He may be the most famous and controversial advertising person in China, a ceiling in the field of marketing planning. A name that everyone who has been exposed to marketing will hear - Ye Maozhong.

The legendary "Mad Men" died of illness in Shanghai on January 13, 2022, at the age of 54... The death of a superstar marks the end of an era. It is sad and regretful...

Looking back on Ye Maozhong’s life, he left us with too many valuable marketing theories and classic cases. Many people may not have heard of him, but it is impossible that they have not read these works↓↓↓

Arctic Velvet "Everyone on earth knows it!"

Hengyuanxiang's "Hengyuanxiang, Sheep, Sheep, Sheep"

Fu Yanjie's "Wash for Health"

Qipai Men's clothing, let the ruthless Jet Li say "Men should be ruthless to themselves!"

Two brainwashing advertisements during the 2018 World Cup:

Why why why "Before traveling "Go to the hornet's nest first"

Liu Haoran repeatedly asked you if you know "If you have any questions, ask me on Zhihu"

These familiar and breathtaking advertising slogans were all written by Ye Maozhong.

They all have a strong earthy smell and are demonic in nature, and when read in front of a large audience, there is a sense of confusion and shame (please wear a helmet and try it if you don’t believe me). The haunted area that has dominated a certain dilapidated station for many years is an existence that many Chinese people still cannot forget after many years.

This has always made Ye Maozhong’s advertising career questionable. In the words of Teacher Banfo, a kowtow enthusiast:

Now that he has passed away, the floods can no longer disturb Ye Maozhong. gentlemen. I am not qualified to evaluate the master, but what I want to share with you is: Ye Maozhong’s legendary life has given us important inspirations in life and work.

To a large extent, a person's destiny depends on his character, and character depends on his childhood experience.

In 1968, Ye Maozhong was born in a fishing village in northern Jiangsu. Because he was born very strong, his mother named him Ye Shijin. After he became an adult, he changed his name to Ye Maozhong.

Childhood life was harsh and harsh. His parents are fishermen, and Ye Shijin grew up on the boat. My father often went to sea for several months without returning, and my mother was frail and sick and often hospitalized. There was even a time when his parents were away for 10 days, and the only food on the ship was a pumpkin. He and his sister had to rely on this pumpkin for a week, so the siblings cut the pumpkin into thin slices and added in the fish they occasionally caught, and they survived like this Came down.

By the time he was in elementary school, Ye Maozhong had developed martial arts and courage, and was a well-known "carrier" in school. It is said that he never carried a schoolbag by himself when he went to school, and was always carried by his younger brothers. There is also a child who instinctively kneels down and calls him daddy as soon as he sees him...

This was later mentioned in the book "Advertising Heroes" by Ye Maozhong:

Generally, little boys fight. , is nothing more than fear of being bullied and wanting to bully others, but Ye Maozhong grew up in such an environment, but he gradually understood the rules of the game in the real world. The ruthlessness and survival wisdom developed through his childhood experience paved the way for his future success.

22 years old is the age when I graduate from college. I am motivated and confused at the same time.

Ye Maozhong, the world-famous advertising madman, actually first entered the advertising industry at the age of 22.

It was 1989. At that time, Ye Maozhong was still working at Taizhou TV Station. Since there were not so many people in the station, he wanted to be used as a donkey of the production team, with artists, reporters, and cameramen all shouldering the responsibility.

At this time, he didn't have many ideas. He was just waiting to work in a TV station and be allocated a house. He would have a solid job in this life, marry a wife, have children, retire, and live a stable life.

However, fate likes to throw a lot of chili peppers into the noodles in clear soup.

Ye Maozhong, who grew up on a rickety boat, could not stand very steadily on the boat, but looked like he was about to fall down on the stable ground because he was always shaking his body subconsciously. Adapt to water fluctuations.

Judging from his later deeds, he has indeed been living in the fluctuations of the times, and his life is destined to have nothing to do with stability.

At that time, Taizhou TV station had an advertising department, and the conditions were so poor that they could only use cameras to shoot simple advertisements.

One day, they received a call from Chunlan Group, the largest air conditioner brand in China. The other party felt that traditional TV commercials were not up to par and wanted Taizhou TV to help shoot a film commercial.

After receiving the demand, the entire advertising department was stunned. Chunlan Group is a big investor in TV stations. This "dad" can't afford to offend him and can't refuse. But the key is that no one can film this stuff.

After Ye Maozhong understood the situation, he hesitated for a few seconds and then said: "I can shoot, just film, small scenes."

Can he really do it?

Know how to use a hammer.

But that’s not important. You have to agree first. Because Ye Maozhong thought that after this film was shot, it would be broadcast on CCTV. For him, an ordinary employee of a local TV station, it was a rare opportunity that he could not miss.

Even if you mess up, you will be fired at most, so what else can you lose? If you do something you don’t understand, won’t you understand it?

