Marketing for social impact with Madmen co-producer Josh Weltman

Josh Weltman:
Donald Trump and Joe Biden on the same ticket would be, yeah, it makes you cringe, but Donald Trump is all promise and no delivery. And Joe Biden, just the point I’m trying to make is all delivery and no promise at all.

Lee Wochner:
Josh Weltman is a madman, an advertising guy who served as the advertising guy as co-producer on the show Mad Men during its seven seasons. What qualified for him doing this were decades of creative advertising work for clients such as Carl’s Jr., Teleflora, Whole Foods, BMW, and Doritos. What makes him mad now though, is the bad advertising being done by the Democrats, especially when he thinks they’ve got a winning story. In 2020, he’s stood up his own campaign for Elizabeth Warren and now he’s ready to do it again in 2024, this time for Joe Biden. We’ll talk with Josh to find out what makes for advertising that works, how you get your message to leap from the pack, and how the Biden campaign can win again.

Jaclyn Uloth:
Welcome to the podcast that lightens the tension when things sort of get hard… That’s What C! Said, the Counterintuity podcast, featuring interviews with leaders and doers who have helped to make our world a better place through their actions — and especially through marketing, communications, and embracing change. Here’s host Lee Wochner.

Lee Wochner:
Josh, nice to see you. Thanks for joining us for this podcast discussion.

Josh Weltman:
Thanks for having me.

Lee Wochner:
Always a pleasure. And you know, I’ve read your book and I think I’ve told you, I read your book twice, which, you know, who has time for that, right? And now I’ve read your book three damn times and I’ve done that because it’s just so great. And Josh’s book, by the way, is called, Seducing Strangers, How to Get People to Buy What You’re Selling, The Little Black Book of Advertising Secrets. And he’s got some behind the scenes Mad Men things in there as examples. And you know, Josh, as somebody who, like you, works in creativity, I find your book inspiring about creativity.

Josh Weltman:
Thank you, I appreciate that a lot.

Lee Wochner:
Well, you bet. And it’s taped flagged all over the place, which is always a good sign. There’s like a million tape flags sticking out of it. So let’s talk about creativity for a minute if we could. Now, we all have a baseline idea of creativity as something that breaks through, right? Something, whether it’s Leonardo da Vinci or whatever the heck, it’s different than what’s around it. It stands out. But Something that you and I and the other people here at Counterintuity shared is being creative is our job. And when creativity has to be your job, I mean, how do you make it happen? How do you make sure you didn’t just slip into the form?

Josh Weltman:
That’s interesting because that was my greatest fear going into advertising. When I took my first class in advertising from Mark Montero and Dick Siddig at a school that used to be in town called Ad Center, the thing that just horrified me was… I was doing pretty good in class. I was able to come up with concepts and ads. They were very encouraging of me. But the idea of having to do this under a deadline, I kept raising my hand and saying like, how long do they give you to come up with an idea? I just wanted to know because that absolutely horrified me. nothing makes my head go blank faster than somebody saying, we need a big idea on this. It just clears my mind of everything. One of the things that I kind of realized after I wrote the book is that I was kind of thinking about creativity the wrong way. we all have this idea that creativity is your ability to come up with, like you said, an unusual answer to the question, and or something original, stuff like that. I’ve never been that interested in originality and coming up with something unseen before. And I realized that the way I think about creativity. or when I started to think about creativity different, it became much less scary. And I sort of define creativity for myself as a pathological inability to accept the status quo. the quickest way for me to sort of solve the creativity problem is like, bore down on what needs to change. What’s… the thing that I need to change to make this client happy, to get our message out there. And the more I can figure out or the more clear the particular part of the status quo that needs to change for everybody to be happy. That makes me more creative. Then ideas start to come.

Lee Wochner:
Now, one of the things I’ve discovered about you, probably more recently, is that you’re not just a writer, you’re also, wow, is this, is it insulting to say graphic artist? I mean, you have design and drawing capability that I deeply envy. That’s what I wanted to be doing when I was a boy. Is it unusual in advertising to be able to do both?

