Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast

Scott - 00:00:00:

I don't trust any ideas that come out of like a conversation or a meeting where people get together and brainstorm and jot down. Those ideas are always terrible. The best ideas come from one person writing them down, because then that's a pure vision that they have and it's being articulated in a pure way, straight from their brain.


Louis - 00:00:27:

Bonjour, bonjour and welcome to another episode of everyonehatesmarketers.com, the no fluff, actionable marketing podcast for people sick of marketing bullshit. I'm your host, Louis Grenier. In today's episode, you will learn how to grow your brand the wrong way and still make it stand the fuck out thanks to outrageous marketing. You probably do not know my guest today, but he's actually a local legend in his high school in Wisconsin still because he crawled to school one day with his friends. A few decades ago, I'm sorry to reveal his age. He's also the guy who actually created the most popular humor publication in the world, The Onion. He wrote or developed a TV project that sold to MTV, Comedy Central. He won over 30 Webby Awards, consulted for big brands like NBC, LucasArts, Pixar. And now he teaches others to be funny at howtowritefunny.com. So I'm super happy to have you, Scott Dikkers in the podcast.


Scott - 00:01:27:

Yeah, thanks for having me. That was a spectacularly written introduction, knowing that you wrote it in two seconds right before we started.


Louis - 00:01:35:

Well, there was now some of it was already there. Most of it, in fact. But yes, I didn't mean to insult you when I said that you probably don't know the guy. But I guess compliment almost.


Scott - 00:01:47:

Yeah, always been a behind the scenes person, like it there. And easy to be behind the scenes nowadays because everybody's in front of the camera. But I started that way when it was a little more obscure way to succeed in the entertainment business by hiding.


Louis - 00:02:02:

So tell me more about that. Tell me more about this thing, because that's one of the things you've done the wrong way with The Onion, which was to not put you or the other writers at the forefront, right?


Scott - 00:02:14:

That's one thing. There's another thing I wanted to talk about, too, which is getting into entertainment, getting into comedy. The sort of red ocean is doing stand-up comedy, going on stage, etc. The blue ocean is writing articles, publishing your own newspaper. It's still comedy. It's still the comedy business. One of them worked really well for me when I was a kid, I thought I was going to be a performer. I thought I was going to go that route. That's how I was in high school. You mentioned I did stunts like that, like I did comedy stunts. I was very much inspired by Andy Kaufman, Steve Martin, people like that. And yeah, maybe that inspired the way that we ran The Onion because I wanted everybody to be invisible at The Onion, not just me. I wanted all the writers' names to be hidden from articles. And big part of that was learning the lesson from the national lampoon and spy magazine which were magazines that made their writers celebrities. And so when those writers left to go to Hollywood or sold the publication or whatever, everybody said, hey, it's not funny anymore. We lost so-and-so. I didn't want that to happen with The Onion. I wanted The Onion brand to be the star and not the writers who created it. There were many writers at The Onion who were instrumental to its creation and to making it funny. And whenever they would leave, whenever they would go to Hollywood or whatever, nobody knew about it. Nobody could tell because it was a very clear, consistent voice. And I think that's partly why The Onion survives to this day. I don't think it would have survived some of the turnover that we've seen over the years. There was a big one in around 2010 or so where we lost 80% of our staff in this angry schism. And nobody knew about it. It was a very niche thing that people could read about on the internet, but The Onion just kept plugging away like normal. People would see the headlines. Nothing was different week to week.


Louis - 00:04:14:

What's interesting here is because, you know, you believe that when you created The Onion, it wasn't journalism, never has been, right? It's entertainment. And when you look at TV shows, like one of my favorite, if not my favorite, is The Office. When you look at that, they don't put the writers in the forefront either, right? They don't market them, any of that. And the turnover for writers in The Office was pretty high as well. There was different directors for most episodes, so many different people. But the brand, The Office brand, was there always. Do you feel like that's roughly the same idea or is it not the right comparison?


Scott - 00:04:50:

Yeah, The Onion was modeled more after entertainment enterprises like that, or like making a movie, where you don't have the writers of the movie come out during the movie and tell you how they wrote it. You just want to see the movie. And I think The Office is due to the genius of Greg Daniels. I think he knew those principles and kept himself very hidden. A lot of other people, one of his co-creators was a character on the show, but he was very much hidden. And he’s a genius who's created so many shows. But the only time you ever saw him was on the last episode of The Office. They had this group picture, and he's one of these dots in the picture. That was it. That's how you do it. You find Steve Carell, and you put him up front.


Louis - 00:05:34:

Yeah, so the actors were the people that others can look up to, but obviously they were the fictional part of it.


Scott - 00:05:39:

It's the The Wizard of Oz principle. You got to have the big, fancy, glowing orb of a face with the fire, you know?


Louis - 00:05:47:

Yeah, to draw the attention. So that's I feel could be some sort of a conundrum, right? When people are hearing this right now, feeling like, that means you have to put aside your, maybe your dream or your, or those irrational needs that humans have to be recognized or to be remembered and whatnot, to be your best creative self, right? Do you feel there is a connection between that need for anonymity of feeling like, it's better if I'm behind the scenes and the quality of the work being put out by creatives like writers.


