Marketing People Love

Welcome back to Marketing Conversations with Lamp House Films, the show where we conversate about all things marketing. I'm your host, Josh Henry. On today's episode, we're going to talk about the magic behind some of the most effective internet marketing of all time. To do that, we're going to chat with Jacques, the co-owner of Raindrop, the agency behind these ads.

Raindrop started as a humble marketing agency making local advertising in San Diego. until everything changed. Not because they signed some massive client, but because they signed a relatively small client and through a bit of creative genius, changed the game for both of them. So we met a local business owner named Jack Haldrup and he was running a men's soap company called Dr.

Squatch. And they were doing a little, I mean, around $3 million a year in business. They were like five, six years into the journey. and he came to us and said, do you work with direct-to-consumer brands?

And we're like, well, not yet, but I bet we can do a great job for you. And he took us up on the offer. One of our hypotheses was that men don't traditionally care about maybe their bathroom products. A lot of them are just using whatever maybe their mom or their wife has purchased or their girlfriend's purchased for them in their life or their boyfriend's purchased for them in their life.

And so at the end of the day, it's like there wasn't a huge emotional attachment to soap. And we created really great content that got people excited about trying it. And it is a great experience. But ultimately, you know, selling $9 bars of men's soap through the Internet was sort of our first hurdle.

And so we saw a couple wins there with ads that really took off. All right. Here is where I'm going to have to interrupt and give Jacques the understatement of the year award. That three-minute explainer film that they made for Dr.

Squatch went on to become one of the most successful ads in YouTube history. It got more than 120 million views and a hundred thousand shares. In a matter of years, Raindrop helped Dr Squatch go from 3 million in revenue to over 150 million in revenue That success along with a handful of similar stories threw Raindrop into the national conversation And now they're creating hit after hit. They were able to go from, you know, these clients are able to go from spending thousands of dollars a month on YouTube to tens of thousands of dollars a day.

And then that just changes the game. I would say at this point, I mean, knock on wood, I would say one out of every four or five videos that we do, campaigns that we do, and it's a mix of things. It's got to be the right market. It's got to be the right channels.

It's got to be the right media buyers. But like one out of every four or five scales to those tens of millions of views. And that is, that's a huge, I always say you can't hit a home run without taking a big swing. And so when people make this type of advertising, they're big swings.

It's expensive to do that. It's expensive to spend a whole day getting eight seconds of footage. Yeah, but you're never going to make something great unless you're willing to do it. That's what I'm saying.

But there's more that goes into great advertising than effort. While I do think that taking your time in production is a huge part of the equation, what you do before production is the whole ballgame. So I asked Jock, what makes Raindrops films so effective? Because a lot of people will see funny videos or they'll see these, what I call edutainment style videos.

and when I look at what we do is like our writing team fundamentally understands, I hate to do these like rule of three things, but they fundamentally understand attention. I would say that, I would say about half our writing team used to be full-time comedians and it's interesting because they're not necessarily just writing comedy, but what they understand on an intuitive level is these people have toured the country. They have been in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They have been in New York.

They have been in Florida. They have seen rooms full of people that are 60 years old, people that are 40 years old, people that are 20 years old. They understand almost on a gut level instinct, like, oh, that joke's too niche. Oh, that joke's too offensive.

That joke's too whatever. It like a self process to go because that the biggest thing I see is that people just try to like be shocking for shocking sake And then it like well then the video becomes almost unshareable And I feel like before you move on from that I am so fascinated by that fact Because I think the other thing that stand-up comedians learn is they get instant feedback on whether or not things are working. Not only their own stuff, but everyone that they go to watch that night.

Yeah. You know what I mean? So it's like the person that really bombs, why do they bomb? And how much trust do they have to build the audience before they can take a bigger swing?

I want to make sure that the point here isn't getting lost in all this talk about comedy. Because the principle goes way beyond how funny something is. In one of my favorite TED Talks of all time, Andrew Stanton, the director of Finding Nemo and Wally, makes the case that storytelling is joke telling. Always.

Whether it's a joke or not. The way you set up a satisfying punchline is the same as the way that you set up a satisfying conclusion to any story. But once again, knowing how to tell a good story isn't enough. You also need to understand how to make that story sell.

I would say that's the second thing is like our team is so keyed in on like what works, what doesn't work, why it hasn't worked. And I think that probably started like that heartbeat kind of started with like my mindset and where I come from. But then now after, you know, now four years writing with the same team, like they are masters, like they have learned by what's worked. They've learned by what hasn't worked.

And then we carry those theories forward. And because we write so many different hooks, you know, we'll write three, you know, two to five openings per campaign we do. We're always getting feedback. What worked, what didn't work.

And it's data. It's not like our opinion. It's like, oh, that had a way longer watch time and a lot more people are buying off of that ad even though 80 of it is the same that ad outperformed all the interesting so you'll shoot all five hooks you'll a b c d e test yeah exactly cool yeah yeah and sometimes they have really drastic differences in the opening so i would say um you know it like understanding how to hold and keep people you know attention um which yes is humor but it can be other things it like you can be clever without it being funny and we do have examples of like clever spots doing well where it's not necessarily like funny um and then it you know i would say at the end of the day too it's like you only get what you ask for and so many times ads don't ask um so um and i think another reason that i look at that is i go you know some brands are at brand saturation and so it's like you know we have people come to us and they go well the average woman between the ages of 30 and 45 have seen our have seen our ads 30 times this year already and so then the question then becomes okay well then why haven't they bought yet instead of the reverse where people are like, people don't know who we are, we have a great product.

They only knew we would take off. This final piece of the equation is probably my favorite just because of how remarkably simple it is. Once these ads lay out all the benefits of the product, they just ask you to buy it. Advertisers do this for the same reason that YouTubers always say, don't forget to like and subscribe.

Because for some reason, when they don't ask, we do just kind of forget. Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Conversations with Lamp House Films. Lamp House is a production company that creates film-driven marketing campaigns. If you want to chat with us about your next film, we would love to hear from you.

You can reach me at josh at lamphousefilms.com. If you haven't yet, please take a second to leave us a review wherever you're listening to this. That helps other people find the show.

Also, if you aren't following along on TikTok, you are missing out. You can find us there at Marketing Conversations. This show is a production of Lamp House Films. It's produced by Malia Irby.

And this week's episode was written and edited by me, your host, Josh Henry. Until next time, stay inspired and let's keep the conversation going.