Josh Weltman:
I was trained first as an artist. I went to art school and I got hired as an art director and I was paired with So I went away from what I really… sort of was interested in, which was comedy and being around people at school who saw their futures like writing television shows and sort of going stand up to writer to television. I didn’t know how that worked and it didn’t really matter because I decided to quit hanging out in places where I wasn’t particularly good and start rolling the ball downhill and go to art school where I could succeed in every class instead of feeling that I was failing. So I entered with pretty good graphic design and artistic skills and then got an opportunity. The agency was working for Doritos. Jay Leno had been a spokesperson for Doritos for a couple years and he was thinking about jumping ship. He didn’t like the quality of the work, didn’t think it was particularly funny, etc., etc. And they opened the assignment up to everyone in the agency, writers, art directors. They said if you could get sort of help, keep him and write funnier stuff. we’d show him the stuff. So I was able to work with my partner and come up with a campaign for him that he liked and that was modestly successful, but did the job. I only do that with television, but I went through the next 10, 12 years basically coming up with ideas for TV commercials. More often than not, they would pop into my head fully formed, like little stories at 30 seconds or 60 seconds. I could hear the dialogue, I could see it, you know, but that’s all I could do. So I just wrote it down and I drew the pictures and stuff like that. My writing wasn’t always particularly great and I work with my writing partner to make things better. But oftentimes… It was a… coming up with the whole little story, you know, the parts that needed to be pictures, the parts that needed to be words. There was a producer on Mad Men who, after we left the show, said something really interesting because a lot of the people on the show were constantly asking questions about how does the partnership work? The art director does the pictures, the writer’s supposed to do the words, but… Semi-Chalice, who we were talking about this after the show, she said, you know, ads aren’t really about words and pictures, they’re ideas, you know? And I have never had a situation where, you know, someone had half the idea and I had the other half. It’s usually a back and forth, you’re kind of ping-ponging across the desk. trying to top each other, you know, well, what about this? Or what if we did this? Or what if we change this word? But the idea, it pops up first in one person’s head. And then you go off and you do what you’re trained to do, which is one person sort of flushes out the words and the other person makes the pictures happen. But, you know, the more you do it, the more you don’t need to divide. um, uh, those, those two things anymore, especially since they’ve all become very easy.

Lee Wochner:
I believe that was the campaign for Doritos. The tagline some of us will never forget, I think I got this right, was “crunch all you want, we’ll make more.” Yeah, and that succeeded because, first of all, it had never occurred to me that there was a limited supply of Doritos. So it made me anxious that maybe I should go get some because they were gonna run out, no matter what they said, right? Now that you…

Josh Weltman:
They’re not gonna run out right.

Lee Wochner:
Right.

Josh Weltman:
Yeah.

Lee Wochner:
They had to be purchased right away, but it’s funny. I don’t think I’ve seen that thing in, I don’t know, 30 years, 35 years, and I still remember it, which actually makes me think about, you write in your book about enthymemes, which is partly where we get the word memes. And, you know… Can you explain an enthymeme so that people can understand what this is and why it’s important?

Josh Weltman:
Yeah, an enthymeme, what they called a concept when I was in advertising school really came down to, or let’s go to the enthymeme first since it’s described in Aristotle’s rhetoric. So it’s like a 3000-year-old idea and what he basically says is if the first part confuses, the second part explains and if the first part explains, then the second part confuses. When I’m… trying to come up with, or a good example of this is Samuel Johnson said, or he could have said, “In London, there are lots and lots of things to see and do.” Which is kinda okay, that’s true, and it’s kinda flat. But what he said was, “When a man is tired of London, he’s tired of life.” So the first part kind of confuses it, it raises the question, you know, and the second part answers it, you know. You put the two parts together and it equals there is everything you could possibly want to do or see in London. And what was going on when I started in advertising is you created a book of concepts and pictures and headlines that were designed to stop a person from flipping through a magazine and pay attention to the ad. So what an enthymemes does is it creates this discord in your mind for a second.

Josh Weltman:
Where is this going? How is this question going to be answered? It’s sort of a riddle and a punchline in one statement. And that’s what an advertising concept, I saw the similarities. I saw if the picture confused, then the headline explained. And if the headline confused, then the picture explained. And that was basically what people were calling a concept. So when you see a picture of a little Volkswagen on a big white page, and it’s, it says, think small, you know, you’re going, wait a second, what is this? What is this a car ad? I have to figure out what this is all about. Now they’re just called memes

Lee Wochner:
So now you get the little cartoon dog sitting on a chair in the middle of a house burning down and the cartoon dog says, this is fine.

