It Started in His Bedroom at 13

When I asked Ken where it all started, his answer surprised me. "In my bedroom when I was a teenager. I was a nerd, man, like real nerd."

Growing up in New York, all of his family would go to the beach on the weekends. Ken didn't want to go to the beach. The beach was boring. He wanted to sit in his bedroom and make commercials.

He grew up listening to New York radio because his parents listened to it in the car. Their music was terrible. Elvis. It was painful to listen to as a kid. But what he loved about listening to the radio was the magic of the DJs. When they would go to a commercial break, he was fascinated that somebody could say something on the radio and it would convince people to want to buy that thing.

As Ken put it, "I don't know why. Like I said, I'm super nerdy, not a normal kid thing, right? Most kids are out playing tag with their friends or with their matchbox cars or doing whatever. I really got into ads and I thought it was really cool."

He spent his formative years writing ads for fun. Something was definitely wrong with him.

That led to him creating a recording studio in his bedroom. He had a loft bed, and on top of the loft wasn't his bed. He slept underneath it. On top was all of his equipment.

The story behind the recording studio is incredible. When Ken was bar mitzvahed, his uncle came up behind him in the bathroom, slapped him in the face, and slipped an envelope into his inside jacket pocket. Kind of like a mafia thing. He said, "The parents know about the box, the one in the box. This one's for you. Do whatever you want with it."

That envelope had enough funding for Ken to go to Crazy Eddie's and The Wiz, the two big electronic stores in New York at the time, and buy the rest of the equipment he needed to create a full production studio.

At 13 years old, he had reel to reel recorders with editing capabilities, dual cassette decks, turntables, mixers, and microphones. He started writing ads, producing them, creating mixed tapes of ads, and then reverse engineering why they were effective. Not thinking about the economics of it, just purely fascinated by the messaging.

A couple months later, he was at Buddy's Schwinn Bike Shop. Buddy said to him, "Hey Moskowitz, you're pretty good at writing ads. Could you write something for this local paper?"

Ken wrote an ad for the bike shop and that ad worked well. It drove new customers in. The next time Buddy was able to buy an ad, it was in New York Newsday. Ken wrote another ad for him.

His first paid advertising gig was at 13 years old. "It was the coolest thing that I got paid to write words about bikes and they made people come into the store."

He didn't know the mechanism behind it. He didn't understand the psychology behind it. But he had been studying all of these ads. He was not a normal kid. And that was really the start of his advertising journey. It only grew from there.

Working With Coca-Cola and the World's Biggest Brands

The first major brand Ken worked with was Coca-Cola. They had launched their Red Hot Summer Campaign and it wasn't really well thought out. Considering they're a big company with a lot of money, you'd think they would have had it dialed in. It kind of sucked.

Ken wasn't working with them at the time. He was actually a creative director at a radio station. When talking to their marketing team, he said, "Hey, this is the way I would do it and here's why." He repositioned it and they were like, wow, this is really great.

His first real taste of big brand stuff was with Coca-Cola. And it was only because he put himself out there and had no fear of saying your stuff is stupid, this is the way I would do it.

He had no street cred, nor did he have the experience that their marketing team had. But he had an instinct. "Instinct has served me well and has truly, if it wasn't for my instinct, I don't think I would have gotten where I am and would have touched all the products and brands that I have over the decades."

The Power of Emotional Storytelling

I asked Ken what he was doing with his ads that the previous ads weren't.

"My ads always told a story," he explained. And then he shared something that cuts through all the digital marketing noise: "Everyone likes to sell with pipelines and funnels and all of these tactics to get people in the funnel, in the web, whatever. I just like to tell stories that create an emotional connection. If you can touch someone's heart and then their brain, you are able to move them to take action. I don't need a funnel. I don't need a pipeline. I need to create an emotional connection."

All of his messaging, 95% of it, is about emotion. It's about creating connection. It's about telling a story in a way that moves people to action.

He gave me an incredible example. Shortly after he moved from New York to Phoenix, he knew the Phoenix Fire Captain and Fire Chief. Phoenix has more pools per capita than any other state, and there was a huge uptick in childhood drownings.

Ken had an idea. He went to Phoenix Fire and asked for access to the 911 calls from drowning incidents. Those calls are public domain. He got them. And it was gut wrenching listening to those calls.

