We sit down with advertising veteran Jos Anshell, founder of Marketing Forensics and the strategic mind behind the iconic former agency, Moses Anshell.
In this episode, host Rosaria Cain peels back the curtain on a career that spans from the disciplined halls of Unilever to the high-stakes world of airline marketing. Jos shares his philosophy on why branding is about the “benefit to the consumer” rather than just selling a product, and why he believes the best strategic breakthroughs happen on a basketball court rather than in a boardroom.
In this episode, we dive into:
- The Power of Consistency: Why a “red Yankee hat” is a branding sin and how subconscious cues like the “Golden Arches” define market leaders.
- The Human Element: Jos reflects on his legendary partnership with Louie Moses at his former agency, and why mutual respect is the foundation of great work.
- The Challenger Mindset: Lessons from Peter Piper Pizza, America West Airlines, and how to take on industry giants like Procter & Gamble.
- Marketing Forensics & The Future: How Jos’s current focus on management and succession planning is helping legacy companies thrive, plus his candid thoughts on how COVID-19, remote work, and AI are reshaping the agency world.
- A Surprising Finale: Stick around until the very end to hear Jos reveal a hidden talent that leaves Rosaria—and our listeners—speechless.
Whether you’re a marketing student, a business owner, or an advertising enthusiast, Jos’s insights on running a business and maintaining brand integrity offer a masterclass in longevity.
Full Transcript
Rosaria Cain 0:00
Please welcome Jos Anshell, thanks for coming, Jos. Gosh, your story precedes you, and the story of Moses Anshell and your enchanted past. We’re happy you’re here. You’ve been client side, you’ve been agency side. You’ve had iconic accounts. You’ve worked on iconic accounts. How would you sum up your career?
Jos Anshell 0:26
Well, I really have loved my career, both sides of it, the client side, as well as the agency side it, I am far better off having worked with Louie Moses than I would have been on my own. I think, honestly, I probably would have made more money on my own, but I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do the kind of work that we did. Louie dragged me kicking and screaming into getting out of my comfort zone, and consequently, we ended up doing some really, really good work. I feel like I was involved in all of it. If he were sitting here, he’d probably go, yeah, yeah, yeah, because I was the guy behind the scenes, you know, doing the strategic work, which, to me, is the critical part of doing great creative work. Otherwise, you’re just, you might as well be doing paintings, and we’re not. So I love my career. I mean, I love and we have a body of work that’s really tough to parallel in this market, and then really in a lot of cases, nationally, I’ll tell you, though Rosaria, the thing I’m most proud of is the relationships, one of which is that we’re sitting here talking. That was really the most important thing to me. I had a party a few years ago, and I invited lots and lots of people. I invited competitors. And those relationships are the most important thing to me. I love the work. I love to look at the work. I’m really proud of the work. I’m most more proud of the relationships that not everybody loves you, but nobody can say we ever stuck it to anybody that’s just not who who we were. So I’m most proud of that.
Rosaria Cain 2:30
How did you fall in love with branding and with the whole what preceded the historic Moses Anshell and and creating something that lasted decades.
Jos Anshell 2:44
Well, you know, I started off, after I got out of Northwestern, because I started off as a writer and went to Medill at Northwestern, but I was on the marketing side, and from there, I went to Lever brothers, which was really interesting, because I was just a real weird entity at Unilever was Lieber brothers at the time, because everybody there was a Harvard MBA or a Dartmouth MBA or a Columbia MBA, and I had an MS in marketing from Northwestern, which was like a, what, who?
Rosaria Cain 3:25
Great journalism school.
Jos Anshell 3:26
Great journalism school. But when I got out of Medill, went to Unilever, I could was plug and play. I mean, I could do the whole plan, from soup to nuts, the research, the strategy, the positioning, the branding, the execution. And the Harvard guys could, they just did a lot of case work. They really couldn’t do that. So I actually wrote the guy at Northwestern who ran the program, and said, Dr Freiburger, I have a real unfair advantage here over the guys from Harvard and people, if you tell that to people, they look at you like, what? But so Lever brothers really taught me the branding side of it, of how important it was that a to understand, really, really understand the compute the consumer. They go way overboard with that, and that’s something that I never, ever forgot, and I think was a differentiator later on with with Moses, because we were just bound and determined we were really going to understand the consumer, and what was the benefit to the consumer, as opposed to selling products and services. What is the benefit to the consumer? I consider myself a I’m not a literal strategist. A literal strategist is when you figure out who you’re talking to, and it’s a husband and wife and 2.2 kids and Honda Odyssey minivan and a Golden Retriever, and she, the little girl is ballet and blah, blah, blah, the you know, you have to see them in an ad or commercial. A non literal strategist is, who these people are. This is what’s important to them. And I don’t care if they’re even in the ad or commercial or post or whatever. I don’t care, as long as this is what you get across. This is what’s important to those people. And unfortunately, most agencies don’t do that. Most think they’re selling products and services and the consistency of everything you do, regardless of the medium, is just huge. I guess I’m an old school branding guy, and I’m from the East, so this makes me particularly crazy, but you can buy a Yankee hat in red. Yankee hats shouldn’t be in red.
