Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

We settle for sex when we cannot find love.Likewise, we settle for the excitement of energy – adrenaline – when we cannot find oxytocin – that quiet but satisfying excitement of knowing we belong.Adrenaline and oxytocin are the neurotransmitters that make us feel our most important feelings.POW! The release of adrenaline is easy to trigger. But it takes subtlety to gently release oxytocin.SPOILER ALERT: Yes, we’re talking about advertising and marketing. We’re talking about selling. We’re talking about building long-term relationships with our friends, our clients, and our customers.The ancient Greeks had 6 words for love.Three of them – eros, philia, and agape, were used in the original Greek text of the New Testament:Eros is erotic love. Adrenaline excitement.Philia is friendship. That oxytocin-based feeling of connectedness.Agape is sacrificial love. An oxytocin bond so deep that you will take a bullet for your partner.The following 3 words for love are not found in the Bible, but they may prove to be of use to us nonetheless:Ludus is playful love. Banter and repartee. Teasing. Dancing. Ludus is that interesting blend of adrenaline and oxytocin we see in two puppies rolling and tumbling as they play-fight. Ludus is ludicrous. Ridiculous. Restorative.Philautia is self-love. It is confidence, self-connectedness, being comfortable in your own skin. Those of you that have been to Wizard Academy have heard me say, “Much of what we buy is purchased to remind ourselves – and announce to the world around us – who we are.” This identity reinforcement – “self belonging” – is oxytocin-based, not adrenalin-based. Philautia is a good thing, but too much of this good thing will make you a narcissist.Pragma is longstanding love. It is the deep understanding that develops between long-married couples. You might think of it as oxytocin that has been aged like fine wine. Brand loyalists have pragma for the brands they promote.Did you notice that only 2 of the 6 kinds of love – eros and ludus – involve adrenaline?Eros in advertising is using a girl in a bikini to sell auto parts. Eros in advertising is a billboard showing pretty girls in tight tops serving food in a place called “Hooters.”I like to believe I’m above doing those sorts of things in ads.(I’m probably not, but I like to believe I am.)I like to believe you’re above doing those sorts of things, too.But I’m definitely not above using ludus, playful love, banter and repartee in advertising. In fact, I’m wildly in favor of it, as are most of the people on earth, if popular movies and TV shows are any indication.Have you noticed that logic is not a driver in any of the 6 kinds of love?Wow. That’s scary.There is something in each of us that desperately needs to believe we are creatures of logic, and that our most important decisions are based on reason, after careful consideration of the facts.Unfortunately, this has been medically proven not to be the case. In fact, 100% of all decisions require an emotional component.Without emotion, there can be no decision.1Without surprise, there can be no delight.Without you, there can be no Wizard Academy.Come and see us when you can.Roy H. Williams

Wizard Academy began with an itch and an image.I got the itch in Tulsa in 1978 when I was 20 years old.I saw the image online in 1994 when I was 36.The itch was to help little businesses succeed.The image was of a boy sitting beneath the stars with an open book in his lap. The crenels and merlons in the battlements beyond him suggested that he was sitting on the top of a castle tower.Looking at that cartoon image on my computer screen, I knew I was going to build that tower.I know this makes me sound crazy, but there have been a handful of moments in my life when I quietly but suddenly knew what was going to happen. I’m not talking about premonitions or visions or dreams or hopes or wishes. I’m not talking about goals or goal-setting. I’m talking about knowing something as surely as if it had already happened.Did I mention that I know this makes me sound crazy?I was 13 when I saw a photograph of Pennie Compton and knew that I was going to marry her. The two of us had never met. A few months earlier, I had been flipping through a 1963 Reader’s Digest atlas of the world when I noticed a city – Austin – in the center of Texas. I remember raising an eyebrow when I suddenly knew I would move there someday. The sequence of events that would cause these things to happen remained an absolute mystery to me. But the outcome was never in question.So I knew I was going to build that tower. But I had no idea why.My 1978 itch to help small businesses grow led to a string of remarkable successes. By 1992 I was traveling 40 weeks a year teaching ever-larger groups of business owners how to lift themselves to higher levels of success.I hated it.Dorothy was right, “There’s no place like home.” I’ve suffered from separation anxiety throughout my life. Travel, for me, is “the little death.”“Honey,” said Pennie in 1993, “let the people who want your help come to Austin. Schedule a monthly class in our conference room and if someone wants to come to it, they can come.”When we outgrew that conference room we began to rent the ballrooms of luxury hotels. By the time we paid for those rooms and rented the projection equipment and bought the coffee at $60 a pot and fed lunch to all our guests, we were spending about $20,000 per event to host these classes.Did I mention that we weren’t charging anyone to attend the classes, and that we had no capacity to serve additional clients?So we built a new headquarters building for our marketing business with a large, open room on the second floor that we could use as a classroom. That worked for about 2 years.Then we built a classroom building next to the main office building. That bought us an extra 4 years.Then, in 2004, Pennie said, “Honey, I found some land we should buy.”“Why do we want to buy some land?”“We’ll build some stuff for ourselves on one half of it, and then donate the other half to Wizard Academy and let the school become whatever it wants to become.”When she showed me the land, I smiled. There, on the top of that majestic plateau was the tower I had seen 10 years earlier. It wasn’t physically there, of course, but I knew that someday it would be.If you have a crazy image in your mind of a possible future, an inexplicable guiding star that encourages you in the dark moments and lights your way one step at a time, never forget that you have a tribe, and they’ve built a fascinating place for you to come when you need guidance or instruction or fellowship or encouragement.Do you have an idea? An itch? A hunger?Do you see something that no one else can see?Are you willing to leave a trail of sweat and tears and dollars behind you as you struggle to make it real?Welcome to Wizard Academy.You, my friend, are exactly our brand of crazy.Let the adventure begin.Roy H. Williams

2018 is looking to be a good year for small business.My personal definition of “a small business” is an owner-operator doing between $1M and $75M a year. I do not pretend to know the trends outside this group.The following are the small business trends that seem to be emerging in 2018:1: Small businesses are falling out of love with social media and with SEO (Search Engine Optimization.)2: Broadcast Radio and Broadcast Television are regaining their previous stature within ad budgets due to the excellent values available at this time.3: Business owners are beginning to learn the power of having a memorable personality. (The typical company spokesperson is “polished and professional.” Which is just another way of saying “bland, vanilla-neutral. Unremarkable. Interchangeable. Easy to ignore.” Criticism is the price of personality. Which is why so few company spokespersons have any.)Brad and Sarah Casebier used the power of personality to grow their tiny little company in Austin, Texas to astonishing levels of success. You can hear the ad they currently have on the radio on the first page of today’s rabbit hole.4: Experiments with ads in online radio (Pandora, etc.) have typically been disappointments and word is spreading quickly.5: Google is actively blocking all attempts by SEO specialists to “game” a client’s ranking on Google.6: The most savvy online marketing people are openly advocating mass media as the most efficient way to drive “direct navigation” to a website. (Direct Navigation is currently the single, most important criteria used by Google to determine the search engine ranking of your website. Number two is Time on Site. Number three is Pages Per Session. That being said, there are at least 14 other, smaller criteria considered by Google, but with each one having a decreasing degree of importance.)7: Sensing the dying momentum for their services, SEO consultants are beginning to push harder than ever in their search for new clients.8: Recognizing the importance of aligning all their channels of customer communication, business owners are becoming adamant that their online marketing contain the words and phrases [brandable chunks] that have been popularized through their mass media ads.9: Extremely savvy business owners are taking this concept of “channel alignment” to its ultimate end: ongoing agreement, alignment and reinforcement of mass media messaging throughout all their:A. online efforts,B. direct mail, including invoicingC. email,D. outbound calls,E. conversations of Customer Service Representatives with inbound callersF. weekly orientation and training of salespeopleG. weekly orientation and training of all other employees who might interact with the public on behalf of the company.Let me say this as plainly as I can. The smartest and most successful small business owners are orchestrating and aligning all these previously “siloed” departments into a single, concerted voice.And it’s about time.Roy H. Williams

I am, by profession, an ad writer. I tell stories about people and products and services.You do, too.But because I get paid for it, I spend a lot of time considering – and measuring ­– the impact of stories.Some of the stories I’ve told have made people an enormous amount of money.But the most important stories I tell, by far, are the stories I tell about myself, to myself. Those stories are the source of my identity and the foundation of my purpose in life.But we’ve talked enough about me.I see something good in you and I’m calling it out.Is it okay for me to do that?Let us stare together into the eyes of the truth:Whether good or bad, your current circumstances are temporary.Success is temporary.Failure is temporary.Your future depends on your choices.Your choices depend on what you believe.What you believe is not determined by what you see and hear, but by how you interpret what you see and hear.How you interpret what you see and hear is determined by the stories you tell yourself, about yourself.Who do you believe yourself to be?What do you believe about this world we live in?What does the future hold?Your mood, your attitude and what happens to you next will be greatly impacted by your answers to those questions.“If you want your baby to die with a name, you need to pick one now.”The newborn had inhaled meconium during birth, the most the doctors had ever seen. His lungs were 95% full of it. The father and the baby rode with lights and sirens to Dell Children’s Hospital 30 minutes away, with the grandmother riding the back bumper.The doctors at Dell looked at the x-rays and slowly shook their heads in disappointment.The grandmother stayed with the newborn while the father went back to see his wife.The mother was puzzled when the nurse showed her the baby’s birth certificate. She and her husband had been torn between 2 names for their new son and had agreed to choose the name after they met him.The husband walked into the room.She said, “I thought we agreed to talk about it before we chose the name.”“Honey, Lincoln died. But Gideon overcame impossible odds. When they asked me his name, I said: ‘This boy isn’t Lincoln. This boy is Gideon.’”When the specialist at Dell met with the parents the following day, he was holding two sets of x-rays. Holding up a film in his left hand, he said, “I have no explanation for it, but this baby…” Then he lowered that film as he raised the one in his right, “isn’t this baby.”Gideon will be eight years old on March 15 and he suffers no after-effects at all.You may believe that what happened was going to happen anyway, and that belief in the power of a name is superstitious nonsense. That would be the logical, scientific belief, to be sure.But do you really believe that beliefs have no power?Beliefs are what separate Democrats from Republicans, Hindus from Muslims, stock market Bulls from stock market Bears, and scientists from storytellers.Your beliefs are what make you who you are.And your beliefs are determinedby the stories you tell yourselfabout yourself.You are not responsible for the beliefs of others.You are responsible only for your own.During his time at Walden pond, Henry David Thoreau observed, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” And I agree with him.I also agree with Jack Kerouac. “But why think about that when all the golden land’s ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see?”Did you experience 5 years of life during the past 5 years?Or did you experience 1 year of life 5 times?Don’t let 2018 be the 6th straight year of 1 years’ experience.Do something new.Tell yourself a different storyabout yourself.And believe it.Roy H. Williams

A pleasant surprise is the beginning of delight.You surprise and delight your family by listening to them.You surprise and delight your friends by being interested in what they say.You surprise and delight your customers by giving them your full attention.That’s why everyone likes you.Ray Bard is the ringmaster of untamed quotes, captured in the wild. Crazy quotes you’ve never heard before; frightful, delightful, insightful. One of my recent favorites is by Lisa Kirk,“A gossip is one who talks to you about others. A bore is one who talks to you about himself. And a brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself.”Lisa Kirk’s observation applies to ad writers and online content writers as well.A gossip trashes competitors.A bore talks about their company and their products.A brilliant writer talks about how they hope to improve some part of your world.That’s you in 2018, improving some part of everyone’s world.2018 is going to be wonderful for you, because you have the courage, confidence and compassion to make every person you encounter a little happier.Even when they don’t deserve it.Your attitude springs from your gratitude, like water gushing up from an artesian well. You are thankful for all the good in your life. You find interesting ways to celebrate the ordinary.Lunch with a friend.Making a new co-worker feel welcome.Remembering others by their best moments.You have chosen to be grateful because gratitude makes every weight feel lighter.Gratitude drives away depression, just as light drives away the darkness.That’s you in 2018: a beam of light! Making others feel special by listening to them, being grateful for all the good in your life, finding ways to celebrate the ordinary.You’re really lucky to be you.I’m glad I know you.Roy H. Williams

Indy Beagle brought me an electric fan and a hammer.The fan is to blow away the smoke.The hammer is to shatter the mirrors.You hear a lot of talk these days about transparency and engagement and the Zero Moment of Truth.My friend Dewey Jenkins says the most dangerous statement a stock broker can make is, “But this time it’s different.” Dewey has been around long enough to know that ideas and concepts don’t really change so much as they get repackaged and renamed.A number of marketing’s oldest ideas are getting repackaged and renamed. Among these new names are Transparency, Engagement, and the Zero Moment of Truth.What is Transparency?One clothing store says,“We have the biggest selection, the highest quality, the best service and the lowest prices.”Yawn.Another clothing store says,“Sure, we’re more expensive. But looking good costs money. How good do you want to look?”Which clothing store do you believe?The more expensive clothing store admitted the downside and won your admiration and your trust.Transparency = They’re not going to believe the upside until you admit the downside.Do you have the humility and the courage to let the public see you real? Few companies do.None of this is new.Winning a customer’s attention is easy.Hanging on to it is called “engagement.”What percentage of your selling opportunities become sales?This used to be called your close rate.Now it’s called conversion.Yesterday’s loss leader is today’s tripwire.Use the wrong word and you’re a dinosaur.None of this really bothers me much.The thing that makes me look at the ground, shake my head and sigh is the dangerous myth of the Zero Moment of Truth. But then again, Google is the new Yellow Pages, so it shouldn’t surprise us that they’ve repackaged and renamed the old Yellow Pages scare tactic.The fundamental premise of the Zero Moment of Truth is that the customer is going to go online when they’re ready to purchase what you sell.I have no argument with that.But the dangerous, underlying assumption is that all contenders are equal during the Zero Moment of Truth. But that simply isn’t true.The company most likely to get the click, the call, and the sale is the company the customer has heard of and has good feelings about.The tortoise patiently wins the hearts of the people long before the race is begun. He says he’s “bonding with tomorrow’s customers.”“Stupid tortoise,” says the rabbit, “he still believes in branding.”Have you heard how that race turned out? Take a look. I dare you.“Knowledge is power” is another dangerous myth.It doesn’t matter what you know.What matters is what you do with what you know.So what are you going to do?Roy H. Williams

