February 6, 2021 • 37 mins
Advertising is essential to get an idea out to the public. It needs to be memorable, engaging and relevant to be effective. Follow The Profit’s David Grasso talks to ad man Allen Kay who has created successful, iconic campaigns to get some insight into the world of advertising. Plus, we’ll take a look at how a merry band of reddit followers were able to upend the ways of Wall Street.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Follow. The profit is a production of ging Ridge three
sixty and I Heart Radio. For those people investing in
the stock market, there's always two groups, the very heavily
funded and well connected fat cats on Wall Street, and
then there's you and me, the average Joe. And both
groups really, if you think about it, they have the
(00:21):
same goal. They want to make money using their money
in stocks to work for them. And the majority of
the time it's Wall Street that wins. And recently though
stuff changed. The average Joe suddenly was a formidable person
on Wall Street. But then something happened. We're gonna take
(00:42):
a look at what a bunch of people on Reddit
did to a number of stocks that has really bothered
some big guys on Wall Street, especially the hedge fund
crowd market analysis and politicians from both parties. Wow, they
actually agree. Plus advertising is essential to get an idea
out to the public, whether it's thirty seconds on TV,
(01:03):
Billboard and ad on Facebook. Advertising has to be memorable,
engaging and relevant if you want it to be effective.
So we'll be talking to someone who created successful, iconic
campaigns that you will probably recognize, and we'll get some
insight into the world of advertising. UM David Grosso and
this is followed the Profit. So you're looking to get
(01:31):
rich quick, there's plenty of podcasts out there for that.
Don't look here. Here on follow the Profit. We aim
to deconstruct what's happening economically, politically, and socially out there
in the world, so that you can use your money
to help you. And for any company who has a
product to sell, or any consumer who has a product
they want to buy. There's one element that is common
(01:52):
with both advertising. Historians say the first ads were verbal.
Sellers would shout what they were selling, and we still
see this in marketplaces across the world. Then someone came
up with a bride idea to put up a sign
to promote their product. Someone like a cloth seller decided
to promote themselves on papyrus scrolls. Then came printing on walls,
(02:12):
and of course the printing press, then newspapers, radio, TV,
and now the Internet. Some ad campaigns, of course, turned
out to be memorable. We can think of one that
involved a medieval Franciscan monk who finished the manuscript and
was ordered to make five more so, Brother Dominic found
a copying store with a brand new Xerox machine, and
(02:34):
the problem was solved. That sixty second ad played during
the nine Super Bowl and instantly became a classic. Another
involved getting the message out to New Yorker's to be
more vigilant about terrorist threats, and that's why the local
transportation authority there adopted a very simple ad campaign, if
you see something, say something. And that's very same person
(02:58):
who developed those campaigns has been involved in many that
you've probably seen, for the airline Virgin Atlantic, for the
TV channel Comedy Central, for the automaker Honda, for the
Vegas resorts, Win Resorts, and he joins us today. His
name is Alan Stephen. Kay, hey, Alan, how you doing good?
Very well? Thank you, very nice introduction. It almost made
(03:21):
me believe it. So let's talk about that. How do
you make someone believe in what you're selling? Because isn't
that essentially what advertising is all about? Yes, that's the objective.
But the way to get people to believe it is
to tell them truth. Everything that I've done, I could
swear on the Bible. We use our imagination to tell
(03:43):
the story, but we don't make up stories. So how
can you tell whether an ad is effective or not?
If you're saying that It's all involves truth. How do
you know whether there's fakes out there or not? The
bottom line is the bottom line. How sales are The
sales are really good, your advertising working. If sales you're
(04:03):
advertising isn't working. Fortunately, I've worked with some very smart
people and they bought the right things, they had the
right ideas, they gave the right input. So my job
was pretty easy. All I had to do is figure
out how to tell the story. We are kind of
all naturally born storytellers. But how do you figure out
(04:26):
how to tell the right story to the right audience
when you're selling something. First you have to know your audience,
know what makes them tick. Then you have to speak
to them in their own language and tell them things
that they would be interested in. That's where you start.
I have five guidelines that I use for developing advertising,
(04:47):
and that's start with the customer, live with a client,
uncovered the obvious, keep it simple, and follow through. And
I say, if if you do all that, you're not
going to screw up too much. So how do you
know who you're selling to? Because a lot of times
growth and companies comes from unexpected places and demographics. That
(05:08):
comes from the client the client is the source of
the input. They know who their customer is in terms
of demographics psychographics. With that information, we then use our
imaginations to come up with something that is interesting for me.
I coined a word called advertainment and advertainment. So an
(05:31):
advertisement that entertains you then exactly right. And you have
to have both because if you have an add that
isn't entertaining, people won't stay around long enough to get
the information. Okay, So there has to be a balance
of entertainment and information to make a good add. So
(05:53):
let's talk about your hits, because there's been quite a few.
What was your first hit and how did you feel
when that happened? WHOA. I graduated college on Tuesday. I
flew back to New York on a Wednesday, and I
got my first job on a Thursday in a very
very good agency that I didn't particularly want to work for.
(06:13):
My goal was to work for Wellsword Screen and I
couldn't get arrested there, and I took this job at
McCann Erickson and I wind up doing very very well.
Oddly enough, I was hired as an art director, writer, producer.
(06:33):
In those days, they would have a lot of slashes
art director, slash writer, slash producers slash. So they gave
you slashes instead of money. Okay, So so you felt important,
right Alan, like, oh slash slash slash yeah, okay, so
that will give you an idea how much money I
(06:53):
was making. Um No, Actually I happened to be paid
quite well for a recent college graduate, which was good
because I had my wife, my first child, um, looking
for home, so everything kind of fit together. The first job,
and this is pretty unusual, was for Good Dear International,
(07:16):
like the blimp, yeah sort of, and I wrote it
and art directed it, and next thing I knew, I
was in France shooting it. And here I was, all
of twenty one years old, my first job, my first project,
and I'm in Nice. The commercial the concept was that
(07:38):
if you have these Good Dear International tires on your car,
you feel like Mario Andretti driving in the Lamans. So
the commercial started with this very meek, little frenchman coming
out of his very modest home and getting into his
little Fiat and he started it up and then all
(08:01):
of a sudden he's dressed in racing outfit and he
puts it into gear and zoom, zoom zoom zoom and
now suddenly he is going through the streets of Monte
Carlo as if he is in the race, the ground free,
and then the voiceover just says something to the effect
that when you put good your tires on your car,
(08:23):
not only your tire performance better, So do you good
your international whatever. So that was my first spot. It
was humorous, made its point, and it was fun to do.