Lee Wochner:
And it works on the same principle, except now what happens is the cartoon dog in the burning house is used endlessly and its freshness is not inherent, it’s in reaction to wherever it’s placed.

Josh Weltman:
Yeah, kinda. Kinda. That’s exactly it.

Lee Wochner:
Yeah. So let me ask you one more question about creativity, because, and you know, you and I could talk about this for hours and should do that over drinks soon. We should do that.

Lee Wochner:
You know, one of the things that you also quote in the book, so now you know, again, I’ve read it three times. You quote a line from Mad Men from Don Draper to Peggy, the copywriter, and he says to her, because they’re doing research. to do some campaign. And he says to her, fill your head with all the information you can, then go to the movies. And what I’ve been saying for years, because we do writing and editing here at Counterintuity and then in my private practice as a writer, working with other writers, and what I’ve been saying for years is, you write, then you edit, you can’t do both at the same time.

Lee Wochner:
And so why is the… And writing is a subconscious process and editing is a conscious process. So why is the subconscious so important to creativity?

Josh Weltman:
That’s a great question. And it’s funny, there was another part of that line that was cut that I really liked, which was, he says, fill your head with everything, then go to the movies. Sherlock Holmes played the violin, you know?

Lee Wochner:
Ah, yeah, That’s right. Good point.

Josh Weltman:
Any I always, I miss that part because it’s sort of like, stop thinking about it. Because I think how it works, and of course, can see this, it’s very hard to think both specifically, well, it’s impossible. It’s impossible to think specifically and abstractly at the same time, you know? So if you have like abstractly, we can talk about a big thing chasing a small thing. Specifically, let’s picture Tom and Jerry, you know? And what I think you’re doing when you’re filling your head with all the specifics, you know, is filling your head with all the Tom, Jerry. And then when you go to the movies, you let your subconscious sort of play with the abstractions of what you’ve just filled your head with. And and sort of try to fit square pegs in round holes. And then eventually come up with a hole that fits whatever the peg is, you know? And that’s that aha moment, you know? When suddenly you see that there’s this opening in the abstractions that you can’t see when you’re looking at the specifics. but your subconscious can recognize. And then to me, it feels like everything has just been reordered in my head, you know, coming up with an idea where it clicks, you know, or all that stuff adds up to something that it was right in front of your face before, but because you were looking at the specifics of it, you couldn’t see the underlying abstraction, the generality that made it clear. You know, in the case of Crunch All You Want, we’ll make more. There was a moment during the focus groups. First of all, Jay Leno was an observational comedian at the time. He was like Jerry Seinfeld, you know, you ever seen, you know, that kind of stuff. And there was a moment we did these focus groups down in Texas. And at the time I smoked about a pack a day and we were talking to teenagers because the trouble with Doritos at the time was You know, moms were buying them and kids were eating them. And the reason moms bought them were different than the reasons kids ate them. And moms bought them because they were wholesome, well-made, you know, ingredients, whatever, all that sort of stuff that they looked at and cared about. And the kids didn’t care about that stuff at all. They were eating. Doritos, like they would put them on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and they would eat them when they were on the phone after school. They’d eat a whole bag if there was a test the next day. They were eating Doritos for all the reasons I smoked cigarettes. It was just oral entertainment. And when there was a moment in the focus groups when we said… We passed a note into the moderator. We said, ask these kids, if you eat a 12 ounce bag of Doritos, like 800 or 1200 calories at noon, have you had lunch? And they said, no, absolutely not. They didn’t think of them as food at all. It was not the Doritos that was driving, it was the behavior, the situation. And that’s what clicked with and made J. Leno suddenly the right guy for the job. Because he was always talking about, you know, you ever see a guy, you know, whatever the behavior was, was his whole shtick. And he started, we started writing commercials about the behavior, about, you know, going through a market and picking up a bag and eating it. while you’re marketing and then standing there for that humiliating moment of paying for an empty bag at the checkout stand. And that was like right in his wheelhouse. And that was one of those moments that just kind of clicked.

