Josh 0:00  

Welcome to the Work The System podcast where we help entrepreneurs make more and work less by managing their systems. And I’m your host, Josh Fonger. Today we have a special guest, we have Brian Gregory, our guest today. Brian is the CEO and founder of admanity.com. If you ever wished that a professional ad agency would coach you about your brand, but found out you couldn’t afford it, you’re going to enjoy today’s show. Ad Manatee has created a breakthrough emotional algorithm that can instantly give any business the advertising strategies, tactics and formulas that will sell it most effectively in the market without the high cost of hiring an agency. Alright, Brian, so why don’t you give us the backstory? How did you become an expert in advertising? And tell us what got you here today?

Brian  0:50  

Sure, Josh. You know, I wasn’t always an expert. And thanks for referring to me as one. When I started out in this world of advertising and marketing, I was a publisher, I owned a magazine that I hadn’t actually planned on owning. I got it. Long story in a business deal. And I had to learn how to sell ads to people very, very quickly, because this magazine made no money. And I learned over the years, the next 20 years, I probably sat across the table from five to 5000 business people, all kinds of businesses, mostly local. And I learned about their fears, their phobias and what their strengths were and their strengths were not in how to create a good quality ad. And I learned that if I wanted to keep my customers long enough to make some money, I was going to have to help them. And because they didn’t know what they were doing in structuring, winning advertising, messaging, and almost nobody does, because it’s not really taught. And so I just made it a mission, a life mission to study all the great ads, and say, you know, that ad worked great. And that ad was phenomenal. Let’s study the phenomenal one, what did they do differently, they’re selling almost the same thing. And when you kind of dissect all of the world’s great ads, you end up coming to the same conclusions over and over, the same formulas start to, to reappear in front of you. And you realize that if you learned those or mastered those, you could sell just about anything to anyone at almost any price. And I made it my mission to do that. Lo and behold, it started helping my customers, the ads started to work. And they were happy. And they were not afraid of advertising anymore. And that’s how I got started.

Josh  2:34  

So for those people listening to this, most of them are small business owners, and they’re there around the world. And I’ve got to believe that most of them have not hired an ad agency before ever not thought about it. And so as the owner, maybe they owned it, but they own a smoothie shop, or they own a car repair location, or they own a digital marketing company, they own it themselves. Do you recommend that they should actually be the ones that come up with their own ads and figure it out themselves? Or what do you recommend for something like that?

Brian  3:06  

Well, when they undertake our, our test is called the Ad Manatee protocol. And we’ll give you all the answers for your brand, which I’m sure we’ll talk more about that. But sometimes it’s a CEO, and they’re not really a marketing person. I mean, there’s all kinds of CEOs in the world just like anything else. And you may say I love this, I’m a marketing kind of CEO, I’m just gonna dig my teeth into this, and I’m going to lead this charge. Otherwise, you say, I’ve got five marketing people here, and they would love this information. I’ve got a social media person, I’ve got a sales guy or two, I’ve got people doing my ads and my artwork, they would love this information, because it’ll help them do their jobs better. So either way, but I think as a CEO, you ought to at least read it. Just as you may want to learn a little bit about accounting, even though you might hate accounting, you have to learn a little, this would be something similar to that, I think.

Josh  3:59  

Okay, yeah, I think that’s a great, great point. So for all you owners out there who are thinking, Oh, this is just one more thing that I have to learn. You have to be aware of everything as the owner for you to lead your business. We don’t have to do it all or be an expert at this. So why don’t you give us some tips here. Before we get on the call. You’re talking about these emotions, you’re talking about colors, you’re talking about shapes. Like, what are the things that an owner really needs to be aware of if they’re going to properly brand and advertise what they do?