Back then, Xerox was what Tesla is now. I imagine
that this six Super Bowl commercial involved a monk because
(08:45):
it's a reference to the Guttenberg Press, because the automatic
press was the first time the Bible. The first thing
they printed was the Bible, of course in Germany. How
do you draw that out in your head? I put
my brain on auto pilot and I really don't think
about it. I get the input, I understand it. Then
I go to sleep and I don't think about it.
(09:06):
The first thought before I went to sleep was one
thing that this duplicator did was it made books. It collated,
So I was thinking, make books, make books, make books. Aha,
a bookie, A bookie makes books, they do their cow cheats.
What if you do a commercial about a bookie that
(09:26):
business is really growing he has all these cow cheats
to do to him out what's he do? Ah, he
has a friend who has a Zero's duplicator. Fine, so
I knew working with Xerox, and now they're they're not
going to go for a bookie. So then that's when
I went to sleep, and I started thinking right before
(09:47):
it fell off that okay, when did information start being
put down? And I thought Papyrus and egypt writing on
a skull. Okay, well maybe an Egyptian writing on a scroll,
not particularly humorous, but I knew I was on the
(10:09):
right track. Then he said stop thinking about it, went
to sleep. At four o'clock, my brain connected all the dots.
A monk in a monastery in the catacombs doing the script,
bringing it to his father's superior. Father wants five more.
(10:34):
Brother Dominic gives an Ave a kind of look and
and goes off to figure out what to do. And
as you said, he goes to a friend that has
his York's duplicator. The job is done. He brings a
big pile of copies to Father Superior, who looks at
(10:54):
them and it's totally amazed, and looks up and says
it's a miracle. And then Z York's logo comes in,
and that was the whole story. The Monk commercial got
the most notoriety, many people that credit it as having
started the Super Bowl as the arena for introducing new
(11:18):
breakthrough concepts. Wait, Alan, that wasn't a norm. That's the
birth of the super Bowl commercial that we know of today. Yes,
people have said that, that's even in writing what don't
we talk about the m T A. So when you're
in the subway in New York City see something, say
something so pippy, so easy, almost like anyone could have
(11:40):
come up with that, but somehow no one did until
you did. Well, I kind of beat into the punctures.
I came up with that on I was in my
office and I was very upset beyond as everybody else.
And in the advertising industry, we are like born helpers.
(12:04):
We want to make things better. And I said that
I would like to do something, and many heads of
agencies were thinking about that, and I knew that, and
I felt that what was going to come out would
be something very nationalistic where Americans were proud, kind of
(12:25):
make people feel good for the moment. And I said, Okay,
I'm sure that's gonna be taken here of I want
to come up with something that will make people feel
good for a long time in the future, kind of
like announce of prevention. Then autopilot goes in, and I'm
thinking that Americans, particularly New Yorkers, are very jaded. They
(12:51):
in most cases, are oblivious to what's going around them.
They were taught when we're walking to look down, never
look up, never look into people's eyes. Mind owned business.
So I thought, well, let's look at the opposite in Israel,
because bombings and things like that were way too common
(13:11):
on the currence. The people who need to we all knew,
to be aware of their surroundings and if they see
something suspicious reported. So then the next step was how
do we make Americans be aware of what's going on,
not be complacent. So I said, well, if I were
(13:31):
to tell people what to do, what would I say
to get like that? I would say, if you see something,
say something, m that's pretty good. I wrote it down
on a three by five card always carry them around
for extraneous thoughts, and I said, yeah, that's it. I
(13:51):
think that does it. We're gonna take a quick break here,
be right back. When I ask you a question you
look up, So, because I'm seeing you on video, what's
going on in your brain? There's a lot of systems thinking, like,
you have a formula for doing this. I see that
(14:12):
you kind of take these ideas and you have a
process that you do this in your brain? What's going
on in there? It does it by itself. It gets
the input and then it just stills it from what
am I trying to communicate? What am I trying to say?
Take all the extraneous elements out of it, and then
get to the nucleus of the idea, and then like
(14:35):
a seed water, it fertilized it, it grows, and then
my thought process takes over on it tone and says,
what's the best way to communicate this, What's the best
way to explain it, What's the most dramatic way, What's
the most humorous way. There's one other key thing that
(14:58):
the work that I do was known for is a
sense of human I don't deal in bits and bites.
I deal in flesh and blood. The commercials that I
do are not technology oriented at all. There's another phrase
that I came up with in two which was human ology,
(15:18):
which is technology not for technology's sake. But for people's sake,
and that was always my belief. The first time that
I went to the Xerox Palto Alto Research Center Park,
which is where all the virtually everything that we were
(15:39):
using today came out of that laboratory, one of the
chief engineers named David Liddell, he started by saying, technology
isn't about bits and bites. He said, it's about getting
home in time to have pizza with your family. And
that struck me because I never thought of that consciously.
(16:02):
But that's what my work was all about, helping people,
and I applied that same thing to Xerox, and I
love when he said that because one of the hardest
things to do is to explain to clients what you're
doing and why are you're doing it, because most don't
get it. When I'm explaining things to some clients, they
(16:25):
don't get it. They get like this thirty miles stare
And then you're discussing what idea with on a daily basis,
no one gets it. How's frustrating. And the more sophisticated
they are, the less they get it. Is what contrary
to popular belief, So being on your side of the
table is not easy for anyone who doesn't know you're
(16:47):
trying to please the client, and the client doesn't even
know what questions to ask. Yeah, the it's funny, should
say that. Um lowest Corey. She passed away way too
soon and left me with a company to run. Um.
She used to say that she was sure it had
(17:08):
something to do with the next tie becose on the weekend.
On the weekend, you have a client, he's a regular
guys watching television. Oh that's a good commercial, that's funny. Whatever, Okay,
then you get stressed in the morning, puts on his
tie a little bit too tied, comes to work. She
she was sure it cuts off enough oxygen in the
(17:30):
brain to make him not understand anything that made sense.
That was her theory of the next tie. That's the
you know what's funny. I I go on networks all
the time that you're you're mandated to wear a tie.
I was on one yesterday and I don't because of
that because it restricts my air flowers. So I think
your ex partner was right, Oh, that's that's funny. You
(17:53):
know what this show is all about really is helping
people who are in different phases of their career. Figure
out is to get ahead? What do you think your
secret sauce was? Was it right place, right time? Did
you put in the work. How do you begin to
explain your story and why you feel you were successful.
