The Mound - #28 - The Pitchmen

Welcome to The Mound, a weekly newsletter in which we at Good One Creative pitch— for free — our solutions to the world’s problems.

Ask any ad-person who their advertising hero is and they will most likely name someone to whom one of those letters in one of those acronyms supposedly belongs. We're talking about your TBWAs, your WJJs, your JWTs, your BBDOs, your Y&Rs et cetera, et cetera. Their reason for choosing this person will inevitably be their having read a book by one of those letters, or maybe they saw a letter's quote painted onto the lobby-wall of an old agency once and thought it was decent advice.

These are all great advertisers; and there's nothing wrong with holding them in the esteem that, let's face it, having your letter on the side of a building provides. An issue, though, is that almost all (and I mean - so, so dearly almost all) of these letters lived and worked in a time when the pithy print advertisement reigned supreme, of one million dollar budgets, of lunchtime martinis, captive audiences, the two-buttoned television remote and offices like ashtrays. These letters' lessons are of course still useful and should be heeded but you've got to wonder about the health of an industry when its heroes and the working worlds to which they belonged are - for the most part - like, super dead.

Adding insult to injury, yesterday morning it was announced that Morgan Stanley has downgraded their valuation of several Australian media companies due to the “not well understood” threat of retail media - a global trend in which large retailers are turning their websites, apps, and stores into advertising platforms. This is impacting media companies because, as opposed to placing ads through them and them alone, brands are now paying their retailers directly to promote their products in-store (or online, in-app etc.). How this plays out for the creative industry - well, a glass-half-empty copywriter might bemoan the addition of yet another channel to their list of deliverables (for no more money) before once more indulging in their nostalgia for a time they never knew. A simpler time. The letter time.

Here's how we fix it:

Reading about retail media excites me. I think that, as it matures, it's probably going to become my very favourite means of advertising products.

Because I like it when ads are ads. When they look me in the eye and tell me that I'm going to want to see this, that I shouldn't change the channel, that I should WAIT because there's MORE. It’s the unabashed and yet rhythmic pace of the voiceover, the supers, the exclamation marks, the starbursts, the prices seeing themselves in the mirror and then fainting because they’re just so damn low!

Thinking about the rise of retail media yesterday, we at the office got to asking ourselves how far this thing might go - and what sort of ideas we as a creative advertising agency might someday get to produce. Someone asked what "Woolworths: The TV Show" might look like and I shivered all over before sprinting to my office, locking the door behind me, and reacquainting myself with the work of - ladies and gentleman - this ad-person's favourite advertising person.

A genius technologist whose talent for product design was rivalled only by his ability to sell those products. A man who almost single handedly birthed customer-centric design and who domesticated machines that were previously available to corporations exclusively. A man whose product launches alone created more demand than any single ad campaign could ever hope to achieve.

I first learned of Ron Popeil through an article by Malcolm Gladwell, entitled 'The Pitchman'. In short, he invented the air fryer's ancestor along with so many other appliances that we still use (and sell) today. More than any one of the lettered icons of advertising, I learned about selling from Ron.

It's all there: how to write a hook, to position your product in the lives of your customer, to structure a pitch, to creatively utilise celebrity endorsements, and to ask for your customer’s money. Like no one before him or since, Ron Popeil had the ability to stand in front of a whole damn country at midnight and to sell a million dollars' worth of product in less than an hour.

Like so many of the lettered icons of advertising, Ron is sadly no longer with us. His world - that of the 24hr Shopping Channel - has also passed but in the rumbling rise of retail media, as massive retailers begin to invest in and produce livestreamed sales events, we sense the emerging need for ad-people to write and to pitch like Ron did. More honestly, more effectively than any of us are capable today.

So instead of a solution this week, I'm just going to provide you a link to one of Ron's pitches. Before it plays, you'll most likely see an ad and you'll skip it. You're then going to watch an ad for longer than any Tik Tok or any Reel that you've yet seen. Enjoy.

You're welcome, Australia.