a new valuation, 13 billion. I replied, how about today, Ramp reached a new valuation, 13 billion. We're not Steve Jobs or Wilbur Wright. We won't invent the next iPhone or flying machine. Now what do we have here? None of you know where this is going. This is unresolved tension. This is the point of this. This is conflict. And we continue, we're not Steve Jobs or Wilbur Wright. We won't invent the next iPhone or flying machine. Our job is more modest, save you time and money so perhaps you can. You got the rectangle, right? So we have on the left-hand side, we're not the hero. We're not Steve Jobs or Wilbur Wright. Right-hand side. You are. That's how my mind often works. And he posted it on social media and it did quite well. Quick recap. The first important thing, the one thing I want you to remember, story is conflict. It's really simple. It's all you need to know. Story is conflict. Nearly all writing could benefit from more conflict. Of course, the skin first, makeup second, I think it's a really good tagline for Instagram. One more. But listen, keep a liar. Nitro, swim school. Others do lessons we teach swimming. It's not just we teach swimming like everyone else is saying. That's part one. Now, part two, not a very good title. It's your story. Let's start with some definitions, just kind of on the same page. Positioning April is going to talk about it tomorrow. Very simply, it's just we do this. We do X. Story is why we do X, right? And the point of the story is to point at your position or make it make sense. That's the point of the story. Like a little arrow like this. So I'm just going to show you this with a few examples. Lou, the position is video messaging for work. That's what it is. Story. Why? Work's gone remote. But the way remote teams communicate sucks. Meetings are boring. Calls drag on. Emails lack a personality. So the solution, video messaging for work, the position. The story points at the positioning. It makes it make sense. One more example. I train marketers in writing. So my position, very simple, where marketers learn copywriting. The job of the story is to make the positioning make sense. Writing, storytelling, home pages, hooks, offers, ads, social, CRO, emails, sales. It's all what? It's all writing. Marketers spend 22,000 hours of their career writing. Spend a couple of learning how to do it well. No one's trained them how to do it well. So copy where marketers learn copywriting. That's the position. And the story makes it make sense. Last one. Pepper bras. Better fitting bras for double AA and B cups. Story. Your bra probably doesn't fit because it wasn't made for you. The industry designs around the 36C base, then they apply that standard base to all sizes. That's why you get cup gaps. And then we got the position. We designed just for AA and B. If you just say we designed just for AA and B, why? Well, the story explains it, right? How do you do the story? Well, let's start with story. Story is conflict. Now, really, what does conflict need? It needs enemies. And there's free and only free enemies any company can have. The first one is direct competitors. So this would be Apple and Mac. For a vodka brand, it would be what other vodkas. So Stolenshire, where's the conflict? So direct competitor. The other vodkas. Most American vodkas seem Russian. Stolenshire is different. It is Russian. Okay. Second enemy, competing approaches. This is a different way of solving the same problem. So you could take the tube to work or you could cycle there competing approaches. You could take the tube to work or you could take the train. So it's an ad for the London Underground in, I think, 1960 something or take the tube. Where's the conflict? The enemy is taxis. How slow they are? Finally, beliefs. Beliefs you stand against. You don't pull beliefs out your backside. They come from your product and they kind of point back at it as well. So for example, cruise self-driving cars. Direct competitor would be other self-driving cars. Competent approach would be human beings driving to work. And the belief for an enemy would be that humans are terrible drivers. We believe humans are terrible drivers. 42,795 Americans were killed last year in car crashes. It's really easy to remember this. It's just ABC. A approaches. B believes. C competitors. Now, the question is, how do you like, cool, but like, how do we know what our enemy is? And I think April Dunford has a question which really helps with this. I actually think this is the most important question in marketing. What are we actually competing against? So we had Lume earlier. Meetings are boring. Cools drag on. Emails lack personality. Why are we talking about meetings, calls, and email? Because Lume competes against emails, calls, and email. Meetings, calls, and email. I talked about copy. What am I competing against? I'm competing against the belief that marketers should not learn writing. That's the belief. I don't need to learn this. I do my job. Why