Common sense. That's what's lacking in business today and for
(18:17):
quite some time. For some reason, people they try to
think what to do instead of using their common sense
and saying, gee, what's the right thing to do. It's
funny every time that I have a decision to make
to go one way or another, I just say, well,
what would my grandmother say? Because she was always right,
(18:39):
She'd say, well, all you should do is blah blah blah,
And I say, oh, my god, absolutely right. So I
would listen to her long after she passed and just say, well, well,
grandma say, And that's that's part of I always used
my common sense, and people working for me as well,
I tell them to just use your common sense. And
(19:02):
I'd say, I'll tell you my opinions. Agree with what
you think it's right, don't agree with what is what
is wrong. And once you leave my office, you're in
control of your head in your hands. You do what
you think is right. And I was fortunate enough to
hire some really bright people and they did the right things.
You mentioned processes. Every agency had their particular process, their
(19:28):
brand development process, seven steps to develop a brand, and
they were all the same. They just call them something different,
and it was really just a bunch of bullets. Really.
It was like window dressing to make the clients feel
that there's something mystical about advertising, and there isn't. So
(19:48):
when companies would come to us and then they'd say, well,
you know, what's your process. We just came from three
agencies and they're explaining their brand development process and what's
your process, I'd say, well, we have a very unusual
process that none of the other companies seemed to us.
It's called the thought process, and we apply it to
(20:09):
everything we do. The process one guy said, he said,
oh my god. He got up, came around, he grabbed
my face and he said, if I could kiss you
on the lips, I would. We have heard so much
crap about this process. You're the first person that spoke English,
(20:31):
and god, I wish that was more common in pr
agencies in New York. I worked in one for five
years in New York. The process for everything. Thank you
for saying that. I think the simpler you make things,
the more you should be paid. Everybody can make something complicated.
(20:53):
It's the really smart people that can make it simple.
And I've worked with clients, particularly scientists that start their
own company, and they take something simple and make it
very compliment scientists. I'm married to one. I can tell
you all about that, right, but I don't have patience
for complicated things. They shouldn't be even things that that
(21:16):
are very complicated and result is simple. Who's doing it
right now? Alan, let's talk about today's world. I'm sure
you still consume ads. Who's doing it right? Nobody? Nobody.
If you listen to any normal person, they say advertising sucks.
(21:36):
Nobody says wow, advertising is greater. Just so this great
and oh my god, yeah, and said no one ever correct, no, no, wow,
I saw this great tweet. Oh boy, this award winning tweets.
I don't think they give out tweet awards. I know
they cancel people, but I don't know about awards. Yeah,
I said, that's one day. They're going to get it.
(21:56):
They're going to give a clear award for the best
tweet of year, and then they're going to be in categories. Okay,
what was the best tweet about boyfriends and something about politics.
The fact of the matter is advertising went from special
to social. Even the companies advertising agencies got taken over
(22:19):
by these conglomerates, by these holding companies that do anything
but advertising. They know business, but they don't know how
to sell a product. And it's the guys at the
head of those companies that are very, very wealthy making
all the money now and for a while they've been furloughing,
so to speak, people that are making the most money,
(22:43):
that know the most about the business, and they're letting
them go. It's a known fact. And the business gets
taken over by young people that really don't know what
they're doing, that weren't taught the same things, aren't taught
the essence of advertising. There's all this bureaucracy now when
(23:05):
you try to pick up work from these big companies,
which really have the budgets and the resources to run
the big ads. The tenure of clients or that agencies
used to be many, many years, and the last I
heard it was like seven months. If your project lasted
a long time, that's ridiculous. What clients don't understand is
(23:28):
by being like a frog jumping from lily pad to
lily pad um. Some lily pads are better than others,
and you're better off jumping to the shore and building
yourself a home and being surrounded by Now I'm getting
into people with people who understand your business, who have
worked with it, who have developed your brand, And it's
(23:51):
not that way anymore. And agencies we used to be
able to hire a staff and keep staff. We never
hired freelancers because the time it took to teach them
what the product is all about, what the brand is
all about, what the clients were all about, is time
(24:12):
wasted by having a consistent staff. All of that was gone.
There was no learning curve. Clients don't see that's that
side of it, and I don't. I don't know why,
because it really is to their detriment. The last commercial
that I saw that I really clearly remember is the
(24:32):
Nike commercial featuring Colin Kaepernick and Serena Williams. Very political.
Do you think it's smart for ads to be political
these days? Isn't that something kind of relatively new? I
think it's it's fair for them to express their opinion.
It's gutsy because they might express an opinion that their
(24:54):
customers won't agree with but that's tough. I think people
should stand on their principles. I've developed principles over the years,
which makes UH decision making a lot easier. Is this
the right thing to do? With the wrong thing to do?
It's the wrong thing to do, I forget it. If
it's the right thing to do, I take that direction.
(25:17):
When we first started handling the Xerox account, the CEO
of z rx C, Peter mccullou, called me into his office,
sat down, Alan. He said, let me tell you this.
This is what I believe. As companies get closer and
closer to parity, you're going to do business with people
(25:39):
you like. Until people know our company you're advertising is
our company. I want you to do advertising people like.
And I thought to myself, yeah, I can do that.
And I've always agreed with that. Philo she people that
(26:02):
have have worked for us over the years. I said,
be nice to you. If they don't like you, they're
not going to like your stuff. But if they genuinely
like you, they're more apt to listen to you and
to buy from you. Alan. You know, I think I've
laughed more on this interview than I have on any
(26:23):
of the ones I've done for this podcast. I want
to thank you for your time and congrats on a
on a great career. I hope that advertising changes and
that we don't end on a down note, like hopefully
that someone figures out that common sense, likability, and resonance matter.
(26:44):
But evidently you're saying that that's an endangered species these days. No,
I'm an optimist. I believe in the pendulum. It's going
to start swimming back the other way. It has to.
That's physics. I believe in physics. That's something that is
true with it and never going to change. And that's
the pendulum. Look and look through history, take any topic,
(27:07):
and you're gonna see it goes from one extreme to
the other. Right now, I don't know how much further
the pendulum can go into non inter personal relationships where
people live on the computer. You know, that's that's really hard.
Now we have no choice, and I think people are
making the best of it. But once this is over,
(27:29):
human beings are going to be like animals let out
of a cage. They're gonna want to have fun. They're
gonna want to live that We're gonna have life. They're
gonna want to make up for all this time lost
being in a cave. And I think that that's gonna happen.