Scott - 00:06:25:

Yeah, I'm sure it's all messed up in a cauldron of anxieties and issues that we have. We all have a need for significance, but I do think we also have a need for privacy. It's balancing that. And it totally depends on the brand, too, I think. Now, obviously, everybody's talking about authenticity and you want to be out there, you know, warts and all, talking about what you do. And that goes counter to what I'm saying, which is put a clown out front. You should hide. But it's definitely something that everybody needs to think about and work out for themselves because everybody's got a different tolerance level for being on camera, being in front of the scenes as opposed to behind. I don't think there's necessarily a right or a wrong.


Louis - 00:07:10:

Okay. So I want to dive in into something which you're very good at, which is creating new brands from scratch anonymously or almost anonymously, right? Like you would use your talent. Obviously, you use your network and all of that to propel it forward.


Scott - 00:07:27:

No, I wouldn't even use that. People would say I'm crazy. I would leave The Onion and start something new under a pseudonym and not use any of the network, any of the list, any of the anything. Yeah, just crazy. And the reason I would always do that is, well, there's a couple reasons. One is a smart reason that I just wanted to succeed on its own merits. Then I'll know it's real. The other thing is more of a ridiculous addiction to a drug that I got to experience pretty early in life when I did a comic strip that became really popular. And I started feeling that fame where you're getting a lot of fan letters and people are writing about you, putting you on TV, etc., etc. It's a really powerful drug. If any of your viewers, listeners have experienced that, it's like you're suddenly validated. It's, oh my God, I am worthy. I'm not a fraud, whatever. And in the entertainment business, that stuff waxes and wanes. So you might get a little notoriety and then it might fade away. And for anyone who's experienced that, and I know I've spoken to people who've tried crack. I've never tried it myself. Very similar to the crack experience, where you take a hit of crack and you get the most unbelievable, glorious high you've ever experienced in your life. But it's brief and it's followed by two to three days of the worst low you've ever experienced in your life and all you want is another hit of crack, because that's gonna make it go away and it's almost impossible to resist that. Obviously, we're having a crack at it. But I wanted that hit again, that hit of fame, that hit of notoriety, that hit of validation. So I wanted to recreate it and I succeeded a couple of times and it is glorious and wonderful when it happens, but now, I look at those experiences and I wonder, was I just self-sabotaging? Was I just purposefully making it hard on myself for no reason just to get this incredible hit, like just to set up this set the stage so I would experience this amazing feeling again? I don't know. I try not to get too in the weeds analyzing myself because like, what's the point? But it's a little silly. So now I'm a little easier about, you know what, I'll use a little bit of my network. I'll use a little bit of my email list that I built up before and tell people what I'm doing. Because the main thing was I didn't want people's opinion of the new thing to be colored by their... The baggage from the old thing. And especially when you're moving from comedy to non-comedy, that's tough. That's like every comedy actor who's tried to do a serious film always gets that negative backlash. Oh, he thinks he's a serious actor. And if he had just gone into the serious role at the start, he wouldn't have gotten any of that criticism. That baggage is like controlling the audience's experience is the number one craft of comedy. Controlling their context, making sure that you are as aware as you possibly can be to what they've seen before, what they know about you, what they know about the topic you're talking about. The more you can control that context, the better. It allows you to entertain them. And in person, you can do that pretty well. At a comedy club, let's say, or in a comedy movie, the industry kind of sets you up really well. They have really comfortable seats. They have previews. They have trailers. You have the people's experience of, oh, I've been in this environment, this experience, this scenario before. I love it. I'm primed. I'm ready. And then you have music, you have lights, you have sound, you have in person, if it's a comedic performance, you have somebody coming out, introducing. Then you have the person's personality, like you're out there winning people over in person, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In print, you don't really have much of that. So when you're doing a print thing or prose product, let's say it's a book, let's say it's The Onion, anything like that, you have to make up for all those things you don't have. That's why The Onion is a news website. Okay, we control the context now. You're looking at this as if you're looking at a news website. We know how you perceive that context. That was another thing I learned from Mad Magazine and National Lampoon was they didn't really have that. Their context was, hey, here's a bunch of funny stuff. That's just too broad. That's just creative people can't really function under that kind of unrestrained, no parameters.


Louis - 00:12:19:

Which sounds counterintuitive, but actually the more we put creative people in a box, the more they're going to fuck with it. But if the box is, we don't really know where the walls are, it's very difficult to play against it or whatever.


Scott - 00:12:32:

To take nothing away from Mad and National Lampoon, and even Saturday Night Live is another example, they do pretty well. But they get a lot more criticism for not being funny than The Onion does. I don't see a lot of criticism from people saying, ah, The Onion's not funny. And partly it's because we controlled that context and we made it a serious context because people like to laugh when there's a serious construct around them. If they're at a funeral or if they're at church or in a classroom, that's when you want to burst out laughing. You just create this tension where people desperately want to laugh.


Louis – 00:13:04:

What is that?