Brian  4:29  

One of the things we try to point out to people, and it’s pretty obvious when you get your materials, is you may be a plumber and but you don’t sell plumbing. And you may be a banker but you know you don’t sell the accounting of numbers. There’s that as owners, we tend to focus on the nuts and bolts of our business because we deal with it nonstop all day long. But when it comes to selling it to another human being it’s a different side of the brain. It’s no longer your conscious Sherlock Holmes brain that sources and sifts and reasons things out. your conscious mind, your logical mind has never purchased in your life and it never will. It’s the subconscious mind that makes all the purchasing decisions. And so if you own, if you own a company, you got a product or service, you have to learn how to sell that, or present that in a way that the subconscious mind would like to see it. And that’s emotions, because all your fears, your phobias, your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, your emotions, that’s what’s inside of your subconscious mind. So the message has to be structured differently than our conscious mind would do. And so we sit down to write an ad, for example, and it’s filled with conscious stuff. here’s, here’s all the facts and figures, the dates, and then all the things we’re great at all the awards we’ve won doesn’t matter to the consumer at all. All they want to know is what to do for me, and how do I feel about this? And so we try to help you get there. So we know most people are going to become super subconscious thinkers. So when you get your report from Ad Manatee on your business, we just give you the answers. It’s so simple, when you see the actual strategy in front of you, you don’t have to dream it up, you just have to follow the numbers and it becomes very, very easy to do. And so that’s what we set out to do. And I think so far everyone’s agreeing, it works.

Josh  6:20  

Well, let’s do it in real time here. So we’ll pretend like the podcast isn’t happening. Because we’re, we’re launching a new service. Let’s just do our newest service. So a new service where we actually do, you don’t know much about my business, Brian, but we help companies document their processes and procedures through coaching, consulting, number things. But we’re going to start advertising a new thing, we’re starting promoting a new thing never done before. And it’s where we’ll actually go in. And we’ll document all the systems for a small business, or medium sized business, you know, a man has a process will document everything. And then the owner will have a business in a box, so to speak, they’ll have all of their operations figured out, they can delegate and cross train, they can hire, they can train quality improvement, all this other stuff. And in my mind it is always logical. So like any one like you said, they think okay, here are all the components. Of course someone wants to buy it, they’ll do the math, it’s an easy buy. Right? But I’m thinking about it wrong, I’m sure. So what is the emotion like what is the colleague? What should I start to think about? Other than going to AdManatee.com? What should I think about?

Brian  7:25  

Well, it’s kind of like the salesman who’s trying to sell a car. And he’s talking about how great the brakes are, and how the magazines rate them and how the warranty is the strongest in the country. And all the person on the other hand cares about is does this come in red? You know, do I look good in this car? That’s all I care about. I’m sure it’s fine on all that other stuff. And so we tend to overanalyze our own products, because we have to as owners, you have to look inside and find every bug and every strong selling point. But when you’re selling, you can’t do that. So the first thing you’d want to think is okay, you gotta put yourself in the place of the consumer, what would make me want to buy this thing would I buy this, if I was selling it, to me, is that sales approach very interesting at all, or it doesn’t read more like a book report of all the things that we can do. If it’s the book report, or if it’s leaning more towards the book report, you’re not going to make too many sales, people by 100% of the time on emotion, it will never change. Human 1.0 is what we are, 2.0 isn’t out yet. So you still have all the same emotions of Caesars, Socrates and Shakespeare. They were masters of emotion and we still remember their brands to this day. So take a lesson from those people. It’s the emotional brands that capture our attention. It’s the brands filled with logic that lose our interest and fade fastest from our memory. So you would want to find the most exciting emotion you could latch on to and whether it’s excitement, they give you some of the examples of some of the emotions within humanity. Affinity which is happiness, approval, which is popularity, temptation, which is desire, authority, which is trust. Urgency, which is fear, ambition, greed, admiration, envy, prestige, ego. Let’s see a couple others attractions, which is transformation innovation, which is a curious new thing. So these are the types of emotions we call them primal. The primal emotions are the prime movers of humanity. And if you understand what they are and why they work, you’re so much better off and the interesting thing, Josh is they work together. So I could say, hey, it sounds like you’re a service brand. You’ve got to perform a wonderful task for other people. But what you don’t realize is the service brand is made up of many many combinations of emotions. They become your formulas. So when it’s when they combine together that they get really super powerful for you. And if you don’t know those combinations, you’re just flying blind, the roulette wheel is spinning, your money’s on the table, and you don’t know where it’s gonna go. And that is not a good business plan, you need to know the emotions that sell your brand. And that’s what we tell you.

