What whiskey & dead lovers can teach you about creative marketing

I can’t tell if the sky is falling or if the tide is rising.

In mid December, I wrote about the looming tough winter for companies. A few of my predictions were layoffs, budget cuts in marketing, and product stagnation.

Unfortunately, it’s played out with 150,000 layoffs in tech, 30% of advertisers slashed budgets and, outside of AI, tech progress slowed down.

I don’t say that to pat myself on the back—I’m not the Joe Lunardi of business predictions. Any one who reads the Wall Street Journal could have come up with that list. I call it out because there is a rhythm to economic impact that is predictable. We’re now entering the “do more with less” phase.

It’s not all bad news, but it’s clear we are going through a massive correction of bloated departments and failed experiments. If you’re a leader, this turbulence is probably weighing on you to perform more efficiently, and with less budget. It’s not easy thinking through what levels to pull, and which to ignore. There are many factors your business can evaluate to get more efficient, but today I want to talk about being more effective with your marketing creative with a ridiculous example.

Today is a creative tale told through whiskey bottles and dead lovers.

Time warp: It’s 2011 and my friend is on the homepage of Perez Hilton’s website

2011 doesn’t sound that long ago, but let’s remember that Netflix was still trying to switch from DVDs to streaming, Google was launching Google+ (LOL) and Steve Jobs died.

One thing that was true as it is today was the power of viral social content.

My friend Jeff Hortillosa was in a band that tapped into the power of going viral better than anyone I’ve ever seen. Their hit music video generated national coverage of their music and launched an incredible run for the trashgrass band (“trashgrass” is a term they coined to describe their dirty, punk bluegrass).

After all of these years, their content recipe is still gold.

“Whiskey Shivers” was the band—a group that still remains one of the most fun bands I've ever seen live. They had already recorded a few albums when Jeff joined, but it was their song "Gimme All Your Lovin'" that catapulted them to fame, and it leaned on great storytelling.

The lyrics start with front-man Bobby pleading with his woman to give him her lovin'. As the song progresses, the main character's pleas get more desperate, ending with this:

"Goin' home to get my gun
I'll shoot you down put you in the ground
Then you'll quit your runnin' 'round
Gimme all your lovin'"

Then, at the end there is a shocking plot twist. Watch the video to see what I mean:

This video went viral on Reddit, which kicked off a wave of attention for the Shivers. The band was suddenly being talked about by national celebrities and credible music sources alike, including celebrity gossip guru Perez Hilton, the Austin Chronicle, and Ryan Seacrest.

This launched an incredible run for the group:

• Touring with and opening for super stars like Old Crow Medicine Show, Trampled by Turtles and Billy Strings

• Playing major music festivals

• Being featured in an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s show

• Being cast for the movie Pitch Perfect 3 alongside uber celebs like Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson

Of course, the Shivers were also just really good. A single viral video doesn’t earn all of that success, but it can be the catalyst. The Shivers would have still be talented without this video, but going bold earned the attention and ongoing fandom. Imagine if they had done the whole “let’s stand in a field and play music with somber faces” for their music video.

Woof.

A shot of whiskey for your marketing

The same goes for your marketing.

No one cares about your clean, corporate informative marketing content. Too many brands fall victim to creating content or marketing around banal customer testimonies or talking about “service makes us different.”

Heads up: Everyone says service makes you different.

People don’t choose brands for service, they stick with them because of it.

Your marketing needs to communicate other differentiators to earn a new customer.

Category designing marketer, Christopher Lochhead, says “Marketing isn't about selling products, it's about selling emotions. If you can make people feel, you can make people buy.”

The Whiskey Shivers video was highly emotional—love, loss, heartache, humor. It had more drama packed into 3 minutes than a daytime television soap opera that just killed off Robert for the third time for sleeping with his father’s second wife. Again.

There are three things you can replicate from this video:

Oddity, a shocking stinger and rolling on a low budget.

Oddity

The video opens on tight shots of torsos of each musician holding their instrument. 20 seconds in you realize the torso is all one—this is a human centipede playing all of these instruments.

This oddity is a delightful disruptor. It catches you by surprise, and therefore pulls in what Luke Sullivan says is one of the best mechanisms for advertising—entertainment.

As Bobby, the lead singer, starts singing, we see female hands coming in to stroke his hair, give him a cigarette, a shot of the good stuff, etc. The video is chock full of odd quirks, which holds your attention.

Our company has found great success in our short video content by going weird. Be interesting, or be forgotten.

Stinger

In advertising, a stinger is a surprising and even shocking delighter at the end of the commercial. The Whiskey Shivers has one of the most successful stingers I have ever seen.

By now, I’ll assume you’ve seen the video. I gave you a fair chance.

This video would have been fun and weird without the last few seconds, but when the camera pans down below the floor and you see the pile of dead lovers, it’s unbelievably shocking. The story comes together.

This stinger provides a powerful “OMG” moment that makes you want to share it with friends, but it’s also delivering on another powerful mechanism for good advertising. The stinger provided a reward for watching to the end—you feel it was worth your time.

Budget doesn’t matter

This video was created on a budget that nearly any of us can afford—it was $500. Sure, the band called in some favors to pull it off, but I call it out because it’s important for you to remember. The Whiskey Shivers catapulted themselves into the national country music spotlight with a budget that’s the equivalent of what the average American spends on coffee every year. It’s nothing.

Losing budget hurts, but don’t let budget keep you from flexing your creative muscles to inform, entertain and surprise your audience.

How to apply these two tactics in 2023

1) Pack stingers into your content

Providing that last second reward for someone who made it to the end is a powerful way to communicate not only delightful disruptions, but it says “I know your time was valuable—here’s a delighter to make it worth watching until the end.” The most viral influencers understand the value of the last-second stinger that makes you share. Once you’ve mastered this a few times, you’ll see that people come to expect surprises, which will increase your overall engagement time with your content.

2) Odd is good

Liquid Death Mountain Water built a brand that even the CEO says is dumb. It’s also part of the reason the company is worth $700M. If you understand your audience, and their quirks, you can tap into their version of odd to build a relationship. It communicates “we understand you because we are you.” Being odd for the sake of making people squirm is risky. My own company finally figured this out on our third podcast attempt, where we stopped using everyone else’s formula and leaned into our weird selves. The odd quirks about us and our show helped us achieve 1M views/downloads in the first 60 episodes. (See more about that here).

3) Try more with less

Budget cuts are rampant right now. Many marketers are cutting the unproven or awareness tactics to pile into more digital spend where they can track better (which is a short term win, but likely going to hurt in the long run). This may leave some of your previous initiatives under funded, but now’s the time to try something new with those limited resources. If your social content has been fairly stagnant, now is the time to try out more personality and short video format. The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife tried out a comical voice for its Twitter account, and with the same amount of resources has completely gone viral and gotten people to engage with their content. Meanwhile most other government agencies are terrified of sounding remotely human. The cost of the social content was the same.

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I do this for free and in my “spare” time. I enjoy it, and want to help other leaders. If you enjoyed this piece, please feel free to forward the email to someone else. Thanks!

Who I’m listening to: Whiskey Shivers (duh)

What I’m reading: “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” (Like Hitler, I’m on my final hours with this one)

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