Fifty years ago, an 18-year old songwriter named Laura Nyro asked, “Can you surry? Can you picnic?”Laura Nyro didn’t tell us HOW to surry. She just asked if we could do it. Then she instructed us to,“Surry down to the stoned soul picnic. There’ll be lots of time and wine, red-yellow honey, sassafras and moonshine. And from the sky come the Lord and the lightning.”What? What did you say would come from the sky?And “surry” by the way, is a verb that Laura Nyro admitted she made up.Laura’s Stoned Soul Picnic became a platinum record for The Fifth Dimension, selling more than a million copies.Do you have the courage to write that way?“Eli’s comin’. Hide your heart, girl. Eli’s comin’. Better walk-walk. But you’ll never get away from the burnin’ heartache. I walked to Apollo by the bay.”In ancient times, the temple of Apollo by the bay in Naples was believed to be one of the entrances to the Underworld. So maybe Laura Nyro was saying, “I walked to the edge of death tryin’ escape the burnin’ heartache.” But then again, maybe she meant something else entirely. She never bothered to say.Do you have the courage to write ads that way?“Yes, but why would I want to?”“Because most ad writing is painfully predictable and coldly colorless. It lacks rhythm and bounce. It lacks laughter and light. And that’s why people ignore it.”“I’m not scared of dying and I don’t really care. If it’s peace you find in dying ­– when dying time is here – just bundle up my coffin, ‘cause I hear that it’s cold way down there. Yeah, crazy cold way down there. My troubles are many, they’re as deep as a well. I can swear there ain’t no heaven, but I pray there ain’t no hell.”Written when she was 17, Laura Nyro’s And When I Die sold more than 4 million copies and was certified quadruple platinum. It also won a Grammy for Blood, Sweat and Tears in 1970. The rhythm and bounce of that song were remarkable. [I’ve gathered all these songs for you in the rabbit hole – Indy Beagle]Do you have the courage to write website copy with rhythm and bounce?Believe it or not, it was a Laura Nyro song that made Barbra Streisand a household word. Laura’ s Stoney End (1971) was Barbra’s biggest song for 5 years, until she recorded Evergreen in 1976.“I was born from love and my poor mother worked the mines. I was raised on the Good Book Jesus till I read between the lines. Now I don’t believe I want to see the morning. I never wanted to go down the stoney end. Mama let me start all over. Cradle me, Mama, cradle me again. I can still remember him with love light in his eyes. But the light flickered out and parted as the sun began to rise. Now I don’t believe I want to see the morning.”And just to show us the breadth of her diversity, Laura Nyro wrote Wedding Bell Blues.“Bill, I love you so. I always will. I look at you and see the passion eyes of May. But am I ever gonna see my wedding day? I was on your side, Bill, when you were losing. I was the one came runnin’ when you were lonely. In your voice I hear a choir of carousels. But am I ever gonna hear my wedding bells?”Hang on a second. What does “a choir of carousels” sound like?Wedding Bell Blues rocketed to #1 on the charts and stayed there for 15 weeks.Do you have the courage to engage the imagination and raise eyebrows?If you do, you’ll elevate attention, increase time on site, time spent listening, and ultimately conversion and profitability.Do I have your attention now?The reason most ad writers don’t have the courage to include made-up words and weird phrases in their ads is because every time they’ve done it in the past, a prune-faced martinet weaned on a pickle rapped them on the knuckles with a ruler, rolled his eyes and said, “You’re not doing it right.”Frightened, uptight martinets would rather be “safe and correct” than successful.AElton John credits Laura Nyro with giving him the courage to cut loose, engage the imagination and raise eyebrows. In a 2008 interview, Sir Elton spoke of the influence Laura Nyro had on his songwriting. “I idolized her,” he said. “The soul, the passion ­– just the out-and-out audacity… was like nothing I’d heard before.”Laura Nyro refused multiple invitations to appear on The Tonight Show and on Late Night with David Letterman. Uncomfortable with her fame, she retired from songwriting at 24, then passed away 20 years ago at the age of 49.Last week, Wizard Academy purchased a treasure trove from the family of Laura Nyro, including the letter she received from David Geffen, the painting she made of her mother, the music chart you see at the top of this page, a chunk of her personal record collection and a couple of dozen other mementos of her reluctant ride to fame 50 years ago.You’ll see all of these on display when you attend our special event of 2018, How to Make Money by Raising Eyebrows. We’re

I was worried Thanksgiving dinner wouldn’t be the same this year without Uncle Alfred. Every year for as long as I can remember, when the time came for each of us to name something we were thankful for, Uncle Alfred would tell his famous Story of the Shoes.“Your mother was six and I was nine when I had to cut the ends off my shoes to let my toes stick out. A year later, I couldn’t get my foot in them at all. On really cold days, I’d wrap my feet in newspaper and bind it with brown twine. I always knew where to find the twine because the newspaperman would cut the bundles apart at Ninth and Pike every morning, right in front of Boscov’s Department Store.One morning in late November I was looking at a pair of shoes in the window of Boscov’s when I heard a woman’s voice behind me say, “A penny for your thoughts.”I turned around and there she was, holding out a penny. You could buy penny candy in those days, so I took the penny and I told her the truth, even though I was horribly embarrassed. “I was asking God for a pair of shoes.” Her face fell a little when I said that, so I thought she was disappointed in my answer and wanted her penny back, so I dropped my eyes to the ground. That’s when she lifted my chin with her fingertips and smiled.“What’s your name?” she asked.“Alfred,” I answered.She held open the door to Boscov’s with one hand and extended the other to me, “Come inside with me Alfred.”I had never been inside Boscov’s.She sat me down in the shoe department, unwrapped the newspaper from my feet, and told the clerk to bring seven pairs of socks, all the same color. She put two pairs of socks on me, then told the clerk to fit me with the finest pair of work boots that money could buy, but fit them a little loose because I was obviously a growing boy.Standing up in those new boots, I felt six feet tall.She paid the clerk, then handed me the boot box that contained the other five pairs of socks. She shook my hand and said, “Happy Thanksgiving, Alfred, and Merry Christmas.” And then she began to walk away.That’s when I was surprised to hear my own quavering voice ask, “Are you God’s wife?”The beautiful lady turned and smiled, “No, baby doll, I’m Mrs. McGovern.”Uncle Alfred always finished his Story of the Shoes in exactly the same way. “I never saw Mrs. McGovern again, but I’ll remember her for as long as I live.” And then he would wipe the tears from his cheeks.Uncle Alfred never married and he never left Reading, Pennsylvania. But he rose through the ranks to become a railroad executive and did very well for himself. But my Uncle Alfred also did good. For every year in late November, beginning when he was 17, Alfred would purchase a substantial new pair of shoes for as many poor children as he could afford. Hundreds of children a year. And every pair would be delivered with a note that said, “A Gift from Mrs. McGovern.”And now I must break your heart.I don’t have an Uncle Alfred.“We are all very good at suspending our disbelief. We do it every day, while reading novels, watching television or going to the movies. We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had.”– Marco Tempest, in his 2012 TED talk“Fiction is usually seen as escapist entertainment…But it’s hard to reconcile the escapist theory of fiction with the deep patterns we find in the art of storytelling… Our various fictional worlds are– on the whole– horrorscapes. Fiction may temporarily free us from our troubles, but it does so by ensnaring us in new sets of troubles– in imaginary worlds of struggle and stress and mortal woe… Fiction also seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard.”– Jonathan GottschallFacts tell. Stories sell. And specifics are more believable than generalities.I call these specifics, “reality hooks.” They make a story feel true, even when it’s not.I put 62 of them into my story of Uncle Alfred. See if you can find them.My story of Uncle Alfred was simply a doctored-up version of a story attributed to the late Leo Buscaglia. Here’s how it’s usually told:A (nameless) barefoot boy was staring through the window of a (nameless) shoe store on a cold day (in a nameless town.)A (nameless) lady approached him and said, ‘My, but you’re in such deep thought.’ The boy replied, ‘I was asking God to give me a pair of shoes.’Taking him by the hand the lady led him into the store and asked the clerk to get half a dozen pairs of socks for the boy. Then she asked him to get her a basin of water and a towel. (Because, you know, shoe store clerks always have a basin of water and a towel handy.) So he quickly brought them to her. She then washed the feet of the boy and dried them with the towel. Placing a pair of socks on

The world of online marketing was rocked so hard this summer that it almost fell to its knees.Some really big names in online marketing had the courage to announce that online customers are more likely to buy your products if they’ve heard of your company and feel good about it.Dumbfounded, I spoke to my computer screen as though online marketers everywhere could hear me, “How did you not already know that?”And then these same researchers suggested that building awareness through mass media might be a good thing to do, after all.Again, I mumbled, “How did you not already know that?”I’ve been fascinated for years that an entire army of Search Engine Optimization tweakers could – with a straight face – argue that brand awareness and brand preference are of no consequence in the online world. But then I would hear the echoing voice of Anatole France1 – with a French accent, because he was French, you know – “If fifty million people say a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing.”SEMrush2 was one of the big names in online marketing who concluded that “direct website visits” are the single most important factor in determining your SERP [Search Engine Results Page] position. In other words, they announced that Google is impressed – and will reward you with higher SERP placement – when people go directly to your web page instead of merely choosing your name from a list of search results.It makes sense, doesn’t it? Google is effectively saying, “If this is the company people think of immediately – and feel best about – in this category, then they must be the category leader.”Voilà, you and your company are on your way to the top of the Search Engine Results Page. All as the result of brand building through mass media and public relations.Like yesterday’s telephone book Yellow Pages, a Search Engine Results Page is an information source for customers who haven’t already made up their mind. But when faced with a list of names on the Search Engine Results Page, does it surprise you that even the so-called “undecided customers” will often choose the name they’ve heard of, and have good feelings about?Direct navigation is a powerful vote of confidence. Just like it was 25 years ago when customers would look you up in the White Pages of the phone book – or dial 411 for “Directory Assistance” and say your name – when they wanted to make contact with you by telephone.WordStream3 is a huge Pay-Per-Click company that works with over one million advertisers. They were the second big name in online marketing that came to the same conclusion as SEMrush, although they traveled a different road to get there. In their case, WordStream became fascinated by a PPC campaign that had a 300% increase in conversion rates for no apparent reason.They had changed nothing in the Pay-Per-Click campaign. They hadn’t changed the landing page, the bid strategy, or the ads. What WordStream finally discovered was that some brand-awareness ads were being funded in another media, and these ads had created a halo effect on the Pay-Per-Click ads.Here are their conclusions, in their own words:“Direct visits are fueled by your brand awareness, so building a strong brand image should be an essential part of your promotion strategy.” – SEMrush, page 42 of 55“What we are seeing here is that people with stronger brand affinity have higher conversion rates than people without any, because people tend to buy from the companies they already heard of and begun to trust.” – Larry Kim, WordStreamJeff Bezos figured all this out a long time ago.In chapter four of Be Like Amazon: Even a Lemonade Stand Can Do It, we read an exchange between Poobah and a younger man:The younger man continued to read. “Although it seems counterintuitive on the surface—a little bit insane, even—Bezos knew that making honest reviews available on each product page was the right thing to do for the customer. Today more than half of all retail purchases begin with a visit to Amazon to look at product reviews.”“Are you saying that Amazon.com has become the primary search engine for consumer product research in America?”The younger man looked up and locked eyes with his inquisitor as he nodded.You and I go directly to Amazon – because we think of them first and feel good about them – whenever we want to buy something. It is only AFTER we’ve navigated directly to Amazon that we begin to consider exactly what we’re going to buy.And that, my friend, is an example of a powerful brand. We choose Amazon first, no need for Google, or SEO tweakers, or AdWords to help us. Because we like Amazon.We believe in them.Now here’s the really good news: You can be like Amazon.Even a lemonade stand can do it.Roy H. Williams1 Anatole France (1844 –1924) was a French poet, journalist, and novelist who wrote several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered to be the ideal French man of letters. H

We are alert to danger because our survival depends upon it.But there is more to life than danger.There is singing.And looking at the sky.And chewing on a blade of grass.Have you done any of those things recently?They call to you from beyond your window.Walk outside.Sing a song.Pluck a blade of grass.Hold it high.Take a selfie.Email it to [email protected] he will email you something in return.Be sure to tell Indy what song you sang.Do it.You can afford to stop for 5 minutes.I promise you won’t get in trouble.Don’t just agree with me in your mind.Take a literal walk to the literal outdoors.Pick a literal blade of grass.Take a literal, ridiculous selfie.Literally send it to Indy.It will help you re-establish perspective.Now, more than ever, we need to cheer ourselves up.I will not name the things that are bringing us down.Too much has been spoken about them already.Do you remember the story of Chicken Little? An acorn falls on his head and he goes ripping through the village screaming that the sky is falling.He gets everyone all worked up.Did you know that story was 500 years old when Jesus walked the earth? It’s listed under Aarne-Thompson-Uther1 type 20C, which are folktales that make light of paranoia and mass hysteria.We are surrounded by Chicken Littles.On page 226 of Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, Lee Iacocca talks about his father.“When I was worried about something, he’d prod me. ‘Lido, do you remember what was on your mind a year ago?’ And I’d say, ‘How could I remember? A lot of things happen in a year.’ He’d pull out some notes with a flourish, and say, ‘I have it written down.’ Then he’d proceed to tell me about something that had made me unhappy a year ago, and deliver the punch line: ‘You can’t even remember it now.’”Go outside.Pluck a blade of grass.Hold it up and sing a song and I promise that a year from now you’ll smile when you remember doing it. But you won’t be able to remember the name of today’s Chicken Little, or the particular acorn that has him so terribly frightened.I think I’ll have chicken for dinner.Roy H. Williams1 The Aarne–Thompson classification systems are indices used to classify folktales:

In 2018, I will continue to fade from sight. By the end of 2019, I hope to be completely transparent. This has been my goal since May of 2000.If the founder of an organization remains vitally involved until the day they are no longer viable, the organization they founded will cease to exist within 10 years after their passing.I don’t want that to happen to Wizard Academy.Don’t worry, I’m not dying or anything like that.The time-tested model for a successful transfer of leadership is to pass the torch to the next generation while the founder is still healthy and capable. Pennie and I have known this since the day we started the school.Does your organization have a plan of succession? I ask this only because I’ve seen fabulous businesses fumbled during the hand-off. It’s a heart-breaking thing to watch.I began to fade from sight in 2016, popping in only to say hello to each of the classes I wasn’t teaching. I’d spend a few minutes interacting with the students, asking each of them about their favorite moments, then I’d be gone.In 2017, I’ve chosen to stay completely out of sight during classes taught by other faculty members and everything has been fine. Wonderful, in fact. No one seems to have noticed my absence.In 2018, vice-chancellor Whittington will become the first person ever to teach the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop other than myself. You might want to consider being in his first class to share this important rite-of-passage with him.I do plan to teach Magical Worlds a few more times and I’m sure I’ll always have some small part to play in the Wizard Academy Reunion each October, but right now my biggest concern is to finish the construction of The House of the Lost Boys and The House of Bilbo Baggins, thereby making it possible for 24 students and an instructor to stay on campus. (Our current capacity is 18 total in Engelbrecht House and Spence Manor.)Pennie has a dazzling plan for terra-scaping the deep valley that stands between Chapel Dulcinea and the student mansions. I’m incredibly anxious to see it.When those last two student mansions and the valley are complete, Pennie and I will have finished what we set out to do.Want to hear something funny? I originally thought construction would take 5 to 7 years. But by the time we’re through, it will have taken 20.The directors of Wizard Academy know the importance of onboarding new leadership, so they’ve invited Ryan Deiss and Rex Williams to join them in managing the oversight of our 501(c)3 educational organization. Your 7-person board of directors is now 9 persons.The 50-and-60-somethings are beginning to turn things over to the 30-somethings.To every thing there is a season,and a time to every purpose under the heavens.A time to be defiant, and a time to comply;a time to struggle, and a time to relax;a time to get started, and a time to be done;a time for Gen-Xers and Millennialsto grasp the torch freely offeredby the Boomers in Winter.If you’re the kind of person who reads these Monday Morning Memos – and you obviously are – you’re spending the hours, days and years of your life building something that ought to forever be remembered and appreciated. So please begin thinking about a plan of succession. It’s not urgent, but it’s incredibly important.And to the thousands of you who have helped build Wizard Academy, please know we’re doing everything in our power to make sure your gifts will never be lost or forgotten. The campus guidebook – to be published in 2018 – will have many of your names in it and a mountain of glorious photos.Indy said to tell you Arooo, and that he’ll see you in the rabbit hole.Roy H. WilliamsPS – In case you were wondering, Pennie and I won’t be retiring for many more years. We still have lots of ads to create, client businesses to grow, Wizard of Ads partners to serve, and a smiling number of books to write. The leadership of Wizard Academy is the only thing from which we’ll be fading.

Dale Earnhardt, Jr will make 21.4 million dollars this year.He is the world’s one hundredth most highly paid athlete.1But don’t assume pro athletes make a lot of money. The sad truth is that the top 10 percent – the star athletes – receive more than 90 percent of all the money paid to athletes. If the 80/20 rule held true in sports, the salaries of the bottom 90 percent would more than double while the top 10 percent would get a barely noticeable haircut.The world’s most highly-paid athlete, soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, will skip happily home with 93 million dollars in 2017. (Well, he’ll skip as happily as one can skip while lugging 2,048 pounds of hundred dollar bills.) 293 million dollars is $372,000 a day, more than $46,000 an hour. 3The average professional soccer player makes only $80/hr ($160,000/yr) and will play for just 3.2 years.Advertisers are like pro athletes. Everyone gets to play on game day, but only the best get paid on payday.Sure, Cristiano Ronaldo is better than the average soccer player. But is he 581 times better? Because that’s how much more money he makes. And keep in mind that the salaries of the other highly-paid soccer stars contribute toward raising that “average” salary up to $160,000.But my objective isn’t to rail against the injustice of professional sports.My objective is to draw a few comparisons that I believe you’ll find to be helpful and encouraging:1: Advertising’s Grand Illusion is that – because you paid for it – people are going to notice your ad.2: This illusion that people are going to notice your ad is perpetuated by three groups of people:(A.) By advertising salespeople.“The secret is to target the right people, and we have them for you!”(B.) By advertising agencies.“The secret is to target the right people, and we’ve found them for you!”(C.) By hope-filled advertisers.“The secret is to reach the right people, and that’s what I’m going to do!”3: REALITY: I’ve never seen a business fail because they were reaching the wrong people. But I’ve seen hundreds fail because they were saying the wrong things in their ads.4: TRUTH: Decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. This is why your ads must also reach the influencers; the friends and neighbors, co-workers and associates, hair stylists and golf caddies of your “target” customer.5: MORE GOOD NEWS! Untargeted “mass media” reaches the influencers along with your target, and it’s astoundingly cheap when compared to targeted media.6: BAD NEWS: Each of us is assaulted by more than 5,000 selling messages per day. 4 and 5 And we – like your customer – have become extremely good at ignoring them.7: The secret ­of success in advertising is knowing how to craft opening lines that pierce the clutter and win attention.8: After you’ve won their attention, you’ve got to hang on to it.9: TIP: Leave out the parts that make your ad feel like an ad.10: Because those are the moments we turn our attention elsewhere.11: GOOD NEWS! Your ads don’t have to be 581 times as good as the average ad.12: Your ads, your products, your services and your people just have to be a little bit better than your competitors’ for you to become the Cristiano Ronaldo of your category.Goal!Roy H. WilliamsLooking for answers that apply specifically to you and your situation?1 Forbes.com2 one pound of hundred-dollar bills is $45,4003 Assuming a 40 hr. workweek, 50 weeks a year.4 Yankelovich Market Research5 This number includes “brand exposures” along with ads.The average number of ads we encounter daily, including online, is 362.

Your body doesn’t have a single immune system; it has a bundle of them. And the most powerful of these systems is the one that rejects foreign tissue. This is why doctors do everything they can to suppress it during transplant surgery.That suppression doesn’t always work.When the cells of your body detect an intruder cell – “This is not like me, and I am not like it!” – they employ powerful forms of rejection.Your company employs a body of people who work together and each employee is like a cell within that body.And when a new employee comes and goes, they say, “He never really fit in.”This is why onboarding and enculturation should begin while the candidate is reading your job posting. When you’ve been taught how to write ads for employment, your ads will repel the people you don’t want while powerfully attracting the people you do want. When the right people read your ad, their hearts will whisper, “These people are like me, and I am like them.”Branding is nothing more than corporate culture made known.Good advertising promises or implies a specific kind of customer experience. It is then up to your people to deliver that experience.Your people are the essence of your brand.The most valuable skill a businessperson can have is the ability to recruit and retain good people.Did you hear that?Did you?I just heard ten thousand successful people quietly whisper, “Amen.”Roy H. Williams

Characters in books and movies and TV shows are magical. They make us laugh and cry and hold our breath as they take us to a vivid elsewhere.Conflicted, exaggerated, accelerated characters live in a world more interesting than our own. And it is a world we like to visit, even if it’s only 30 seconds at a time.This is why character-driven ad campaigns are outperforming logic-driven campaigns, hands down.We quickly get tired of sales pitches, but we never get tired of being charmed. The characters we love may change over time, but our love for characters never changes.Best of all, character-driven ad campaigns don’t have to be targeted to a specific birth cohort. Their appeal is cross-generational.So if you need to build a bridge to Millennials, put your hammer in the hand of a colorful, memorable, entertaining character.Do you remember the suave, invincible James Bond of the Sean Connery/Roger Moore years? (1962 to 1985 in case you were wondering.) Take that character, sand the British off him, wrap him in Chuck Norris jokes, and you’ve got The Most Interesting Man in the World. He tripled the sales of Dos Equis in Canada. And while craft beers were driving the sale of other beers down across the US, sales of Dos Equis increased by 34.8%. 1Put Mayberry’s wise, caring, and infinitely patient Andy Griffith in the passenger seat of an air-conditioning service van with an idiot-savant Forrest Gump in the driver’s seat and you’ve got Mr. Jenkins and Bobby, the most successful ad campaign in the history of home service companies. When Mr. Jenkins gave Bobby $100,000 during a 30-second ad that debuted two weeks ago and encouraged him to pursue his dream of becoming a movie star in Hollywood, social media exploded. The next morning it was front page news – above the fold – in the important Charlotte Observer, and a savvy outdoor advertising company asked permission to post “We’re Going to Miss You, Bobby” on all their digital billboards for free, and 2 major network TV affiliates treated it as major story in their newscasts, with one of them giving the story about 3 minutes, the other giving it more than 5 minutes.Can you believe this local service company in Charlotte, NC, has accumulated more than 1,000 Google Reviews with a 4.7 star average? This isn’t a restaurant, it’s a service company! Have you ever heard of such a thing?Only one other home services ad campaign has generated that kind of audience love and effectiveness: the relatively new “Boy with a flashlight” campaign of Goettl Air Conditioning in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Tucson. Sadie, the boy’s dog, is also an important part of that campaign.“What do a Forrest Gump idiot-savant and a boy with a flashlight and a dog have to do with air conditioning?”“Nothing. But they have everything to do with winning the hearts and minds of customers.”Take grubby Oscar Madison and uptight Felix Unger of The Odd Couple (1968,) give them each a glass of whiskey and fling them 49 years into the future (2017,) and you’ve got Rex and Daniel of The Whiskey Vault, YouTube’s fastest-growing whiskey channel, adding more than 20 new subscribers every hour, 24 hours a day. They just poured the foundation of their new distillery next to the campus at Wizard Academy.“Hello, ladies. Look at your man. Now back to me, now back at your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me. But if he stopped using lady-scented body wash and switched to Old Spice, he could smell like he’s me. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a boat with the man your man could smell like. What’s in your hand? Back at me. I have it, it’s an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love. Look again, the tickets are now diamonds. Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady. I’m on a horse.”That campaign more than doubled sales and rocketed Old Spice Body Wash from its position in distant, second place to become the world’s best-selling body wash.Indy Beagle has these examples for you in the rabbit hole.No other beer company created an interesting character to win our time and attention. And how many air conditioning companies perform delightful antics to give customers warm feelings and happy thoughts? No other whiskey review channels on YouTube feature an entertaining odd couple, and no other soap is represented by a shirtless guy who shamelessly flirts with your wife. That’s why these companies – and lots of other companies with colorful character-driven ad campaigns – are winning. And winning big.When the customer laughs and smiles and bonds with your advertising, they now have a friend in the business. Why would they call anyone else?So, if character-driven ads are more effective, why aren’t more companies creating colorful and engaging characters to capture our attention and win our affection?Short-sighted advertisers are unwilling t

The object of conformity and compliance is to bring the best of the past forward.A person can achieve expert results by following in the footsteps of an expert.The old ways are often the best ways.But you, my strong-willed friend, are a nonconformist; a renegade, a rebel, a misfit. One of “those” people.Congratulations. ADiscoveries are made only by those who stray from the path. “I make more mistakes than anyone else I know, and sooner or later, I patent most of them.”– Thomas Edison“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”– Henry David Thoreau“The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.”– Rita Mae Brown, Venus EnvyYou and I know an empowering secret: traditional wisdom is often more tradition than wisdom.That kind of talk is heresy when you’re surrounded by guardians of the orthodox. Let’s hope that none of them are listening.Two Powerful Questions and a Magic Word:When someone shouts, “You can’t do that!”Ask yourself, “What happens if I do?”If the potential reward is large and the negative consequences are small, pull the trigger and ride the bullet.When someone says, “You have to.”Ask yourself, “What happens if I don’t?”If your distaste for the activity is strong and the negative consequences are weak, shrug your shoulders and walk away.We’re talking about a simple but powerful concept: the evaluation of consequences.Sometimes it’s better to learn from expert advice and example.Sometimes it’s better to wander off the beaten path and learn from consequences.Your gut will tell you when.Here’s another way to put “consequences” to work for you:The next time you want to do something unorthodox and you need permission, say to the authority above you, “I’d like to do an experiment.”And then immediately tell them:1. what you hope to learn,2. why that information will be useful,3. how long the experiment will take, and4. what it will cost.It’s going to blow your mind how often you get approval. Present the same idea as a suggested change to the status quo and you’ll be shot out of the sky quicker than an October duck in Saskatchewan.The Magic word is “Experiment.”“Experiment” promises1. a budgeted window of time and resources, and2. “We’re about to learn something valuable that we don’t currently know.”The price of continual conformity and complianceis that one never experiences discovery.What a sad way to live!Ciao for Niao,Roy H. Williams