Josh  10:20  

So I really like this, I can’t wait to do your assessment. So there’s those 15 emotions, and you’re saying, don’t just pick the five that you like. And I’m assuming some combinations work well on, some of them actually backfire. Or maybe they’re polar opposites. So it is more based on I’m assuming that you pick the emotions based on the kind of customer you want to buy. Or, in our case, and I know, my, my sales team is gonna listen to this episode. I’m gonna force them to, so when they have a customer on the phone, and they have a customer who is, you know, puts into persona A versus persona B versus persona C? Are they going to say, Okay, I’m going to follow these emotions for persona a, these for B and these for C? So do they change up the algorithm based on the person they’re talking to? Or is the brand always the same?

Brian  11:14  

That’s a good question. The brand is always the same. And humans are, I would say we like to think we’re snowflakes, right? We’re a one in a million. But when you’re selling, you sell to the snow, not to the flake. Okay, because it’s the snow that binds us together, humans tend to all understand happiness, they all understand fear, they all get hungry. So we have this common bond that is primal and innate to our psyche. And so when you’re selling to people, it’s more, I would use this archetype to sell this feature, I would use this emotional archetype possibly to upsell into this feature, because it’s a different emotional trigger that they’ll need to buy more. And so we show you that in the report, when do you just sell a new customer? When do you upsell the new customer? And how do you get one back that’s 100 off because if you could do that, you would never lose a customer, right? So it’s more geared towards the brand, because humans tend to respond in like mind and like fashion. Good example. You’re sitting at home one night, you’re watching TV on the couch, it’s primetime, you’re watching all these awesome commercials that they spend zillions of dollars on. And then a local commercial comes on the screen. And it’s the, it’s the same person sitting on the same couch with the same brain. It’ll work on them so the little guys often think small I can’t do it. I can’t advertise like those big brands. And actually, the biggest fear of a big brand, is that you’ll wake up one day and realize you should be advertising exactly like them. And then they wake up and everybody’s doing it. All the little guys just got our formula. Oops. Now what do we do? And because we are all the same. The tactics, strategies and ad formulas we give you will work generally speaking, on the populace at large, whether it’s social media, whether it’s email, whether it’s print, radio, TV, direct mail, or flyers on the door hanger, it doesn’t matter. The human brain interprets things in certain pathways. And that’s why yes, you’re correct. certain ones do go together better, and others would almost repel each other. And that’s why it took seven years to build the algorithm because it’s not an easy job.

Josh  13:30  

Sounds like so so you have the emotions, those are primal. Are there any other factors that an owner really needs to be aware of? Or maybe needs to be aware that they’re missing right now? Because I think he mentioned color styles shape other triggers that are human?