Rosaria Cain 6:09
Aren’t they supposed to be blue?
Jos Anshell 6:10
It’s blue.
Rosaria Cain 6:11
Yankee blue, not just any blue.
Jos Anshell 6:13
It’s even worse, because Boston’s red. So if you wear a red Yankee hat, I mean, it’s just wrong to me. I mean, it’s like, if you drove down the street and there were green arches, right? It’s like, no, it’s wrong. So I’m a stickler for that anything that the consumer comes in contact with has to support that same look, taste, feel, strategy, it. If there’s one piece out of it, I call those things that are out of it, the and this is really tough, you know, with clients, my category for that is called it’s just a, the category is, it’s just a scratch pad. It’s just a this. It’s just a that. No, it’s not, “it’s just a” it’s every bit as important as the posts that you’re doing and the ads that you’re doing, or PR that you’re doing. It’s it all has to support something that’s contrary to that sticks out. Goes, Huh? And you do recognize that. How many times you drive down the street, if I drive down the street and I see this block lettering, and it’s red, and I don’t have to look over and see, oh, it’s Five Guys. I’m looking someplace else, out of the corner of my eye, I see this thing, subconsciously, I go, Oh, there’s a Five Guys here. That’s what it should be tough to get clients to do that.
Rosaria Cain 7:44
Do you think it’s more difficult in the digital age? So I think one thing about the digital age is it does kind of build on what you were talking about as really working on the relationship with the consumer. Because there’s that whole journey, the consumer journey, and that really was brought to the forefront, maybe you were doing it already, but it was more of a thing with digital. It kind of brought it to the forefront of several, shops that maybe weren’t doing the same things that Moses Anshell was doing. Digital is a tactic, and I fully agree with that. I don’t believe it’s its own it’s its own category, but it does seem like it’s brought into the equation some of what you’re talking about, a consumer relationship, and also their journey and what’s important to them because of all the calls to action and all of those digital tactics, what do you think about that?
Jos Anshell 8:45
Oh, you know, I think you’re right. The the digital age has really changed a lot, because the consumers now are the client and the agency, because you’re not controlling them, so if you’re not consistent with them and you’re not saying stuff relevant to them, I remember saying this years ago, early in digital to the folks at Peter Piper Pizza, they looked at me like I was insane, because we’re selling pizza, and I said we should be on moms.com for pizza. Said, yeah, for pizza, because Peter Piper is a place. It’s not just a place to go eat and leave. It’s an event place. It’s a place you sit around, you spend time with other moms while kids are playing video games and things. So if you appeal and say, Look, there’s a lot of moms like you out there, let’s talk about situations you have as a mom. Then a pizza place becomes a place that you want to go and because you’ve set this, and then moms start talking. Oh yeah, you know when the kid does this and that, they start a conversation themselves. And now you’re part of the,you’re not leading it, you’re part of the conversation. And now here’s a demo that if you say, well, let’s, let’s go to moms.com, the client would look at you like you’re like, You’re nuts.
Rosaria Cain 10:32
I think it’s perfect, because when you think about it, Peter Piper is, people don’t go there for the pizza, not really.
Jos Anshell 10:39
No, they don’t.
Rosaria Cain 10:40
They go there to have a place for the kids to play and relieve them of constant 24 hour supervision.
Jos Anshell 10:50
Yep, it is. I’ve worked on that for a long time. Crazy stat, 30% of their business comes every week. Now that is a loyal customer.
Rosaria Cain 11:05
That is a loyal customer.
Jos Anshell 11:06
30% of their business, they come every week. The most successful Peter Piper restaurant, of all of them was Juarez, Mexico. Peter Piper is an event. It’s where you take your kids on Saturday night, it’s Disneyland.
Rosaria Cain 11:23
Every birthday party.
Jos Anshell 11:26
Pizza is important, not as important as the environment.
Rosaria Cain 11:29
Right? No, I would, I would agree with you. As you’re looking ahead, there’s a lot of challenges in the agency world right now, and now you have a bird’s eye seat because you’re not in it. Well, you work around it and you work with it, but you’re not in it like you were. What do you think the greatest challenges are from your cat bird seat?
Jos Anshell 11:54
Well, first, I wouldn’t want to be in the agency business today. I thought the most important part of the entire agency business was the collaboration of different mentalities, different personalities. I don’t think that there wasn’t a substitute, and I don’t know if you were building the one on Jackson. It was an old warehouse.
Rosaria Cain 12:25
There’s no where I was in the building on Van Buren. Oh, I loved that building.
Jos Anshell 12:30
Yeah. We were on top.