It's that's going to influence everything and advertising. It's going
(27:50):
to get better too, because people won't stand for the
bad stuff, and the people doing the advertising will stand
up and say to the client mine them think that's
very good. I think, why don't we do something that
has a little humor, that has some humanity in it,
that's based on reality. I think that has to happen
because the vacuum has been created for that. On my
(28:13):
personal opinion, I think history has proven it and now
the future I believe will prove it again. Wow. Well,
on that note, that's incredible. Alan, Thank you so much
for taking the time to join me today from the
New York area. All the best to all of you
up there. We're gonna take a quick break here, be
(28:37):
right back. The buying and selling a stock used to
be very straightforward. If a stock is popular, the price
goes up. If a stock tanks, it's probably because people
aren't buying it. But there are moments when buying and
selling of stock gets blocked, particularly when there's volatility, and
(28:58):
that's when there's major drops or right is is at
the stock exchanges. For example, when the SMP index, which
is just literally a synthetic measure of how the stock
market is doing according to a basket of stocks, they
halt trading when the market drops a certain percentage point,
sometimes seven. And this exists to stop panic selling. And
(29:20):
really they say, you know, it's important just to maintain
some sort of stability, But what about exuber and buying
right Well, that kind of falls into that category, and
that happened with game Stop, and it's happening with several
other currencies and medals, etcetera. So one of the metrics
people use with determining the value of the stock is
how good of a business they're in. And game Stock,
(29:41):
we all know sells video games. You've seen them at
the mall, and these days you kind of order those
things online. So game Stop is kind of sitting on
a really outdated business model. So most people expected game
Stock to just die right. Earlier this year, the stock
was twenty bucks, and then a few days later in January,
(30:02):
you know, from January twelve to January they went up
to forty bucks, and then six days later it was
fifty bucks, and then the next day, get this, it
went up to three fifty, and then since then it's
just been going up and down and super volatile and
just absolute insanity. At one point, game Stop was worth
(30:23):
more than Best Buy. It's cousin that is much larger
and much more profitable. So why did it go up?
Did Game Stop announced a new way to get video games? Nope?
Did they create the next hottest game? Nope? None of
that game stock saw its stock sore thanks to a
bunch of people on a Reddit feed. So millions of
(30:44):
retail investors, you know, average joes, were on Wall Street bets,
you know, that's a Reddit thread, and they identified a
little problem that hedge funds had massive short positions in
game Stop, and they thought, if we make the price
go up, will not only make a lot of money,
but we'll screw the hedge funds like a little populist uprising,
(31:06):
which a lot of people are upset at Wall Street
for what happened during the Great Recession and got off
scott free. So they thought, why don't we try to
make a lot of money and get back at these
hedge funds, these big Wall Street fat cats, you know,
let's pull out our pitchforks and play their game. Well,
guess what happened. They got turned off T d Amir Trade,
(31:27):
Charles Schwab, Robin Hood, many more blocked these average Joe's
ability to buy game, stop stocks, and many more, while
hedge funds, guess what, they were allowed to continue as
usual as if nothing was going on. It was really disappointing. Honestly,
I was kind of blown away myself. How is this allowed?
(31:52):
So let me get this straight. Wall Street is just
a casino for the well connected and for the regular investor.
Oh you know, never mind, when you stop winning, we're
gonna lock you out. So in the end, it's just
a casino for Wall Street. The house always wins. Right.
The day that regular people figured out how to play
the hedge fund game, they got locked out. So this
(32:14):
brought together politicians and ordinary people like you and me
on all sides of the political spectrum. Notice this isn't right.
These are people just trying to make money. My neighbor
came up to me and was livid and said, how
dare they lock me out? This should be illegal, And honestly,
I agree with my neighbor. You know what, if people
(32:36):
want to go barbecue money in their backyard. That's their prerogative.
It was wrong for these platforms to lock people out.
And really it's a metaphor for what's been going on
for years in America. Right, there's two sets of rules.
There's a set of rule for the big guys and
a different set of rules for the small guys. Average
entrepreneurial Americans wanted to make some money in the stock market.
(32:58):
And guess what big institute one. Anyway, you know, this
is a moment here, an inflection point, a game changer,
no pun intended with game stop. Right, we can't allow this.
This is unfair to regular people. And it doesn't matter
whether you're liberal or conservative. The whole point of a
(33:19):
stock market is to allow freedom of trade. You're able
to buy when you want, you're able to sell when
you want. And you know, honestly, platforms like robin Hood,
which many of us use during the pandemic, we've discovered
there in bed with the hedge funds. Is that fair?
Is that fair to us for them to use our
consumer behavior against us when they're betting. I think not.
(33:42):
Something means to change on Well Street, and I don't
know whether it's regulation or perhaps less regulation. It depends
on what your ideology is. Honestly, that's above my pay grade.
But I can tell you one thing. This is unfair
and we all know what happened. This is good old
fashioned corruption. And really all Americans and all companies big
(34:05):
and small, should be treated equally by these platforms, and
that needs to change. And I'm happy that politicians as
dissimilar as Ted Cruz and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez noticed that
this was wrong. Thanks to all of you for joining
me as we Follow the Profit, and I'd like to
(34:27):
thank advertising guru Alan Kay. He made me laugh a lot,
and while he was making me laugh, he gave us
valuable insight into the advertising world and how that world
can really benefit you in your career. As always, I'd
like to thank my team, Emiliano LeMond, Scott Handler, Cheyenne Reid,
and our executive producers Knew ging Rich and Debbie Myers.
I'm your host, David Grosso, So if you're enjoying this
(34:48):
show as much as I am, give us five stars
and give us a review so that others can really
learn what this show is all about. Follow the Profit
is a production of ging Rich three sixty and I
Heart Rate years. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts. All opinions expressed by David Grasso
(35:15):
and his guests on the show are solely their opinions
and do not reflect the opinions of Gingrich three sixty
or affiliates, and may have been previously disseminated by David
Grasso on this podcast, television, radio, internet, or another medium.