Scott – 00:13:05:

That's a really good question. I don't really know why we do that except to say that laughter is the involuntary response to stimuli that we can't really process. Happy stimulus.


Louis - 00:13:20:

Yes, it's a defense mechanism, right? It's a way to cope with the situation.


Scott - 00:13:23:

Yeah, if it's sad stimuli, we're going to have this involuntary response of crying. But if it's joyful or funny, intellectually interesting stimuli, we're going to laugh. And irony and contrast are a huge part of that. And so when you're in a really serious environment and people are telling you, you are not permitted to laugh in this environment. It is not permitted. It is unlawful. It is against the rules. You mustn't, that's, you're just, you're baiting a predator. Because humans love to laugh. We have this higher brain function where we're able to laugh at intellectual stimuli. And when we're told not to, there's a rebellious streak in us that makes us really have to at that point.


Louis - 00:14:14:

So I want to go back to something you said. You said already so many interesting stuff. I want to go back to them, repeat them, making sure I understand so that people can digest them even better. The first thing that I really picked up on that is like a phenomenal kind of way to see it is this kind of anonymity, starting project with like pseudonyms and all of that in order to prevent yourself from feeling, basically to get away from that crack, right? In a sense, so that you don't get that thing. You just do the work because you're doing the work, because for the love of the craft, not for the sake of the high, because you know that this might lead to maybe doing things to please people or to be loved instead of doing things because you want to do them.


Scott - 00:14:58:

Yeah, it wouldn't be as pure an experiment because you'd be playing to people's expectations more. The expectation management is what I was talking about with that controlling the context. Comedy is all about expectation management.


Louis - 00:15:11:

Which leads me to the second thing that is phenomenal in the way you describe it is controlling the context. You don't get that many people complaining that The Onion is not funny because it's not a comedic site. It's not positioned as such, right? It's the news site.


Scott - 00:15:25:

It doesn't purport to be funny. Yeah, it tells you that it's a serious news organization.


Louis - 00:15:30:

So you can't just say, hey, this edition was not funny at all. It just doesn't fit because, yeah, I completely get that. So by being a control freak, which you are, right? In the right sense of the word.


Scott – 00:15:42:

Yeah, absolutely.


Louis – 00:15:43:

By controlling everything that you can, the context, you really try to frame it in a way that really people will understand. And not only that, but you can really fuck with the conventions inside it, right? Which I think you do so well. We can talk about the other projects you've done. It's not only The Onion, but it's so many other stuff. For example, to go back to the comic strip you talked about that you started in high school or around that time, which is Jim's Journal, right? It's a comic strip. So they used to have the traditional four little squares of a comic strip in newspapers. But instead of having a traditional story ending up with a joke or something delightful or whatever. You actually use anti-humor. There was basically no humor, which made it funny. I'm just going to read one straight that I found. I found funny, but it's not, but it is. So it said, I went to the chiropractor today because they had a free consultation offer. The chiropractor asked me if I had back pain, and I said, not really. Good, he said. It's never too early to start prevention. And he showed me some exercises I could do so I could never have back pain. And that's it. So I love this kind of humor. I love anti-joke and all of this stuff. That's another example of a context, which, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but of a context of the comic strip inside a newspaper where you would expect it to be, based on conventions, somewhat funny, delightful, blah, blah, blah. And you actually end up reading it and you're like, what the fuck? Where's the joke? Where's the end? And it fucks with your perception of the context that you thought you were in.


Scott - 00:17:19:

Yeah, and I love the idea of comic strips. I started that comic strip coming from a place where I didn't really like any of the other comic strips in the newspaper. There were a couple that I thought were good, like The Far Side was good. Calvin and Hobbes was good. But for the vast majority, I would read them and I would just think, oh my God, this is so not funny. It's just hacky humor. And it's so predictable. It's like you're going to have a setup in the first panel, and you're going to have a punchline in the last panel. And Berkeley Breathed used to do a thing where you'd have a secondary punchline in the last panel, like a tag. And I just thought, oh my God, this is such a tired, conservative medium. And a lot of the comics in the newspaper at that time and still today are ancient. It's the most conservative medium of comedy. There were comic strips in the newspaper when I was a kid, and some of them are still in the newspaper, who got started in the 1920s, and they're unchanged. They're the same, like Blondie, things like that. So a lot of the big comics got their start in the 40s and 50s that are still around. I knew this was an opportunity to really shake up that industry, to do something really different. But I do the medium, and I think it's a wonderful medium for comedy. So I wanted to meet the audience's expectations for what you're supposed to get from that medium. You're supposed to get laughs. You're supposed to get characters that you like and that you want to see every day. You're supposed to get something that's easy to read. You just, quick glance, you got it. Nothing too dense. Not a lot of alternative comics will just pack each panel with words. Way too complicated. Even Berke Breathed with Bloom County was too complicated sometimes, or Doonesbury. So I had as few words as possible, simple stick figure drawings and characters that I tried to make people like. But I would mix up where the joke was. Sometimes the joke was an after effect. Sometimes it was in the second panel and not the first panel. Sometimes, or the last. Sometimes it was really hidden. Sometimes it's just this very subtle reaction that the character or the reader was having to this situation. Primarily, I relied on reference humor and like you said, anti-humor, which is a form of meta humor, where you're making fun of other humor. Because I was making fun of other comics. I wanted people to look at this comic and say, why does this comic deserve to be in the newspaper? It's not, it doesn't really have anything to say. It's someone's journal. It's just somebody telling you what they did that day. Why is that important? And the later the comic strip, Diary of a Wimpy Kid was inspired by my comic to target kids and became obviously a huge billion dollar success. It's an idea that works. So, yeah, there was a lot of thought that went behind that. And I, of course, do love that you control the context. You know where people are coming from. They're reading the newspaper. They're reading, I mean, at that time it was newspapers. Obviously now they could be online, but they're expecting to find something funny in these four squares or three or whatever it is. And so that's something you can use. That's a context. In other environments, like let's say you're just placing an ad somewhere, you have no idea where people are, what they're seeing. I guess you can probably guess they know they're looking at an ad. So that's some context that you can use to your advantage. It's all about finding out as much as you can about the context and then exploiting that to the nth degree.