Rosaria Cain 12:31
I was never in your new one.
Jos Anshell 12:32
The new one was a 60 year old warehouse that we converted, and it had with a big open area in the back with a half court basketball and like 20 feet of tables and in a cafe. Well, a lot of meetings took place in the cafe, and a lot of meetings took place shooting hoops. Some of the best meetings were shooting hoops. And one of the reasons is if you disagreed with somebody, weren’t sitting across the table looking at them, you were looking at a basket, and you were saying something that you might not have said to them if you were looking at them. So it could be a more open and honest conversation. The other part of it was people who were playing basketball kind of were hearing what’s going on the meeting. And invariably, someone would turn around and go, “You know what you ought to do,” and they weren’t even in the meeting. Or people walking back and forth, that collaboration, the difference of of media people inputting, here’s an example of that, we actually never did this. Implemented it. It was for America West Airlines. America West was a pretty crappy airline early on.
Rosaria Cain 13:57
Ed Bove.
Jos Anshell 13:57
Ed Bove, I loved Ed Bove. They were employee, you know, you were handling bags on Monday, and you were flying the plane on Tuesday, and, you know, it was crazy anyway, you know, they hit the skids. They had a real tough time in the economy, and they weren’t very good at what they were doing. They were run by a financial guy who never understood that it needed an extra plane instead one, if one had a mechanical difficulties, instead of putting another one in service, you had to delay the flight. So I don’t know if this was before after they bought US Airways, but they became a much, much better airline. They were really concentrated on it. They brought a guy in, oh, it must been US Airways, because they brought in Jeff McDonald, great ops guy. So we had a campaign. And it was called, it was basically, the concept was, we screwed up. We weren’t very good. We weren’t good, but we really spent a lot of time and effort, and we’re pretty good now. Give us another chance.
Rosaria Cain 15:07
Was that the “I’m On Board” campaign?
Jos Anshell 15:09
no, it was called, “I Want You Back.”
Rosaria Cain 15:11
Oh.
Jos Anshell 15:12
And, and it was like, like, lovers, the guy had done something and, you know, so part of it was, what, we were actually going to have Doug Parker deliver cakes to corporations, because the business side of the airline industry is really important. Say, there’s, like, hotels, sure you have to have, like, a 30 year business in business people, because that’s where the money really is. He was going to deliver cakes and say, we would say, I want you back. And he would, you know, it was kind of a PR deal. One of the things was it was going to be a stump in front of chain link fence. And in the chain link fence was going to be white styrofoam cups that said, I want you back, and it was like this unrequited love thing. So the point is, did a creative department do that? Is it a creative thing came out of the creative department? Is it a PR stunt? Is it a media thing, because now the backdrop, the fence, is a billboard. So now you have the media department involved. You have the PR department involved. You have the creative department involved. You have the stress strategy people and the account people are involved. You have different people with different mentalities, and nobody can take credit for it.
Rosaria Cain 16:39
Because it’s a strategy.
Jos Anshell 16:40
It’s a collaboration. That’s why I at this point, I wouldn’t want to be in the business. I mean, you’re in the business, so you had to evolve. I got out of it before this really became what it is. Covid changed a whole lot.
Rosaria Cain 16:57
So what you’re saying is, you think most agencies don’t collaborate in the same way because they don’t, because, quite frankly, most don’t come to the office day in and day out.
Jos Anshell 17:07
Yes, okay, big I don’t know if you saw this in Business Journal this past week was big article about in office and out and out of office, and the huge disconnect between this monster that we’ve created of difference between employers and employees that article, I can’t remember the stats, but it was 80% of the employers want the employees back, and 20% the employees want to come back. And then there’s this, how much hybrid or not hybrid, is it? I think you really lose something. Yeah, we never think we’ve lost something as a society because of that. I think so too.
Rosaria Cain 17:47
In fact, we’re all in office, and we stayed through covid. We worked in the office the entire time now. We were more careful, but our clients wanted to see us. Lot of
Jos Anshell 17:58
people didn’t. I mean, it’s tough to collaborate with a little, you know, two inch by two inch square. It is, it
Rosaria Cain 18:05
It’s crazy how that went.
Jos Anshell 18:08
Yeah, I think that it’s, we really lost something there. I think that and the combination of the digital of everybody being able to, you know, kind of come up with stuff themselves.
Rosaria Cain 18:22
What do you think of AI as being a factor for agencies right now, useful tool or disintegrator of humanity?
Jos Anshell 18:32
Well, I’ve used a bunch of it. The thing I’ve learned mostly is not to trust it.
Rosaria Cain 18:38
That’s good one, and not to let it write for you.