Lee Wochner:
So that’s all great stuff. So

Josh Weltman:
Hahaha

Lee Wochner:
speaking of marketing and change, what has changed about advertising and marketing, whatever we wanna call it these days, in the recent, oh, five to 10 years? Has anything changed?

Josh Weltman:
Um, yeah, I think… I think in the late 90s, what I noticed was when we used to talk about communication strategy or marketing strategy and stuff like that, we were much more competitive. Meaning if I worked for a fast food company and I worked for a few of them, Taco Bell or Carl’s Jr. What we did, when we came into the office in the morning, our job was to steal McDonald’s share for our client. Basically figure out how we could get, sell more burgers at lunchtime than they sold. And we had to be aware of what they were doing, what other people in the market were doing, that sort of stuff. And I think somewhere… And it was very competitive. It was like a game of risk, you know, where we were all vying for mental territory, mindshare, as well as market share. And somewhere in the late 90s, I think strategy became sort of this combination of wish fulfillment and positive thinking, you know. You know, it became sort of about positive thinking and wish fulfillment and identity and branding was, started being tossed around a lot more than positioning. That when it became more than just one person’s signature as the person who did the job or made the purse or made the car, then we started talking about brands because it wasn’t just You know, Henry Ford was responsible for the whole thing, but you know, I don’t know who’s responsible if I get a bad Coca-Cola. You know, that’s somewhere on the line, there’s somebody who can ruin the reputation of Coca-Cola, but that, you know, I don’t even know the person’s name who invented the formula. Does that make sense

Lee Wochner:
And yet you and I, you and I are both conversing through Apple products and wouldn’t be caught dead going to get a Dell or an HP or something. So that’s branding. They have succeeded in convincing you of that.

Josh Weltman:
Yeah, that well, definitely. But the reputation Apple has for working and being usable is, I think, unmatched, you know, by any other computer or technology that I’ve ever used. Oh, they’ve succeeded convincing me and I was one of the three creative directors on the Microsoft business in 1999 the creative director of the group at McCann Erickson that was responsible for every all the Microsoft products that were aimed at the enterprise space and One of the things that I did not know until I took that job was what Apple’s positioning statement was, how they saw themselves. They don’t see themselves as a technology company or a technology brand. Their mission is to eliminate complexity and ugliness from the world. I think they do a pretty good job of it.

Lee Wochner:
Well, I would agree. So switching gears for a moment, we’re having this great discussion about advertising and everything. Okay, so most people think that ads and advertisers lie, and you actually feel quite the opposite. So why do you say that? You’re saying that advertising does not lie, that it has to be truthful.

Josh Weltman:
Well, the way I look at it is I think every company exists in the marketplace as basically a promise to the marketplace.

Josh Weltman:
Goods and services are how the companies fulfill their promise and their brand is just their products and services deliver on their promise. So if, you know, Bill Birnbach said there’s no better way to go out of business than doing great advertising for a shitty product. You know, if you lie or, you know, if… If that equation doesn’t work, you make a promise and you under deliver, it just doesn’t do you any good in the long run. You have to make that math work out. And lying doesn’t really help you.

Lee Wochner:
So that takes us to a story that I hope you’re gonna share for us. A few years ago, you led a really fun creative workshop for the Counterintuity team. And in it, you shared the story of an absolutely seemingly unmarketable Mexican fast food that you nevertheless were able to successfully market. I wonder if you can share that story with us again.

Josh Weltman:
Sure. You’re talking about Green Burrito. And the thing…

Lee Wochner:
Oh, we can name them. Oh, good.

Josh Weltman:
Absolutely. The advertising agency had been successful with the Carl’s Junior business and Carl’s made so much money. They went out and bought a little Mexican food chain called Green Burrito at the time, co-branding, like a Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken or a Taco Bell, Pizza Hut kind of thing was all the rage in the fast food industry. And they had this green burrito store and they wanted us to create advertising for green burritos. It was a pretty small store and the food wasn’t great. But the people who own Green Burrito or whoever it was, the store owners were insisting that the company make good on the product and put a million dollars into advertising for the store, which was part of the deal that Carl’s did. I think a million dollars a year in Los Angeles is a drop in the bucket, it’s not a lot. And the agency… was not impressed with the menu to say the least. They were using microwaves at the time. They might still, I don’t know. I just remember when we went down to try the product, we didn’t finish what we had bought and we stopped for Mexican food on the way back to the agency.