Louis - 00:20:59:

So let's dive into this. Because you're probably one of the best in the world at doing this. It's probably very something that you do naturally now. Like you don't even think about it, but because you teach.


Scott - 00:21:11:

Talk about sexual intercourse. No, he's talking about something else.


Louis - 00:21:15:

You teach how to be funny. So I'm pretty sure you've made it out of your brain to put it somewhere and to teach people how to do this. So let's say we are working together on a marketing-related project. It doesn't have to be like dirty marketing. It can be, as you said, it could be an ad or it could be like a new project, a new book or whatever. Talk me through the steps that you take to first understand the context people are in. What questions do you ask yourself? How do you analyze it?


Scott - 00:21:45:

I don't give much thought to that. That's usually pretty automatic because it just takes a little bit of awareness of the medium. So, I've been alive when partaking of so many different mediums of entertainment and information. I feel like I know them well enough. So it's just a matter of being aware and then just making a mental list. Oh, okay. So the context here is A, B, C, D. This is what people are coming to this with the expectation of. This is what they normally hear or see, hear or read. And just then starting to come up with ideas for what I can do, just almost subconsciously incorporating what I know about the medium. So I don't want it to be too, like I write these series of books, the How to Write Funny books, that really deconstruct the process in a really scientific and almost mechanical way, which is helpful to learn, but in the actual doing of it, you want to get past that mechanical deconstructing process. That's for learning, and it's learn what you can from that, but then eventually you want to internalize that knowledge. And do it like it's an instinct. It's like a good analogy would be you practice the violin at home, and you're going to be doing your scales, and you're going to be making mistakes, and you're going to be trying to get them perfect. But when you perform, you want that all to just be inherent. Muscle memory, your feelings, your emotions. You don't want to be thinking too much about the mechanics.


Louis - 00:23:13:

And maybe to that question or that challenge a bit differently. What's one domain that you're interested in that you don't know much about, but you thought maybe that's something I like? I don't know. Could be fucking mushrooms or anything, right? Like just let's pick something you're not super familiar with. Something you don't really know well.


Scott - 00:23:30:

I don't know cars. I don't know anything about cars. I don't know makes. I can't look at a car and say, oh, that's a 19, you know, whatever.


Louis - 00:23:38:

So let's imagine that together we are starting this. We are reselling very classic cars, right? What's considered classic. I don't know what fucking classic means, but they are old and people like them. And we have trying to do something around that, right? Let's say we have an inventory of those classic cars. How do we take the context and fuck with it? Like to make it fun, like to create something that is actually people will actually notice.


Scott - 00:24:03:

Yeah, I guess I would look at, I would go to the fundamentals of it and I would say, why do people buy cars? What do they want? Obviously they need to get around, but they also want something that's going to reflect their, the image of themselves that they want to project. Because a car says a lot about you as a person. I would look at what other cars have done or do. What are some of the ways other cars have succeeded at really tapping into the right demographic in terms of what kind of image they're trying to present. And I would try to rethink it as much as far upstream as I could. I love things that are really outside the box but still meet the requirements of the box. So things like a solar-powered car or one of those three wheelers that look really goofy and funny that you see at car shows or something like that. Those are really interesting to me. You can do okay, like making something just like everybody else makes it because they're doing okay. But to really make a mark you should do something different. You should do something that's a little off from what everyone else is doing. Do a gut check with yourself. Say oh would I like this? And audience test it. Would other people like this? Because. Just because there's a way that things have always been done doesn't mean that's the best way that could be done. Like anybody who thinks that everything we do now is the best way it can be done is crazy. Because the whole history of humanity is somebody comes along and says, I think we should do it like this. Totally different from how we've always done it. And everybody is like, oh, my God, yes, this is so much better. This is perfect. What were we thinking? And that's going to keep happening. It's going to keep happening. And all those ideas are just out there, just waiting to be plucked. Most people don't think that way. Most people think. How are we doing it now? They're very myopic about it. How are we doing it now? How can I slightly tweak how we're doing it right now? I think that's 99.9% of people's thinking.