Jos Anshell 18:41
Not to let it write for you. Interesting. Everybody should try this. Do a question you really want an answer to, and take five different AIs and give the same question all five. See what you get. Me and copilot, my buddy at copilot, a dozen times. Now I’ve said that’s not right, and then they goes, What do you mean? He goes, your pal over Gemini said this, and then he would come back. Tried to justify not having the right answer, and then ultimately went, Yeah, you’re right. He was right. It was really fast.
Rosaria Cain 19:31
You’re seeing it doing some reasoning.
Jos Anshell 19:34
Yes, yes, but it’s really tough to get Louie. And I always believe that most decisions, not all, most decisions, are made emotionally and justified rationally. It’s tough to do that with AI. Can you get AI to have the emotion that you have? That I have. Can you get that?
Rosaria Cain 20:04
There are some in the strategy world, because I follow them that talk about prompts on how to use AI as a junior strategist, kind of as a beginning of ideas and a creator of initial concepts based on information you feed in. Do you think it can be used that way? Or do you think that should be left to humans for the best work?
Jos Anshell 20:31
I know it’s, it’s, it’s a tough question. We’ve just implemented an AI chat bot at Shasta, and I was really, really skeptical, and her name is Aqua.
Rosaria Cain 20:47
Oh, very nice, perfect.
Jos Anshell 20:51
And it’s four inbound phone calls. And I really tried to piss her off, throw her off. I mean, I try. She’s really good. She is much better in that respect. She has more information than anybody in the company. Think about there’s, you know, hundreds of people there, because she has input from all hundreds, all the hundreds. So she knows everything from, you know, pH of water to concrete density to, I mean, but she’s not like, God, this is great. I love the idea of what we’re putting together here, that your backyard is going to be an oasis. She can’t do it like, I could. Like, you know, I don’t know how you do that. I think you do more of the strategy stuff,
Rosaria Cain 21:50
Or beginning of a strategy.
Jos Anshell 21:53
I just did one, just for fun, and I, I put together a pretty damn good plan in an hour that would have taken me months to do. The premise of this is I’m doing it so anybody want to use this, it’s yours. You have all these prescription drugs, billion, multi billion dollar advertising industry. So I wanted to talk through AI of what percentage of people know those top 10 brands know what they do? How many people know what zaralta does? How many people everybody knows now but Ozempic.
Rosaria Cain 22:40
Right, yeah, yeah.
Jos Anshell 22:42
And everybody can sing, “Oh, Oh, Oh, Ozempic” you know, everybody can, but there’s every one of them. There’s, there’s like a dozen that there’s only 25% of the people know what the thing actually does, because they all these goof ass names. So the premise of the plan was to come up with names for those that actually had some relevance to what they do.
Rosaria Cain 23:03
To tie into the result that they’re looking for.
Jos Anshell 23:06
And then go to the challenger brands and say, you have the same brand as as, I’m making up of Ozempic, you’re a number two brand, but they don’t know 20-25% of people know what that does. You rename your brand this, and then we’ll help you market that, and you’ll take market share from them, because you’re the efficacy of your brand, and their brand is the same. And I put together a whole plan and and it gave me a whole bunch of names, and I didn’t like the names that. Know that those are too cute. I don’t want a cute name, but I don’t want a prescription name with X’s and z’s and that with no no vowels. Give me something. So then we went the other way, and we went give and take, and it was like talking to a friend. And we came up with a real interesting, interesting plan to go to challenger brands. Maybe somebody who hears this is going to go, wow, I could do that.
Rosaria Cain 24:07
There are agencies really taking that challenger brand philosophy very seriously.
Jos Anshell 24:13
Yeah.
Rosaria Cain 24:13
Yeah. But not, not many, but there are a couple,
Jos Anshell 24:18
I like being a challenger brand. It really gives you something to shoot at. And very often, the top guys, and I found this at at Lever Brothers at Unilever, I think that the whole CPG category, the top one is in that whole category is Procter and Gamble they were our biggest competitor. Colgate was a big competitor, hurch and Dwight was a big competitor. I think they create their own life cycles, because what happens is they spend a ton of money on research, and then they introduce a brand, and they support it with zillions of dollars, and then they milk it. And while they’re milking it, that’s when they’re vulnerable. And so what happens is they go up, they become a top brand, or one of the top brands, they start to milk it, and they go down. And as they stop supporting it, this is where they make their money. They don’t make their money on the beginning and when it’s number one investment in the business. They’ve invested so much in it. Now, over the next 10 years, they’re they’re going to pull a lot of the support back. And that’s where they make their money at it. But in so doing, they’ve created their own life cycle. So while they’re going down, then they introduced another, a new brand that kind of crisscrosses with it and takes over, and then that one grows. But they’ve invested twice, I always thought, and Tide has done a phenomenal job at this. Tide’s my number one marketing examples in the world. How many brands do you know besides Tide, and I don’t know, Heinz Ketchup, that is the top brand for 50 years. How is that possible, but the Tide today is nothing like the Tide 50 years ago. But they keep reinventing and they keep doing they keep Procter and Gamble’s philosophy was, we can’t be number one in a category. We don’t want to be in the category. That’s a pretty interesting philosophy.