You should not treat any opinion expressed by David grass
so as a specific inducement to make a particular investment
or follow in particular strategy, but only as an expression
(35:38):
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he considers reliable, but neither ging Rich Productions nor its
affiliates and or subsidiaries warrant its completeness or accuracy, and
it should not be relied upon as such. David Grasso,
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(35:59):
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Past performance is not indicative of future results. Neither David
Grasslo nor ging Hich three sixty guarantees any specific outcome
or profit. You should be aware of the real risk
(36:20):
of loss in following any strategy or investment discussed on
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may fluctuate in price or value. Investors may get back
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This material does not take into account your particular investment objectives,
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(36:42):
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Follow. The profit is a production of ging Ridge three
sixty and I Heart Radio. For those people investing in
the stock market, there's always two groups, the very heavily
funded and well connected fat cats on Wall Street, and
then there's you and me, the average Joe. And both
groups really, if you think about it, they have the
(00:21):
same goal. They want to make money using their money
in stocks to work for them. And the majority of
the time it's Wall Street that wins. And recently though
stuff changed. The average Joe suddenly was a formidable person
on Wall Street. But then something happened. We're gonna take
(00:42):
a look at what a bunch of people on Reddit
did to a number of stocks that has really bothered
some big guys on Wall Street, especially the hedge fund
crowd market analysis and politicians from both parties. Wow, they
actually agree. Plus advertising is essential to get an idea
out to the public, whether it's thirty seconds on TV,
(01:03):
Billboard and ad on Facebook. Advertising has to be memorable,
engaging and relevant if you want it to be effective.
So we'll be talking to someone who created successful, iconic
campaigns that you will probably recognize, and we'll get some
insight into the world of advertising. UM David Grosso and
this is followed the Profit. So you're looking to get
(01:31):
rich quick, there's plenty of podcasts out there for that.
Don't look here. Here on follow the Profit. We aim
to deconstruct what's happening economically, politically, and socially out there
in the world, so that you can use your money
to help you. And for any company who has a
product to sell, or any consumer who has a product
they want to buy. There's one element that is common
(01:52):
with both advertising. Historians say the first ads were verbal.
Sellers would shout what they were selling, and we still
see this in marketplaces across the world. Then someone came
up with a bride idea to put up a sign
to promote their product. Someone like a cloth seller decided
to promote themselves on papyrus scrolls. Then came printing on walls,
(02:12):
and of course the printing press, then newspapers, radio, TV,
and now the Internet. Some ad campaigns, of course, turned
out to be memorable. We can think of one that
involved a medieval Franciscan monk who finished the manuscript and
was ordered to make five more so, Brother Dominic found
a copying store with a brand new Xerox machine, and
(02:34):
the problem was solved. That sixty second ad played during
the nine Super Bowl and instantly became a classic. Another
involved getting the message out to New Yorker's to be
more vigilant about terrorist threats, and that's why the local
transportation authority there adopted a very simple ad campaign, if
you see something, say something. And that's very same person
(02:58):
who developed those campaigns has been involved in many that
you've probably seen, for the airline Virgin Atlantic, for the
TV channel Comedy Central, for the automaker Honda, for the
Vegas resorts, Win Resorts, and he joins us today. His
name is Alan Stephen. Kay, hey, Alan, how you doing good?
Very well? Thank you, very nice introduction. It almost made
(03:21):
me believe it. So let's talk about that. How do
you make someone believe in what you're selling? Because isn't
that essentially what advertising is all about? Yes, that's the objective.
But the way to get people to believe it is
to tell them truth. Everything that I've done, I could
swear on the Bible. We use our imagination to tell
(03:43):
the story, but we don't make up stories. So how
can you tell whether an ad is effective or not?
If you're saying that It's all involves truth. How do
you know whether there's fakes out there or not? The
bottom line is the bottom line. How sales are The
sales are really good, your advertising working. If sales you're
(04:03):
advertising isn't working. Fortunately, I've worked with some very smart
people and they bought the right things, they had the
right ideas, they gave the right input. So my job
was pretty easy. All I had to do is figure
out how to tell the story. We are kind of
all naturally born storytellers. But how do you figure out
(04:26):
how to tell the right story to the right audience
when you're selling something. First you have to know your audience,
know what makes them tick. Then you have to speak
to them in their own language and tell them things
that they would be interested in. That's where you start.
I have five guidelines that I use for developing advertising,
(04:47):
and that's start with the customer, live with a client,
uncovered the obvious, keep it simple, and follow through. And
I say, if if you do all that, you're not
going to screw up too much. So how do you
know who you're selling to? Because a lot of times
growth and companies comes from unexpected places and demographics. That
(05:08):
comes from the client the client is the source of
the input. They know who their customer is in terms
of demographics psychographics. With that information, we then use our
imaginations to come up with something that is interesting for me.
I coined a word called advertainment and advertainment. So an
(05:31):
advertisement that entertains you then exactly right. And you have
to have both because if you have an add that
isn't entertaining, people won't stay around long enough to get
the information. Okay, So there has to be a balance
of entertainment and information to make a good add. So
(05:53):
let's talk about your hits, because there's been quite a few.
What was your first hit and how did you feel
when that happened? WHOA. I graduated college on Tuesday. I
flew back to New York on a Wednesday, and I
got my first job on a Thursday in a very
very good agency that I didn't particularly want to work for.
(06:13):
My goal was to work for Wellsword Screen and I
couldn't get arrested there, and I took this job at
McCann Erickson and I wind up doing very very well.
Oddly enough, I was hired as an art director, writer, producer.
(06:33):
In those days, they would have a lot of slashes
art director, slash writer, slash producers slash. So they gave
you slashes instead of money. Okay, So so you felt important,
right Alan, like, oh slash slash slash yeah, okay, so
that will give you an idea how much money I
(06:53):
was making. Um No, Actually I happened to be paid
quite well for a recent college graduate, which was good
because I had my wife, my first child, um, looking
for home, so everything kind of fit together. The first job,
and this is pretty unusual, was for Good Dear International,
(07:16):
like the blimp, yeah sort of, and I wrote it
and art directed it, and next thing I knew, I
was in France shooting it. And here I was, all
of twenty one years old, my first job, my first project,
and I'm in Nice. The commercial the concept was that
(07:38):
if you have these Good Dear International tires on your car,
you feel like Mario Andretti driving in the Lamans. So
the commercial started with this very meek, little frenchman coming
out of his very modest home and getting into his
little Fiat and he started it up and then all
(08:01):
of a sudden he's dressed in racing outfit and he
puts it into gear and zoom, zoom zoom zoom and
now suddenly he is going through the streets of Monte
Carlo as if he is in the race, the ground free,
and then the voiceover just says something to the effect
that when you put good your tires on your car,
(08:23):
not only your tire performance better, So do you good
your international whatever. So that was my first spot. It
was humorous, made its point, and it was fun to do.
Back then, Xerox was what Tesla is now. I imagine
that this six Super Bowl commercial involved a monk because
(08:45):
it's a reference to the Guttenberg Press, because the automatic
press was the first time the Bible. The first thing
they printed was the Bible, of course in Germany. How
do you draw that out in your head? I put
my brain on auto pilot and I really don't think
about it. I get the input, I understand it. Then
I go to sleep and I don't think about it.