Lee Wochner:
Ha ha

Josh Weltman:
Cause it was like, it reminded us of Mexican food, but it really didn’t do the job. So the… You know, we went back and we said, you know, we tried this and why don’t you take the million dollar ad budget and put it into fixing your menu and then a year from now you’ll be in better shape to advertise. And they said, no, no. We want you to do the advertising. Part of that brand promise thing is really about setting expectations. I think that, you know, happiness happens when reality meets expectations. So I didn’t think there was any way to talk about the food
and make customers happy. I thought it was gonna be like one of those burnbox things. I think we could have done good advertising for them, but people are gonna come in and taste. bad food and be really disappointed. And so what we did was we said, we came up with this little singing green dot. I did the animation on the computer with PowerPoint and I just like sat there pressing the button 12 times a second to make this thing look like it was talking. And we did I think 36 commercials for $6,000 and put them on and all these commercials were just little couplets. My favorite was, let’s see, they just said… If it’s green, it’s good. If it’s bluish green, you’re gonna need shots. Because what we told them was, you know, so we made jokes about gangrene, we made jokes about boogers, we made, you know, all this sort of stuff because we said, you know, if you set the expectations of the consumer base low enough that
the food… can meet or exceed it, then people won’t be disappointed when, you know. So they were just dopey little couplets and songs talking about nothing really. But you know, after a year, we did a million bucks worth of advertising. And I think within the demo, 18 to 36 year old men, we had achieved parody. with Taco Bell in the market and they were outspending us like 28 to 1. So the little dot was enormously successful in that it didn’t over promise and people really liked it.

Lee Wochner:
All right, well, let’s take a listen so we can hear the ad campaign for the restaurant where we’re not advertising the food. So let’s take a listen now. All right, well, that seemed to prove your point that the food was so bad, you couldn’t lie. And so, and so there you go.

Josh Weltman:
Mm.

Lee Wochner:
That’s pretty damn funny. All right, let’s, let’s take a short break. We’re gonna take a short break here. And when we come back, Josh and I will be talking about the future about political advertising and about politics and naming names. Stick around.

Jaclyn Uloth: Hi, this is Jaclyn with Counterintuity.

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Lee Wochner
And we are back with advertising guru, mad man, interesting guy, funny guy, Josh Weltman.
So Josh, you and I were introduced several years ago because we were working on websites for Adam Schiff, his campaign websites, congressional campaign websites. And you had some thoughts about those, as I recall, and about Adam. And that started our friendship and our discussion about politics, as I recall. Is that right?

Josh Weltman:
Oh yeah, definitely. Um, what I had, I had become concerned towards the end of the Obama administration, uh, at that. I didn’t really know what the promise of the democratic party was anymore. I’m a lifelong Democrat. Um, and I, uh, support, of course, supported Obama and we were going into this, um, sort of transition where Hillary was beginning to put together a campaign. And I didn’t see any message. And, you know, Trump was kind of, uh, rising and no one was taking him seriously. But, um, I was very worried because, uh, I didn’t see one Hillary lawn sign in the San Fernando Valley.

Lee Wochner:
I will say this, Josh, you know, on Super Tuesday of that election season for the nominations in both parties, I wound up listening to radio coverage as I was driving to West LA. And I think Trump, whom I despise. And I listened to every minute of it because it was so damn entertaining and awful.

Josh Weltman:
Well, it’s entertaining and it’s clear Yeah, it’s now, it’s entertaining, it’s clear, and it’s surprising. You know, one of the things that we were talking to Adam Schiff about when we were talking to him is Trump is winning because he’s the most entertaining thing. You can’t take your eyes off him. It’s like a car wreck, you know.

Lee Wochner:
So, when all this was going on, before Hillary got that far, you grabbed a hold of the idea of Elizabeth Warren. That brought us together because you needed a digital marketing firm. You were standing up a political action committee supporting Elizabeth Warren. You needed a digital marketing firm, and that’s what counterintuity is. So we got to work together. What was it that you were trying to do with that campaign for Elizabeth Warren? How was it a little different than what was going on with the Clinton campaign?