do I need to learn this? So that's the conflict. Do I really need to learn copywriting? Yeah. It's the most important skill in marketing. And finally, Peppa, very simple. What the bras compete against? Over bras, direct competitor. The industry designed around a 36C base. That's why we're talking about the brahar industry. Very quick recap. Your positioning is we do X. Your story is why we do X. Story is conflict. There's free enemies you can create these conflicts from. Direct competitors, competing approaches, or beliefs you choose to stand against. How do you work these out? You start with April's question. What are we actually competing against? Okay. That's a very simple way of understanding story. Now let's talk about storytelling. Let me explain this. First we do X. Story is why. And the storytelling is getting inside the customer's head. So base camp position, refreshingly simple project management. Here's the story. Modern work is messy. Documents are here. Tasks are there. Your slack links about meetings. They're talking about this stuff because they compete against it. They're trying to reposition it. It's like sitting in a wind tunnel with different apps flying at you and it's impossible to get any work done. It doesn't have to be this way. For nearly two decades, we've been refining base camp to be what? The simplest way to manage projects. Now let's talk about storytelling. All the different ways you tell the story. How you get it into the customer's head. Years ago, Base Camp ran a promoted tweet that said, "Slack is a day long meeting with no agenda." That's storytelling. On their homepage, same thing. Storytelling. "Dear VP of wasting my time, just let me do my job storytelling. Free books. Rework. It doesn't have to be crazy. It works. Remote. Therefore, Base Camp." Andy Raskin, find your company's version of six pack apps and you tell the story over and over again from different angles. That's what you're trying to do. You have a very simple story and you tell it again and again and again and again. This five, I've called them immutable, they're actually very mutable, laws of storytelling. We've talked about conflict, no conflict, no story. No people, no story. No butts and so's, no story. No ordinary, no story. If you start explaining no story, I'm going to start off by seeing Mark Zuckerberg break them all with this. He wrote last month about personal superintelligence and I'll pull out some highlights. In some ways, this will be a new era for humanity. Superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress. People have used our newfound productivity to achieve more than was previously possible. Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone. We've got no people, no butts or so's, nothing ordinary. It's all high-falutely, superintelligence and it's a whole long explanation, the whole thing. It's one big explanation. The great explanation. Let's start with no people, no story, okay? Stories are about people. This sounds incredibly simple, but you won't believe how people forget it. I got given a brief at Ramp, write an ad that shows that Ramp's development team are cutting edge. Now, you get a brief like this. The obvious thing to do is talk about how Ramp automates everything, sprint cycles, coding languages. It's not very interesting. I was in New York when I set this task and I went over to the development team and there was a bunch of them there and there's this one guy called Calvin and I was smiling thinking about Calvin. He was very odd. He was very funny and I just thought, "Let's talk about Calvin." So I came up with one Calvin to file your expenses. I'll read you a couple of lines. "Meet Calvin." So I got talking to him. At 11, he was fluent in Python. At 15, his code was running on the International Space Station. At 16, he dropped out of high school and was admitted into MIT. He graduated one and a half years early with a perfect GPA. At 17, he represented the United States, not in hockey and hacking. At 19, he was hired by Google. This is the conflict now. Now, you're probably wondering how a boy genius like Calvin ends up filing expenses for a living. Now, let me tell you. At 20, he joined Ramp and he wrote the code that made filing and expense as easy as taking a photograph of a receipt. 