(09:06):
The first thought before I went to sleep was one
thing that this duplicator did was it made books. It collated,
So I was thinking, make books, make books, make books. Aha,
a bookie, A bookie makes books, they do their cow cheats.
What if you do a commercial about a bookie that
(09:26):
business is really growing he has all these cow cheats
to do to him out what's he do? Ah, he
has a friend who has a Zero's duplicator. Fine, so
I knew working with Xerox, and now they're they're not
going to go for a bookie. So then that's when
I went to sleep, and I started thinking right before
(09:47):
it fell off that okay, when did information start being
put down? And I thought Papyrus and egypt writing on
a skull. Okay, well maybe an Egyptian writing on a scroll,
not particularly humorous, but I knew I was on the
(10:09):
right track. Then he said stop thinking about it, went
to sleep. At four o'clock, my brain connected all the dots.
A monk in a monastery in the catacombs doing the script,
bringing it to his father's superior. Father wants five more.
(10:34):
Brother Dominic gives an Ave a kind of look and
and goes off to figure out what to do. And
as you said, he goes to a friend that has
his York's duplicator. The job is done. He brings a
big pile of copies to Father Superior, who looks at
(10:54):
them and it's totally amazed, and looks up and says
it's a miracle. And then Z York's logo comes in,
and that was the whole story. The Monk commercial got
the most notoriety, many people that credit it as having
started the Super Bowl as the arena for introducing new
(11:18):
breakthrough concepts. Wait, Alan, that wasn't a norm. That's the
birth of the super Bowl commercial that we know of today. Yes,
people have said that, that's even in writing what don't
we talk about the m T A. So when you're
in the subway in New York City see something, say
something so pippy, so easy, almost like anyone could have
(11:40):
come up with that, but somehow no one did until
you did. Well, I kind of beat into the punctures.
I came up with that on I was in my
office and I was very upset beyond as everybody else.
And in the advertising industry, we are like born helpers.
(12:04):
We want to make things better. And I said that
I would like to do something, and many heads of
agencies were thinking about that, and I knew that, and
I felt that what was going to come out would
be something very nationalistic where Americans were proud, kind of
(12:25):
make people feel good for the moment. And I said, Okay,
I'm sure that's gonna be taken here of I want
to come up with something that will make people feel
good for a long time in the future, kind of
like announce of prevention. Then autopilot goes in, and I'm
thinking that Americans, particularly New Yorkers, are very jaded. They
(12:51):
in most cases, are oblivious to what's going around them.
They were taught when we're walking to look down, never
look up, never look into people's eyes. Mind owned business.
So I thought, well, let's look at the opposite in Israel,
because bombings and things like that were way too common
(13:11):
on the currence. The people who need to we all knew,
to be aware of their surroundings and if they see
something suspicious reported. So then the next step was how
do we make Americans be aware of what's going on,
not be complacent. So I said, well, if I were
(13:31):
to tell people what to do, what would I say
to get like that? I would say, if you see something,
say something, m that's pretty good. I wrote it down
on a three by five card always carry them around
for extraneous thoughts, and I said, yeah, that's it. I
(13:51):
think that does it. We're gonna take a quick break here,
be right back. When I ask you a question you
look up, So, because I'm seeing you on video, what's
going on in your brain? There's a lot of systems thinking, like,
you have a formula for doing this. I see that
(14:12):
you kind of take these ideas and you have a
process that you do this in your brain? What's going
on in there? It does it by itself. It gets
the input and then it just stills it from what
am I trying to communicate? What am I trying to say?
Take all the extraneous elements out of it, and then
get to the nucleus of the idea, and then like
(14:35):
a seed water, it fertilized it, it grows, and then
my thought process takes over on it tone and says,
what's the best way to communicate this, What's the best
way to explain it, What's the most dramatic way, What's
the most humorous way. There's one other key thing that
(14:58):
the work that I do was known for is a
sense of human I don't deal in bits and bites.
I deal in flesh and blood. The commercials that I
do are not technology oriented at all. There's another phrase
that I came up with in two which was human ology,
(15:18):
which is technology not for technology's sake. But for people's sake,
and that was always my belief. The first time that
I went to the Xerox Palto Alto Research Center Park,
which is where all the virtually everything that we were
(15:39):
using today came out of that laboratory, one of the
chief engineers named David Liddell, he started by saying, technology
isn't about bits and bites. He said, it's about getting
home in time to have pizza with your family. And
that struck me because I never thought of that consciously.
(16:02):
But that's what my work was all about, helping people,
and I applied that same thing to Xerox, and I
love when he said that because one of the hardest
things to do is to explain to clients what you're
doing and why are you're doing it, because most don't
get it. When I'm explaining things to some clients, they
(16:25):
don't get it. They get like this thirty miles stare
And then you're discussing what idea with on a daily basis,
no one gets it. How's frustrating. And the more sophisticated
they are, the less they get it. Is what contrary
to popular belief, So being on your side of the
table is not easy for anyone who doesn't know you're
(16:47):
trying to please the client, and the client doesn't even
know what questions to ask. Yeah, the it's funny, should
say that. Um lowest Corey. She passed away way too
soon and left me with a company to run. Um.
She used to say that she was sure it had
(17:08):
something to do with the next tie becose on the weekend.
On the weekend, you have a client, he's a regular
guys watching television. Oh that's a good commercial, that's funny. Whatever, Okay,
then you get stressed in the morning, puts on his
tie a little bit too tied, comes to work. She
she was sure it cuts off enough oxygen in the
(17:30):
brain to make him not understand anything that made sense.
That was her theory of the next tie. That's the
you know what's funny. I I go on networks all
the time that you're you're mandated to wear a tie.
I was on one yesterday and I don't because of
that because it restricts my air flowers. So I think
your ex partner was right, Oh, that's that's funny. You
(17:53):
know what this show is all about really is helping
people who are in different phases of their career. Figure
out is to get ahead? What do you think your
secret sauce was? Was it right place, right time? Did
you put in the work. How do you begin to
explain your story and why you feel you were successful.
Common sense. That's what's lacking in business today and for
(18:17):
quite some time. For some reason, people they try to
think what to do instead of using their common sense
and saying, gee, what's the right thing to do. It's
funny every time that I have a decision to make
to go one way or another, I just say, well,
what would my grandmother say? Because she was always right,
(18:39):
She'd say, well, all you should do is blah blah blah,
And I say, oh, my god, absolutely right. So I
would listen to her long after she passed and just say, well, well,
grandma say, And that's that's part of I always used
my common sense, and people working for me as well,
I tell them to just use your common sense. And
(19:02):
I'd say, I'll tell you my opinions. Agree with what
you think it's right, don't agree with what is what
is wrong. And once you leave my office, you're in
control of your head in your hands. You do what
you think is right. And I was fortunate enough to
hire some really bright people and they did the right things.