But that's where he had the light bulb moment. He was going to create a campaign that taps into the raw emotion of what these parents experienced.

The campaign was called Two Seconds is Too Long. It's still running today, decades later. The message was taking your eyes off of kids around water, even for two seconds, is too long.

To get that message drilled into people's skulls, it starts with a simple voiceover: "Two seconds is too long." Then he rolled into the panicked parent on 911 tape screaming, "My child, they can't breathe, they're blue. I found them in the bottom of the pool."

These were gut wrenching, heart wrenching cries from moms and dads. You hear people screaming in the background as they're trying to resuscitate a young kid, a baby. It's brutal. Then there was a little PSA reminder at the end.

These were 30 second long ads. They were painful to listen to.

That was the first time Ken had death threats. People were upset. People were calling news channels, calling TV stations, any radio outlet that was running them. They were angry.

Ken was interviewed by one of the news stations. They asked why did you make these things? "I'm like, because I wanted to create an emotional connection that would get people to do something so kids stop drowning, right? You have to create emotional connection and emotional impact to move the needle."

He had a lot of hate. A lot of people were upset. But everyone who knew the mission and knew his purpose for this supported it. Not one station pulled the messaging. It got even more airtime because of all the hate. It became the lead story on several local news stations because it was so graphic, so dramatic. And it was just audio.

Ken's philosophy on this is clear: "It's the emotion. It's telling a story in a way that people don't forget it. And that's what I love to do with my ads."

Fighting Cancer and Mastering AI

When Ken gave his presentation at the Swarm Mastermind, he started with a story about going through cancer recently. I had to ask him about that.

"It sucked. I would highly recommend not going through any kind of cancer treatment unless you need to."

He had a business that was being impacted by the invention of AI. When AI started to really hit the market in January and February 2023, this business started seeing negative impact. Their monthly recurring revenue was dropping. By March of 2023, they had lost 20% of their top line revenue.

Everyone who was canceling said, "Hey, you guys are amazing, but this AI thing is pretty okay, right?" Pretty okay replaced amazing because the cost differential was enormous.

Ken started to pivot. Gary Vaynerchuk, who he's friends with, told him, "Spanky, you got to pivot. You got to do this now because AI is here to stay."

Then Ken got diagnosed with stage three rectal cancer. "When you get a diagnosis like that, you just stop caring about everything else. The only thing you focus on at that point is surviving."

He went into survival mode. Screw the business, don't care. It was diagnosed as late stage one, early stage two. It was only when they got inside during surgery that they discovered it was stage three. His entire treatment journey and plan changed in the operating room.

He woke up on July 5th, the day of his surgery, thinking 12 weeks from now he'd be back to normal. That wasn't the case. Five weeks after surgery, he started months of chemo, then radiation, then surgeries to reverse all the work they did. It was a full year of his life that he lost.

But that year was critical. As Ken explained, "I decided to do what Julia Roberts did in that movie Sleeping with the Enemy. I decided to become a practitioner of every AI tool I could get my hands on and find out how to kill this thing, how to beat it. Not kill it and stop it, like how to really utilize this thing to make a killing and have this tool become an asset rather than the enemy that destroyed a business."

You always have the opportunity to take a negative position or a positive position. Everyone leans into negativity. Ken leans into positive.

He used that time to his advantage to really become a practitioner. If a new tool came out, he bought it or paid for a monthly subscription. If something changed or went away, he'd just pivot to the next thing. "I'm always pivoting and moving and have throughout my career, throughout my life in the industry. I'm always moving to where things are."

A lot of people get stuck in nostalgia. Remember when life was so good back then? "No, it wasn't. It's great now, right? But you got to lean into what makes it great."

That's what he did. He pivoted, figured out how AI could benefit him, could benefit his businesses across all the businesses, and then started implementing and creating tools to do the work that was the heavy lift.

How to Write Great Copy With AI

I had to ask Ken how to write good copy with AI, since this is one of his strongest skill sets.

"You have to train AI, especially if you have a style. You have to train AI to write like you."