80,000 expenses are now filed this way. I don't want to talk about automation. Sorry, you want to get people's attention and you want to talk about people, real people. Again, it ended up doing quite well on LinkedIn. While I was at Ramp, I got another idea. I read a customer quote, "Ramp is like getting out of a messy relationship and finding the one." I thought it was a really good quote, but I kind of wanted, like, how can I bring this to life? Like, that's not really a story, right? Stories are about people. So, I thought, how could we make, how could we turn that line into two people on a wedding day and ramp the engagement ring till death do us part? Again, once again, they did quite well on social media. Rule free, no butts and soes, no story. What I mean by this is this is came from two South Park writers and what they said when they write is, if when you stick your little story together, the word "and" is in between all these sentences, you haven't got a story, you've got a shopping list. This episode is brought to you by Walnut. It's 2025, something has to change based on how people buy today. Why are we pouring all of this effort into marketing just to hand prospects a PDF or push them behind a book a demo wall? Come on, today's buyers, just like you and me, we don't want to wait. We want to explore the product, see how it works, and understand its value before booking a meeting with someone. I wanted you to show me the product. Come on, 70% of the B2B buying journey is already done before a sales rep is even contacted. So, your buying experience needs to match and that's where Walnut comes in. Walnut helps you put your product at the center of your marketing. They make it easy for marketers like you and me to embed interactive demos on the site, drop them in campaigns, or personalize them for sales in minutes. No engineers acquired. Love that. Some vibe coding. Once a buyer is interested, they don't just want a one-off walkthrough of your product. They want a place to actually evaluate, compare notes, and make a decision that they feel confident in. So, Walnut has deal rooms that make it easy for your internal champion to sell your product to their team with interactive demos at the core. The result is fewer stalled deals, fewer stalled deals, consistent buyer experiences, and intent data that shows exactly what features are winning. That's why companies like Adobe, NetApp, and more trust Walnut to shorten sales cycles, sell pre-sales, and drive millions in new pipeline. Want to see it for yourself? Go check it out. Walnut.io, that's Walnut.io, and they have a cool offer for you. They will actually build your first demo for free so you can see how demos and deal rooms actually work. So, you get to see the product, test it out, they're going to do it for free because we're sending you there from Exit 5. So, go to Walnut.io today and tell them that you heard about them from Exit 5. What you see between the sentences should be "da-da-da-da-da butt", so I came to Burlington but I nearly missed my flight, so I dashed through Terminal 6, that kind of thing, okay? Now, you're going to see Family Guy do it really well here. Got it. We'll rob a train. Love it. All right, everybody. This is it. Hey, where the hell is everybody? We haven't had a paying customer in months. Nobody rides a train anymore. Oh, well, for God's sake. Are you robbers? Yeah. Well, you could take my wallet and my MasterCards in there, although, to be honest, I'll probably just cancel it before you can use it, so. Oh. Give me that hole punch. Yeah. Is this your hole punch at a train company? Well, that's... You know what? I got to pay for that. I got to pay for that of my paycheck if you'd take it. Oh, oh, really? Yeah. Well, I can't in all good conscience take that, then. Oh, good. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm a working man myself. No, it's tough out there. Yeah, no. It's tough. It is. On the way. All right. Well, can you stop this thing so we can get off? No. I mean, I'd love to, but it stops at the pre, doesn't mean it stops, you know? Okay. So, Button, so, what driver's story? So, you have these sentences and you have butts so in between. Now, you'll see this with this. Peter goes to rob a train, but no one's on the train, but the guard doesn't even mind being robbed. He's going to offer his card, but he'll say as he'll cancel it, so Peter steals the hole punch, but the guard said it's going to cost him a lot of money, so Peter decides to not rob the train. So he asked to get off, but he can't get off. And it's this constant sort of but so, but so, which keeps your interest. Okay. Number four, no ordinary, no story. It's easier to make something small feel big than the other way around. So, you got a little very simple graph here. We got big at the top and small at the bottom and your company like Google, it's very easy to brag about stuff like 10 billion searches. That feels really big, but it's much easier to start small with one search and then you can make that feel big and you'll see this here with this, with this advert. So, you start small. So, I think my favorite part of the ad is when he's typed long distance relationship then he backspaces it and he types job jobs in Paris. You want to continuously be trying to add conflict to things. Jobs in Paris? No. He's questioning himself. One more. This one's actually quite emotional. I'm being serious. Basically this guy called Warren Zevon, who hopefully some of you know, and he sadly died from pancreatic cancer and he on his last album, his last ever song, it was about his wife and he's telling his wife what it could be like when he's gone. He's