Brian  13:47  

Yeah, it all relates back to emotion. And a lot of people. You know, we don’t always think like this because we think so much with a rational brain like we’re using a rational mind right now to communicate. But what would get you interested or excited is far more subconscious. Your subconscious actually decides to buy a split second before you announce, hey, I’m going to buy that your subconscious mind leads us most of the time. So yes, what else do you get? You get strategies, tactics and formulas for your ads, and your messaging and your beat, use it for your emails and all that social media. We show you the tactics to upsell, every emotion archetype. Every emotional archetype in humanity has a different upselling formula, depending what you are. So we’ll show you that we’ll show you the formula to win back customers who’ve wandered off or maybe you’ve irritated to the point where they ran away screaming. Either way, there’s ways to get them back. The colors of your brand, a lot of people don’t realize how influential color can be. It can literally be up to 80% of the consumers’ decision to buy will show you the colors of your brand that the color is most likely to persuade people to like you. Here’s let’s talk about copywriting. One of the most important things in any ad, any email, any social media post is the words that you’re using. Inside the report is a complete persuasion library out of 170,000 words in the English language, we’re going to show you about 1000 that would sell your product, your brand, we’re going to show you words, phrases and metaphors to work into your copy. So you can have instant high powered copywriting. We’re even going to show you how, what kind of gifts you should buy. A lot of people just buy a box of candy for the clients, they are given candy again this year, right? Or worse, give them something with our logo on it, they’ll love that. And they don’t. And you should be giving certain types of gifts, if you’re an authority brand. And an affinity brand or a temptation brand would completely give different types of gifts to their customers and clients. And we point that out to you and kind of leads you down the right path there. So you don’t make people irritated. It’s nothing worse than getting the wrong kind of gift. It makes customers feel unappreciated. So there’s so much in the report, it’s, you know, it’s it’s, it’s 150 pages of like an owner’s manual for your brand. You may not use it all today. But isn’t it nice to know it’s in there for you someday you’ll need it.

Josh  16:18  

What it is, I want to pause you absolutely on the idea of emotional archetype. Archetype is the emotional archetype, the customer, are you saying that your brand is an emotional archetype?

Brian  16:33  

Your brand is an emotional archetype. After you take the test, we will categorize you and show you exactly what your brand is. And what that means is to the consumers of the world, or potential consumers. These are the emotions, these are the combinations of emotions, these are the feelings that you’re going to have to trigger in them. And so this archetype triggers certain types of feelings, and this one over here has to, it has a completely different toolbox. And you just need to know that you are you, and that the people respond to these little triggers on your, your archetype. And then we show you how they all linked together and how they all work. Which ones are strong for you? Which ones are kind of, you know, weak? And you maybe should just avoid a couple of these, they’re not really going to help you much. Right? So yeah, it’s a new way of thinking about a brand. To my knowledge, no company anywhere has ever done this, where we can completely just look at any brand. And in five minutes, I can tell them how to market and they can do it too. So it’s really fun.

Josh  17:37  

So what about owners who are so well connected, or married to their business, that they feel like their business is them? Does this exercise is going to help them kind of understand that their brand, their business is actually different than them? Or do they find that actually, they’re one in the same or, or maybe that maybe there’s no connection at all? 

Brian  17:57  

You know, what I’ve found in talking to thousands of people that have taken this assessment, and then seeing what they think of it, you run into people that are, I’m not gonna say no at all, but they’re pretty darn knowledgeable about their brand, right? So they’re not expecting much when they go into this. And they’re saying, I’ll try it. But you know, maybe, and especially people have been doing this for 10 to 20 years, they do tend to feel like I’ve learned it all. And then they get the report. And they realize, I never thought of that, or I always wondered about that. But I wasn’t sure, or I kind of knew that. But I know, I’m glad that it’s confirmed now. So that it all ends up in the mind blown category, that in five minutes, we could tell you more about your brand than you could ever tell us. And that’s it and it’s an amazing transformation to watch because it gives them new hope, new excitement for the brand. Oh, there’s like 10 roads, I have never gone down and now I see them for the first time. We could try this and that and the other thing. And so they get excited again, kind of like they were when they probably started up when everything looked like a profit right? in the making. And you get stuck in business and you get beat up in business. And here we are in COVID times and in COVID has beaten us up now for a while. And you know, you kind of lose sight of the passion. When you see all the ways that there are for you to make money in the way we do it. I think it reignites those, those fires.