Ken has decades of knowledge and years of advertising. He pulled out one of his Oxford composition notebooks, the black and white notebooks you had as a kid. He has dozens and dozens of these filled with ads, ideas, scripts, and storyboards he's written throughout his career. He still goes old school pen to paper when working through something.

Having all of that, all the ads he's done and produced and worked on and scripted and storied, he was able to give AI a vast amount of information. Here's how I write. Don't do these things. Don't write like this person. Here's what I want you to learn and understand.

His AI tools have a really deep knowledge of how he writes. If he goes into his specific project in Claude, he can tell it to write anything and it will write and sound like it was coming out of his mouth.

Most people when they train an AI, they get lazy. What they do is give it one or two things, like here's a great example of the way I wrote this email. "It's not enough contextual information for the AI to understand your writing style."

Ken also wrote a book called Jab Till It Hurts. He asked Gary Vee for permission on this. Gary's book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook is about give, give, give, ask. How you build your business. Ken's book was Jab Till It Hurts, which talks about how he built a multimillion dollar business following Gary's ideas and principles.

He told the AI, "Here's my book. I want you to take everything from Jab Till It Hurts and understand my writing style."

His advice is clear: "You have to give it a lot of shit. Don't be lazy when you're trying to train your AI. Give it an abundance of information. And that's how you get an AI to do your work the right way."

Using Different AI Tools for Different Purposes

Ken doesn't just use ChatGPT. He uses all different language models for different purposes.

"I find that different tools do a better job at some things and different tools do a better job at others, right?"

ChatGPT is the general practitioner. It's like your primary care doctor. It does a little of this, it can give you a shot, it can do all the things, but it's not a specialist.

Claude is great at writing and code. Ken uses Claude to write. "Claude is still today, and I test other tools regularly, today as of the recording of this podcast, still the strongest writer out there as far as writing tools go."

When he was going through treatment, his team was struggling. Clients would come and say they want a project and want Spanky to work on it. He couldn't. He was going through treatment. His team would try to emulate his style, his voice, and they couldn't.

So Ken started scratching his own itch while going through treatment and built a tool. That tool became more and more robust over time. Now people buy that tool. It's called the 100 Year Copywriting Engine. It literally has his voice, his snarkastic voice. A little snarky, a little sarcastic. It's got the world's best copywriters and is trained on thousands and thousands of ads that have been done since the 1920s.

You can get it at AddZombies.com under the learn tab.

The M&Ms Campaign That Made Everyone Turn Their Heads

I asked Ken about his favorite or top performing ad.

"I like ads that tell stories, but I also like fixing broken messages." Companies come to Ken when a message is broken. That's his area of expertise.

Many years ago, M&Ms launched their custom M&Ms. The little M&Ms you can order for birthdays, weddings, bar mitzvahs. They're called My M&Ms. They were having trouble getting people to understand the value prop.

Everyone was pitching with storyboards. Ken thought, that's so lame. He asked M&Ms for visual assets and created an actual 30 second mockup.

The cool thing was watching their reaction. "It got to a point in the story where everyone in the room went like this." Ken demonstrated. "They all turned their head to the side, their mouths open, and it was like a collective experience because I created an emotion."

The ad tells a love story. From start to finish, a boy and girl meet, date, get engaged, get married, and live happily ever after. It's about sharing your love story with My M&Ms. "In 30 seconds, I told an entire love story through M&Ms. And it was magical."

Emotion Is the Key

I noticed there's a heavy emphasis on emotion throughout Ken's work. There has to be some emotion that sparked whatever the ad is, and that's given through a story or demonstrated or connected through a story.

Ken's favorite emotion to use? Laughter. "People will tell you I'm a laughter first advertiser. If I can make someone laugh, that's a win for me."

He shared an idea he's had for years for an air conditioning ad series: Air conditioning so cold, dot, dot, dot. Picture a couple running back from their morning jog, sweaty. They open the door and as soon as they step inside, they frost over. They ice up.

"Every ad in the advertising space for home service, whether it's pest control or HVAC, plumbing, electrical, it's the same thing. It's the technician at the door, the happy customer greets them, they spray for the bugs, they shake hands. There is the same version of every ad has been created a fucking thousand times. Why not do something different and come up with something fresh?"