In this way, Ye Maozhong took over this task. Just when I was about to show off my talents, I realized that this thing is so professional! It is as difficult as delivering a sow, and it is impossible to learn and sell now. It is really a dilemma.

This is how Keren’s potential is forced out. Ye Maozhong calmed down and studied carefully, and found that the only thing he could do was to be a director, and other jobs must be done by professionals. I immediately left for Shanghai and found a fellow villager who worked in a film studio to help me.

Ye Maozhong used all his resources and strength to finally complete this task with great difficulty and beauty.

After this advertisement was released, it aroused enthusiastic response from the society and was broadcast on CCTV for 5 years. Chunlan Group paid Ye Maozhong 1,300 yuan with satisfaction, which was equivalent to more than a year's salary at the time.

At that time, Ye Maozhong knew nothing about the advertising industry, and it was not until many years later that he used the "conflict" theory he created to explain the success of Chunlan advertising at that time. Someone asked him why he dared to accept advertisements from such a big company. Ye Maozhong said:

After this battle, Ye Maozhong felt the connection between creativity and money. He gradually felt that he could not make a name for himself on the TV station, so he decided to switch to TV. Tao, join the more lucrative advertising industry.

Ignorance and ability to execute are the core factors for young people to break into the world.

Ye Maozhong, who got into advertising, left Taizhou and went to Shanghai to develop. He came to a large advertising company at the time (Nobel Advertising) as an art designer. The title sounded nice, but in fact he was doing Still working as an art artist.

At this time, he was anxious.

Not long ago, Ye Maozhong gave up the iron job and welfare housing in the TV station and moved to a big city with an advertising dream. Now he is working in a private company as a graphic designer. The salary was not high and the pressure to survive was high. Ye Maozhong planned to change his job to become an advertising salesperson with commission, but found that he had no business resources in the advertising circle and could not receive any advertisements! If we don’t do something, we may have to draw pictures like this for the rest of our lives!

Looking at the entire office, there are three main ways for colleagues to become salesmen:

This is not the best solution for Ye Maozhong, who has just entered the industry and has no resources.

What to do?

Before the boat reached the bridge, Ye Maozhong forced it to straighten. He saw the opportunity and opened up a fourth way to show off:

Specifically, he first wrote a professional advertising book to show off his fans, and then waited for fans to actively visit and convert them into customers for monetization .

This style of play was too avant-garde in the 1990s. During that time, Ye Maozhong went to the library day and night to study on his own, and read more than 100 books on advertising and marketing in one year. By 1996, his debut novel "Notes of an Advertiser" was released!

The book sold out as soon as it was published, and the publisher had to reprint it several times.

At this time, Ye Maozhong showed off another nerve-wracking trick - no royalties, just asking for his phone number to be left in the book.

Since then, Ye Maozhong's name has gradually spread throughout China. More and more people have read his books and followed the phone number on the back cover to find him for advertising planning.

From the beginning to the end, Ye Maozhong’s purpose in publishing the book was not royalties (but the book is very popular, which is the most irritating ヽ(｀Д?)?). What he wanted was only dissemination, and the high-net-worth private equity brought by the dissemination. domain client.

Later, after Ye Maozhong became famous, he bought advertising space everywhere and asked people to congratulate him on his new book "Conflict". In fact, he was repeating the same trick.

American psychologist Carol Dweck mentioned in his book "Lifelong Growth" that the key to success lies in two modes of thinking:

Ye Maozhong has no Questions have a growth mindset.

Some people often feel that they are not good at academics or have no experience and dare not accept challenges, or they want to wait until they are perfectly prepared before taking action. In fact, Ye Maozhong in the 1990s was just an artist at Taizhou TV Station not long ago. He had no basis for transformation and had never filmed a few commercials.

At that time, there were countless advertising people in China who were more senior and qualified to write books than Ye Maozhong, but they felt that writing a book and biography was a very serious matter, and they were too embarrassed to write it or dared to write it.

In this regard, Ye Maozhong called himself an "advertising duck" in "Advertiser's Notes", which means:

Ye Maozhong, who did not have any business resources, was forced to rush out. A book.

When he first started his career in the early years, Ye Maozhong once took over a job that no one else was willing to do - to help Procter & Gamble with rural promotion. During this period, he visited countless villages and concluded a set of theories:

China has 300 cities, 2,860 counties, more than 40,000 towns, and 660,000 villages. How many counties and villages have those people who write ideas in the office visited? When I see consumer groups, they are all fresh faces in front of me. An excellent advertising person is the same as an excellent actor. He looks like whoever he plays, but he doesn't look like himself. The most powerful thing about advertising is that even if you don’t like the ads you create, the target audience will like them. This is the most powerful thing.

