#157: Pictionary – Followed a Path To Success

The Empire Builders Podcast

Recognizing problems growing a new game and then looking for solutions that have worked in the past. WTG, Robert Angel.

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.

[Tappers Jewelry Ad]

Dave Young:

Welcome back to the Empire Builders podcast. I’m Dave Young, and Stephen Semple is sitting right here with me. Well, we’re recording. We’re virtually sitting directly next to each other. I’m in Austin. He’s in Canada. He’s right there, and he just whispered the name of today’s topic into my ear, and it’s Pictionary. And man, it’s been a long time since I’ve played it, but I have played it. I don’t know the whole story about it, so I’m all ears and I’ve always sucked at it because I couldn’t draw a paper bag to save my life.

Stephen Semple:

I’m with you there.

Dave Young:

And convince you that it was a paper bag.

Stephen Semple:

My challenge is drawing even a straight line.

Dave Young:

Yeah, exactly.

Stephen Semple:

Pictionary is a pretty big deal. In 2001, it was sold to Mattel. At that time, they’re in 60 countries, 45 languages, and just in the United States, 11 versions of the game. And I haven’t looked into what the different versions are, but they have sold a total of 32 million games worldwide.

Dave Young:

Oh, that’s amazing.

Stephen Semple:

That’s a big deal.

Dave Young:

It’s almost like Charades, but you’re drawing. Help me remember, literally, it’s been a long time since I’ve played this.

Stephen Semple:

It is very much Charades on paper, and that was the inspiration to the game. So it started in 1982 in Spokane, Washington. Robbie Angel has a degree in business and he’s working as a waiter and a bunch of his friends would stay in to play games, right? Because they don’t want to go out to spend money. They want to hang out together. And so what would happen is they would start drawing something and people would guess what it was. And again, it was like this whole idea of Charades on paper.

But the problem was what made it slow was they would struggle with a word to come up with. That would be the slowest part of the game. So it’d be like your turn to draw something and it would take you forever to even think about what it is you wanted to draw. So they would start opening the dictionary to look for words randomly to come up with the idea to draw. And they realized this would make a great game. And it led to the name Picture plus Dictionary, Pictionary.

Dave Young:

All right.

Stephen Semple:

And so they started thinking about doing this as a game. And Robbie’s Mom sent him Trivial Pursuit to make him understand how to package a game, because remember how innovative that game was at the time in terms of the packaging. In looking at Trivial Pursuit, he realized the words would become the challenge. And he also looked at Trivial Pursuit and he saw Trivial Pursuit has 6,000 questions, so he probably needs 6,000 words, but he looked at it and said, they’ve made it work with that. So that’s probably the goal. And them, he created four categories.

So the whole idea categories and the number of words came from looking at Trivial Pursuit, and you need to make it fun. So how do you make it fun? It was by creating a time limit. The other problem that he noticed was one team versus the other.

Dave Young:

You already draw poorly. Now do it fast.

Stephen Semple:

I’ll do it fast, but at least we only have to watch you for a short period of time. The other problem that he noticed was when it’s one team versus the other, when the one team is up, it’s boring for the other team. But that’s the reason why they came up with this idea of the steal, right? Where if it’s not solved, the other team could solve it. And that was the all play category, and they wanted to make it look good. So they had this trifold board.

So when they got ready to make the game, an uncle of his lent him $35,000 so he could create a thousand games. So it was June 1st, 1985, and they’re ready to launch. But the printer misquoted the job and the price did not include assembly. All of a sudden they had all this stuff show up and they had to put it all, there’s like 500,000 cards. They had to put all of this together.

So Robbie gets a pizza party to put this whole thing together, did this initial launch to sell to consumers. And he sold a few hundred, and then sales just stopped, and he was really struggling to get out there. So he decided, I’m going to sell this to retailers. And he managed to get an appointment with Nordstrom’s in July of 1985. And Nordstrom’s basically said to him, “We don’t sell games.” Robbie said, that’s exactly why you should do this.

So he made a deal with them. He said, “Look, I’m able to come in and do an in-store demo. I will take back any that are not sold.” So this gets them in the Nordstroms. They’re like, “What the heck?” They start getting some sales through, but it’s not enough. It still hasn’t caught on.