Josh Weltman:
Well, what I heard Warren talking about was, you can’t have, don’t expect to have social justice if you don’t have economic fairness, you know? And that made a lot of sense to me. It sort of weaves back into the experience on Mad Men. During every season, Matt would tell us what… what year we’re going to come back in. And I would try and do research about the advertising. We would all read about the politics, what was happening in the world at the time. And one of the things that startled me was I somehow was reading about the 70s. That’s when I grew up in the San Fernando Valley.

Josh Weltman:
And in 1972, I read. that 50% of people, workers, took home 50% of the wages in this country. That was the height of the middle class. And now, today, I think it’s 40% of, or 80% of workers in the United States take home about 40%. Of wages, it could be even less. I think it’s between 20 and 40 and 35%. To me, that’s what’s gone wrong with the country. What I was trying to do with Warren is try and force her to stay on her message of… economic fairness because she was talking about billionaires this and they got to be taxed and all this sort of stuff. But what I was trying to do was to get purchase on an idea that I was calling a 50-50 deal instead of the new deal. I don’t know what the policies are. I don’t know how to make it work. But if you want to make America great again, figure out how to once again, we did it before, we can probably do it again, have half the country take home half the wages. That’s when people had two cars in their garage, they could afford a lake house and a retirement and all that sort of stuff. And we just set about dismantling that. And what happened to, to Warren is, you know, when she was on that message in Iowa, she was going up 17 points a week, I think, and then she won Iowa. And, uh, suddenly, uh, the identity politics crew, you know, joined her campaign and, uh, she started having t-shirts and posters that said things like she has a plan for that, you know? And she totally tanked, you know, as soon as they made it, made her into that smart girl in class that you wanted to punch in the face, you know, it totally derailed the campaign. But, but I think the more we talk about trying to figure out how to. take 50% of the money and give it to 50% of the people, the more successful we’d be. It’s doable.

Lee Wochner:
Well, I will grant you the clarity of the idea, right? I mean, one of the things that I see in your work again and again is the focus of the idea. And in this case, it’s 50-50. And we used to be 50% took home 50% of the money. And we can and the country was working really well. And we can do that again. And see, I can immediately understand that. If you say that she has a plan for that, well, plans don’t always come to fruition, they’re not always in place, I don’t know that I like her plan, I don’t know anything about it.

Josh Weltman:
Right.

Lee Wochner:
There’s no promise there. The promise is she has a plan, and I don’t care about that. I grant you your premise

Josh Weltman:
There was a guy, one of the teachers at my art school was a guy named Richard Saul Werman. And he went on to create the TED conferences.

Josh Weltman:
But one of the things that he said that I always remember is an idea without an image is forgotten.

Josh Weltman:
And I think that we are in a post-literate, not illiterate society. but a post-literate society. And the Democrats are still making arguments when what we need to make. are images and 50-50 is a real clear image in your head. You know, that creates kind of a word image or an image that’s very easy to understand. And, you know, when they start talking about, what is it, even healthcare and private option or public option, These are all words that create no image in my mind at all. I have no idea what that, you know, even healthcare, it’s not even what we need. What we need are doctors and nurses. And we need them in every county in the country, you know?

Josh Weltman:
And when you start talking, you know, like of edges, actions, and things like doctors and nurses, then you can make an argument like, You know what, when every child is born in the United States, they have the right to, you know, protection. They have soldiers, they have a right to feel safe in their house. So we have firemen, they have a right to feel safe on the street. So they have policemen and they have a right to learn to read. So we have teachers, you know. And suddenly I’ve got policemen. army or soldiers and I’ve got firemen and teachers and what’s a doctor and a nurse? You know, it’s not a big deal. It’s a marginal addition to all the people that we pay to make good on our promise to every citizen. You know, it’s not that big. I don’t know what healthcare is. You know, I don’t know what’s… Then we’re arguing about what’s healthy, what’s not healthy, it’s crazy. Just get.

Lee Wochner:
Well, I don’t think that I don’t think those Doritos were actually as healthy as you implied earlier. Let me just start with that.