not talking about grief. He's talking about cleaning the house and the song lyric is sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house, maybe you'll think of me and smile. It's actually probably my favorite song lyric of all time because he's not trying to make it big, he's trying to make it small and that's what stories are about. Right, I'm bringing you back to B2B now. I'm with Ramp, our favorite company. We walk around the New York office, everybody, everybody keeps talking about these billions of hours they save and I'm like, "That's not great." It's really impressive. I'm just going to win you some big deals, but it's not going to take off, everyone claims these big numbers. So we were doing a sales deck and this guy, Jack, was like, "Let's not start with billions of hours. Let's start with something like customers do every single day. They buy a cup of coffee." We set up a slide. It's a coffee cost, $5, $5. Every single employee at your company is going to expense a cup of coffee at one point. You think it costs $5, the real cost of a $5 coffee. Employee uploads and tags the expense, that's three minutes. Manager stops what they were doing to approve one minute finance hunts for the expense four minutes, double checks it one minute, matches receipt, finance finally approves, reconciles. Cost of a $5 cup of coffee is three employees, four interruptions, 13 minutes. It's a little bit more impactful than just bragging about billions. Final immutable, brakicks, very mutable law. If you start explaining, no story. Spare me the explanation, give me an example. Every time you explain something, backspace it and just write an example. I'm not kidding. So goodwill hunting, Dave referenced it earlier. He's sitting on the bench for a while. What does he say? He says, this is Robin Williams talking to Matt Damon. He says, "Loves an active commitment, Will. It's the choice to value someone else's well-being as much as your own." No, he doesn't, Robin Williams doesn't say that on the bench, you don't explain love. He said, "You wouldn't know about sleeping, sitting up in the hospital room for two months because the doctors could seniorize the terms, visits and hours don't apply." You give an example, you're trying to explain to me, just give an example, it's all I've done today. The last little story, and it's the, I crossed the Atlantic Ocean three times in my life. This is the third, and I'm going to tell you by the first time, it's two years ago, I was in the Bahamas with my friends, we were having dinner, and there's this guy there, and he was really interested. He was talking about schools in America, and he's got this like AI school thing going on in America, and I didn't know who he was, and then my friend nudged me, and he's like, "You know that guy's like one of the richest people in the world?" I didn't know, and it's not something to particularly brag about, but anyhow, the kind of level of money where I'm not going to mention his name, but you could probably work it out. So I said to him, "How are you going to get parents to pick your schools instead of like the ones you all send your kids to right now?" And he was the kind of guy who just looked at me dead in the eyes, and he said, "It wasn't even arrogant." He said, "I know more about the problem with the education system in America than anybody in America." And I believed him. And I think when we talk about stories and how to get better at stories, we get really bogged down in like, in technique, really, what you want to do if you want to tell a good story is you want to have a story to tell, and how you do that is you want to know more about the problem with your category than anybody else in the category or anyone else in America. And honestly, the rest will take care of itself. You're like a dog with a bone, and the problem's the bone, all right? You should know so much about your category, you could write a book on it. That's the test. You actually want to get better at storytelling, stop reading books, write one. The title is, "We Do It This Way." Our company does it this way because, so Drift, conversational marketing, Mr Gerhardt's name is on the front, him and David Cancel. Conversational marketing, therefore Drift. The Canine Cochamiga Effect, a breakthrough to healing your dog's gut with superfats. That's the story of the book, "Therefore, Yumworth." The Roastington, "Therefore, Buy a Tin." This isn't about the book, actually. It's about putting your ideas into words. That's how you know, you only know you got a good idea when you start writing it down. People say, "Based can be good at storytelling," and I agree, I think they are. But the guys who run the company have written like, over a hundred essays on project management. It's not surprising. Then everyone's like, "Oh, we can't do it. When was the time you wrote an essay about your product?" You could give Zuckerberg's essay, ironically, "Personal Superintelligence," to the best storyteller