So Robbie decides to do PR. Now again, he’s been copying Trivial Pursuit. Remember Trivial Pursuit, if we go back and listen to Trivial Pursuit, Trivial Pursuit, remember, had an awesome PR strategy.

Dave Young:

They put celebrities in the questions.

Stephen Semple:

So he goes to the same lady who did the PR for Trivial Pursuit, and here’s what she does. She gets him to create a small version with five cards and a pencil, and she gets the small version both onto airplanes and they also mail them out. So in other words, it’s a sample, a little tiny sample of the game. Here’s five questions. Here’s a little pencil. You could scribble this out when you’re sitting on a plane or whatever, right?

Between 1986 and 1999, the game goes crazy. It becomes a best seller, selling 200 million in sales. And again, in 2000, the company has sold to Mattel. I was not able to find exactly the price, but it was north of $20 million that they sold the company to Mattel for.

Here’s the thing I did find interesting about the idea because normally we would say to people, look outside of your industry for inspiration. And what these guys did was look inside the industry. And so for those who want to know more about the Trivial Pursuit story, it’s episode 139.

But what he did copy was an innovator inside the industry. So he looked at it, he looked at it and said, “What did they do? What did they do right?” He also went to the same PR person. Normally you’re much better off doing inspiration outside of your industry, but you know what? He managed to figure out the things they did and to pursue that idea.

Dave Young:

Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.

[Empire Builders Ad]

Dave Young:

Dave, let’s pick up our story of where we left off. And trust me, you haven’t missed a thing. I think it’s an interesting take on, and we’ve talked about business problem topology mapping before where you’re trying to solve a problem. So you look at, it doesn’t have to be in your industry, but you look at problems that have a similar topology, a similar shape and size. You look at the solutions that somebody used to solve that problem and you apply them towards your own problem.

And like you said, typically you do that outside your industry. But I think this is a brilliant way of doing what he did was how do we solve this inside the game world? What do we copy without copying the game? We copy the strategies and techniques that made that game successful.

Stephen Semple:

I just went back and looked it up. PR person that both, they used, Trivial Pursuit used was Linda Pezzano was her name.

Dave Young:

All right.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, but think about that success rate where she’s like two big hits. But the interesting thing is, again, what I admire that they did in PR is a lot of places go, let’s just do PR. We’re going to do a bunch of press releases and whatnot. No, you actually have got to do something that is still interesting because you’re asking for somebody’s time and attention.

And I thought this whole idea of here’s five questions and a pencil and we’re going to distribute this on airplanes would be great because you’re on a plane, you’re bored. What are you going to do? Oh, you get to play this little game with the person sitting next to you.

Dave Young:

It’s an interesting game. It’s definitely an extroverted game. If you think about Myers-Briggs personality types and that you either are introverted or extroverted, and games like Pictionary are very much an extrovert game. You’re drawing in front of people. You don’t mind drawing in front of people, and then other people are shouting things out as you draw. If you’re an introvert, there’s probably nothing more uncomfortable than doing something like creation in front of a live studio audience.

Stephen Semple:

Almost like the drawing version of karaoke in a lot of ways, right?

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

You’re not necessarily very good at it, but it’s still entertaining to the audience.

Dave Young:

I’m thinking there are extroverts that are like, yay, let’s play Pictionary. And introverts go, oh my God, I’d rather just crawl in a hole.

Stephen Semple:

It’s a significant part of the population, but I also liked the whole idea. They were all, again, like Trivial Pursuit, has a very similar origin. Trivial Pursuit, they were playing, remember it was Scrabble. They’re missing Scrabble tiles. They decide to do something different.

These guys were home playing this game, we decided to do the drawing part. The slow part is the words. Let’s use a dictionary. Next thing you know got Pictionary. It is interesting from the standpoint that they had created this own game that they found fun, but needed to find a way to get it out into culture. And both used a PR strategy for getting it out in the culture.

But both used something different in terms of the PR. In the Pictionary case, it was getting people to sample the game through PR. In the Trivial Pursuit, it was getting celebrities to talk about it. So it was really interesting.

Dave Young:

This also relates to the problem topology. As advertising professionals and copywriters, we have a thing that we call random entry.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. I love random entry.