Lee Wochner:
so, so now, um, some years later, you’re getting ready to stand up a campaign of sorts, um, for Joe Biden. And, um, and, and I, I’d love to hear your thoughts about this because. There is a school of thought that Joe Biden is, uh, in some ways, one of the most successful presidents with one of the most successful presidencies since Reagan, who succeeded at what he was trying to do and FDR. And yet Joe Biden is not being perceived this way. And you have some thoughts on this. So what are your thoughts about Joe Biden’s marketing?

Josh Weltman:
It’s awful. I mean, you know, it’s, look, there’s always, there’s always the front of the house and the back of the house, right? And Joe Biden is back of the house. He’s been a Senator since what, right? And he’s the operations guy. And he’s successful because he knows how the Senate works and he knows how Congress works and he knows how Washington works. And he’s getting… shit done, you know? And the operations guy always thinks that the stuff is gonna sell itself and it never does. You know? The best, whatever, you’re gonna get me in trouble, but Donald Trump and Joe Biden on the same ticket would be, yeah, it makes you cringe, but

Lee Wochner:
that makes me cringe

Josh Weltman:
Donald Trump is all promise and no delivery.

Lee Wochner:
Yeah.

Josh Weltman:
And Joe Biden, just the point I’m trying to make is all delivery and no promise at all. He’s not out there saying this is what we’re gonna do. I mean, kicking COVID’s ass, stopping inflation, bringing manufacturing back, moving chips. He’s like he’s turning around this battleship that’s been cruising down bullshit highway since. the Reagan administration

Lee Wochner:
Me too.

Josh Weltman:
and he’s got to turn and he’s turned the whole thing around in three years and no one knows what the hell he’s done you know.

Lee Wochner:
So we’re, by the way, we’re going to put, we’re going to put links in the show notes for people to see some of the things that we’re going to talk about. So, but, and I know you’re putting up that you’re, you’ve developed a number of memes. There you go. Back to the entha memes around
Joe Biden that you, that you want to gain traction. But, and you have a perspective on how to market him. What is your perspective given that he’s back of the house? Given that he’s in operations, as you say, how are you gonna market him?

Josh Weltman:
Look, the only thing they keep talking about is his age. And if you read the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, which is a great book written by Reese and Trout, they talk about sort of how your mind works with things like perceiving a negative and a positive. And one of the laws is that if you give your audience a negative, they will give you a positive. And the example I think they use is, Listerine tastes so bad, it must work great. That sort of thing. And we all do that all the time, but it’s one of the laws of marketing that if you give a negative, you get back a positive. And I think the age thing is a negative. The flip side of it is… is competence, you know, and

Josh Weltman:
the… the put that together with How was I, hold on, if you put that together with the ideology rather than the identity of the guy, then

Josh Weltman:
those memes start to come out and you have posters that I’m working on that say, you know, vote for Biden in 24. Because my body, my choice does not get old. Because

Josh Weltman:
$35 insulin does not get old. Because democracy does not get old. And make his candidacy about the ideology rather than if you admit the guy is getting, yeah, the human being is getting old, the ideas are not, they are alive today. And that’s what he’s doing. He is pumping new blood. This old man is pumping new blood into a lot of good ideas.

Lee Wochner:
So in your formulation, this 80 year old guy who will be even older if and when re-elected represents the timeless values of when the country was working better.

Josh Weltman:
Absolutely. that’s what he’s he keeps talking about Scranton and growing up in Scranton and talking to his wife and people are laughing at it, you know, because when he makes it specific, yeah, but what he’s really talking about is when the party was about representing people who worked hard, not people who thought right. That worries me and I don’t like that. And I am much more, I am much more akin and with the people that work hard people who took that money away from the middle class, they continue to win. It’s been a 40-year transfer of a huge amount of money out of the pockets of the middle class into the pockets of 1% of the country.

Lee Wochner:
And one could argue out of the pockets of a bunch of other people, because one of the things I tell my kids is, we did not have this many people living on streets when I was a kid. This just didn’t exist. So somehow or other, we’ve created this situation, and we need to uncreate it.