in the world, and they couldn't do anything with it because he's got nothing to say in the first place. John Ruskin, "To be taught to write, but what is the use if you've got nothing to say?" In the absence of knowledge, this is Bob Levinson, you will be doomed to rely more and more on adjectives, always a mistake. You came to Burlington, probably not, but perhaps you wanted to learn a little bit about storytelling. Well, there's no secret. If you want a secret, fill up your water bottle before you start hiking. What I'm going to leave with is just like, it's honestly this simple. Forget arcs and whatnot. Just know your shit. I'm being serious when I say that. When the chap on the Bahamas told me he knows more about the problem with the education system in America, I spent the next couple of years trying to understand more about the problem with my industry, advertising than anybody in America. I'm not sure. I'm probably a long way off, but it's meat. It gives me meat to come up here and talk about. Finally, I'm just going to take you a little peek behind the curtain, and it's cool. If any writer was totally honest, this is what their work looks like. I was writing a story about my business where I train marketers to write, and I'll read it to you, and then I'll tell you where it came from. Perhaps to try and inspire you a little bit to write essays, to read books. Close your eyes. Can you tell me an ad you remember from last week? I'm trying to explain the problem with the advertising industry, or how companies do marketing. Close your eyes. Can you tell me an ad you remember from last week? It's the decade of slop, mushy and flavorless, from lunch lady Doris' ladle to your homepage. We gum together the same abstract verbs, nouns, adjectives in different combinations, and call it copywriting. Imagine spending $100 million a year on advertising to tell me, move work forward, smash your marketing goals, drive business value with sustainability data. Do you know what any of these companies do? Do you remember any of the edge riddles? Writing is a skill you don't have it, you learn it. That's why I made this. Now, it's a story, right? But like, I didn't just, I didn't write it. First line. Close your eyes. Can you tell me an ad you remember from last week? On the plane, I looked at this, and I started thinking how subconsciously, where it all came from. John Long, the problem with the advertising industry in a nutshell. How many current ads can you remember in 10 seconds? That's what inspired the first line. Second little bit. We gum together the same abstract verbs, nouns, adjectives in different combinations, and call it copywriting. We gum them together. That's George Orwell. As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have been set in order by somebody else. The third little bit. Drive business value with sustainability data. As Dave Harland, I saw it on social media, a wonderful copywriter, a few months ago. That's $3.6 trillion. Why do we bother in these screenshotted Microsoft's adverts, drive business value with sustainability data? Finally, the end. Writing is a skill. You don't have it. You learn it. This was Thai Nasi Coates writing in the Atlantic. One of my students insisted that whereas in math, you could practice and get better. In writing, you either had it or you didn't. I told her the writing was more like math than she suspected. I suppose my point, if I have one, is if you spend time doing the work, when it's time to sit behind your keyboard, it will all work out. If you haven't spent any time to actually do the work and understand your problem in the category, when it's time to sit behind the keyboard, you'll just gum together verbs and adjectives like Mark Zuckerberg. Final summary. If you can't wrap it in a compelling narrative, nobody cares, right? Positioning. We do this. Story. Why we do this? We're telling how you get it in the customer's head. In one word, story is conflict. Where does that conflict come from? You need enemies, direct competitors, competing approaches, beliefs. ABC. No conflict, no story, no people, no story, no butts, no so's, no story, nothing ordinary, no story. If you start explaining, no story. One little thing to take away, perhaps, I know more about the problem with my category, my product than anybody in America. Honestly, you'll be fine. Thank you very much for listening. We got questions. We're going to hang out. That was excellent. I want to kick off the first question and then let's take, this is amazing. Thank you. So on the, you got to know your shit thing, right? This comes up a lot, I think, with us in the room as marketers. It's like, a lot of times, not all of us are fortunate enough to be able to pick a company as a marketer and go work for a company where the founder knows the industry and cares a lot about the product. Right? And so a lot of times we're asked to basically put lipstick on a pig in some ways. Do you believe that we can, like