Essay one

The coach who refused to sell himself.

This went out as an email first. The version in the inbox carried the part I have left out here. You can get the next one.

His name was Bobby McGee. A running coach from South Africa, and not a small one – he prepared athletes for six Olympic Games. Online, almost nobody knew he existed.

I came into marketing at exactly the point where the agency I worked at, James Cook Media, was working with him. So this is not my story. It is a story I walked into, and it has decided most of what I have done since.

The agency did what the industry taught. It wrote Bobby a sales video. A good one – structure, hooks, the right words in the right order. Then it sent the script over with a note: Bobby, look into the camera and say this.

He said no

“No. I’m not going to sit there and prostitute myself online in order to make a few sales. I’d rather not make sales than do that.”

I want you to notice what that is, because it is easy to file it as temperament and move on.

It was not stage fright. It was not modesty. Every version of “put yourself out there” anyone had ever shown him looked like look at me, look at my life, look at my car – and he wanted no part of it. So he went on doing what he was good at instead of what he loved.

You have heard this sentence. Maybe from a client. Maybe from yourself. “I’m not that kind of personality.” “I don’t want to be one of those people on LinkedIn.” “My work should speak for itself.” Sometimes it was never even a sentence – just a decision taken a long time ago that the whole business of being visible was not for them.

So the real question was never how do we make Bobby comfortable selling himself.

The question was what to point the camera at

Ask Bobby to explain why he is a great coach and he freezes. That is the exact thing he refused to do.

Ask Bobby about an athlete he worked with last month and he disappears into it. The shoulders drop. The eyes change. The hands start moving. Twenty minutes later you have something no copywriter on earth would have written.

So that is what we did. We stopped writing and started recording. And we recorded long – because the first ten minutes of any interview is a person performing the version of themselves they want to be seen as. Somewhere in the middle they forget the camera is there. Everything you will ever actually use arrives after that moment. Amateurs film ten minutes and get a performance. We filmed for hours and got the truth.

The best thing that came out of it was a film about Bobby. There is a moment in it where he says – again, his words, not ours:

“Every time an athlete is in front of me, it’s the only person on the planet at that period of time.”

That sentence was the entire sale.

We would never have written it. And to be clear about the year we are in: AI would not have written it either. It could not. It was not anywhere to be found – not on his website, not in his bio, not in his head as a sentence. It came into existence in the friction of being asked a question, and if the camera had not been running it would have evaporated.

Then we tested it against the professional version

Same page. Same traffic. Two videos.

The film ran seventeen minutes and twenty-six seconds. Everyone knew that was wrong. Nobody watches seventeen minutes.

The cut-down trailer ran two minutes and six seconds. Hooks in the first five seconds. Everything the industry said was correct.

The long one converted about two and a half times better.

And it was not a one-off. We ran into this again and again – with Bobby, with other clients, and on ourselves.

The number, and the part where I am boring instead of impressive

That film did somewhere around a quarter of a million dollars in six months. For a running course at two hundred and ninety-seven dollars. For a man who refused – refused – to sell himself.

Now the honest accounting, because I would rather be boring than impressive.

This was a long time ago. A different internet, a different cost of advertising. And it went first to an email list of roughly four thousand people who already knew who Bobby was. It was not a cold audience discovering a stranger.

The number has aged. The mechanism has not aged a day – and I would argue it has got more valuable, not less, for a reason that has nothing to do with running coaches.

When a machine can produce a polished two-minute video for anyone in about four minutes, polish stops being evidence of anything. What Bobby had is the only input left that cannot be synthesised: a specific person, saying a specific true thing, that did not exist in written form anywhere until someone asked him a question and let the tape run.

The raw material is the scarce part now. Not the production.