Louis - 00:26:02:

Yeah, I agree. Familiarity is important for people and all of that. So to go back to this exercise, right? We are planning to create, to launch a dealership, selling cars, but they're classic cars, vintage cars. We know from what you've said so far, definitely you don't buy a vintage car to go from A to B. It's definitely an identity thing. It's definitely when you hit the big 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, something on those lines, like to treat yourself, to project an image to others, like self-love, a lot of big irrational needs that we need to meet, right? We can agree on that. Then about the dealership itself, for the way we sell the cars, right? Would you think about it in the context of, okay, what's the usual context? People go to the dealership after looking at a few stuff online, then they go and they meet a salesman. That's what tradition is done. Do you think this way or would you just think something else?


Scott - 00:26:56:

I mean, there I would start thinking about brand identity and brand voice and stuff. And I would think about how does that person want to be spoken to? How does this customer avatar want to be spoken to? And I would try to think outside the box there too. And nowadays too, I would think about authenticity. I wouldn't think in terms of being too calculated about it because everybody can spot that. That's where I would start my thinking.


Louis - 00:27:23:

So I feel we are nearly there. I feel you're about to drop the fucking knowledge bomb that I'm waiting for. But so let me ask you one level down again. You said I would think outside the box. Okay, cool. Let's fucking play that right now, right? Let's think about that literally together. It doesn't have to be perfect, that quantitative versus quality, right? But like, how would you use that brilliant brain of yours and experience to fuck with those conventions of a dealership and think outside the box?


Scott - 00:27:53:

This is going to sound really boring because the end product is always where the razzle dazzle is. The process is very boring. I would sit down and write 10 ideas, and then I'd have everybody on my staff write 10 ideas. And then I would have a meeting where we'd look at all those ideas and see if one of them hits us is like, oh, that's really interesting. I think what you're asking me is, what would my ideas be?


Louis - 00:28:16:

Or how do you get there? How do you get there? How do you feed your brain? Because just to give you a quick example, I feel almost weird saying that because you're the master on this, but I also like to do this kind of stuff where I would tend to list down what is expected of a category, like of a context. So like for marketing podcast, that's what I did. I hated all the marketing podcasts. I still do. Because the thing that I hated the most was the host not listening to the guest, asking boring questions, feeling like they were just making the guest look good and feel good instead of trying to get any knowledge, right? That was the hate that I had in my heart that I needed to fucking view, right? And by just pointing at those two conventions in my head, it was very easy for me to come up with the opposite, which is actually a real authentic discussion between two people, someone who's interested in the other and just challenging the guests a bit, not just fucking talking about truth that everyone can agree. So I was giving this example of the marketing podcast box where by just simply listing down the things that pissed me off about it, I found two things that I would do completely differently and just did them. So it wasn't extremely super sophisticated scientific. It didn't take me long. I was just fueled by this contrarian mindset of like, fuck, like, I'm sure we could do something a bit different here. Obviously, you've done things, you've done way, way, way more creative stuff that I have ever done. You have way more experience than that, which is what I feel a bit weird talking about this to you as an example. But this is what I want out of you in a sense is not the idea at the end doesn't really matter to me. And I'm sure it doesn't matter to the listeners. What matters is absolutely the process that's sexy, right? Which is like, the people don't talk about it, which is like, how do you come up with those 10 ideas, for example? So you say, I come up with 10 ideas, my staff come up with 10. What do you like to do? Do you like to just sit down, write down all the shit that car dealerships do wrong that you don't like? Or how do you like would approach this problem?


Scott - 00:30:16:

Yeah, so I like to have people write in private. I don't trust any ideas that come out of like a conversation or a meeting, where people get together and brainstorm and jot down it. Those ideas are always terrible. The best idea come from one person writing them down, because then that's a pure vision that they have and it's being articulated in a pure way straight from their brain. And then everybody gets to read through the ideas and read each idea. And there's no pitch. There's no annoying caveats where the person has to explain. It's just written out. And everybody reads it. And then everybody thinks about it for a second. And you get a reaction in that moment. That's the same as what the audience will get. Where you're experiencing this idea for the first time and you don't know anything about it. That's a precious moment because you'll never get that again. After you hear an idea that you like and you adopt it and you start working with it. You're never, ever again going to have an experience similar to the audience. So you kind of have to latch on to that first moment. In comedy, we call it, it's called remembering the first laugh. First time that got a laugh, remember that, remember how, remember why. And I'm talking about in the meeting, like in the writer's room meeting, because that's really critical. People after that will try to like tweak the idea and change it. And it's always like, I don't, you're going to ruin it. You're going to change it to something different. And then we're not going to know whether we would have liked it, you know.


Louis - 00:31:51:

Ideas are fragile, right?


Scott - 00:31:53:

Very fragile. Yeah, very fragile. And that's a precious discovery when everything, if it's not in comedy, if it's in marketing and an idea really resonates with everybody, it's like, yeah, that's really interesting. That's really good. That's the moment. That's the emotion that you have to capture.