Josh Weltman:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, we created the situation by, you know, we, we shut down. Well, how do, how do I put it? They, they say that our parents had careers, we had jobs and our kids have gigs or tasks. And the cities are still, you know, I don’t see how you have a house. which is designed to be bought with a 30 year mortgage, that takes a career to finance and you’re… filling the city with gig workers. You know, gig workers need gig houses is basically how you solve the homeless problem. Because most of the people on the street, most of the homeless people are not career homeless people. They’re people who have recently had to move out of their house or lost their job, you know? And that’s what, and it… What we don’t have that we used to have is we used to have cheap hotel rooms, you know, residency hotels, you know, like we had at Skid Row before we had the Staples Center or whatever down there and stuff, or until they cleaned up the 50 blocks, square blocks downtown that where all these residency hotels were. And what’s kind of replaced that is Airbnb. You know, but until we have enough cheap hotel rooms to or places to stay, we’re not going to solve the problem.

Lee Wochner:
So again, I’m interested in your ideas about the Democrats’ forthcoming campaigns and the Biden campaign. And just to remind people, we’re gonna put links in the show notes where they can see some of Josh’s iconography where he’s trying to turn Joe Biden’s age into a positive. So, go ahead, Josh.

Josh Weltman:
Well, I think it’s not just I can, I think that the question of our time, because I grew up, I didn’t grow up with the internet and there’s people, I think the question of our time is how do we turn our social connections and shared beliefs or our online social connections and beliefs into offline support of politics. policies and candidates. So how do we, because online, it’s just opinion and talk, it’s images and stuff, but offline, it’s walking the walk, it’s voting and winning and political power. And I think we gotta figure out how to, I’m as new to this as anybody is, but figuring out how to translate the connections. and shared beliefs into real world political power is the question that people spent their lives in marketing and sales.

Lee Wochner:
So the thing that this takes me to my last question for you. And so that I’m glad you just said that. The thing that counterintuity is trying to achieve is to provide opportunity for marketing and advertising to address some real issues in this country. And maybe be a force for good in our neighborhood, in where we work, where our clients are and so. So in your mind, what is the opportunity for marketing and advertising to help make some repairs and improvements here? and to maybe perhaps bring people together to make a real impact on the body politic.

Josh Weltman:
Uh, I think the opportunity is with setting expectations. I think that, um, I don’t know, were you in town? Well, you were in the country. Do you remember the two minute, uh, Was it the two minute history lessons that used to come on before the bicentennial?

Josh Weltman:
This moment in history kind of thing?

Lee Wochner:
Yeah, I’ll remember that. to unite us in common purpose, to say, you know, if you’re a citizen, you should have some expectations, but you should also have some responsibility.

Josh Weltman:
I think the country should be running those nationally and locally all the time. Let people know what to expect, where they came from, why things are the way they are. You know, I think that using broadcast, what’s left of it, to do stuff like that free for people is probably a good idea. Help set expectations for what it means to be a successful citizen, And I think that might be helpful, you know?

Lee wochner: To unite us in common purpose,to say if you’re a citizen you should have some expectations but you should also have some responsibility.

Josh Weltman:
Absolutely. The idea that you have rights without responsibility is ridiculous. And online is where we are all alone together. But we have to, you know, translate things into the real world where we’re really together together, you know, you can’t be alone. And I think that the discord between the algorithms which are designed to make you feel like everything you do is good and works out and leads to more of what you like compared to the real world where hardly anything you do leads to what, you know. I think it’s the difference between being pleased so often and so easily in the digital world. And it’s still being sort of really hard to live in the real world that is making people sort of crazy nowadays.

Lee Wochner:
it’s been, it’s, it’s been a real pleasure. Um, and you know, drinks are on me. We can, we can debate on some of these issues. I think we can talk this back and forth, but I, I gotta say again, I find the, uh, the messaging and the iconography that you. put out absolutely arresting, which is job number one of marketing, it’s to break through. So it’s always a pleasure to see those things and to get excited about those things. And it’s always a lot of fun having a conversation with you.

Josh Weltman:
Oh, thanks a lot. I really appreciate it.

Lee Wochner:
All right, well thanks a bunch.

Jaclyn Uloth:
Thanks for listening! We’re glad you came. That’s What C! Said is produced by Lisa Pham and engineered by Joe Curet. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Please like and follow the show. Visit Counterintuity.com to sign up and learn more.