This is almost the underlying mentality of Ye Maozhong's advertising career, and it coincides with the most important "user thinking" of the Internet. In terms of expansion, there are three principles:

Speaking in human terms The advantage is that it makes consumers feel cordial and simple, while there is no professionalism in safety advertising. The only criterion for success is to sell the product.

For example, when planning the advertisement of Hailan House, Ye Maozhong discovered that most men do not like shopping, but they need to dress decently. After discovering this conflict, the idea of ??"Shopping at Hailan twice a year" was born. Home! Hailan Home, Men’s Wardrobe!”

In 2003, two farmers in Dongguan, Guangdong approached Ye Maozhong and hoped that Ye Maozhong would make their restaurant “Double Seeds” a dominant brand of Chinese fast food. . Since it is positioned as the overlord of fast food, Ye Maozhong has set its sights on Golden Arches and KFC. Although both of them are very popular, consumers think that foreign fast food is unhealthy and fried food can make people gain weight easily.

Therefore, Ye Maozhong made full use of this conflict and argued that "steaming is better for nutrition". He suggested that Double Seeds cut off its fried product line and rename "Double Seeds" to "Zhen Kung Fu" and change its trademark. He became a kung fu master wearing yellow tights and looked like Bruce Lee. In the second year, the number of direct-operated stores of Zhen Kung Fu exceeded 100.

By the way, Ye Maozhong has had a Red Army revolutionary complex since he was a child. His background is similar to that of his idol Cui Jian. He himself is also a red five-star hat addict.

This is another symbol he created: For marketing planning, look to Ye Maozhong. Please look for this man with the red star hat.

In terms of speaking human language, Cui Jian has a lyric:

Ye Maozhong believes that this is speaking human language that everyone can understand, so Cui Jian became the only famous person in that era. Someone who can hold a concert for thousands of people.

△Ye Maozhong’s idol Cui Jian

Tracing back to the origin, the obvious red mark of a man born in the 1960s on Ye Maozhong’s body comes from another great man he admired throughout his life - Mao Zedong. Legend has it that when he was writing "Notes of an Advertising Man", when he got tired, he would take out "Bloody in Jinggangshan" and read a few pages. He would be full of blood in an instant and continue to work until dawn! There are 400 to 500 books about Mao Zedong in his home.

Mao Zedong has a famous saying:

Shopping malls are like battlefields, and advertising is also not about elegant dinners, chess, calligraphy and painting.

Now if we go back to the earthy case at the beginning and the evaluation of the half-Buddha Immortal, we can understand why Ye Maozhong is rejected by the mainstream advertising circle.

Because he not only had a profound insight into human nature, but also said it too bluntly, plucking all the feathers cherished by the literati.

Writings that convey truth, and good advertisements that should inspire rather than brainwash, are all bullshit here in Ye Maozhong. How to do it effectively!

You have collected millions of advertising fees from your clients and used them to realize your cultural vision. You are being idealistic, but your clients’ money has been burned. Wouldn’t it hurt your conscience to hold this money? ?

Whoever you serve as a soldier and whose food you eat, you must eliminate disasters and solve problems for whomever you want. Since the advertising agency is supported by the client's budget, then be a good swordsman in the hands of the client.

If you show your sword, you will see blood sealing your throat. Go to the market and fight fiercely, and come see you with your head up.

While countless creative people are still working overtime and staying up late, trying to come up with creative ideas but getting rejected, Ye Maozhong has already sat firmly in his 2,000-square-meter super studio in Shanghai, confidently stating "no pitching, no bargaining, no searching." By following the three principles of "Customer", you can sell millions of advertisements with just a few words.

The Japanese god of management, Kazuo Inamori, once said: "There are gods at the scene."

If you don't put down your body and go to the scene in person, gods will not be able to help you. Many people despise soil, but few would refuse to pick up gold from the soil. The real good opportunities are not in the office buildings where everyone wears neat suits, or in the exquisite PPT in the conference room, but in the dirtiest and messiest soil.

At the age of 25, Ye Maozhong was struggling with a question: should he stay at Taizhou TV Station or leave the advertising industry?

So he wrote an autobiographical novel called "Resolution" to sort out his true inner thoughts. The protagonist in the book is himself.

In the end, he wrote himself to death in the book. When I finished writing, I firmly decided to leave Taizhou TV Station.

The dead protagonist is reborn in reality.

At that time, he did not know how the great waves of the times would rise and fall.

Little did he know that he would become China’s Mad Men, and that hundreds of companies and brands would soon rise and fall in his hands.

The river of destiny is rushing, but it seems like such an ordinary day.

Now more than 20 years have passed, Mr. Ye no longer has to endure the torture of illness, and he no longer hears the disputes about right and wrong.

He closed his eyes forever, but he was always bright like a beacon, illuminating the way forward for every lonely, confused and anxious young man.

Ye Maozhong, have a good journey!