TCC Podcast #113: Creating viral ads with Daniel Harmon

Creative Director and copywriter, Daniel Harmon is one of the brains behind the popular ads for PooPouri, Purple mattresses, Chatbooks and more. In the 113th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira and Rob talk with Daniel about The Harmon Bros. approach to creating advertising that’s calibrated to go viral, demonstrate the product, and sell enough to make a lot of money. Here’s what we covered: •  how growing up on a potato farm led to a career in advertising •  using YouTube to sell a tongue brush, air freshener and mattresses •  how a Huffington Post article gave the Harmon Bros. their name •  the creative process that led to working with Golidlocks •  why they hold “writing retreats” as part of the creative process •  how he (and the HB team) knows when something is truly funny •  how they cast talent for their videos and look for the “comedic X-factor” •  the two levels of hell and how to stay out of both (when it comes to casting) •  what ads need to do at the end of the day—even the funny ones •  how the HB formula works for both humor and serious ads •  what it takes to get hired by an agency like Harmon Brothers •  what it takes to turn “gross” into “gold” •  the course they built to share all of their how-to secrets There’s a ton of great advice, stories and ideas that anyone serious about creating compelling ads (especially those that work in environments like YouTube and Facebook). To hear it all, click the play button below, or download the episode to your favorite podcast app. Or scroll down to read a full transcript.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Orabrush Devin Supertramp Austin Craig Poopouri Harmon Bros. The Goldilocks Ad Studio C The Abe Lincoln Ad Hey Whipple Squeeze This How to write ads that sell  (The HB Course) Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity   Full Transcript: Rob:   This podcast is sponsored by The Copywriter Underground. Kira:   It's our new membership designed for you to help you attract more clients and hit 10K a month consistently. Rob:   For more information or to sign up, go to thecopywriterunderground.com. What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts? Ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes, and their habit, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That's what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira:   You're invited to join the club for episode 113 as we chat with the Chief Creative Officer at Harmon Brothers, Daniel Harmon, about storytelling and humor, what it takes to create viral videos that also sell products, building an agency, and what we need to do to create amazing work like the Harmon Brothers. Welcome, Daniel. Daniel:           Thank you. Thanks for having me on, guys. Kira:   All right. Well, why don't we start this off with your story, Daniel, about how you ended up as the Creative Director at Harmon Brothers. Daniel:           My story actually goes back to when I was born. No. Not exactly. I was born in Idaho, Burley, Idaho specifically, and grew up working on the potato farm. This seems tangential, but it's not. I learned to do sales face-to-face before I ever got into selling anything through video or through social media. What I mean by that is in order to earn money, my brothers and I, we would grab a truck that my uncle had and we would fill it full of 50-pound boxes of fresh Idaho potatoes and illegally, I'm sure, drive it down across the Utah border and go door-to-door or street side and sell boxes of potatoes. We would sell a 50-pound box for $20. Utah was a really good market because it wasn't Idaho where everyone already has potatoes and because there's a lot of families there. We figured out that we could make more money selling potatoes door-to-door and face-to-face than we could if we worked minimum wage jobs, you know, as teenagers. The pitch was pretty basic. It was like, ‘Oh, I've just come down from my uncle's farm with a lot of fresh Idaho potatoes that I'm selling to earn money for college,’ or in our case, ‘Earning money to pay for a mission to go and sell for our church. Does your family eat potatoes?’ If they said yes, we're like, ‘Okay. They're $20 for a 50-pound box. Do you want one or two boxes?’ It was basically the pitch. If they said, ‘No, we eat rice,’ then we just kind of moved on with our tail between our legs because we didn't know anything about overcoming objections or anything like that, but it was very successful. We were able to make I think probably double the money that we would have made had we just worked minimum wage jobs. The first vehicle we ever owned was a van that my uncle came down and bought in Utah at auction. He bought it from an old copper mine. It was run to death. It was a 15 passenger Econoline Ford van. Big old white van, industrial strength kind of thing, but it had been beat to death. He bought it for 900 bucks and then he brought it back when he saw that we're having some success and we've been running his trucks into the ground, putting all the miles on. He said, ‘Well, I bought this van and you guys are going to buy it from me.’ We're like, ‘Okay. I guess we'll do that.’ The first vehicle we ever owned was a $900 15 passenger van. This is teenagers. We'd load that thing up with potatoes and we blew the tires on the freeway on a couple of occasions because we didn't want to spend money on replacing bald tires until we were forced to. That was kind of our first jump into sales. Then later on while in college, we went and did a summer sales program where we sold ADT alarm systems door-to-door. Here we learned more about the structure of a sale, that there's an actual structure to it, that's been used over time for basically probably centuries, but certainly decades. We learned how to overcome objections when people bring those up. We learned how to make something very complex like home security systems for people that don't have them, boil it down to something very simple. We were some of the top salesman in the company. We were very successful with that. It was also a job I hated. I always hated going door-to-door, but the money trade-off was worth it to me. Coming back from that, I studied advertising at BYU where I got a degree, where I went to their creative track. I went out and worked in Chicago as a copywriter at DDB Chicago, as well as BSA Partners and worked on brands like McDonald's and Dell and Chicago International Film Festival, with Caterpillar, Harley-Davidson, GE Healthcare, just to name a few, and got a sense of the big agency world and the big city. Really liked the big city overall, but didn't love the commute and kind of got tired of that. At this time, my brothers had co-founded a company called Orabrush, which made a tongue cleaner that helped cure bad breath. It was basically this tongue cleaner that the inventor, Dr. Bob, had tried to peddle online. Well, excuse me. He hadn't tried to peddle online. He tried to peddle it in grocery stores and things like that and had no success. In kind of last stage effort, he took it over to the local university here, BYU, and had them do a study on it and see if it could be sold online. The class basically came back with the conclusion of, ‘Oh, based on our surveys and all this data, it suggested maybe like 7% or 8% of people would be willing to buy a product like this online, so we suggest you just don't do it.’ Then my brother Jeffrey that was kind of hanging out in the back of the class and always just like reading things like TechCrunch and watching YouTube videos and stuff during class, kind of raised his hand. He said, ‘Well, wait a minute. 7% to 8%? That's still millions of people. Why not sell to them?’ Dr. Bob was really excited about this response from him and kind of joined up with him after class and said, ‘Why don't you sell this for me? Why don't you sell the Orabrush for me?’ That led to my brothers Jeffrey and Neal becoming Co-Founders of Orabrush with Dr. Bob where they ended up making a video in order to try to promote the product. They've been driving traffic to the Orabrush sales page, so basically a landing page or sales funnel. They were having some success, but just a little bit. Jeffrey decided to pull a video from YouTube that was a way to test if you had bad breath or not. It used a spoon. It didn't have anything to do with Orabrush, but just putting that video on the landing page increased the conversion rate by like 30%. It really made him think, ‘Man, what if we did this, but was actually branded for Orabrush and we did it as an actual ad?’ They made this really cheap video for Orabrush. It cost about $500 to make. Jeffrey's roommate at the time, this is my brother Jeffrey of course, his roommate at the time was Devin Graham, who is now known as Devin Supertramp online. They shot the video together. He had his other roommate Joel help him make the script really funny. Jeffrey and Devin directed it. They got a coworker, Austin Craig, to be this guy in the lab coat to do the video. They made it and they put that on the website. All of a sudden, everything started converting much better. That's when YouTube launched their platform for ads. This was back when you could buy views for less than a penny. Jeffrey got out in front of it and Orabrush was literally buying up views by the hundreds of thousands. It was probably honestly buying up more than half of the inventory on YouTube at the time. People were getting pretty sick of the ad, but I mean it drove the Orabrush in a big way. The sales really took off. It ended up getting placement in Walmart. Essentially, what happened from there is I mean they went into Walmart. They went into CBS, Walgreens, into retailers all over the world and started getting cited all over the place.