“I was told that repartee heightens the attention of an audience.”“Is this going to be like that time you told me about ambergris?”“What do you mean?”“There I was, minding my own business, when you started telling me how the most expensive perfume in the world comes from whale puke. Like I needed to know that.”“Yes. This is another interesting fact that will broaden your horizons.”“Okay, let’s get this over with. So tell me, what in the name of King-of-the-Sea Poseidon and Chicken-of-the-Sea tuna is repartee?“Repartee is the banter between interesting characters.”“Great. I appreciate you sharing that with me.”“But I haven’t told you why you need to know.”“I don’t know that I do need to know.”“You need to know.”“For the record, your little whale puke story still hasn’t done me any good.”“Someday you’ll be glad you know about ambergris.”“Can you name that day for me? I’ll put it on my calendar.”“You need to know about repartee today. Right now, in fact.”“Why?”“You’re about to start advertising.”“Yeah, and?”“Yankelovich says the average citizen is bombarded with more than 5,000 selling messages per day.”“Yankel who?”“Yankelovich. It’s a consumer behavior research firm.”“Five thousand a day, really?”“Yeah. So what are you going to do to make your message stand apart from those other 5,000?”“Repartee?”“Exactly.”“I think it might be easier to find some whale puke.”“Repartee works because people naturally turn their attention toward interesting interactions. Ever heard of Elmore Leonard?”“Novelist, right?”“When he was asked if he had a secret formula for writing bestsellers, he said, ‘I try to leave out the parts that people skip.’”“Dewey Crowe is my favorite character of his.”“Yeah, Dewey’s awesome. But then the interviewer had a follow-up question.”“Did they ask, ‘What are the parts that people skip?’”“Yeah. How did you know?”“It’s what I would have asked.”“So, do you want to know what they skip?”“Actually, yes.”“Everything that isn’t dialogue.”“So you’re saying all I have to do is turn my ads into a conversation between two people?”“That’s not what I’m saying at all.”“How is it not what you’re saying?”“If you write an ad and put it into the mouths of two people, it’s still an ad. It’s not dialogue. It’s not banter. It’s not repartee.”“What is it then?”“It’s Ad Speak.”“It would still sound like an ad?”“Of course it would. Real people never talk like that. Repartee is the personality-revealing banter between characters who actually have personalities.”“Like me and you?”“Mostly me.”“I’d have to do this repartee thing on radio or TV, right?”“Why do you think that?”“I mean, it’s people talking.”“But we’re not doing this on radio or TV. We’re doing this in an email.”“Is repartee a French word?”“I think so. Why do you ask?”“It sounds pretentious and that usually means it’s French.”“You can call it banter if you want.”“Banter. My ads are going to be known for banter. I’m going to be the Banter man.”“I’m glad I could help.”“Wait a minute. Did you say we were having this conversation in an email?”“Yeah. It’s a weekly thing sent out by a guy named Williams. Calls himself the Wizard of Ads.”“The Wizard of Ads?”“Yeah.”“Must be French.”[Both men start laughing.]# # END # #Roy H. Williams

(1.) Adrenaline is a neurotransmitter that increases blood flow to the muscles during times of excitement and creates involuntary recall of events.When there is adrenaline in the blood, you are more likely to remember the moment. This is why advertisers try to make their ads sound exciting.(2.) Oxytocin is a neurotransmitter that produces feelings of connectedness and bonding.This is how powerful brands are built.More than 240 years after the fact, we continue to admire John Adams and his amazing wife, Abigail, because they left behind words of bonding, both to one another and to the ideals they shared. John said, “I believe there is among our people a fund of wisdom, integrity, and humanity which will preserve their happiness.” John Adams wanted the best for us, and he believed the best about us.We likewise admire Thomas Jefferson because he, too, gave us words of bonding that showed us his heart. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and were given by their Creator the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson wanted the best for us, and he believed the best about us.These people showed us what they valued.They showed us what they believed.We call them Patriots and Founding Fathers.They gave us oxytocin.But we have no deep admiration for Thomas Pinckney, although he served with distinction during the Revolutionary War, then became Governor of South Carolina where he presided over the state convention that ratified the United States Constitution. In 1792, George Washington appointed Thomas Pinckney ambassador to Britain and envoy extraordinary to Spain and in the Presidential Election of 1796, Pinckney gathered almost as many votes as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson! But Pinckney was a man of action – adrenaline – rather than bonding. Pinckney gave us no oxytocin.Bonding – that feeling of connectedness – is a product of oxytocin.And bonding produces loyalty.Bonding and loyalty… what words those are to a marketer!Are you sharing words of bonding in your ads?Are you encouraging your customer?Do they believe you want the best for them?Sadly, most ads are built on logic and adrenaline. “Act now! Save money! Don’t miss this event!” But the best marketing is built on stories that trigger the release of oxytocin.“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Everyone loves a good story; every culture bathes its children in stories.” – Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p. 287When a person proposes marriage – the ultimate expression of bonding and loyalty – they choose not only their words, but also the time and place of expression.What is the Emotional Environment that will precede your advertising? What will the customer be feeling in that moment before they encounter your ad? What chemicals will be flowing in their blood?Emotional Environment is dictated by where you spend your ad budget.Adrenaline in the blood (excitement) will give your message a higher likelihood of recall.Oxytocin in the blood (bonding) will give your customer a feeling of connection to your brand.Sporting events provide adrenaline excitement mixed with the oxytocin of bonding (with a team.)Romantic stories, romantic TV shows and movies, and romantic music provide adrenaline excitement mixed with the oxytocin of bonding (with a lover.)Adrenaline without oxytocin is “fight or flight.” Politics make us fighting mad and fear makes us feel like running away. Mix your ads with politics or fear and you will be remembered, but never loved.Words of bonding are the essence of Community Content.Words of bonding are the keys to not having to discount.Words of bonding are expressed by characters in stories.Bonding and loyalty are triggered by the stories you share in your ads, videos, podcasts, and blog posts.Are the characters in your ads interesting and credible?Does the public love and trust them?I leave you now to do with this information as you will. A© 2017, Roy H. Williams

Real experts in online marketing rarely use the phrase “going viral,” because it has no agreed-upon definition. Instead, they talk about “Discovery Content” and “Community Content.”To understand Discovery Content, just look at anything posted by BuzzFeed or any of the other organizations whose principal income is generated by the companies who sponsor their clickbait.1But not all Discovery Content is shallow and vacuous.The goal of Discovery Content is to generate a click. (The headline is the key.) If a customer finds something satisfying on the other side of that click, they’re happy-happy-happy. And if your only goal was to get more people to “discover” your website, then you’re happy, too.A visitor who “discovers” your website – but never returns – has no value beyond stroking your ego, unless1. their visit brought you ad revenue, or2. they purchased something on which you made a profit, or3. they told other people about you.Used correctly however, Discovery Content brings newcomers to your website where they will “discover” Community Content that truly speaks to them.It is Community Content that will bring them back again.We’re talking about Targeting Through Copy Writing rather than Targeting Through Media Selection.Today’s Monday Morning Memo is an example of Discovery Content. That headline: The Truth About Going Viral, will doubtless generate a lot more first-time visitors than usual. The Community Content these visitors will find includes the Archives of the Monday Morning Memo, the Subscribe button, the Rabbit Hole of Indy Beagle, and all the free Downloads accessible through the nav panel.Discovery Content attracts first-time visitors.It brings people to your website.Community Content builds a tribe.It makes them feel like they belong.But these ideas aren’t new.In the wild and woolly world of mass media, the Loss Leader was the original Discovery Content.The advertiser offering a Loss Leader hoped that by selling something at a loss they would explode store traffic and this horde of new visitors would then “discover” the wonder of their store and buy other items at full price.Today’s online marketers call the Loss Leader a “tripwire.” 2But I prefer to target through copy writing, which is why I use full-price Feature Items to attract new members of a tribe instead of cut-rate Loss Leaders that attract grave robbers, vampires, coupon clippers, discount addicts, freebie Freddies, and every other variety of Twitchy Little Bastard.A Case History of Targeting Through Copy Writing:Shreve and Company has been part of the ritzy Union Square district of San Francisco since the California Gold Rush more than 165 years ago. Shreve routinely sells jewelry items that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Due to the rich history of this store and the impact of all the world’s-finest brands they carry, they could easily be perceived as stodgy, snooty and overpriced. But they aren’t.In the radio campaign for Shreve, 5th generation Shreve jeweler Lawrence “Ren” Schiffman, a young and definitely NOT-stodgy, NOT-snooty 20-something has become the official spokesperson for the family store. Ren’s dad is a jeweler, his grandad was a jeweler, his great grandad was a jeweler, and his great-great grandad was a jeweler. Credibility and history wrapped in youth and style.Here’s the Example:REN:   Polo is “the sport of kings.”ROY: And in the go-go 80’s, the Paiget Polo was the watch of kings.REN:  Having a Piaget Polo was even cooler than having a phone in your car.ROY:  [reflectingly] I remember those days.REN:  The new Polo “S” is satin-finished stainless steel.ROY:  [surprised] And the shape of that dial is fascinating!REN: What do you think about the pinstripes?ROY:  I LOVE the pinstripes.REN: This ultra-modern Polo “S” is going to become a classic just like its predecessor.ROY:  Wait a minute. I didn’t know Piaget made a luxury watch in stainless steel.REN: This is the first one in 60 years.ROY:  It’s definitely distinctive.REN:  Vintage and Futuristic at the same time.ROY: Vintage and Futuristic… just like Shreve and Company… luxury timepieces,  fine designers, and flawless diamonds.REN:  Come and see the new Paiget Polo “S” at 150 Post Street off Union Square, or see it onour blog at Shreve.comROY: He’s Ren Schiffman.REN: And I’m looking forward to shaking your hand.This ad gives you a specific, entry-priced item to consider, but it offers no discount or bribe that might attract a Twitchy Little Bastard looking for something other than what Shreve sells.The benefit of a Feature Item isn’t measured only through the immediate traffic it brings, but thro

Whittington said it.Eisenberg endorsed it.The waitress distracted us with a question of her own.I somehow knew to capture that moment with a photo.Our conversation never made it back to Daniel’s idea that every life has a theme song, but later that day I carried his wandering thought to the Worthless Bastards at the Toad & Ostrich Pub.“What is the theme song of your life?” is a question hard to answer, but the Bastards came through as they always do.1And now we turn to you.For the purpose of this exercise I’m going to ask you to choose between just two categories:Your public theme song. This is a song that will make sense to anyone who really knows you. The music, the lyrics… they fit you. Or at least they fit some aspect of the public you.Your private theme song. This is a song that has stayed with you year after year, although you’ve never fully understood why. But there it is, stuck in your unconscious mind. It makes no sense that you feel connected to it, but you do.Indiana Beagle has asked that you send him either your public theme song or your private one, along with a couple of sentences of explanation. These might show up in the rabbit hole, or in a video, or be used in some other way. I can’t really say for sure.Indy never explains his motives to me.I’m not sure he understands them himself.Roy H. Williams

Everyone agrees that Henry Leverseege would have become much more famous had he lived beyond 29. But even though he died young, his paintings hang in museums across England. There is only one of them in private hands.Mine. AHenry was born in 1803, the year that Thomas Jefferson famously negotiated the Louisiana Purchase with Napoleon Bonaparte. I say “famously” because Jefferson was fully aware that an American President had no authority to acquire territory in this way.Ohio became the 17th state during those negotiations.Want to hear something funny? Jefferson’s original goal was only to purchase the port city of New Orleans. But Bonaparte needed cash and Jefferson wasn’t an idiot, so as soon as the ink was dry he sent Lewis and Clark on their famous journey across our virgin continent. (I say “our” continent because the ownership of land was a foreign concept to Native Americans, so we just conveniently ignored any claim they might have to the property. Later, when they got fussy, we killed them.)Forty-six years after the Louisiana Purchase, gold was discovered in California and westward expansion accelerated like a Southwest Airlines 737 after leaving the gate 8 minutes late.The last time I flew Southwest, our pilot pushed our plane down the runway so hard I could feel the corners of my mouth pulling back to my earlobes. The woman sitting next to me thought I was an actor getting ready to play The Joker in a Batman movie.As a young boy in a public-school classroom, I was taught that America was created by visionary “Founding Fathers” who saw the future and courageously paid the price for it. It’s a pretty story, but even a casual student of history can see that the early years of our young nation were as freckle-faced and awkward as a bucktoothed Romeo.(I hesitated writing that last sentence, but Indy insisted. Blame him.)Our nation is not the result of a grand plan. We are the product of a series of reactions to circumstances and a lot of stumbling and bumbling into happy accidents.I’m proud of us.Not the part about the Indians or the enslavement of Africans or the forced relocation of more than 60,000 American citizens of Japanese descent during WW II, but the rest of it. You know, the Charles Lindberg, Neil Armstrong part.I see us real and I love us anyway.I hope you do, too.Can we please quit fighting now?Roy H. Williams

