Discover how the State of Texas saved money and got cleaner highways through an anti-littering marketing campaign that never used the word litter.
Dave Young:
Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner, Dave young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it's us, but we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients, so here's one of those.
[No Bull Ad]
Dave Young:
Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast. Dave young here, along with Stephen Semple. And Stephen, you picked a topic today that hits me a little close to home here because I moved to Texas in the last year, and so we're going to talk about that saying don't mess with Texas.
Stephen Semple:
We are going to talk about the saying don't mess with Texas. And part of the reason why I want to talk about this is advertising is a very important part to building an empire. And there's some cool things about how this ad was created that I think provides us some really good insight in terms of how great advertising campaigns are done.
Dave Young:
I'm going to interrupt you just for a second because I have a feeling that there's a lot of people that just think that phrase don't mess with Texas is just one of those things they say in Texas. But that's not the case. You start talking about advertising. And I don't know that people understand just where that phrase came from.
Stephen Semple:
That phrase is now actually trademarked and it's owned by the state of Texas.
Dave Young:
As it should be. It's not just saying, "Hey, we're Texas. Don't mess with us." It was a litter campaign.
Stephen Semple:
It was a litter campaign. And here's the problem. The state of Texas had this issue that they were spending $20 million a year cleaning trash off the highway, and it was increasing by 17% a year. And so they needed to come up with a way of reducing that. And when they started this campaign, don't mess with Texas, within six years, the littering dropped 78%, saving the state 16 million a year. So it had a huge impact.
Dave Young:
When this started, I'm guessing, Stephen, that the state of Texas didn't spend lots of money on buying time because I believe these were public service announcements. Was there an actual campaign?
Stephen Semple:
Well, they were partially public service announcements and they were an actually campaign. But here's what we want to talk about. So we're going to peek behind the curtain of how this campaign was created because this is where business owners can learn something for applying to their own campaign. We're going to insert the audio for the very first don't mess with Texas ad.
[Don't Mess With Texas Example Ad]
Stephen Semple:
All right. So now, this ad was created by Mike Blair and Tim McClure of GSD&M in your hometown of Austin. Now, if you noticed, in the ad, they never used the word littering. This was an anti littering campaign that never used the word littering. And we often talk about, Dave, that when we want somebody to do something or feel something, the most powerful ads are when you don't use the word. If we're fun, don't use the word fun. If we're trying to build trust, don't use the word trust. If we're trying to get people to stop littering, don't say stop littering. They never use the word littering in the campaign, yet we all understood what they were trying to convey.
Stephen Semple:
And the brilliance of this ad started with the description of the customer, in this case, people littering. And how often do we come across customer descriptions that are just basically a bunch of socioeconomic crap? Oh, they're 18 to 24 year olds that live in this community and make this much money an...
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