Rosaria Cain 26:35
If not, we try harder, yeah, Avis.
Jos Anshell 26:40
Avis, We Try Harder. We did one of those for America West that that didn’t fly. It was Deputy Dog.
Rosaria Cain 26:50
Best campaigns left on the table, right?
Jos Anshell 26:52
We were using deputy dog, and we got all senior management bought it, and it was a we try harder thing, and we got all the senior managers we were going to do. The whole thing would have been so different the airline industry and Doug Parker and Scott Kirby, who’s now the head of United, President of United, they all loved it, but we couldn’t get it past the 10 unions that are in the airline industry.
Rosaria Cain 27:21
Do they weigh into the marketing?
Jos Anshell 27:23
Yes.
Rosaria Cain 27:23
I didn’t know that.
Jos Anshell 27:24
So they loved the campaign. And they said, Well, you got to talk to our people, it was really the gate, people who killed it, because one of the lines in it was and they got this dog flying around,
Rosaria Cain 27:39
Kind of like underdog?
Jos Anshell 27:41
Underdog, sorry, not be dog. Okay, it was underdog. So we’re Avis.
Rosaria Cain 27:45
Okay?
Jos Anshell 27:45
We try harder. And one of the lines in it was, we fight for what’s right. That was an underdog. We fight for what’s right. And we hit this nerve with the gate people. He said, we fight for what’s right. You think it’s right that we sell 200 tickets for 150 passenger plane? You think that’s right, buddy, huh? You think that’s right. How about you think we have 15 minutes to turn around an airplane? Do you think the pilots would help? No. Do you think the flight attendant? No, they’re too busy doing their nails. No, we think we get any help. You think that’s right?
Rosaria Cain 28:25
There’s some bitterness there.
Jos Anshell 28:26
Oh, my God, it killed the whole campaign. It was, it’s crazy.
Rosaria Cain 28:32
I didn’t know unions participated in those final campaigns.
Jos Anshell 28:38
Yeah, yeah. I really liked the US Airways in America West. I really like, enjoyed working with them.
Rosaria Cain 28:47
I love the “I’m On Board” campaign. In fact, our own client, Doug Fulton, participated.
Jos Anshell 28:54
Yeah, he did. We had Eddie Basha,
Rosaria Cain 28:57
Some of the best, the biggest leaders in town.
Jos Anshell 28:59
I’m on board. Yeah, we had, we got Mark Russell from Oregano’s and Doug Ducey was on one.
Rosaria Cain 29:06
Before he was governor.
Jos Anshell 29:08
Before he was governor, nobody pushed him off.
Rosaria Cain 29:10
Yeah, that’s because it was before covid.
Jos Anshell 29:14
Yeah, that was tough to do campaigns for airlines.
Rosaria Cain 29:18
You know what? That was a great category, is it still a great category? Seems like it’s so consolidated right now.
Jos Anshell 29:25
Yeah, well.
Rosaria Cain 29:26
Not a lot of great creative that I can think of. Except it’s painful to buy a ticket.
Jos Anshell 29:34
Well I saw last night or this morning. It just killed me, because we used to use Southwest as an example.
Rosaria Cain 29:41
Because they were different, and now they’re not different.
Jos Anshell 29:44
Oh, they’re increasing their bag fees $10 and I went well, until six months ago, they didn’t charge. And I used to use Herb Kelleher as an example. These guys know what they’re doing.
Rosaria Cain 29:56
Yeah.
Jos Anshell 29:57
These guys, Kelleher really knows what he’s doing. He knows how to separate himself from the other people and nobody else could do that. United. Years ago, had this campaign called fry the fly the friendly skies united. It was an example of what not to do. So the research showed that they weren’t very friendly. So instead of getting friendly, they came out with an ad campaign that said, we’re friendly. I said, No, you see if you don’t do something, then shut up about it.
Rosaria Cain 30:27
Right, right. You’re not authentic anymore.
Jos Anshell 30:30
Yeah, you got to get behind it and find out what the consumer really wants. I work on a thing called xylactin. It was cold sore medicine and zapit with xylactin. What we found was all cold sore medicines. I’m not a cold sore medicine person, but they all have some they have xylocaine or benzocaine. They have some -canes because they’re painful. So every one of them gets rid of pain. That’s what they do. Getting rid of them fast is the key. The pain isn’t the key. Because what we found out was the pain wasn’t the major issue, on the surface, it looks like it is, but if you really get behind it, this one talking, I was talking about, about the husband, wife, 2.2 kids. It’s being a social outcast.
Rosaria Cain 31:27
You know, that’s so interesting. We had one of our team members here had a cold sore, he walked around in a mask for days.