I consider myself to be the luckiest person on earth. And I can tell you of several specific moments in my life that would convince you of it.Being lucky is a choice I made. Because the truth is that I could just as easily tell you of other moments in my life that would convince you that I am the unluckiest person on earth.Allan Gurganus says, “Stories only happen to people who can tell them.” And you, my friend, are a person who can tell them! You’ve been telling stories about yourself your whole life.And the person you’ve been telling them to is you.Have you been telling yourself stories about lucky breaks, moments of serendipity and happy adventures? Are you remembering all the delightful occasions when you were in exactly the right place at the right time to experience something wonderful? Or are you remembering only the hateful parents, the unfair bosses, the unspeakable abuses and the horrible injustices you’ve had to endure?The key to happiness is knowing what to leave out of the story you tell yourself about the forces that made you who you are.Like any published memoir, our own life stories should also come with a disclaimer: “This story that I tell about myself is only based on a true story. I am in large part a figment of my own yearning imagination.” And it’s a good thing, too. As we will see, a life story is an intensely useful fiction. 1Personally, I admire the Swedish tramp sitting in a ditch on Midsummer night. He was ragged and dirty and drunk, and he said to himself softly and in wonder, “I am rich and happy and perhaps a little beautiful.” 2That tramp looked past the “truth” of the moment to see a greater truth beyond.You can do the same if you like.In fact, you should.Oh! Are you one of those people who believes you should always be “honest” with yourself and remember things exactly as they really and truly happened? Well, I’ve got some bad news for you: we humans are incapable of that.According to the Journal of Neuroscience (Sept. 2012,) every time you recall the memory of an event, you make your memory of that event less accurate. Instead of remembering the “truth” of the event, you’re recalling the memory of the last time you remembered it, along with any mistakes that may have been introduced. Like a game of human telephone, those mistakes build on one another over time. 3Tom Robbins said the same thing  – but a little more colorfully – back in 1971: “Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.” 4Everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.5We sometimes choose the most locked up, dark versions of the story, but what a good friend does is turn on the lights, open the window, and remind us that there are a whole lot of ways to tell the same story.6I’m trying to be your good friend today.Pennie and I have a good friend named Susan Ryan who said something about life on Dec. 14, 2008, that was so profound that I wrote it down. “We get to show up. We get to step into this story.”Every day is a new opportunity to change your life. You have the power to say, “This is not how my story ends.” 7Abraham Lincoln said it cleanest and best. “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” No one can prove that Lincoln said it, but I have a very clear memory that he did.Indy said to tell you he’s waiting for you in the rabbit hole.I’ll go with you.Roy H. Williams

Ivan and Alvina are in their early 20s.Ivan was born and raised in Bulgaria. Alvina, in Siberia.When Alvina sees Ivan playing keyboards in a café on the Black Sea, they become pen pals. And then they fall in love. And then they get married. They dream of moving to the west.Canada says it will accept them as immigrants if they will learn to speak French.Self-taught piano players in cafés don’t make enough money to pay for dreams, so Ivan and Alvina sleep in their car so they can pay a tutor to teach them French. They spend long hours every day for a year learning and practicing their nouvelle langue étrange. There is no money for anything else.Ivan and Alvina step onto Canadian soil with bright eyes, big smiles and 4 thousand dollars; exactly enough money to pay the first and last month’s rent to live in a landlord’s unfinished basement. There is no money left for food or transportation.But they have each other and they’re living their dream. This is the west! So Ivan and Alvina never quit smiling, never quit laughing, never quit feeling grateful.Ivan gets a job as a construction laborer for an older man who can’t always pay Ivan all he is owed. But he is an honest man, so he pays the balance of Ivan’s unpaid wages by giving him tools. After many months of working for this man, Ivan has the knowledge, the tools, and the man’s blessing to go into business for himself.Ivan and Alvina arrived in Canada exactly 11 years ago. Last year their business did more than 20 million dollars. It appears they will do 30 million next year. Neither of them is 40 years old.I share their story to encourage you, and to tease Ivan and Alvina a little. None of this delightful true story appears on the About Us page of their website. Not a word of it. Not even their names.Do you remember what I wrote to you in last week’s Monday Morning Memo?“Inspirational stories are never about accumulation. They’re about sacrifice. What have you sacrificed and why? Are you willing to tell that story?”Here are some final thoughts for you to ponder:Never quit smiling, never quit laughing, never quit feeling grateful.You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.The only safe thing is to take a chance.Oh! I forgot to mention 2 tiny details in this wonderful story of poetic, home-made destiny.Ivan and Alvina finish unfinished basements.And they’ve never needed to speak a word of French since the day they arrived in Canada.Have a great week.Roy H. Williams

The door to immediate action is easily kicked open by the steel-toed boot of urgency.If you want people to take immediate action, you’re going to need a credible shortage.A shortage of product. “Only 11 remain!”A shortage of time. “Sale ends Saturday at 6PM!”A shortage of capacity. “Only 128 seats are available!”Some kind of shortage.But smart marketers don’t create a series of non-stop urgencies.Smart marketers create a bond with future customers.And you don’t create a bond by crying wolf.You create a bond by telling a story.Do you want to inspire your customer?Inspirational stories are never about accumulation.They’re about sacrifice.What have you sacrificed and why? Are you willing to tell that story?Scientific American published an essay on May 8, 2013, in which Jag Bhalla quotes Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, “The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Everyone loves a good story; every culture bathes its children in stories.” The purpose of these stories is to engage and educate the emotions. Stories teach us character types, plots, and the social-rule dilemmas prevalent in our culture.Stories explain how the world works and help us understand who we are.“Research consistently shows that fiction does mold us. The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard…”“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories. But why are humans storytelling animals at all? Why are we, as a species, so hopelessly addicted to narratives about the fake struggles of pretend people? Anthropologists have long argued that stories have group-level benefits. Traditional tales, from hero epics to sacred myths, perform the essential work of defining group identity and reinforcing cultural values.”– Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us HumanStories are what shape and define a tribe.Make no mistake, people who bond with a brand are people who have joined a tribe. And that’s a healthy thing. According to Professor Alison Gopnik, “other people are the most important part of our environment. In our ultra-social species, social acceptance matters as much as food.” *We include ourselves in dozens of tribes. Tribes of geography, school, sport, faith, music, nationality, art, hobby, history, family affiliation, hair color, age, gender, lifestyle, transportation, recreation, food, fashion, tattoos, facial hair and footwear. We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are.Our purchases tell our story.Most ads are full of information. They don’t really tell a story.Story = character + predicament + attempted extrication.“Stories the world over are almost always about people with problems,” writes Jonathan Gottschall. They display “a deep pattern of heroes confronting trouble and struggling to overcome. Stories give us feelings we don’t have to pay full cost for.” Stories free us from the limits of our own direct experience and allow us to learn from the experiences of others.Online reviews are stories told by customers about their experiences.Testimonial ads are another type of story told by customers about their experiences. But we listen to these stories with a grain of suspicion as we seek to pierce the veiled motives of the storytellers.Propaganda is a story that represents itself to be the truth.We believe it only to the degree that we trust the storyteller.Entertainment is a story that doesn’t represent itself to be the truth.If a story doesn’t claim to be the truth, there is no reason to doubt it.This is why we are more willing to believe fiction than nonfiction.Entertainment is the currency that will purchase the time and attention of a too-busy public.Have you found your story?Are you telling it well?Are people entertained?How’s business?Roy H. Williams

1. Freeze-frame each moment when something rocks your world.2. When you cry or become frightened or get angry or laugh or are overwhelmed by a sense of wonder, reverse-engineer what just happened. Ask yourself, “Why am I feeling this way? How did they do this to me?” Was it something in the sequence of events? Was it in the shapes or colors, words or music, symbols or associations? Was it facial expressions, vocal intonations, or a combination of several of these at once?3. Experiment with what you learn. The techniques that worked on you will work for you, as well.Communication is usually auditory, graphic, or gestural.These are its primary elements:Auditory:1. Words, and the phonemes that compose them2. Music: pitch, key, contour, interval, tempo, rhythm, texture and harmony3. Sounds: jets landing, babies crying, dogs barking, crickets chirping, etc.Graphic:1. color, form, line, shape, space, texture, value, proximity and radiance2. image – what is being shown, and what associations does it trigger?3. metaphor – what does it mean?Gestural:1. facial expression2. symbolic gestures and movements3. dancingSimultaneous elements of communication can reinforce or contradict each other.Perception is deepened when elements reinforce one another and agree.Interest is elevated when an element contradicts and disagrees.An apple tree is ready for harvest, all its apples a husky shade of red except for one – just beyond your reach – that shimmers electric blue.You’ll wonder about that apple all day.Predictability is the silent assassin of surprise and delight.Defeat it by modifying expected patterns of communication.Enter new subjects from unusual angles of approach.Communicate details. Specifics are more credible than generalities. The more specifically you speak to a single person, the more powerfully you speak to everyone.We love to be in the presence of powerful communicators who take us places and make us feel things; actors and filmmakers, dancers and photographers, sculptors and illustrators, singers and architects, teachers and musicians, painters and writers.When brilliant communicators work their magic, we get lost in it.Would you like to become one?You already own the hardware.Have you ever used a zoom lens? Think of your brain as having one. As you zoom in, you exclude the context to focus on the tiniest details. But when you zoom out, you see those details fold in on themselves to reveal the ever-expanding context of “the big picture.” The idea that captivated your zoomed-in attention is now just a tiny cog in a complex machine.The key to keeping your reader/viewer/listener off-balance is to zoom in after zooming out, and zoom out after zooming in. Take them on a journey with you. Make them think they’re going to see one thing, then show them something different. Unexpected elements make stories and photographs and paintings and music and everything else more interesting.I agree with Leo Burnett: The great danger of advertising isn’t that we will mislead people, but that we will bore them to death.Please don’t.Take them someplace they never expected to go.Show them something they didn’t expect to witness.Give them an experience they didn’t see coming.Roy H. Williams

When you’re trying to transfer a thought or a feeling to someone else, the impact of your communication will be determined by the following equation:How big is the thought in your mind, or the feeling in your heart?How quickly can you transfer it?The Law of Impact (or force,) documented by Isaac Newton, applies to communication as much as it does to physics: impact is the product of mass (size and weight) times acceleration (speed.)How massive is your thought or feeling?How quickly can you transfer it?The works of illustrators like Norman Rockwell and painters like Andrew Wyeth are often criticized as being “too obvious.” But the visual communications these artists produced were among the 20th century’s most recognizable works of art.Rockwell and Wyeth became famous because they were able to communicate big ideas clearly and quickly. Today I’m going to help you do the same with words.Have you ever noticed how short quotes pack a greater punch than long ones?The fewer the words, the greater the impact.Shorter hits harder.Boring people take too long to say too little.Interesting people know what to leave out.The best way to get good at this is to fill your ears with it. As you read, so will you write. If you read the writings of long-winded people, you will learn to wrap a great many words around a small idea.But if every day you read big ideas condensed into few words, you will soon be able to speak and write with greater impact.“The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.” – Gene Fowler (1890 – 1960)Ray Bard published my Wizard of Ads trilogy 19 years ago. We made the New York Times bestsellers list together. The second book in that series became the Wall Street Journal’s #1 business book in America.More than 50 percent of the books published by Bard Press have become New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers. No other publisher has achieved even 10 percent.As a young man, Ray sold books from door to door and he’s been collecting quotes about selling for more than 40 years. His jury of more than 1,000 quote judges spent an entire year evaluating and voting on the best-of-the-best from Ray’s collection.Today, August 7, 2017, is the day these quotes are finally available. Maximum thought in minimum words.Fired-up! Selling.This small book is a gorgeous work of art.It looks like embossed leather but Ray swears no animals were harmed.Three silk placeholder ribbons.Full-color on every page.The distilled essence of a lifetime collection.Think of it as a textbookthat teaches youhow to saybig thingsquickly.Roy H. Williams

I always look forward to my lunches with Ray Bard because he teaches me valuable things. He doesn’t intend to teach me things; it just happens.Our short lunches last 3 hours. Our record is 6 ½.Ray is my publisher.During our most recent lunch, Ray said – and I’m inclined to agree with him – there are only three sources of wealth: Luck, Accident, and Desire.If you inherited the money, married the money, won the lottery, bought the right stock at the right time, or went to work for the right company and were given a pile of stock options, you were lucky. I don’t say that to make you feel small, but we shouldn’t pretend you can teach someone else how to do what you did. Picking the right stock or going to work for the right start-up seems like an easy thing to do in hindsight, but I’ve never seen it happen using foresight.If you’re an artist, a writer, or an inventor who got rich, you were probably never really in it for the money. You got rich by accident. You always knew money was a possibility, but you chose to do what you did because you love it. It scratches your itch. It makes you happy. It makes you feel alive. So again, if we’re being honest, your advice about how to get rich would probably sound like this, “Be good at what you do. Study, experiment, refine your craft. Follow your instincts. Trust your gut. Be true to yourself. Break the rules. Blah, blah, blah.” I can say this because what little I’ve acquired has come to me in exactly this way. And that advice you just read – including the blah, blah, blah – is exactly what I tell people when they ask me how to “get to the next level, financially.” I tell them this because they would be disappointed if I told them the truth, that I am a writer because I am embarrassingly self-indulgent and I love to write. It is something I let myself do.But nearly all my wealthy friends got rich intentionally. It was their lifelong desire. They could teach you how to get rich, too, but only if you have sufficient patience, discipline, and desire.Getting rich is like losing weight; rarely does it happen by accident.How to lose weight isn’t a secret; you’ve got to consume less calories than you burn. Millions of Americans want to lose weight and they’re convinced they have the patience and discipline to lose weight. But the only ones who lose it and keep it off are the ones for whom the desire to lose weight is so strong that the pain of staying as they are is greater than the pain of doing what they need to do.Likewise, how to get rich isn’t a secret; you’ve got to do things other people aren’t willing to do. You’ve got to swallow your pride, restrain your spending, make hard choices, say no to yourself, get back up when you’re knocked down, and learn from your mistakes rather than defend them. But most important of all, you’ve got to patiently, relentlessly, obsessively keep your eye on the prize.Are you beginning to understand what I said about patience, discipline and desire?I met a successful man who spent 3  hours telling me about the biggest failures of his career. At the end of those 3 hours, I knew his blind spot. His failures had a common root: this otherwise brilliant man believed that any intelligent person who has been taught the right thing to do, and who truly believes it’s the right thing to do, can be counted upon to do the thing they’ve been taught.His successes, on the other hand, did not count on people doing anything other than what they preferred to do.Knowing why to do it – and how – is not the same as doing it.To be unable is to lack the skill.To be unwilling is to lack the desire.Don’t they lead to the same place?Intelligent people like you can easily be taught. But let me see the depth of your desire – your willingness to do what you don’t want to do – and I’ll know the likelihood of your success.Roy H. Williams