You mentioned processes. Every agency had their particular process, their
(19:28):
brand development process, seven steps to develop a brand, and
they were all the same. They just call them something different,
and it was really just a bunch of bullets. Really.
It was like window dressing to make the clients feel
that there's something mystical about advertising, and there isn't. So
(19:48):
when companies would come to us and then they'd say, well,
you know, what's your process. We just came from three
agencies and they're explaining their brand development process and what's
your process, I'd say, well, we have a very unusual
process that none of the other companies seemed to us.
It's called the thought process, and we apply it to
(20:09):
everything we do. The process one guy said, he said,
oh my god. He got up, came around, he grabbed
my face and he said, if I could kiss you
on the lips, I would. We have heard so much
crap about this process. You're the first person that spoke English,
(20:31):
and god, I wish that was more common in pr
agencies in New York. I worked in one for five
years in New York. The process for everything. Thank you
for saying that. I think the simpler you make things,
the more you should be paid. Everybody can make something complicated.
(20:53):
It's the really smart people that can make it simple.
And I've worked with clients, particularly scientists that start their
own company, and they take something simple and make it
very compliment scientists. I'm married to one. I can tell
you all about that, right, but I don't have patience
for complicated things. They shouldn't be even things that that
(21:16):
are very complicated and result is simple. Who's doing it
right now? Alan, let's talk about today's world. I'm sure
you still consume ads. Who's doing it right? Nobody? Nobody.
If you listen to any normal person, they say advertising sucks.
(21:36):
Nobody says wow, advertising is greater. Just so this great
and oh my god, yeah, and said no one ever correct, no, no, wow,
I saw this great tweet. Oh boy, this award winning tweets.
I don't think they give out tweet awards. I know
they cancel people, but I don't know about awards. Yeah,
I said, that's one day. They're going to get it.
(21:56):
They're going to give a clear award for the best
tweet of year, and then they're going to be in categories. Okay,
what was the best tweet about boyfriends and something about politics.
The fact of the matter is advertising went from special
to social. Even the companies advertising agencies got taken over
(22:19):
by these conglomerates, by these holding companies that do anything
but advertising. They know business, but they don't know how
to sell a product. And it's the guys at the
head of those companies that are very, very wealthy making
all the money now and for a while they've been furloughing,
so to speak, people that are making the most money,
(22:43):
that know the most about the business, and they're letting
them go. It's a known fact. And the business gets
taken over by young people that really don't know what
they're doing, that weren't taught the same things, aren't taught
the essence of advertising. There's all this bureaucracy now when
(23:05):
you try to pick up work from these big companies,
which really have the budgets and the resources to run
the big ads. The tenure of clients or that agencies
used to be many, many years, and the last I
heard it was like seven months. If your project lasted
a long time, that's ridiculous. What clients don't understand is
(23:28):
by being like a frog jumping from lily pad to
lily pad um. Some lily pads are better than others,
and you're better off jumping to the shore and building
yourself a home and being surrounded by Now I'm getting
into people with people who understand your business, who have
worked with it, who have developed your brand, And it's
(23:51):
not that way anymore. And agencies we used to be
able to hire a staff and keep staff. We never
hired freelancers because the time it took to teach them
what the product is all about, what the brand is
all about, what the clients were all about, is time
(24:12):
wasted by having a consistent staff. All of that was gone.
There was no learning curve. Clients don't see that's that
side of it, and I don't. I don't know why,
because it really is to their detriment. The last commercial
that I saw that I really clearly remember is the
(24:32):
Nike commercial featuring Colin Kaepernick and Serena Williams. Very political.
Do you think it's smart for ads to be political
these days? Isn't that something kind of relatively new? I
think it's it's fair for them to express their opinion.
It's gutsy because they might express an opinion that their
(24:54):
customers won't agree with but that's tough. I think people
should stand on their principles. I've developed principles over the years,
which makes UH decision making a lot easier. Is this
the right thing to do? With the wrong thing to do?
It's the wrong thing to do, I forget it. If
it's the right thing to do, I take that direction.
(25:17):
When we first started handling the Xerox account, the CEO
of z rx C, Peter mccullou, called me into his office,
sat down, Alan. He said, let me tell you this.
This is what I believe. As companies get closer and
closer to parity, you're going to do business with people
(25:39):
you like. Until people know our company you're advertising is
our company. I want you to do advertising people like.
And I thought to myself, yeah, I can do that.
And I've always agreed with that. Philo she people that
(26:02):
have have worked for us over the years. I said,
be nice to you. If they don't like you, they're
not going to like your stuff. But if they genuinely
like you, they're more apt to listen to you and
to buy from you. Alan. You know, I think I've
laughed more on this interview than I have on any
(26:23):
of the ones I've done for this podcast. I want
to thank you for your time and congrats on a
on a great career. I hope that advertising changes and
that we don't end on a down note, like hopefully
that someone figures out that common sense, likability, and resonance matter.
(26:44):
But evidently you're saying that that's an endangered species these days. No,
I'm an optimist. I believe in the pendulum. It's going
to start swimming back the other way. It has to.
That's physics. I believe in physics. That's something that is
true with it and never going to change. And that's
the pendulum. Look and look through history, take any topic,
(27:07):
and you're gonna see it goes from one extreme to
the other. Right now, I don't know how much further
the pendulum can go into non inter personal relationships where
people live on the computer. You know, that's that's really hard.
Now we have no choice, and I think people are
making the best of it. But once this is over,
(27:29):
human beings are going to be like animals let out
of a cage. They're gonna want to have fun. They're
gonna want to live that We're gonna have life. They're
gonna want to make up for all this time lost
being in a cave. And I think that that's gonna happen.