Louis - 00:32:11:

See, I knew you'd drop it eventually. Took a bit of grilling, but you dropped the type of stuff I was looking for. That's super interesting, right? So this cliche that you describe in your book that movies tend to talk about a lot, which is like this guy coming up with one idea and then pitch it to the boss and say, that's it, we should go for it.


Scott - 00:32:29:

That's how they always show it. It's a cliche.


Louis – 00:32:31:

Still today.


Scott – 00:32:32:

Still today, yeah. And people think if they're not doing that, that they're somehow not doing it right or they're not succeeding on it. That's so the wrong way to do it. Because what that does is it introduces all these really unfortunate interpersonal dynamics. Somebody comes in to you, they work for you, and they say, I got a great idea, boss. And then they tell you the idea. That's horrible. Because now, if you don't like their idea, you're just slapping them down. You're just saying, ah, that's a terrible idea. You've ruined their day. And so if you really take it away, you're going to say, it's pretty good. It's not bad. Maybe you'll even adopt it out of politeness. You're going to ruin your whole company out of politeness. You need 10 ideas and you need them anonymously written so that when somebody has a list of 10 and one of them is okay, they feel pretty good about themselves, even though they're a 90% failure. Much better than having one idea and having that failing where they're a 100% failure.


Louis - 00:33:30:

Because when you come up with just one idea, it's really tied to your own identity and sense of self-worth almost, right?


Scott – 00:33:37:

Absolutely.


Louis – 00:33:38:

While, if you do what you created with The Onion in terms of the practice of creating, it was quantity versus quality, right?


Scott – 00:33:45:

Absolutely.


Louis – 00:33:45:

95%, 99% of the headlines and the ideas never went anywhere.


Scott - 00:33:50:

Oh, it's a much more insane ratio than that. It's probably one out of a thousand that would get published. Fuck.


Louis - 00:33:58:

That's a debate I have so many times about in marketing in particular, in the social media world, like on LinkedIn or whatever the fuck people are saying, is it quality? Is it quantity? And I used to believe that it was quality. Like you need to work your ass off to create the best thing. But what I did not understand was that to create that best thing, you first need to create so much shit, right? To be able to pick that thing out.


Scott - 00:34:21:

And I think social media is a different beast than traditional entertainment. Like a comedy website. With social media, it actually is a little bit more about quantity because that's your list of 10. Your list of 10 ideas is 10 posts. And so if one of them works, that's a success. Nobody's going to remember the other nine. Nobody cares. You really have to look at each medium separately because they all have slightly different rules.


Louis - 00:34:49:

But the concept is exactly the same, right?


Scott – 00:34:51:

Very similar.


Louis – 00:34:52:

I agree. In the way you've done it for The Onion when you were working there, when you were doing it with the other writers, your social media testing ground was just between each other in the writer's room and stuff. While the advantage of social media is that it's the input is from the crowd. Did they notice it? Did they pay attention? Did you react to it? And now you can level down on it.


Scott - 00:35:13:

And it's great because the crowd is your staff. That's your creative staff. You get wonderful A/B Test results from them constantly.


Louis - 00:35:21:

Yeah. And it's the way to see it, right? They're not like your customers or people that you need to impress. They're like, they are your staff. We look at it from a hopefully objective fashion, or at least they'll treat it from an objective fashion because they see it for like half a second and then that's it.


Scott - 00:35:36:

Yeah. But I do want to say that it's a macro of a macro. So if I were a marketing professional and I had a company, I would still vet my ideas for every social media post with that system internally. And I would have 10 ideas. I would pick one. I would put that one out there. But then you're on a new macro level. That one is going to be one of 10 for the audience to see. Because in a writer's room, when you're doing comedy and you're going through those 10 ideas, some of them are just not for the eyes of the public. They're going to be way off base. They're going to be weird. They're going to be creepy. And it's good to have them in a private place where you can say, no, we're not going to do that. Let's keep reading and find better ideas.


Louis - 00:36:14:

No, we agree. So going back to the little exercise, we were talking about discard dealership and stuff like that. So you started to talk about coming up with 10 ideas in private. Then you pitch them anonymously and there is no build up upon it. You don't try to explain the idea. You just present it as authentically as you can so that it stays pristine, right? And I think that's a theme in terms of the way you work, right? Which goes back to like keeping your identity pristine as well. Like when you start a new project, it needs to be controlled, like the context, understanding what's going on, your identity, like using pseudonyms, making sure nothing is touching this kind of uncharted territory. It's like this part of the world where no one has ever explored before. That's what it feels like a bit. Like you really treat the creative process, the ideas as this treasure that one can't fuck with that much. At the start, we started to talk about how to start a project anonymously. You've done that many times for that reason, right? What's the go-to advice for folks listening, who do want to start something and really, you know, stand the fuck up, right? Like create something that gets noticed. But they don't have a name. They don't have a household name people remember or whatever. They don't necessarily have created anything spectacular in the past. So they are by default anonymous. What's the number one specific advice you'd have for them?