You hear a lot of talk these days about how no one listens to the radio anymore.Interestingly, the people who make these claims offer no evidence beyond the fact that commercial free music can be obtained through online streaming. This reminds me of that famous malaprop by Yogi Berra, “No one goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”If you want to see raw numbers, look at the Nielsen Audio Ratings. But I submit to you, as a supplement to those happy numbers, a few observations fueled by my investment of tens of millions of dollars in advertising expenditures each year for more than 25 years.Radio advertising is more cost-effective today than it has ever been, mainly because rates have been suppressed by the myth that “no one listens anymore.”This is great for media buyers. Bad for station owners.Four of my friends own large, online companies, and each of them tells me the exact same thing. “To do real volume online, you’ve got to have a big enough markup to let you spend 30 to 35 percent of gross sales on marketing.” The first time I heard this, I couldn’t believe my ears. Most of the advertisers I’ve known spend 5 to 6 percent of gross sales on advertising. The really aggressive ones spend 10 to 12 percent. “You’ve got to be selling products with a 10 to 20x markup or you’re not going to make any money using pay-per-click,” one of them told me while the other three nodded in agreement. The smallest of their online companies does almost $40,000,000 a year. The largest did $85,000,000 last year and one-third of that was spent in online marketing.Fortunes are being made online. This isn’t a secret.But any brick-and-mortar business that abandons broadcast media – and I include television in that definition – and tries to replace broadcast with pay-per-click or social media or content marketing is going to lose a fortune online.I’ve seen it happen again and again.Ryan Deiss is the principal of digitalmarketer.com, a highly regarded educational site for persons who need to know how to make online advertising work. When Ryan spoke to a roomful of long-term radio advertisers recently, he showed them the 8 sequential things that online marketing can accomplish. The first of these 8 was awareness. “No one in this room should be spending a penny online for awareness,” he said. “The cost of creating awareness online is incredibly expensive compared to radio. You just need to maximize the online traffic that radio can easily drive to your website.”He spent the rest of that day telling those advertisers how to generate more online leads and increase their online closing ratios while cutting their online ad budgets by half.Ryan got a thunderous applause at the end of his session. People love the advice of honest, straightforward experts.One of the business owners in the room that day was Ken Goodrich, the owner of Goettl (rhymes with kettle) Air Conditioning in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Tucson. When Ryan’s session was over, Ken raised his hand to say, “My cost of lead generation for A/C system replacement was about $441 per lead, roughly the national average for my category, until I cut my online budget by half and moved all that money into 52-week radio. Two years later, the sales volume of my 78 year-old company had more than doubled, and my cost per online lead these days bounces around between $39 and $47.”Ken Goodrich went on to make it clear that his customers are still going online before they call him. Some of them are reading reviews and some are just looking for his phone number, but most are typing the name of their city and “air conditioning” into the Google search string. Goettl Air Conditioning pops up, of course, alongside all its competitors. But unlike the other companies listed in those search results, Goettl leaps off the screen. “Hey! I know those guys!” says the prospective customer. Goettl gets the click, the call, and the sale.Consistent radio advertising creates echoic retention, a powerful recall cue.But the credit that belongs to radio is often given to SEO consultants and other digital marketing weasels who pretend that broadcast is dead. Remember what Goodrich told us? His customers are still going online before they call and they’re still seeing his name pop up. But it was only after he became a household word through radio that a much higher percentage of them began clicking “Goettl.”My only goal today was to open your eyes a little wider to seven fundamental truths you’ve always known:Fifty percent of the population in your city spends enough time listening to broadcast radio each week to make them easily and cheaply reachable through that medium.   The best way to use radio is to become a household word before the customer needs what you sell, then wait for them to need you. This requires a 52-week schedule.   The customer is still going to go online before they call. (Ryan Deiss told us that 94% of

Exactly three hundred and thirty years ago – roughly ten generations of parents and children ago – the French explorer La Salle, searching for the mouth of the Mississippi River, was murdered by his own men.We were experiencing dysfunction among supposed team members.In Virginia, a panicked Nicholas Spencer of Westmoreland County provides Virginia Governor Francis Howard with, “Intelligence of the Discovery of a Negro Plott for the Distroying and killing of his Majesty’s Subjects, with a designe of Carrying it through the whole Collony of Virginia…”White people feared that people of another other race might overcome them.Back home in England, King James II orders that his declaration of indulgence be read in English churches, a first step toward securing religious freedom in the British Isles. Then he disbands English parliament.The person in charge of the mightiest nation on earth decided he didn’t need any help.And the Royal Society is rocked by the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica.According to author Edward Dolnick,* the Royal Society of 1687 was:“a grab-bag collection of geniuses, misfits and eccentrics who lived precariously between two worlds, the medieval one they had grown up in and a new one they had only glimpsed. These were brilliant, ambitious, confused, conflicted men. They believed in angels and alchemy and the devil, and they believed that the universe followed precise, mathematical laws. In time they would fling open the gates to the modern world.”I am intrigued by Dolnick’s description of the Royal Society because I can think of no better description of the cognoscenti of Wizard Academy than, “a grab-bag collection of geniuses, misfits and eccentrics.”But then Dolnick rings the wrong bell. He contrasts a belief “in angels and alchemy and the devil,” with the belief that “the universe follows precise, mathematical laws,” as if those two beliefs are mutually exclusive.I don’t believe in alchemy but I do believe in angels.And I believe the universe follows precise, mathematical laws.And I believe in miracles.Let’s say that you and I are playing pool. Anyone with a knowledge of physics knows that a pool ball cleanly struck by the cue ball will continue to roll toward the hole where it’s headed: because the universe follows precise, mathematical laws. But what if, just as the ball is about to drop into the hole, an unnoticed bystander reaches down and lifts the ball off the table? Have the laws of physics been destroyed? Of course not.We simply failed to take into consideration the intervention of the unnoticed bystander; that unseen stranger who occasionally works a miracle.Roy H. Williams

Every successful person has a blind spot.Here’s what often happens:You have a unique approach, a particular process, or a special emphasis.It separates you from your competitors.Your commitment to it makes you successful.So far, so good. You found a way to be different and it made you a success!But now your hockey-stick growth has begun to flatten out and level off.You’ve obviously reached a plateau.How do you get to the next level?Most people double-down on the thing that brought them success.That’s when it happens: Blind Spot Blowback.The thing that made you a success will rarely take you to the next level.I’m not suggesting you abandon it. That would be stupid. You’ve got to maintain what you’ve begun.But that’s easy. You like doing it. It comes to you naturally. That’s why you feel good about pressing the accelerator even further.But your business did not quit accelerating because you failed to press the gas pedal hard enough.Your business quit accelerating because it’s time to shift into second gear.Your first innovation shot you like a rocket off the starting line. You were shoved back into your seat by the g-force of your acceleration. The crowd went wild.And then things began to level off.Second gear, idiot! Second gear!But few people ever find second gear.They believe in first gear. First gear works for them. First gear is where they feel comfortable. Second gear seems counter-intuitive. They’re not sure second gear would be the right thing for them.They want someone to help them get more speed out of first gear.Your business doesn’t have an automatic transmission.You’ve got to press the clutch and move the lever.Only then can you press the pedal again.And someday, if you’re lucky,you’ll get to do thisall over againat a muchhigherlevel.Are you lucky?Roy H. Williams

I’m in a strange mood. I hope you’ll forgive me.I’ve been contemplating things unsaid. Deeds undone. Symphonies unfinished.The reality of mortality has shown up as a hole in the light, a silhouette on the horizon. And its whispering voice has led me to compile a list of unfiltered thoughts that seem to me, remarkable. Thoughts that should not be lost.Perhaps I overreact. I get this way when I’ve been traveling too much, speaking too much, alone too little.I think of all the things I’ve learned that deserve to be remembered. These are the first five that pop into my misty mind as I sit on this airplane in the sky.Don’t follow your passion. Let your passion follow you.Passion does not produce commitment.Commitment produces passion.Passion does not lead to success.Commitment leads to success.Recreation is not a vocation.Rest, Shabbat, is necessary. So set aside your labor – often – and inhale the stuff of life. But recreation is not your goal; it is your fuel. The perpetual pursuit of pleasure leaves a person hollow inside. A life filled with money and no work is a fantasy for fools. Do you see the boredom that hides behind the smiles of the idle rich? Look beneath that boredom and you will see the walking dead.Everyone needs the same three things: Identity, Purpose, and Adventure.Identity: Who am I? Where is my tribe? Who are my people? Abraham Maslow said the greatest unmet need of 65% of us was our need to belong. I’ve never doubted it for a moment.Purpose: What should I do with the rest of my life? What should I stand for? What should I stand against? How can I make a difference, leave a mark, be remembered?Adventure: How will I overcome the obstacles that will stand in my way, the challenges that will confront me, the enemies that will make themselves known?When it’s time to make something from nothing, you must first decide:How to End: begin with the end in mind.Where to begin: approach from an unusual angle.What to leave out: shorter hits harder.And the most important thing to remember is this:Marry your best friend. Your mate will be your partner in every aspect of your life. Don’t marry beauty. Don’t marry wealth. Marry the person who will guard your back in the darkness when dragons are about and things get tricky wicked.Marry your best friend.Roy H. Williams

A world of absolutes is a tidy world, but narrow.The wider world must make room for things that are not.“Make room for things that are not.” I wrote about that last week, didn’t I?We cling to absolutes, I think, because they give us the illusion of stability in a world of constant change.We see rivers on maps, but in the strictest reality, you cannot step into the same river twice. The ripples, the creatures, the floating debris, even the shorelines change with each flickering moment.I wrote to you in October of 2015 about The Color that Doesn’t Exist.What we’re talking about today is like that, but different.The people you meet and the moments you experience in advertising and movies and literature and art exist only in the mind. They are symbols of possible pasts and futures.Symbols are the signposts of imagination.When we think ahead to the possible outcomes of our efforts, we see realities that could happen, but these are never the river we step into when we get there.We’re talking about companies and brands.We are attracted to brands that believe in the things we believe in, brands that show us a reflection of ourselves.Every successful brand has a personality. A strong brand is an entity that lives in the imagination, just as real and full of hope and promise as any character in a television show, novel, or movie.Much of what we buy is purchased to remind ourselves –and announce to the world around us –who we are.The idea of a brand is lot like the idea of home.Bart Giamatti was the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, a Professor of Comparative Literature, and the President of Yale University. These are his thoughts about “home.”“There is no great long poem about baseball. It may be that baseball is itself it’s own great long poem. This had occurred to me in the course of my wondering why home plate wasn’t called fourth base. And then it came to me: Why not? Meditate on the name, for a moment, ‘home.’ Home is an English word that is virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and the accessibility and the aroma of inclusiveness, of freedom from wariness. They cling to the word ‘home’ and are absent from ‘house’ or even ‘my house.’ Home is a concept, not a place. It is a state of mind where self-definition starts. It is origins: the mix of time and place and smell and weather, wherein one first realizes one is an original. Perhaps like others, especially those one loves, but discreet, distinct, not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate. And it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it were ever to occur, would happen… All literary romance, all romance epic, derives from the Odyssey and it’s about going home. It’s about rejoining – rejoining a beloved, rejoining a parent to child, rejoining a land to its rightful owner or rule. Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things. And going home is where that restoration occurs because that’s where it matters most. Baseball is, of course, entirely about going home. It’s the only game you ever heard of where you want to get back to where you started; all the other games are territorial – you want to get his or her territory – not baseball. Baseball simply wants to get you from here back around to here.”We remember home, not so much as a place, but as a state of mind.Likewise, the power of a brand is a state of mind.The creation of a good product is easy.The delivery of a delightful service is difficult.The telling of a good story; that’s where the money is.Roy H. Williams

We live in a universe of paired opposites.Proton and electron. Inhale and exhale. Extend and contract. Rise and fall. Male and female. Day and night.What you embrace does not define you nearly so much as what you exclude.I’m speaking of self-definition.EXAMPLE: One person says they love cars made by Ford. Another person says they love Ford “because it is the oldest American brand; I refuse to drive anything foreign.” Which of these persons gives us more insight into who they are?Any description of what the purchase price includes “at no extra charge” is made more credible by describing what is not included.I’m speaking of products and services.EXAMPLE: One air conditioning company says their A/C Tune-up includes cleaning the coils. Their competitor adds, “…and we clean the coils the right way, not the easy way.” Which of these companies gives you more confidence?Any promise of benefit a customer will gain from your product or service is sharpened and accelerated by contrasting that benefit with what it is not.I’m speaking of advertising and marketing.EXAMPLE: The executive team of Jigsaw Health recently spent 3 days in private classes at Wizard Academy. When they explained to us that their magnesium supplement would make a person feel calm and relaxed while it simultaneously boosted their energy, I said, “That sounds like ad-speak. Your ads will be more believable when you describe what the product is not, and what its benefits are not.”These people understood.These people got to work.They wrote, “Our cravings for artificial stimulants and relaxants increase when we don’t get enough magnesium.” They wrote, “Magnesium is a mineral, not a vitamin. And it has been stripped out of the foods we eat.” And, “Magnesium delivers optimistic energy, not caffeine energy,” and, “It makes you feel yoga-relaxed, not alcohol-relaxed.”Have you ever noticed how every mission statement sounds like every other?This is because we all believe in the same things; fairness, honesty, integrity, and treating people right. And as our mission statements progress, we begin to double-dip into the same values we’ve already mentioned. “We desire only to make a fair and honest profit,” and, “We believe in treating our employees right,” blah, blah, blah. Predictable ad-speak.Differentiation is the goal of communication in business.But you won’t differentiate yourself by explaining what you believe in, or what you include. Differentiation is razor sharpened and rocket accelerated by explaining what you don’t believe in, and what you leave out.EXAMPLE: One company says, “We believe in gathering all the data.” Their competitor says, “We give you step-by-step solutions, NOT data without interpretation.” Which of those statements is more convincing?Most people hesitate to define themselves by what they reject, for fear of being perceived as negative.But is it negative to say, “the right way, not the easy way?” Is it negative to say, “a mineral, not a vitamin?” “Optimistic energy, not caffeine energy?” “Yoga-relaxed, not alcohol-relaxed?” And when you say, “step-by-step solutions, NOT data without interpretation,” you’re excluding an idea, not a person.Give some thought to what you are not. Tell people what you don’t believe in.It won’t change who you are, but it will definitely change how people see you.Roy H. Williams