Another concept he would roll: someone sitting on the couch on their phone with a Tinder-like app, literally swiping through contractors. The message: you don't have to waste your time swiping through or hooking up with the wrong contractor.

People Love to Buy But Hate to Be Sold To

This reminded me of a quote I've heard: people love to buy, but they hate to be sold to. Ken's approach ties directly into that. You're not doing $45 offer, get it now before it expires. You're touching into something deeper.

Ken has never sold anything to anyone. "All I've done is create an emotion that makes them want the thing that they're looking at."

Why Home Service Businesses Need Branding

At the Swarm Mastermind conference, someone asked Ken a skeptical question. That's all great for billion dollar companies like Nike, but who cares about my pest control company in the area? Don't people just want the service, a good price, and a lot of reviews?

Ken's response was brilliant. He asked the guy if he had his vehicles wrapped. Yes. How much did it cost? Around $55,000 total, about three to five thousand dollars a truck.

"So why didn't you just get a magnet to put on the door?" The guy said he wanted people to see them. "So boy, you do believe in branding then."

Ken does a quick quiz when he speaks. If you had hemorrhoids, what product would you buy? Preparation H. If you had to blow your nose, what would you use? Kleenex. But Kleenex is a brand, not the product. If you had a cut on your finger, what would you wrap around it? Band-Aid, which is a brand of bandage.

"Branding is everything. And when your lead gen pipeline stops working or you turn it off, you want to still have sales. You want to still have at bats. And brand is the thing that keeps you alive when lead gen isn't working or your pipeline's not right."

Brand recognition creates a mark that consumers don't forget. "I dare the pest control company out there to get creative and fun with their advertising and stand out. I want to see the cockroach HOA meeting on the counter. Like that's different. That's going to grab my attention."

When to Start Investing in Brand

I asked Ken when it makes sense to start investing in brand.

"You should always be and it doesn't even matter like how small you are. The first thing that a company does as soon as they have the money is they wrap their vehicle. That's your first investment in brand."

Your shirts, uniforms, all part of brand. If your techs look like slobs wearing their own clothing, somebody in jeans, someone in khakis, someone with a Grateful Dead t-shirt, that doesn't represent your company.

Your message needs to be consistent, clear, and understandable. "You don't need to sell people on a price point. If you want to negotiate your way to the bottom, price point's a great way to do that. If you want to set yourself up as a premium service, it's not about the price, it's about the quality, it's about the experience, it's about the brand."

Ken's Message: Use AI or You're Already Dead

I asked Ken what his message is to the audience.

"If you are not utilizing and learning and becoming a practitioner of the AI tools that are available at your disposal, you are already dead. You literally, somebody unplugged the ventilator, the beeping is going, and you don't even hear that the beeping is slowing down."

Don't resist AI. Figure out how to utilize it to your advantage. The companies that are going to win over the next five years are going to be the ones that have people inside those teams that are utilizing it, learning how to adapt.

"But what it's going to do is it's going to increase your efficiency and your output, and it can become a great creative companion to help move things faster."

Those AI tools he built came out of curiosity. How do I get people to create content like me? How do I make Super Bowl level creative scalable for small businesses?

His final point: "If someone tells you they are an expert in AI, tell them bullshit. None of us are an expert. Not even Sam Altman is an expert in AI. We are all practitioners and we're learning as we go. I discover new things every day."

No one is an expert in AI. We are all learning. You should learn along with everyone else who's touching AI right now.

My Main Takeaway

This conversation with Ken completely changed how I think about advertising and branding. It's not about funnels and tactics. It's about creating emotional connections through stories people don't forget.

Home service businesses especially need to hear this. You're competing on who people remember, trust, and feel connected to. That's branding. And the AI opportunity right now is massive. Ken built tools during cancer treatment that can help small businesses create Super Bowl level ads.

If you're not learning AI, you're already behind. The companies that win will be the ones that figure out how to use these tools to create better, more emotional, more memorable content.

Thanks for reading, and if you found this valuable, make sure to check out the full podcast episode. Ken is an incredible storyteller and hearing him tell these stories in his own voice is even better.

Head over to AdZombies.com/learn to check out Ken's Story Forge tool suite. It's $99 a month and he's always updating it. You can also find Ken on every social platform under Spanky Moskowitz. He's always available and happy to help.