Jos Anshell 31:35
That’s what it’s all about. It’s a it’s a, they people don’t they think, whenever they have a conversation, people focus on the corner of their mouth. They they just can’t focus and it’s like I got to get rid of this, because it’s herpes, and they think I have herpes. And I’ve been sitting on my on the the pains gone because the xylocaine took care of that, or the lidocaine, or whatever was in it. So it’s getting rid of that. We did a radio commercial, which we ended up having to pull off the air because it was a slice of life husband and wife going to work in the morning, and the husband says, “Okay, honey, I’m going to work. Give me kiss goodbye.” And she says, “I’d rather kiss a leper.”
Rosaria Cain 32:22
Oh!
Jos Anshell 32:24
And we got a cease and desist letter from the Hansen’s Disease Society.
Rosaria Cain 32:30
Oh.
Jos Anshell 32:30
I never heard of Hanson’s Disease Society, but they said, “No, the L word is akin to the N word.”
Rosaria Cain 32:37
Oh, so it’s not politically correct.
Jos Anshell 32:42
Kind of hurts a commercial to say, I’d rather kiss someone with Hansen’s disease.
Rosaria Cain 32:47
Right? No one would know what that was.
Jos Anshell 32:49
We pulled the spot.
Rosaria Cain 32:50
It’s in the Bible.
Jos Anshell 32:52
Hmm?
Rosaria Cain 32:52
It’s in the Bible.
Jos Anshell 32:54
Leper?
Rosaria Cain 32:54
Yeah!
Jos Anshell 32:55
Yeah, it’s a real word.
Rosaria Cain 32:56
Yeah. Not anymore.
Jos Anshell 32:58
It’s just that we’re very sensitive.
Rosaria Cain 33:01
What misconception do you think people have about the advertising agency?
Jos Anshell 33:06
Um, I think they think, you know, what they’ve seen on television is what it is.
Rosaria Cain 33:11
There have been some great shows on TV on the subject.
Jos Anshell 33:15
Yeah, but you rarely see the grunt work. Part of it, you rarely see real market research. Real market research, you may see in some cases. I used to love Thirtysomething.
Rosaria Cain 33:33
Oh, that was my favorite!
Jos Anshell 33:35
Yeah, I love Thirtysomething. But you never really saw the grunt work, the real research of people going and interviewing people, and going through page after page of cross tabs and stuff to really understand the consumer. I think they think it’s like throwing darts and throwing wads of paper in the trash can and playing basketball all the time, and we did a lot of those things. But what you don’t see is all the work that goes into it to get to the point where you’re doing that stuff
Rosaria Cain 34:09
Well now, sometimes or in your past and maybe in your present, you’ve consulted with agencies to help improve their operations and the way that they do things, tell me about that. Are you still doing that?
Jos Anshell 34:23
Yeah, yeah, I am.
Rosaria Cain 34:27
Does that give you some gratification based on everything you’ve learned before and how you can pass it on to people that might need it?
Jos Anshell 34:35
Yeah, for sure. I think we were, we were a unique hybrid. It’s really tough to find, we’ll say two people, it’s two sides of it, and that have 100% mutual respect for the other side. It’s really, really tough to do that, and I don’t see very much of it. More often than not, there’s a person who keep you out of this equation. There’s a person, somebody’s creative, and they spin off and they think they can do it. You know, somebody’s, and I’m not referring to, somebody was in the media. They spin off and think, oh, I can do that. Or somebody, you know, is a business person to have both sides of that is really tough. This is something that I prided us on for a long, long time, and Louie and I didn’t agree on everything for sure, although our system was, here’s the situation, one to 10, how are you? Where are you? Are you black? You’re white, I’m black. How, where are you? I’m an eight. Where are you? I’m white. 10. Man, sure it’s a white. I’m sure it’s white. Okay, 10 beats eight. We’ll go with 10. 10 doesn’t work. The guy with the eight can never, ever, ever go back to the other guy or gal. I’m just using a generic term and say, I told you, so I told you, it was black. You wouldn’t listen to me. You can’t ever do that. You can just you can’t you go, you gotta be right more than you’re wrong. But you can’t go back it, whether it’s a relationship with your spouse or relationship with your business partner, you just can’t go back. You just let it go and move on to the next one. My picture is I stand up on my desk. I close my eyes, I put my arms out to the side, and I fall back, and I never fear hitting the ground ever. That’s what we that’s what we did, whether it was him or it was me, I never worried about hitting the ground. I knew that he would catch me before I hit the ground. He knew I would catch him. And it doesn’t mean everything was, you know, you fought and argued and made the right decisions more often than not. You know, the Yankees are most successful team in baseball, but over his 30 year period where they were absolutely the most successful, they only won 55% of their games. So the most successful team in the history of baseball was 55 and 45 okay, it’s not like it was they were 90-10 you think of it, you go, wow, they won the World Series here and here and here. Yeah, well, they, they still lost 45% of their game. So, that is a key, and that’s what I try to when I’m talking to agencies, talk about is a mutual respect for the other person’s point of view, and then determine how strong you are in your point of view and go with one, and never go back and rehash it like I told you. I told you, so is not part of the equation.