Dave Young:

We also consider that to be like the creative handcuffs. So an exercise that we teach at Wizard Academy is you have the whole room of people. The instruction is write a sentence that, if you were walking through the airport and you overheard it, you’d stop and try to eavesdrop to figure out what the heck they’re actually talking about. So you just write this weird random sentence, and then everybody puts them in the hat and you redistribute them randomly.

So now you have some weird random sentence that I wrote, and I have one that somebody else wrote, and now we have to write an ad for whatever product it is that we’re trying to sell. Our ad has to begin with that sentence, word for word.

What’s beautiful about that, and what’s beautiful about Pictionary is again, if I just said, “Hey, Stephen, just pick a word out of thin air and draw it for me and I’ll see if I can guess it.”

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

You’d spend way too much time trying to figure out what the word is and you’d be stuck forever. That’s almost the problem that people have that aren’t ad writers. When they go to write an ad, they don’t know how to start. That’s a problem that we have as writers of any kind is, I don’t know how to start.

It’s actually a trope in movies and TV shows, right? It’s the writer sitting down and they type out one line of text and pull the sheet of paper out, wad it up, throw it away, and try another approach.

And when you force somebody to be creative by handing them the seed to the creativity, it makes it both interesting for them because now they’re trying to solve that problem. “Oh my God, I’ve been given this word. How do I even begin?”

Well, you will. You’ll have to begin versus I don’t even know where to begin because I don’t even know what word I’m going to draw, and I can’t think of one that I could easily draw. So now I think it’s a beautiful example of this random entry approach that actually makes it fun. And the ads that people write from our random entry-

Stephen Semple:

Fabulous.

Dave Young:

Are always way better than the ads that they just wrote using some other technique that we teach. They’re always, always, always better. And so you’ll be a better artist if you start with a random entry.

Stephen Semple:

Well, and this is the thing they observed. That was what slowed it down. What slowed it down was the figuring out of what it is I’m going to draw. And you’re way better off saying to somebody, here’s the thing, as you’re saying, that random entry style writing. When you’re at home, like the whole dictionary thing when you’re at home, you can use the dictionary as a random writing exercise of, that’s the word I got to start with. Even just saying, this is the word I’ve got to start with. Or go to a book and pull a random sentence out of a book.

Dave Young:

Exactly. I mean, I’ve told people before, that’s a great way to start an ad. Just pick a book and open it to a random page and whatever your finger lands on, that’s the opening line to your ad.

Stephen Semple:

Yes.

Dave Young:

The beautiful thing about that is it works every time.

Stephen Semple:

It really does. It’s amazing.

Dave Young:

Because your brain will figure out how to connect that to whatever it is you’re writing about. Your brain will figure it out as long as you don’t take some stupid shortcut and say, ?And then I woke up from the dream,” and then you start in on some stupid ad.

Stephen Semple:

You actually have to connect it. And so you know what? I’m going to include the ad at the beginning of this. By this point, somebody will have read it. The ad at the beginning of this actually comes from that exercise. It’s Pop Tart. The first line of this ad actually came from a random writing exercise that Nick Torbay did with Roy William, where Kyle said something, Kyle Caldwell, one of our partners said something, and Roy turned to Nick and said, you need to create an ad for that.

And it ended up being into one of our Tapper’s Jewelry ad, and it’s the first line of this ad is random entry challenge from Roy Williams to Nick Torbay. So it’s a great example of how you can turn it into a fantastic ad.

Dave Young:

The other key to this is the time limit.

Stephen Semple:

Yes. And it’s a 60-second ad.

Dave Young:

It’s random entry, and the clock is ticking. And so that creates one more little bit of magic that you don’t understand that’s going on in the back of your mind is that I don’t have time to judge myself. As bad as I know, I’m going to draw. I have to do it quickly, and nobody’s going to judge me because I’m just trying to get people to guess this correctly. Beautiful.

Stephen Semple:

Awesome.

Dave Young:

We should be using Pictionary at Wizard Academy, I think.

Stephen Semple:

There you go. New idea.

Dave Young:

Yeah, a random entry game. Hadn’t thought about it that way. Thank you for sharing this story, Stephen.

Stephen Semple:

Awesome. Thanks, man.

Dave Young:

Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big, fat, juicy five-star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to questions at the empirebuilderspodcast.com.