Josh 19:33  

Well, I think that you’ve got most of us all of this to check it out. And I think all of us could use a little bit of passion and hope after oil just been going through in terms of new ways to look at business and actually enjoy it and actually enjoy getting out there. Especially for those of us who are not marketers to get excited about marketing and selling. So we can serve more people now who want to kind of change gears. I know we’re low on time, and I wanted to get some critical questions out of the way. And one of them we asked all of our guests is we are a show about managing your systems so that you can, you know, scale out your business and grow. And I was curious to know if you had any systems you built into your business? And maybe you could tell us what that was like and what it did?

Brian  20:20  

It’s an interesting question, I remember the day we ran our own Ad Manatee report. And we could actually test ourselves, because it took years just to build the software and the testing software and all that stuff. 2000 pages of curriculum have been written so that we can give you those answers in written form. One day, we could actually take our own test. And it was so exciting. And I can tell you that seeing the innovation, we came out of the innovation brand, and seeing the strategies for innovation laid out in front of me, I had so much security, that I could say, oh, this is our battle plan. These are the paths that will work for us. And as I read them, I was like, yeah, that makes so much sense. Why didn’t I think of that? Because I was too busy thinking of 100 other things like most business people. So I’d say our system is the shocking realization that we could use our own system to grow our own company, and it can happen just that fast. And that was what that was a great day.

Josh 21:17  

That’s a great story. Well, one more question would be what is I know, Brian, you’ve got a lot of experience. So what’s one thing that didn’t ask you, that I should have asked you that you think our audience would actually need to hear about?

Brian  21:33  

Let’s see, Oh, I bet. They probably want to know what it costs to do this. Our goal here is to make sure that all small businesses can afford it, our goal is to help 1 million small businesses to get their ad manager report and start doing things the right way. So we kept the price really low, I’ve had the value assessed as high as $10,000. From agency oriented people who would charge this kind of money, we sell it for $397, a one time fee, it’s one and done. And there is a 30 day money back guarantee on that. So once you get your reports, your briefs and everything that we’re going to give you, then you just take 30 days and look it over and if it’s not to your liking, you get 100% of your money back, no questions asked, and I don’t think you’ll do that. But we do offer it because we realize it’s new. And so 397 bucks, folks, is probably one of the best. You’ve probably spent more than that on office supplies and cleaning supplies last month, what let’s put the money to better use.

Josh  22:33  

Yeah, and usually, for me, I was thinking in my brain, if I do this, will I make one more sale to pay for it? In the next, you know, six months, and I think something like this, which is critical to your ad campaigns, your marketing, that’s pretty obvious. Most companies can make that back with a few new insights. So a very good Brian. So where can people go to find out more about you and add the entity? Where should they go?

Josh  22:59  

Yeah, well, obviously admanity.com. And there’s a lot of information there. We’re offering a free report just for your listeners today. Josh, if they go to admanatee.com/workthesystem, there’s a free report they can download that talks about emotional marketing, why it’s so important and how to do it and explains these archetypes and these emotions to them. It’s free, absolutely free. You don’t have to buy anything. But we hope you go there at least download the free report. And then if you’d like to do it, take the test, get involved, get to know your brand better than you’ve ever known it before. Be your own ad agency, you don’t have to spend $50,000, you can just go do it.

Josh  23:52  

Right, good. All right, well, and with that, Brian, appreciate you being here on Friday and appreciate everyone in the audience who’s watching live. We stream live most Fridays on Facebook. So make sure to join us there and work the system on the Facebook page. And I did want to mention that we’re giving away a copy of our book one right there behind me, Work The System. So if you want a copy for free, go to our website, workthesystem.com to download it. But if you want us to mail a copy of the book to you, I will mail it out. Just leave us a review wherever you’re watching this or listening to this and take a screenshot send it to info at workthesystem.com. Once a week, we pull a name out of a hat, and we’ll mail out a book so maybe you’ll be a lucky winner. Otherwise, we’ll see you next week. Brian again, great to talk to you and we’ll see you soon.