Rosaria Cain 38:17
Right? Right? No, that’s great advice. What do you think of the climate right now, business climate certainly interesting, isn’t it?
Jos Anshell 38:27
Well, the stuff I’m working on and working with is is pretty good. I haven’t seen and I’m working in a couple of weird, different areas. I’m working with an accounting firm who has branched out into what’s called Product Management. Their business is good. It’s better than it’s been because the employer-employee balance has changed. Through covid, the employees were in control, and there were way more. Employers were couldn’t get enough people, and we’re paying a lot of money, and that’s really flipped, and now the employers are more in control. So what I’ve seen is some of the growth couldn’t have happened because people didn’t have enough people to grow on the accounting side. We were talking about, you know, we were doing in her strategic plan. Well, where do you want to be in, one to three, three to five, five to seven, seven to 10 years? Part of this was, it was flat. It’s flat. How can you, how can you have a plan that’s flat so we just can’t get enough? People in the last- Where are? We were April, six months, I would say, fall. the tipping point changed, and now there are more people out there, so now these companies can hire people.
Rosaria Cain 40:20
So there’s a bigger pool of employees.
Jos Anshell 40:25
And so now they can grow. So what they were telling me was, we could get more business. We have lots of people inquiring, but we don’t have enough people to handle the business. Well, now we do. We just hired one guy, and that one guy, they told me this yesterday, has two other people that he’s worked with that he may bring over here, and they’ll increase their business 20% just by doing which they couldn’t do before. The on the pool industry was just not, just not a Shasta. Specifically, the pool industry was a disaster because everybody stayed home and they couldn’t travel and they couldn’t go on vacation, so they took their money and they bought pools, lots and lots. I mean, the industry way oversold its capacity to build.
Rosaria Cain 41:20
Home builders did that too. Home builders did that too. It was quite a…
Jos Anshell 41:25
Home builders did that too. And, well, the pool builders and home builders are, you know…
Rosaria Cain 41:30
They’re intertwined.
Jos Anshell 41:30
You know, they’re linked. And I got, houses with, you would sell a pool or a house, and it would take a year to do it, and it became very unprofitable, because, let’s say, I don’t know if I’m not talking about Fulton, because I don’t know about Fulton, but let’s say a pool, say a pool was $50,000 before covid. Well, then you couldn’t get rebar. You couldn’t get shotcrete the concrete.
Rosaria Cain 42:05
That supply chain problem was a real issue.
Jos Anshell 42:07
You have a limited number of labor. You don’t just go out and get another plumber to plumb for a pool. I mean, you’re going to put 100,000 pounds on this underneath concrete. You don’t just go get a guy to start putting pipes together so that limited labor raised its prices tremendously. So you sold a $50,000 pool, which should have taken 90 days, except you’re a year out. Now the cost to the pool builder is 60. You have a contract selling it for 50, and you’ve got 1000 of these.
Rosaria Cain 42:46
Not a winning preposition.
Jos Anshell 42:47
No. So now you know that settled down is in more of a normal, you know, normal situation. And so you can grow your business profitably, because the balance of labor has changed, and you can actually add labor because they’re out there on the employee side. I mean, you probably see this all the time, and I see it all the time because I’m getting calls all the time, but so and so has been looking for a job for three months and she can’t seem to find anything and something that’s really, I don’t really understand this. It’s I’m way too old for this, but the finding a job is now AI. I’m hearing this over and over and over again is you don’t just like… I used to a whole thing on people, on resumes. Well, that’s all gone. It’s AI is evaluating.
Rosaria Cain 43:56
But now you can really stand out by not using AI. You can by putting some personality in your writing.
Jos Anshell 44:02
If you can get beyond that.
Rosaria Cain 44:04
Right, right?
Jos Anshell 44:05
Yeah, if otherwise, you’re just in this AI pool.
Rosaria Cain 44:07
You’re going to look like everybody else.
Jos Anshell 44:09
There was something I read the other day. It’s called whiteboarding, where people are in their resumes. They’re typing some of the type. They change the color of the type so you don’t see it. It’s blank, but it’s there’s really words there. AI picks up the words, but you couldn’t see it, and it gets around. I don’t really understand it, but it’s a whole different industry. I don’t know how you find the best people that way.
Rosaria Cain 44:42
You have to look at qualifications, bring them in and meet them.
Jos Anshell 44:47
Talk to them, meet them.
Rosaria Cain 44:48
You have to meet them.
Jos Anshell 44:49
I mean, how are they going to work with your other people?
Rosaria Cain 44:52
Well, if you meet them, at least, you have some chance at gaging the chemistry.