Others judge you by the outcomes you achieve, but you judge yourself by your intentions. You judge yourself as God does. This is why I like you.You have no power over the vagaries of your circumstances; to be in the right place at the right time is not a matter of skill, but of chance. But you try to do the right thing in the right way for the right reason. This is why I like you.You have failed, but you are not a failure. You have succeeded, but you are not a success. You have tried and cried and laughed and struggled like a chick breaking out of its shell. This is why I like you.You are wounded and broken and have ugly scars because you run to help those you love. When you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you do not quickly give up. This is why I like you.You allow yourself to like people for the most ridiculous of reasons. You take your inspiration from wherever you find it. You have a strange sense of humor and you can laugh at yourself. This is why I like you.You fall but you get up again. You are at your best when no one is watching. And you know how to keep a secret. This is why I like you.One can love a person one does not like.But what I hold for you is something else.I see you as you are.I see you real.And I like you.– Roy H. Williams

People are being caught off guard by the quirky tale of Sunshine and Poobah.Evidently, reading it cover-to-cover is a much different experience than reading it one chapter at a time. This funny little book is rapidly gaining a life of its own.This is the backstory of how – like Frosty the Snowman – it came to life.Jeffrey Eisenberg gave you the beginning of the backstory on the final pages of the just-released hardback, Be Like Amazon: Even a Lemonade Stand Can Do It.“A few months ago we sought the advice of our good friend and mentor Roy H. Williams. We spent an entire day with him presenting the content we wanted to include in the book. We wanted to avoid the complexity of our earlier books, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? and the textbook feel of Call to Action. While these books were both New York Times bestsellers they weren’t a fun or easy read. By the end of the day it was obvious to Roy that despite our best attempts to simplify and prune our content we were writing another textbook…. Roy reassured us that we had the right elements. He asked us if we trusted him to write the book for us. We did… By telling the story of Poobah and Sunshine’s road trip, he avoided getting bogged down in the details a nonfiction book drowns in. He didn’t do it with a simple parable. He did it by creating an entertaining story with realistic dialogue and character development that Bryan and I are incapable of.”Here are a few tidbits Jeffrey failed to mention:1. The original title was Brand Like Amazon. When our friend Ray Bard sent an email arguing strongly in favor of the name Be Like Amazon, I forwarded Ray’s email to Jeffrey and immediately bought the domain name.2. I said, “We need to mention a Norman Rockwell ‘All-American’ business to give the title a visual anchor.” Jeffrey said “lemonade stand” and the title began to sparkle.3. The Brothers Eisenberg presented a Powerpoint and we wore microphones so our conversation could be recorded and transcribed. That transcript is 40,324 words. The book is 22,961.4. Jeffrey and Bryan provided all the Amazon research, the four pillars, and the principles that needed to be taught. I simply added the stories.5. The cognoscenti will recognize the writing style of the book as “Robert Frank.” There is no omniscient narrator to tell you why a person said what he said or how it made the other person feel. Instead, simple nouns and verbs give the reader the raw material of an experience. Like an eavesdropper, the reader must figure out for themselves what is happening and why.When writing “Robert Frank” you must choose:How to End    (Begin with the end clearly in mind and carefully select the details to be covered.)Where to Begin(Choose an interesting angle of approach.)What to Leave Out(Never say what people already know or can easily figure out for themselves. Your story accelerates when you say things in the fewest possible words.)6. I knew I was going to have to fight for the story in chapter 3 about Moses ben Maimon, a Rabbi who lived about a thousand years ago. Knowing the brothers would be hesitant to spotlight the basic humanity and wisdom of Jewish business principles, I sent them this email before I let them read that chapter:When you read Chapter 3, you’ll notice the old man talks briefly about Maimonides. He’s speaking from the perspective of a non-Jewish person who has Jewish friends and business associates. It fills an important hole in the narrative, so I’m going to veto your veto in advance, okay? A7. I give a nod to Cervantes in the closing scene when Poobah describes the book he has just finished reading – the same book that you, the reader have just finished reading – and buys a copy for Sunshine on Amazon. Cervantes invented this technique of self-referential metafiction in Part II Chapter 62 in which the knight and his squire visit a printer’s shop to read an unauthorized sequel to Don Quixote de la Mancha. Yes, Don Quixote reads Don Quixote in Don Quixote. How cool is that!Good News: I’ve already begun the sequel to Be Like Amazon. It will be called Poobah Talks Marketing. Next week I’m going to send a link to the opening chapter of that book to everyone who posts a review of the first book, Be Like Amazon: Even a Lemonade Stand Can Do It, on Amazon.com.The third book in The Sunshine Trilogy will be called Sunshine On His Own. Books 2 and 3 are being written concurrently and will probably be published simultaneously.)Indy Beagle says to tell you “Aroo” and that he’ll see you in the indigo rabbit hole.Click his poem at the top of this page and you’re in.Roy H. Williams

Boring, ineffective ad campaigns are almost always the result of data-worship.Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman famously said,“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”He was talking about using data to make predictions.Amos Tversky, one half of the Nobel Prize-winning duo* of Kahneman and Tversky, renowned for their discovery of systematic human cognitive bias (the tendency to fool oneself,) said,“Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe.”from Chapter 7: The Rules of Prediction,in The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis.To understand what Tversky meant, we’ll need to probe the terms “deterministic” and “probabilistic.” But before we do, I should warn you that exactly 54.2% of the people in America would be annoyed if they read what I’m about to say.I sincerely hope you’re not one of them.When Tversky said, “Man is a deterministic device…” he was referring to the deterministic belief system that underlies Newtonian physics:“It’s an organized universe.”“Everything happens for a reason.”“Everything can be known in advance, as long as we have enough data.”“If you don’t like the effect, just trace up the causal chain – change the cause – and you will consequently change the effect.”The deterministic belief system is logical, rational, sequential, deductive reasoning. It is an incontrovertible religion to the 54.2% of the population who believe in it. And there’s nothing wrong with that unless you’re in advertising. Sadly, the majority of advertising professionals cling to deterministic beliefs. I call these people the data worshippers. At the center of their faith is the belief that success is due to “reaching the right people.” Data worshippers make no room for whimsical wit or flights of fancy. They give no place to the mystery of curiosity or the magic of storytelling.I’ve never seen a business fail due to reaching the wrong people.I believe every person can be “the right person” or knows the right person and has influence over them.I believe in saying the right thing, engaging the imagination and winning the heart, knowing that the mind will follow. The mind creates logic to justify what the heart has already decided.I believe in (probabilistic) bonding with the masses.This causes deterministic marketers to say to me, “You’re hunting with a shotgun. We’re using a rifle with a scope.” And my reply never changes. “The goal is not to kill, but to capture. And you’re fishing with a hook. I’m using a net.”When Tversky said mankind had been, “thrown into a probabilistic universe,” he was referring to the probabilistic belief system that underlies quantum mechanics:“You can suspect what will probably happen, but you can’t know for sure, even when you have total information.”“You don’t really know until you get there.”Ninety years ago, at the Solvay conference of 1927, Albert Einstein (a determinist) objected to the theory of quantum mechanics, quipping, “God does not play dice.” Niels Bohr (a probabilist) told Einstein to “stop telling God what to do,” and won the day. (17 of the 29 attendees at that conference were or became Nobel Prize winners.) Niels Bohr had won the Nobel Prize in Physics 5 years earlier.Deterministic scientists – and marketers – defend their decisions by pointing to predictive data. They prefer learning from expert advice and example.Probabilistic scientists – and marketers – defend their decisions through outcomes. They prefer to learn from consequences.In all of science, the two things most known to be true are (deterministic) Newtonian physics and (probabilistic) quantum mechanics.The odds against Newtonian physics being incorrect are 1016 to 1.The odds against quantum mechanics being incorrect are 1019 to 1.But the pair are mutually exclusive. They cannot both be true.Have you ever heard of “the search for unified theory?”Now you know what scientists are trying to reconcile.In his 1996 book, The Nature of Space and Time, Stephen Hawking (a probabilist) referred to the 1927 Solvay conference when he said, “Not only does God play dice, but he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.”Remember Richard Feynman? He’s the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who said to a group of physicists, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” Immediately prior to making that statement, he said, “Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, ‘these are the conditions, now what happens next?'”Both men were obviously poking fun at deterministic beliefs. I, however, am not.In my 38 years of experience, I have noticed that a deterministic method of managing a business leads to operational excellence. A probabilistic method of managing a business creates a country club for em

According to all the cognitive neuroscientists, the essential gift of the human race is our ability to attach complex meanings to sounds.Here’s a shocker for you: the written language was developed only to make the spoken language permanent. In fact, the written word has no meaning until it has been translated into the spoken word it represents. This is why it takes the average reader 38 percent longer to understand the written word than to understand the same word when spoken.Think about it. Do babies learn to speak first, or to read first?You’re lying in bed, reading a book. It dawns on you that you’ve been scanning the same paragraph over and over but you have no idea what it says. This is because the part of your brain connected to your eyes is still receiving the visual symbols we call the written word, but you are no longer hearing those words in your mind.Stay with me. An understanding of this stuff will make your ads musical, memorable, and persuasive even when they’re being read silently off a computer screen or from a printed page.The English language is composed of only 43 sounds.*These sounds are called phonemes and they are the parts and pieces of words. Be careful not to think of them as letters of the alphabet.Not every letter of the alphabet has its own sound. The letter “c” usually indicates the “k” sound, but we give it the “s” sound when it is followed by an “i”.A single phoneme can be represented by different combinations of letters. The phoneme we hear as “sh” can be heard in the word fish, but we also hear it in fictitious, where it is created by a “t” followed by an “i.”Fictitious fish.Don’t focus on the spelling of the word in question; it is the sound of the word we’re after.Phonemes are important to ad writers because they carry unconscious, symbolic meanings of their own. The black-and-white definition of a word is softly colored by its sound. A great ad writer would never call a diamond “small.” Because small is dull. Small, at best, would glow, like a pearl.But Diamonds fling jagged shards of light.This is why we write, “tiny little diamonds twinkling, glitt’ring and sparkling in the sun.” The sharp-edged “t” and “k” sounds are what we’re after.In the musical fabric of language, every sound is important. What distinguishes large and small from big and little is the difference in their musics. Phonemes within a language are like the instruments in an orchestra. Just as the drums make a different kind of music than do the woodwinds, and the woodwinds make a different kind music than does the brass, so also do the drum-like stops – like p,b,t,d,k, and g – (don’t read that list as letters of the alphabet; make the sounds the letters represent,) make a different music than do the woodwind-like fricatives, the sounds that hiss or hush or buzz – like f, v, s, z, sh, th. And the fricatives make a different music than the brassy nasal velars, like the “ng” sound in song, tongue, string and bring.Phonemes are either obstruent or sonorant.Obstruents are perceived as harder and more masculine; sonorants as softer and more feminine. Big and little are obstruent, perfect for diamonds that fling jagged shards of light. Large and small are sonorant, just right for clothing made of soft fabric.Now are you ready for the really trippy part? Deborah Ross, Jonathan Choi, and Dale Purves at Duke University recently discovered that the musical scale of a culture is determined by the harmonic frequencies of the vowels they speak.Words, then, are literally music.Ed Yong, writing for National Geographic, says, “Have you ever looked at a piano keyboard and wondered why the notes of an octave were divided up into seven white keys and five black ones? After all, the sounds that lie between one C and another form a continuous range of frequencies. And yet, throughout history and across different cultures, we have consistently divided them into sets of twelve semi-tones. Now, Deborah Ross and colleagues from Duke University have found the answer. These musical intervals actually reflect the sounds of our own speech, and are hidden in the vowels we use. Musical scales just sound right because they match the frequency ratios that our brains are primed to detect.”This is a paragraph from the actual study at Duke:“Expressed as ratios, the frequency relationships of the first two formants in vowel phones represent all 12 intervals of the chromatic scale. Were the formants to fall outside the ranges found in the human voice, their relationships would generate either a less complete or a more d