It's that's going to influence everything and advertising. It's going
(27:50):
to get better too, because people won't stand for the
bad stuff, and the people doing the advertising will stand
up and say to the client mine them think that's
very good. I think, why don't we do something that
has a little humor, that has some humanity in it,
that's based on reality. I think that has to happen
because the vacuum has been created for that. On my
(28:13):
personal opinion, I think history has proven it and now
the future I believe will prove it again. Wow. Well,
on that note, that's incredible. Alan, Thank you so much
for taking the time to join me today from the
New York area. All the best to all of you
up there. We're gonna take a quick break here, be
(28:37):
right back. The buying and selling a stock used to
be very straightforward. If a stock is popular, the price
goes up. If a stock tanks, it's probably because people
aren't buying it. But there are moments when buying and
selling of stock gets blocked, particularly when there's volatility, and
(28:58):
that's when there's major drops or right is is at
the stock exchanges. For example, when the SMP index, which
is just literally a synthetic measure of how the stock
market is doing according to a basket of stocks, they
halt trading when the market drops a certain percentage point,
sometimes seven. And this exists to stop panic selling. And
(29:20):
really they say, you know, it's important just to maintain
some sort of stability, But what about exuber and buying
right Well, that kind of falls into that category, and
that happened with game Stop, and it's happening with several
other currencies and medals, etcetera. So one of the metrics
people use with determining the value of the stock is
how good of a business they're in. And game Stock,
(29:41):
we all know sells video games. You've seen them at
the mall, and these days you kind of order those
things online. So game Stop is kind of sitting on
a really outdated business model. So most people expected game
Stock to just die right. Earlier this year, the stock
was twenty bucks, and then a few days later in January,
(30:02):
you know, from January twelve to January they went up
to forty bucks, and then six days later it was
fifty bucks, and then the next day, get this, it
went up to three fifty, and then since then it's
just been going up and down and super volatile and
just absolute insanity. At one point, game Stop was worth
(30:23):
more than Best Buy. It's cousin that is much larger
and much more profitable. So why did it go up?
Did Game Stop announced a new way to get video games? Nope?
Did they create the next hottest game? Nope? None of
that game stock saw its stock sore thanks to a
bunch of people on a Reddit feed. So millions of
(30:44):
retail investors, you know, average joes, were on Wall Street bets,
you know, that's a Reddit thread, and they identified a
little problem that hedge funds had massive short positions in
game Stop, and they thought, if we make the price
go up, will not only make a lot of money,
but we'll screw the hedge funds like a little populist uprising,
(31:06):
which a lot of people are upset at Wall Street
for what happened during the Great Recession and got off
scott free. So they thought, why don't we try to
make a lot of money and get back at these
hedge funds, these big Wall Street fat cats, you know,
let's pull out our pitchforks and play their game. Well,
guess what happened. They got turned off T d Amir Trade,
(31:27):
Charles Schwab, Robin Hood, many more blocked these average Joe's
ability to buy game, stop stocks, and many more, while
hedge funds, guess what, they were allowed to continue as
usual as if nothing was going on. It was really disappointing. Honestly,
I was kind of blown away myself. How is this allowed?
(31:52):
So let me get this straight. Wall Street is just
a casino for the well connected and for the regular investor.
Oh you know, never mind, when you stop winning, we're
gonna lock you out. So in the end, it's just
a casino for Wall Street. The house always wins. Right.
The day that regular people figured out how to play
the hedge fund game, they got locked out. So this
(32:14):
brought together politicians and ordinary people like you and me
on all sides of the political spectrum. Notice this isn't right.
These are people just trying to make money. My neighbor
came up to me and was livid and said, how
dare they lock me out? This should be illegal, And honestly,
I agree with my neighbor. You know what, if people
(32:36):
want to go barbecue money in their backyard. That's their prerogative.
It was wrong for these platforms to lock people out.
And really it's a metaphor for what's been going on
for years in America. Right, there's two sets of rules.
There's a set of rule for the big guys and
a different set of rules for the small guys. Average
entrepreneurial Americans wanted to make some money in the stock market.
(32:58):
And guess what big institute one. Anyway, you know, this
is a moment here, an inflection point, a game changer,
no pun intended with game stop. Right, we can't allow this.
This is unfair to regular people. And it doesn't matter
whether you're liberal or conservative. The whole point of a
(33:19):
stock market is to allow freedom of trade. You're able
to buy when you want, you're able to sell when
you want. And you know, honestly, platforms like robin Hood,
which many of us use during the pandemic, we've discovered
there in bed with the hedge funds. Is that fair?
Is that fair to us for them to use our
consumer behavior against us when they're betting. I think not.
(33:42):
Something means to change on Well Street, and I don't
know whether it's regulation or perhaps less regulation. It depends
on what your ideology is. Honestly, that's above my pay grade.
But I can tell you one thing. This is unfair
and we all know what happened. This is good old
fashioned corruption. And really all Americans and all companies big
(34:05):
and small, should be treated equally by these platforms, and
that needs to change. And I'm happy that politicians as
dissimilar as Ted Cruz and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez noticed that
this was wrong. Thanks to all of you for joining
me as we Follow the Profit, and I'd like to
(34:27):
thank advertising guru Alan Kay. He made me laugh a lot,
and while he was making me laugh, he gave us
valuable insight into the advertising world and how that world
can really benefit you in your career. As always, I'd
like to thank my team, Emiliano LeMond, Scott Handler, Cheyenne Reid,
and our executive producers Knew ging Rich and Debbie Myers.
I'm your host, David Grosso, So if you're enjoying this
(34:48):
show as much as I am, give us five stars
and give us a review so that others can really
learn what this show is all about. Follow the Profit
is a production of ging Rich three sixty and I
Heart Rate years. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts. All opinions expressed by David Grasso
(35:15):
and his guests on the show are solely their opinions
and do not reflect the opinions of Gingrich three sixty
or affiliates, and may have been previously disseminated by David
Grasso on this podcast, television, radio, internet, or another medium.
You should not treat any opinion expressed by David grass
so as a specific inducement to make a particular investment
or follow in particular strategy, but only as an expression
(35:38):
of his opinion. David Grass's opinions are based upon information
he considers reliable, but neither ging Rich Productions nor its
affiliates and or subsidiaries warrant its completeness or accuracy, and
it should not be relied upon as such. David Grasso,
Gingrich Productions, its affiliates, and or subsidiaries are not under
any obligation to update or correct any information provided on
(35:59):
this website. David Grasslo's statements and opinions are subject to
change without notice. No part of David Grasso's compensation from
ging Ridge Productions is related to the specific opinions he expresses.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. Neither David
Grasslo nor ging Hich three sixty guarantees any specific outcome
or profit. You should be aware of the real risk
(36:20):
of loss in following any strategy or investment discussed on
this website or on the show. Strategies or investments discussed
may fluctuate in price or value. Investors may get back
less than invested. Investments or strategies mentioned on this website
or on the show may not be suitable for you.
This material does not take into account your particular investment objectives,
financial situation, or needs, and is not intended as recommendations
(36:42):
appropriate for you. You must take an independent decision regarding
investments or strategies mentioned on this website or on the show.
Before acting on information on this website or on the show,
you should consider whether it is suitable for your particular
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