Jos Anshell 44:56
One person at an agency can kill the agency.
Rosaria Cain 45:00
Mm, hmm, or ruin in an agency.
Jos Anshell 45:01
What one person I got seen it happen where it you have, in my perspective, you have disciples, followers, and dissidents, that not everybody has to be a disciple. You can be a follower. It’s fine. You have the disciples, and you work for the disciples. Disciples work for the main person. The dissidents have to go.
Rosaria Cain 45:33
You want everyone on the same team.
Jos Anshell 45:36
Yep, you have they have to go, no matter. And it’s sometimes it’s tough because some of the dissidents are the most talented people, but the relationships trump the talent.
Rosaria Cain 45:50
I agree with you. So tell me. So now that you’re working in a different capacity, you’re not in the daily the daily grind of running an ad agency with lots of people. What are you passionate about? What’s moving things for you right now? What keeps you grounded?
Jos Anshell 46:13
Well, I’m still doing a lot of what I did. I’m just not running. I’m not responsible for a company or PNLs or people or HR, but I love the business. I mean, I love the idea of who are the consumers, and what’s important to them and and something that happened that I didn’t really expect after I left, I took six months off a good friend of mine who now is running the Howard Hughes project out in what used to be Douglas Ranch. I worked with him at DMB. After I left, he we had coffee, and he gave me a book called “Take Six Months Off.”
Rosaria Cain 47:06
Sounds like good timing.
Jos Anshell 47:08
Yeah, he had done it before. And he said, “Don’t do anything for six months.” And so I didn’t I just I made file folders. That’s the whole story to tell, that I didn’t know how to do any of that. I didn’t know how to do anything, because people did stuff. You know, for a spreadsheet, I would say here, we’ll go down this way and this way. Put the customers across, put the this down bottom. I give it came back as a spreadsheet. All of a sudden, have to do my own spreadsheets like I don’t know how to do that. But what I found is that, I mean, I probably worked with 1000 different companies, from, you know, my brother in law’s plumbing supply house in Indiana, to Nintendo’s, so you know this, as you really get involved with companies, you learn a lot about the company that’s not just marketing or advertising or PR, it’s about the company and how to run a company, and what companies run well and what companies don’t run well, and why. So I named my little LLC, Marketing Forensics, which, as it turns out, was became as a misnomer, because I’m spending as much time on the management, running the business side of management as I am in the marketing. When I first started working with Shasta, I went there to basically evaluate their marketing, and I quickly realized that they had no succession plan. And at the time, it was a 53 year old business, and there were people in it and there were other family members in it, but nobody was really being trained to take over. I remember saying to Skip Ast Sr., who was turning 80, “We got to set up a succession plan here. I mean, what happens if you’re not here?” And he went, “I’m not going anywhere.” I said, “No, no, I know you’re not, but you’re going to be 80,” you know, and he’s they’re very religious people, born again people, and they donate a ton of money to the church. And I said, “That’s what you need to be doing. Let’s write an obituary for you.” “What?” “Well, I don’t think you want to be known for having built 80,000 pools. Look how many 1000s of people you’ve helped. Isn’t that really your legacy? Let’s talk about you as a person and then figure out how to you. Take this company and for the next 60 years?” “Well, that makes some sense.” So that kind of morphed, now, I’m not in the marketing side of the business. I’m in the management side of the business. And a year later, they said, you know, “The only people on the board are here in the company, would you join our board?” The first outside board member, which was really an honor, and now we have two other, three other outside board members, and they’re home builders, Buddy Satterfield from Shea and Lou Smith from K. Hov, and Jim Younger from Younger Brothers, so they’re all in the construction industry, bringing all sorts of different perspectives. So now it’s really morphed into how to this, take this company into the future? It’s still like a marketing, it’s a strategic plan. It’s just not a strategic plan for the marketing, it’s for the overall business.
Rosaria Cain 51:08
Well, final question.
Jos Anshell 51:09
Yeah.
Rosaria Cain 51:10
What about you would surprise people?
Jos Anshell 51:13
What about me would surprise people? My single best innate ability is singing. See, look at your face.
Rosaria Cain 51:29
I had no idea.
Jos Anshell 51:32
See that?
Rosaria Cain 51:33
What type of music?
Jos Anshell 51:36
Hey, I’m a product of the 60s. So I am, you know, I grew up with with rock and roll.
Rosaria Cain 51:44
I mean, can you sing something right now? Just a few bars. Close this out.
Jos Anshell 51:51
Really?
Rosaria Cain 51:51
Yeah, we’re fun here!
Jos Anshell 51:54
[singing] Oh, beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountains majesties, Above the fruited plain, America. America, God shed his grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood, From sea to shining sea.
Rosaria Cain 52:44
Wow, I can’t think of a better way to close this out. Thank you for coming by today.
Jos Anshell 52:50
Thank you. It’s fun!