Scott - 00:37:39:

Well, unfortunately, I have two bits of specific advice, and they're slightly contradictory. It has to be something that is original and unique that people have never seen before. That's number one. Number two, it has to be something they recognize. It has to be something they've seen before. It has to be something that feels familiar. And that's really the trick. That's really the secret right there, the secret sauce. If you create something so unique and so original that people can't make sense of it, it's never going to connect with them. It's never going to take off because it's like, I don't get it. What is this? And that takes volume. Like that takes a lot of ideas. So sorry, I have to give you a third. So while you've got those two, now that you've got those two, you've got to generate a lot of ideas. And you've got to pick one that you think meets those two requirements. Teeters in that fine balance between those two things and really hits the sweet spot. But then the third one, super important. You have to fall in love with that idea. And it has to be a passion project. The problem with most passion projects is that people didn't go through that vetting process earlier, where they tried to meet those two criteria. And then they came up with a ton of different options and picked the best one, got some feedback from their inner circle. Most passion projects are just somebody coming up with one idea and saying, I love this. I'm going to do it. That's sad. That's just really never, ever going to work. You have to put some thought in behind it. And that's tricky. It's almost like arranged marriage. It's like, no, we're going to find the best match. I'm going to throw you two together. And it's going to be a long lasting, loving relationship, I promise. But that's kind of how you have to do it in this realm. You have to make the best intellectual decision and then buy into it emotionally and have passion. Because if you don't have passion for it, and if you don't love it, you'll fail. You really have to have that. People can sense a lack of passion like a dog can smell fear. And also it's going to make your life hell. Continuing to try to push this thing and build this thing when you don't even really like it. You have to love it so that all that pushing and all that promoting and all that proselytizing feels good and makes you happy.


Louis – 00:39:59:

Have you heard of the MAYA Principle, most advanced yet acceptable?


Scott – 00:40:04:

No, I have not heard that. I like-


Louis - 00:40:06:

It's a design principle and it's basically what you described, which is it needs to be advanced enough so that it's original, but it's not unique. It leans on something that exists. So it's achievable, accessible, right? So they talk about the MAYA Principle that it was coined by, what's his name? Raymond Loewy, the father of industrial design. And I'm sure you came across all of those examples of like Apple trying this iPad way before people were even ready for it because the leap was too far, right? It was original, but people didn't understand it. So, does it feel familiar?


Scott - 00:40:39:

Yeah, I struggle with that. I appreciate knowing about that concept because sometimes I'm way too ahead of my time. And I'll come up with something that people aren't ready for. And it takes a long time. And it's a long slog for me to keep pushing it until eventually they come around. It was almost 10 years of putting out an issue of The Onion newspaper every week and hearing people say, what is this, a humor newspaper? That's not a thing. And just being confused by it, for almost 10 years before people finally put it together. And now it's just a thing that everyone accepts. And there are so many imitators because it's a thing that already exists. And now they can create their own. And it's like, oh, it's like The Onion. Yeah, I have struggled with that in the past, trying to get better at it. And that's a little bit like what we were talking about with the parameters around creativity. When you have no parameters, you might think of this crazy, far outside the box idea that nobody's ready for, which happens. So that part of the vetting process I now advocate that I just mentioned is to make sure you're within that bubble of what's recognizable.


Louis - 00:41:51:

You mentioned as well, the third thing is to fall in love with it. Do you mean first be very scientific about, come up with a lot of ideas that could excite you, whatever, but they need to meet those two criteria of they need to be accessible yet original? Or do you mean you have to force yourself to love it after, once you've picked the right, the one that feels the most likely to work?


Scott - 00:42:15:

Yeah, so that's the least Eastern philosophy part of this whole strategy. Yes, you have to force yourself to get behind it and love it. It's A very Western idea, this idea of like Manifest Destiny. We're just going to force our way and we're going to make this happen. Doesn't matter. But I think there needs to be a little bit of a balance. I think going with the flow is great in a lot of aspects of creativity. But at some points, it does take a lot of bull strength to make something go and make something happen. And forcing your emotions into one lane. And I've seen it happen all the time. I'll just give you one example. We came up with this idea. It was a headline idea at The Onion. And the headline was, I'm going to see if I can remember it exactly. Frito-Lay Asia cuts off chiplomatic relations with snacks on puns. So that was the headline. And it's got like three puns in it. Snack puns, and it's about Middle Eastern conflict. And one of our writers on our team hated the idea. He says, oh, it's just stupid wordplay. What are you doing with this idea? And I knew it could work. And so I assigned him the article. I assigned him the job of drafting that piece. And he did it right. He took the headline and decided, okay, so this is going to be an article of puns. And he wrote an article with as many snack puns as he could possibly fit in there that sounded like and was structured like a kind of like boring news article about some international conflict in the Middle East or something. And it was hilarious. And it was one of our most popular articles ever. And that was an instance of me telling him, you're going to love this. You're going to get behind it. You're going to do it. And it worked.


Louis - 00:44:04:

Is the recipe to force yourself to work on that thing for a while to trick your brain to like it because you've been exposed to it for a while?