the people in this room as marketers, can we be the person that forces that inside of the company to make the founder know the shit? Yeah. It's a good question, Dave. I got a funny answer. So these two ads I made for Ramp, I said that I was given a brief, I'm going to just quickly flash back to them. It wasn't actually true. I just added that in because it kind of just tied together the story. I didn't get a brief. Let me just find them quick. I was in the New York office and they kind of told me to do some work. And honestly, I didn't really do the work and I just met this guy called Calvin and I was like, "This is going to be good." And I started writing it and I just texted the founder and then three hours later, he put it on social media and it did pretty well. I think you got to take matters into your own hands. This other one, I didn't get asked to do it. I just kind of did it because I wanted to and again, it did quite well on social media and I think forced it by like, do the work and then just text it and if they keep saying no, maybe get another job. And then I have more, this is my event also, I'm going to ask you questions on my own. This is an interesting role with Ramp. So like your B2B thing, this is a cool example. And I think the Ramp thing is like, okay, they're a B2B company. They work with Harry to write these cool ads. These don't look like the ads I see in my LinkedIn feed, right? And I think that is an interesting example. Is the goal, like you create this ad and you guys posted on LinkedIn and that's the ad or do they actually like run these ads? Is there a distribution? Because I'm like, shit, I want that Calvin ad everywhere. Are they actually doing distribution on this ad too or is it like you write these kind of pithy things for them and it is what it is? I think, it's a good question, I think there's two things. So short answer is right now, none of these ads have ever been in like a mainstream publication. I always ask them, but I talk to mainly the founders of the company and they're probably too busy. They kind of tell me that they might and they end up not being. The second point is perhaps more interesting is like, these things were getting like 500,000 views on LinkedIn. I do think that like, I don't know how many people are reading The Atlantic, but how Eric put it to me was like, we'll just test it on LinkedIn. Three hours later it's on LinkedIn. Bam. If it works, let's put it in The Atlantic. He didn't, but that's how they talk. And I think that's a good way of doing things like, idea, social media, test. If it's good. Next. Hi. I'm Michael. That was great. Thank you. So I feel like for the last 10 years, everywhere I've been, it's gotten harder and harder and harder to convince leadership that this is something that's worth spending money on early and spending money and resources on early at a company, especially when you're 10, 20, 30 employees, just to bring someone like you in or to basically take marketing resources and put it towards storytelling. I'm wondering if you have stories, anecdotes, examples of people that have done a really good job of that or any tips or just any thoughts on that? Like how do we get that done faster and make that more important to CEOs in particular to doing this earlier and not waiting until the last minute and then scrambling and realizing we have no story? You think they're too cautious. That's essentially, you think that leadership is, we don't want, we're too cautious to- I honestly think that the way I think about it is they're thinking about like their Maslow's hierarchy of needs and they're thinking this is at the top, right? We're going to crawl, walk, run as a company when it comes to our marketing and our coming up with our story, like our quote-unquote story of us is at the top. That's not something that we have to worry about right now. It seems like this squishy feel good story of us is really not something we have to figure out. Well, do you do sales? Does the company do sales? Of course. So, April's got a book called Sales Bitch. Your story is very similar to your sales bitch. You get on the call and you've got to explain why pick you instead of the other alternatives. If the company is doing sales, there will be some semblance of a story there. It's not something which just like you posted on LinkedIn and it exists. No, every single company has one. Most of them just like, it's kind of pretty simple and doesn't exist at all. So like, if you're trying to bring story telling into a company, start with the sales deck. We did that with a coffee thing we did for Rampus. We got to change how we talk about and introduce this business so we change the sales deck. I think that it's ever present like any ad you do, either it says move, work forward and there's no kind of like, there's nothing more to it or there is something more to it. This is, your homepage should be telling somewhat of a story. It's not something which just doesn't exist. It