So we talked about the difference between brand advertising and direct advertising. Brand advertising is a vodka ad. Brand advertising is seeing something in the world but not buying it right this minute. And direct response advertising doesn't work if you don't click. And what happened with the people who got funded heavily to do direct to consumer is they had really good numbers at the beginning and then people stopped clicking. that if you're going to be in the business of spending money to get clicks so you can make enough money to get more clicks, you're going to make bad choices. So that's the first dichotomy. The second dichotomy is the difference between permission and interruption.
Permission is anticipated, personal, and relevant messages that people want to get. Hard to earn, but doable. So my blog, I'm about to post number 10,000, my 10,000th post in a row. I've never promoted my blog, and I don't push anybody to read my blog. But every day, a million people get my blog, and a lot of them read it, because they want to. My blog isn't for me, it's for them. Anticipated, personal, and relevant. This takes patience and discipline. Interruption marketing is, I got money. I'm in a hurry I don't care who I spam I spam them with email I spam them by calling them at home during dinner I spam them by texting them I spam them by running ads in places they're not looking for me this is the marketer who says they're in too much of a hurry to do it the right way so with those components in mind we need to think about what's our strategy and to do that it helps to understand what's a brand.
A brand is not a logo. A logo is simply the label we put on something. A brand is a promise. So let's say the folks at Hyatt Hotels announced they were going to come out with a brand, a line of sneakers. We have no idea what Hyatt sneakers would be like. Now, let's say the folks at Nike announce they're going to open a hotel. I think most of us can acknowledge or guess what a Nike hotel would be like. That's because Nike has a brand, but Hyatt just has a logo. All Hyatt stands for is a dark, quiet room where you can stay with a modest amount of status. Nike stands for more than that. When Google was first competing with Bing, most people said google's results were better than bing's results and then some researchers did a thing where they swapped the results and kept the logos the same and when people saw bing results with a google logo on top they said they were better because google had a brand the benefit of the doubt a brand is when we're not sure what do we expect a brand is an opportunity for loyalty.
Brand loyalty is surprisingly easy to measure. Only two components. Component number one is if your thing costs more than your competitors, does anyone buy yours? They do that if you have a brand. Because if in a blind taste test they're the same, people should buy the cheap one. And the second one is if you announce something, are people interested in it? Do they give you the benefit of the doubt. So when I think about the work of a creative strategist, it begins with this. What kind of brand are you building? How long is it going to take? How much is it going to cost? Who do you want to build that brand with? Are you even measuring the right things?
Because it doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're going in the wrong direction. So the hard work of being the strategist happens long before you do the hard work of being an ad creative. The strategist is the one who takes 10 steps back and says, if we disappeared, who would miss us? What is the change we seek to make? So if I'm going to name a great brand, a brand that people are excited about, something like Rivian. Do people want a Rivian pickup truck because they saw the ads for Rivian pickup truck? Does an ad on Facebook ever sell a $96,000 pickup truck? I don't think so. But someone decided to make a pickup truck, not a sports car.
That decision was strategic. Who's it for? What's it for? What is the change we seek to make. So who do we pick? Do we pick left-handed people? Do we pick people who are tall or who are white or who are from this country? Do we pick people who make this much money? These are demographic choices. Demographics were all marketers used to have. All we could do is look up what the census says about people and pick those people. But we don't care about demographics. We care about psychographics. What do people believe before we even get there? What do people want before we get there? The kind of person who reads, I don't know, Good Housekeeping or Martha Stewart magazine.
These people have houses, but so do you. But you're not reading those magazines. What's the difference? The difference is where are we finding our pain and our fear and our dreams, because that worldview decides what we're going to believe, what we're looking for, what we're going to pay money for, what problems we have, where is our stress, our tension, the pain we seek to address. And decoding all of that is the work of the creative strategist. So let me talk you through an entire arc here that I think helps us make sense. Before I do that, I want to talk about the three most common things that human beings want. We want status, who's up, who's down, who eats lunch first.
We want affiliation, who's to our left, who's to our right, who's like me. And we want the freedom from fear. So my friend Blake came up with an idea, a really interesting idea, to make a brand of shoes where if you bought a pair, he would give an identical pair to someone who didn't own shoes. He called it TOMS Shoes. And the idea of TOMS Shoes began with this. $80 espadrilles made ethically in Portugal with a big logo on the back. Well, that's a big strategic choice because women's shoes in those days didn't have logos on them. Next, they're $80. You can buy a pair of espadrilles for $30. So what are you paying extra for? You're paying for the story.
Who's going to buy a pair of shoes from a new company with a logo on them? Almost no one. And almost no one is exactly the right thing to do. He found women, because they were only women's shoes at the beginning, who wanted to be the first in their neighborhood, who wanted to feel like philanthropists, who wanted to engage on the internet. He found this tiny group of women and when they got the shoes, they wore them because that's what people do with shoes. And now the shoes are in the world and there's an unspoken rule in many communities. If a friend of yours is wearing a new pair of shoes, you need to say to them, nice shoes, where'd you get them?
And this is what happened. And in that moment, the woman who was an early adopter, who's wearing the shoes, is thrilled because now she gets status. She gets to say, these are brand new shoes from a new company. And not only that, but because I bought them, some poor family is going to get a pair of shoes too. the subtext of that is i'm better than you i'm better than you because i knew about these and you didn't and i'm better than you because i'm a philanthropist and you're not well with that status increase tension is created because now the friend has a bunch of problems the first problem is she's behind so now she goes and buys a pair of TOMS shoes and now her friend has the same conversation with her.
Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat until TOMS is so big he sells the company for half a billion dollars. This stepwise progression of serving a tribe of people who seek status and affiliation had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not they bought good media ads for TOMS Shoes. As TOMS grew, they needed to add more products. They wanted to keep growing. So he came out with coffee. The problem is a little different because he didn't then give coffee to people who didn't have coffee, but he created a useful philanthropic output and it didn't work. It didn't work because no one who's drinking a cup of coffee says to you, oh, interesting coffee, where'd you get it?
Because it's just coffee. So the conversation went away. The tribal relationship went away. The status went away. All of it. And instead it was just, you trust TOMS, here's a social media ad, please buy some coffee. That's a totally different offer strategically than saying, I'm going to help this group of people get to where they want to go.