Scott - 00:44:13:

Exactly. And that's why arranged marriage works because we tend to like people who we are around. And so you're probably going to fall in love with somebody you met in high school or college because they're around. There's wisdom in arranged marriage. Now, I would never do it. I'm just saying there's a reason it exists. There's a reason why people have been doing that for thousands of years. All the misogyny inherent in that whole idea aside, when you put people together, when you put a person with an idea, if they're with it long enough, they're going to start to see the benefits, the pluses. They're going to see what's good about it. And it has to work. If it doesn't, I mean, obviously, I'm talking about like a decent majority of the time, this is how it's going to be. I'm not a 100%, 0% guy. I'm always like, play the odds. And I think if you, of course, there have been arranged marriages that have failed spectacularly. So that's not what I'm talking about. There are ideas that you try to fall in love with and you can't and you hate them and you have to give them up. Totally fine. It happens. I think failure is the best teacher, but I think the ones that succeed are going to be in the majority where you're going to be able to fall in love with it. You're going to be able to see all the good in it and make it work, get your team behind it or get other people behind it, whatever you need. And it's going to be fine.


Louis - 00:45:34:

That relates to the cognitive bias, which is the principle of liking, which is the more we see something, the more we tend to like it. That's as simple as, right? So the more we see an ad on TV, the more we tend to like the company. And it's very similar to what you're describing. So by tricking your brain a bit to see that thing every day and work on it every day, you're going to start loving it. Or it's more likely that you'll love it. So to just repeat what you said earlier, I don't remember the exact two adjectives you used. Was it when I said the MAYA Principle? How did you phrase it again?


Scott - 00:46:04:

Yeah, I think I said something original and unique, but it's not so unique that people don't understand it.


Louis - 00:46:12:

Got you.


Scott - 00:46:13:

It's like nothing you've ever seen.


Louis - 00:46:14:

That, and then fall in love with it. I really love what we talked about, the controlling the context. I think it's such a great advice on the reason why The Onion didn't really get a lot of hate about this. It wasn't funny this week because it was seen as a news website, not as a comedic art performance thingy. And then this original and unique, but not too unique, falling in love with the idea. We talk about writing in private. The best ideas coming from like one single person that is untainted by anything else, which I think is the theme of this conversation, which is like really keeping the creative process untainted, like making sure that it's pristine, making sure we don't fuck with it too much because it's all very fragile.


Scott - 00:46:57:

Yeah, there's something magical in a singular vision, and that's what you're trying to capture there. When something is committed, it's very derived. It doesn't have that magic.


Louis - 00:47:07:

There's the, what is this quote? A camel is a horse that was drawn by a committee or something around those line. I like it. It's basic.


Scott - 00:47:14:

Oh yeah, I've heard that phrase. Yeah.


Louis - 00:47:16:

Anyway, it's all that you put all the colors together. Everyone has a different color and you put all the colors together and it ends up being gray because that's what happens when you mix all the shitty colors.


Scott - 00:47:25:

Yes.


Louis - 00:47:26:

So last question for you. What do you think folks listening today should learn that will help them in the next 10, 20, 50 years?


Scott - 00:47:35:

That's a long way down the line. The main thing is the loving it aspect because I think too many times we think about it as work and we think about it as a job. And oh my God, it's so hard. And a lot of this is hard. Like being on social media and posting and promoting things is really hard. It's a lot of drudgery. But when you love the project, when you love the product, we all know like the best ingredient for sales is love of the product. When you love the product, that not only helps you, but it helps potential customers understand that you love it. Like they feel that. And then you live a happy life. So you're on your deathbed 50 years from now. You want to know that you lived a good life and that you were happy and you did something you loved. And I'm not so into this idea of, do what you love and the money will follow. You know I'm all about the make sure it's the right thing. Make sure it's the vetted thing that actually has a chance to work. And if it doesn't work, give it up and try a new thing. Eventually you're going to hit on something. And you want to be able to look back and say, oh my God, that was so much fun. I just loved every minute of it. You know, that's really, really important. Really important.


Louis - 00:48:47:

Thanks. A very good way to finish this conversation that I very much enjoy. So Scott, thank you so much for your time. Where can people learn more from you, buy your stuff, connect with you, anything?


Scott - 00:48:59:

Yeah, it was fun for me too. Thanks for having me on, Louis. People can find me primarily at howtowritefunny.com, where I have information about my system for generating ideas, my books, the How to Write Funny series are all on sale online. And I do a daily tips newsletter on Substack that is free. Anybody can subscribe to that. It's mostly tips about writing inspiration, productivity, and a little bit of like comedy writing, creative stuff.


Louis - 00:49:31:

Where can we find that?


Scott - 00:49:31:

I think if you search my name and Substack, it'll probably be the first return. And I think even if you misspell my name on Google, I come up.


Louis - 00:49:40:

No dickering around.


Scott - 00:49:41:

At least that's change. Yeah, no dickering around is the name of that newsletter. You found it pretty easily.


Louis - 00:49:46:

Yeah. Yeah, so Dikkers is D-I-K-K-E-R-S.


Scott - 00:49:51:

But again, if you get it wrong, it doesn't matter. Google corrects.


Louis - 00:49:55:

All right, Scott. Thank you.


Scott - 00:49:57:

All right. Thanks, Louis.