does exist already, if that made any sense. It does. I like starting with sales. I think that's a great recommendation. Okay. Or like, do the marketing yourself, show them 10 examples of 10 great companies and be like, show me which one of these one without having a good story. Yeah. Basecamp is a really good example. Like they are punching above their weight by so much in the project management space. There is right, there's so many huge, huge companies which do the same thing and these guys are the only profitable one because of how good they are explaining why project management should be simple. Question at the back. Hey, Harry. That was great. I've always felt like good copy dies by committee when too many people get in. They have feedback. It gets sanded down, sanded down. How do you avoid that problem? It's a great question. So when I, when I do do, how do I avoid the problem? I think there's an ad by David Abbott, right? And yeah, I think he pitches this ad where there's a suspended, suspended vehicle. He's doing an ad for Volvo. And the committee is like, we can't put a baby underneath the car and Abbott's like, yeah, probably right. Bad idea. Go again. And then the committee says, we can't put, I guess like a grandmother or no, it's the welder underneath the car and he's like, the welder doesn't want to do it. Bad idea. So Abbott says, all right, whatever, I'll go into the car. And it's, he's the writer and the header line is something like, if the welding is not strong enough, the car will, the car will fall on me. Take matters into your own hands. Like I've always thought, and this is again, try to advise, just be too kind of, you want to be too good to be ignored. Like this is it. I'm going to live or die by my own ideas. When I work for ramp, they have a really good policy, which is the idea is yours. No one's going to F U C K with it. If it goes wrong, it's also on you. And I quite like that as a principle, like autonomy. If it goes wrong, the buck does stop with you, but that allows someone perhaps like slightly more junior to, to take on responsibility. Honestly, I used to work as a web developer 60 years ago for a, and they got me doing marketing and I was shut down. I was stifled. I couldn't break out. It's not easy. I think it's also your job. There's a lot of CMOs in the audience to like identify someone who has got it and give them a chance and say, yeah, let's, let's run with that. Hey, Harry. My name's Derek Schmolland and I am really intrigued about that, but so concept. And theoretically, I think it makes a lot of sense, add your butts and so's. I've actually got some advice to kind of remove those words, filler words might, might be the term from the actual copywriting. So at that context, my question is, do you have any guidance on how, how many times or how often you actually use butt and so in the copywriting itself? Great question. I'm really glad you mentioned that because I probably wasn't clear. This stuff's implicit, not explicit. So I'm not saying right between your sentences, but, and so I did a whole speech with so many butts and so's, but I didn't say the words very much. This is more a principle of, but changes the direction so advances the story. You're not writing the words. It's just between, it's between the lines. You see that it's between the lines. It's not in the lines. Great question. Anymore? Oh, we got one in the back. Sorry. Back in the cap. Yeah. I'm not coming over there. You can shout it out. All right. So big fan of your work always important to me, but very impressive when it comes to one in life, when it comes to one in life, what do you think the others have to do? Usually, the last experience, AI or AI. So it was a really good question. I think the biggest problem is genuinely, and this sounds silly, but I think it's, I think it's believing in your own ideas. So I think, I think creativity is genuinely far less important than conviction. If you believe in the damn thing, you'll make it, you'll get there with it. And the problem with AI is it kind of gives you a bunch of ideas. And honestly, sometimes they're pretty good, but do you actually believe in it? The problem with Mark, so Mark, like Mark's long letter, like it's the, he didn't have the conviction to say anything. And you kind of got to put your head on the parapet and be like, we think this, and I think it's sorry. It's really, it's like the AI is not going to do that for you. It's kind of got to come from within a bit. I think the best use case I've seen for it is I take a homepage and I say, I drag the writing from the homepage in and I say to it, underline or flag any cliches, abstract verbs, abstract nouns, and it comes back with a lot of lines which are not particularly good. I think it's very good to identify in what's not very good. To be honest with you, what's not very good is cliche, like it's the stuff you hear before. Like if you, if you write something on a homepage and it hasn't been said before, chances are it's, it's quite good and most home pages are not that move, work forward, that could be any company. So AI could tell you and it would tell you that move, work forward is not very good. I think it would struggle to have the courage to put something there and be like, yeah, this is what we think. Oh yeah, we got more. I just want to build on like, I think the, my note was like the little exercise on conflict that was super fun. How often do you do that at work though? Like never. We all the time. Yeah. We all have fun thinking like that and that is the difference there, right? And I think like, okay, just because it is B2B, look at all the B2B examples, manufacturing, HR, finance, whatever it is, those are still people, those people still have challenges and problems at work. And so like, I think the ramp example is a good one. I would love to go back. I'm thinking about, shit, we should, we need to fix our website. You know, like all of the ways you can bring that in there, I love that framework and I think we're all getting a lot of the same generic output from AI, but those are the types of ways. And you know, when you're around, there's a million different ideas to riff on just, just on that. So it was awesome. Yeah. You want to shout it out? Oh, you will do that one after this. Yeah. Yeah. No, go ahead. So it's so special about ramp. That's a really cool question. Like I, I had no, I didn't want to work. I don't, I do a few hours a week for them, right? So I'm not a huge employee, but I do know the guys who run it quite well and I'll give you the story of how they hired me, which kind of answered the question, just a little arrogant, but like Kareem's the other CEO, him and Eric, and they sent about 16 DMs to me on Twitter and I didn't, I didn't reply to any of them because I, I didn't follow the guy. They just kind of came up and then I get emails from people at the company. We want to work. You want, they're persistent as hell at finding the right people. There's a great piece of advice I got from my friend, a friend, George. And he says, when you're trying to work something out, don't think, how do I do it? Think who? So we're trying to solve a problem. Most people go on internet and be like, how do I solve the problem? If it's a big problem, think who. So let's say you're trying to, I don't know, do sales, right? Who is the best person to solve our, our sales? And you find the person. The second thing on ramp, which is, if anyone knows the company, you'll probably know is they work really quick. So like the story when Eric, I sent him the ad and he puts it up in two hours in one, it's, that's how they do things. Like they just swing and if they miss, they miss, it's fine. You move on. They, they are fast as hell. And it is. Yeah. Oh, sorry. One more thing. The company is working so hard. And I was shocked. I was like, why are you working so hard for this company? Every employee loves the company. They've all got equity. And I think there's this little smart thing they did there where like, people, the employees are getting paid very well because of equity. And it made me rethink it. Like when I joined, they said to me, I said, I don't want equity. I just want to get paid and get out of here. They forced me to have equity. They were like, we actually want you to give a shit. And it kind of worked. Imagine, there's another hand over there somewhere. I swear. No? Hi. I'll try to do that. Okay. What if, if your customer, if you're like, do you need to do this? Right. Well, if your story for hide of product effects customer is amazing. But you're the person buying the product. Connect with that. How would you, I don't know if it's like, sorry. Yeah, I got it. Like the story that's going to help like the person immediately to be solution with like the best story was ultimately that they are great. That's a really good question. I don't have a good answer to be really on. I'm going to think and I'm not sure if anyone in the rooms has experienced that. If anyone else is doing B to B to C and they've come across it. I don't know. Sorry. I'm going to think later today. I should say I'm hanging around. I'm not hanging around. I'm going to be loving the events for the next couple of days. Hopefully I chat to as many of you as I can and I'm going to come back. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you liked this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B to B marketers at exit five and you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit five dot com. Our mission at exit five is to help you grow your career in B to B marketing and there's no better place to do that than with us at exit five. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group. Or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out, learn more, exit five dot com and I will see you over there in the community. >> Hello David or hello Gerhardt. 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