England, 1890 – Barely 5 feet tall on his tiptoes, 30 year-old Jimmy was a pen pal of 40 year-old Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous author of Treasure Island, during the final years of Stevenson’s life when he lived on the island of Samoa. The two never met, but if they had, they would doubtless have played cricket together in the little village of Stanway in Gloucestershire.In September, 1921, one of the most famous men in the world, 33 year-old Charlie Chaplin, traveled to London in the hope of meeting Jimmy, now 61 years old. According to historian Lisa Chaney, “Upon his arrival, central London came almost to a standstill, as traffic was blocked all the way from Waterloo station to the Ritz on Picadilly, where he was staying. Everywhere Chaplin went, he was mobbed by adoring crowds.”Chaplin achieved his goal of meeting Jimmy by contacting Ed Lucas, one of the group of buddies with whom Jimmy played cricket. At the end of their evening together at the Garrick Club in London, Jimmy wrote to his friend, Cynthia Asquith, about his dinner with the great Charlie Chaplin.“He has a rather charming speaking voice, and a brain withal. A very forceful creature, and likeable. The police who are put on to guard him all produce their autograph books for him to sign.”When Jimmy visited Stanway to play cricket, he was the guest of Herbert and Cynthia Asquith. (Herbert was the son of the British Prime Minister and Cynthia would later become a famous author of ghost stories.) In return for their kindness to him and his cricketing buddies over the years, Jimmy built a pavilion on the cricket grounds of Stanway, where it has been in use for nearly 100 years.Who, exactly, were these cricketing buddies of Jimmy?They called themselves the Allah Akbar-ies under the mistaken belief that “Allah akbar” meant “Heaven help us” in Arabic.This was an odd mistake to make, considering that these men were known for their words.The Allah Akbar-ies included:Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle BookArthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock HolmesP. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and WoosterJerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a BoatA. A. Milne, Winnie the PoohG.K. Chesterton – Father BrownAnd then of course there wasE. V. (Ed) Lucas, the author of more than 150 books, including one of Indiana Beagle’s favorites, If Dogs Could Write: A Second Canine Miscellany (1929)The group also included 10 more writers of slightly lesser acclaim.Spectators at these cricket matches included Jimmy’s neighbor and lifelong friend, George Bernard Shaw, along with the ancient Thomas Hardy, (Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.)And five-foot Jimmy? He was of course J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan.And now you know why New York publisher Charles Scribner traveled to England to sit on a bench and watch a cricket match in the tiny village of Stanway.Scribner never forgot that day.Wouldn’t it be fun to make a movie about all this? Can you imagine their conversations?You’ll be pleased to know the tradition of Stanway village lives on at Wizard Academy.We have Americanized it, of course, but I think Jimmy would approve.The Lost Boys are a group of entrepreneurs who gather once a year to play bocce ball at Wizard Academy. It is a secret society. Their names are never published and group photos are never taken.The House of the Lost Boys will be the third and final student mansion on the campus of Wizard Academy. Its six guest rooms will increase our on-site capacity to 24 students. And when we finally build Bilbo Baggins House in the hillside beneath the Spence Diamond Pavilion, we’ll have room for 25.Wizard Academy is a special place where busy people come to charge their batteries.Sometimes it feels a little like Neverland.Thanks for being part of it.Roy H. Williams

What do you value?Are there things for which you would be willing to suffer humiliation, rejection, and financial loss? These are your deep core values, your non-negotiables. It’s important that you know what they are.A person without non-negotiables is a person without passion.But it’s also important to know your negotiables.A person without negotiables is hard-headed, self-important, obstinate. But such people can be tolerated if they apply their non-negotiables only to themselves.A person who believes their non-negotiables should apply to everyone else is an oppressor. Give them a weapon and they are a terrorist.When Oscar Wilde was in prison, he wrote,“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”I’ve always liked Oscar Wilde.Allow me to list my assertions:Suffering is the price of passion.You cannot claim you are passionate about something if you would not be willing to endure hardship for it.Not every belief is worth suffering for.The opinions and beliefs for which you would not suffer are your “negotiable” opinions and beliefs.It is reasonable, and even good, to be willing to suffer for your beliefs.It is not reasonable, nor is it good, to expect others to suffer for your beliefs.Do you want to hear the funny part? Although I truly believe what I said today, it is not a belief about which I am passionate.It is negotiable. AFood for thought on a Monday morning.Roy H. Williams

On the day he died, long ago, a man said, “In this world you will have trouble.”I’ve never had reason to doubt him.Money troubleWork troubleRelationship troubleLegal troubleHealth troubleFamily troubleTax troubleYou don’t get to choose whether or not you will have trouble.But you do get to choose whether or not you will let it dominate your thoughts and control your mood.I find it interesting that immediately after he said, “In this world you will have trouble,” the man went on to say, “but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”What? Overcome the world?How?According to the story, the man was able to deal with all the trouble that came his way because of “the joy that was set before him.” In other words, he had an immovable North Star, a guiding light his thoughts were fixed upon.Troubles seem smaller when your mind is focused on something more interesting than the trouble, more important than the trouble, bigger than the trouble, happier than the trouble.The way to keep your troubles from filling your mind is to fill your mind with something else.Do you follow a North Star? Are you trying to make a difference? Do you have a purpose?You do? Excellent!Purpose is the primary ingredient of Adventure!The other two ingredients are stress and trouble.“It does not do you good to leave a dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.” ­– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”– G.K. Chesterton (1909)In a 1961 letter to Frank and Jo Loesser, John Steinbeck said,“In the dark the other night I wrote in my head a whole dialogue between St. George and the Dragon. Very close relatives those two. Neither could exist without the other. They are eternally tied together – actually two parts of one whole… So St. George must always kill the dragon and it must be repeated, because if the dragon were ever finally killed, there would be no St. George – only a lonely man looking for something to do.”The adventure of St. George was made possible by the dragon.“It’s when you’re safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you’re having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.”– Thornton WilderAre you fortunate enough to be facing a dragon? Are you in the middle of an adventure?Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine in the end.If things aren’t fine, it’s not the end.Roy H. WilliamsPS – I don’t know who first spoke those last two lines, but I would like to have known that person. Some say it was John Lennon (The Beatles,) Some say it was Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist,) and some say it was someone else (Someone Else.) The only thing that’s certain is that it wasn’t me. – RHW

Our nation is changing, of course.Things aren’t like they used to be.Famous clothing brands are at historic lows and major retailers are closing hundreds of stores. In 2016, 2,056 stores closed their doors. The worst year on record is 2008, when 6,163 stores shut down.Brokerage firm Credit Suisse says in a just-released research report,“Barely a quarter into 2017, year-to-date retail store closings have already surpassed those of 2008… it’s possible more than 8,600 brick-and-mortar stores will close their doors in 2017.”But we’re not in a recession.According to an April 10 article by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic,“America’s GDP has been growing for 8 straight years, gas prices are low, unemployment is under 5 percent, and the last 18 months have been quietly excellent years for wage growth, particularly for middle- and lower-income Americans.”Yes, Amazon.com and the other online players are partially responsible for the decline of retail in America, but not nearly to the degree you might think.In 2016, only 6% of retail purchases were made online.But retailers are down by a lot more than 6%.Want to know what categories are doing better than ever?“Travel is booming. Hotel occupancy is booming. Domestic airlines have flown more passengers each year since 2010, and last year U.S. airlines set a record, with 823 million passengers. The rise of restaurants is even more dramatic. In 2016, for the first time ever, Americans spent more money in restaurants and bars than at grocery stores. Sales in this category have grown twice as fast as all other retail spending.”In other words, we’re buying fewer things, but more experiences.Materialism is on the decline.In retail stores and online, we’re spending a lot less money on clothing. Its share of total consumer spending has declined by 20 percent in barely more than a decade. Houses, cars and furniture seem to be less important to us as well.But we’re spending more than ever on togetherness, entertainment, and fitness.We hunger less for prestige, more for experiences and relationships.Relationships…If you’re going to get in step with this trend, you’re going to need to invest in customer bonding.Use mass media to win their hearts before they need what you sell.Don’t let your company be just another name on a list of search results.Roy H. Williams

Michael Jordan wasn’t a perfectionist; he was an improvisationist. That’s why he was hard to stop.A perfectionist knows exactly what he’s going to do. He plans his work and works his plan. The only problem is that because he knows, the defender knows, too.It’s easy to anticipate what a perfectionist is going to do. He’s predictable.But no one knew what Michael was going to do, because he didn’t know himself.Does it surprise you that nearly all the superstar basketball players and top-scoring running backs test as improvisationists?So do all the best ad writers.Predictability is the curse of the perfectionist,and the silent assassin of advertising.When you say what people expect you to say, no matter how perfectly you say it, you bore them.Improvisation puts the bubbles in champagne.Improvisation puts a wiggle in your walk.Improvisation puts money in your bank account, bread in your basket, glitter on your cheek, and a smile on your face.Unexpected is interesting.Unpredictable is enlightening.Improvised is exciting.Random Entry is a technique that guarantees improvisation in advertising.The magic of random entry begins when the ad writer doesn’t choose the opening line of the ad. Rather, it is chosen for him by someone who has no idea what they are doing.Want to try it? Ask a stranger to think of a colorful sentence. Tell them to make it “vivid, unexpected, larger than life.” Tell them, “The sentence doesn’t have to be about anything in particular; it just has to cause people to be curious about where this story is headed.”The best way to create Random Entry without the help of an unwitting accomplice is to flip open a book and place your finger on a page with your eyes closed. The sentence on which your finger lands will be the opening line of your ad.“Wiggins was Harvey’s pet hamster.”That’s your opening line for the 30-second radio ad you’re about to write for the company that provides your primary income. If your ad makes sense, elevates attention, and successfully sells a product or service, congratulations! You are an improvisationist.Indiana Beagle plans to celebrate the winning scripts in the rabbit hole next Monday.Be sure to time your ad while reading it out loud. Thirty seconds is all you’ve got.There will be prizes, but I’m not sure how many.That will be up to Indy. Some of the prizes will be ridiculous, some will be worthwhile, a few will be sentimental, but at least one will be a scholarship to any Wizard Academy class you choose.Send your 30-second radio script to [email protected] before midnight, Saturday, April 22, 2017.Dunk the ball.I know you can fly.Don’t pretend you can’t.Roy H. Williams

Ask a businessperson or a marketing professional, “What is branding?”Go ahead. Go do it. I’ll wait…Did they mention the importance of a having a logo? Did they talk about the consistent use of a chosen group of “brand” colors and a particular font and layout and look and feel? Have you done what they told you? Congratulations! You now have a visual style guide.And so does every other business on earth.The reason I avoid using the word “branding” is because most people think they’re already doing it.Here’s a far more important question: What are you doing to create an emotional bond with customers you’ve not yet met? This is the real goal of branding. But since too many people think they’re “branding” when all they’re doing is following a visual style guide, let’s you and I call this process “customer bonding,” okay?If your visual style guide is successful, people will recognize you when they see you.If your customer bonding program is successful, people will think of you and feel good about you when they finally need what you sell.Now let’s take this discussion to the street:You sell a product or service that people buy less often than once a year.There’s no way to know exactly who is going to need you, or when.This is why you’re investing in Search Engine Optimization and all those keywords. Am I right?So far, so good: now when the prospective customer finally needs what you sell, you’re going to show up…along with everyone else in your category.Let’s see what happens next:Your customer is scanning the results of their search.Do you want to know which company is going to get the click, the call and the sale?Surprise! It’s the company that’s been bonding with customers through mass media.One of the first signs your customer bonding program is working is that your online cost for lead generation will sharply decline and your conversion rate will rise.The SEO weasels will try to take credit for this, of course, by claiming they made some refinements to your keywords or found some efficient new way to target or blah, blah, blah. This is one of my favorite moments.Because I told the business owner this would happen.So when it does, they always laugh.I want you to laugh, too.It’s never too late to start bonding.Lower costs, higher conversion rates, and laughter.These are just the byproducts and side effects.Roy H. Williams

People read books for the strangest of reasons.I recently read a book about a female aviator in Africa in the 1930s.I have no interest in aviation. I have no interest in Africa.But it was a great book.I began reading it after I stumbled onto something Ernest Hemingway wrote in a 1942 letter to his friend, Maxwell Perkins.“Did you read Beryl Markham’s book, West with the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer’s logbook. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and sometimes making an okay pigpen. But this girl who is, to my knowledge, very unpleasant,… can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people’s stories, are absolutely true. So, you have to take as truth the early stuff about when she was a child which is absolutely superb. She omits some very fantastic stuff which I know about which would destroy much of the character of the heroine; but what is that anyhow in writing? I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book.”How can you resist a recommendation like that?Here are a few sentences from the book:“A map says to you. Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not… I am the earth in the palm of your hand.”“Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead. She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation, but yields her own desires gently.”“The hills, the forests, the rocks, and the plains are one with the darkness, and the darkness is infinite. The earth is no more your planet than is a distant star – if a star is shining; the plane is your planet and you are its sole inhabitant.”Looking down from her plane she sees a herd of impala, wildebeest and zebra,“It was not like a herd of cattle or of sheep, because it was wild, and it carried with it the stamp of wilderness and the freedom of a land still more a possession of Nature than of men. To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told — that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.”Most of the book isn’t really about flying at all. It’s about looking and seeing and living in the world around you.“Toomba’s grin spreads over his wide face like a ripple in a pond… He grins until there is no more room for both the grin and his eyes, so his eyes disappear.”“The trail ran north to Molo; at night it ran straight to the stars. It ran up the side of the Mau Escarpment until at ten thousand feet it found the plateau and rested there, and some of the stars burned beneath its edge.”Writing about a young horse named Balmy, Markham said,“She was neither vicious nor stubborn, she was very fast on the track, and she responded intelligently to training… Had she made her debut on Park Avenue in the middle thirties instead of on the race-course at Nairobi in the middle twenties, she would have been counted as one of those intellectually irresponsible individuals always referred to as being ‘delightfully mad.’ Her madness, of course, consisted simply of a penchant for doing things that, in the opinions of her stable mates, weren’t being done. No well-brought-up filly, for instance, while being exercised before the critical watchfulness of her owner, her trainer, and a half-dozen members of the Jockey Club, would come to an abrupt halt beside a mud-hole left by last month’s rains, buckle at the knees, and before anything could be done about it, roll over in the muck like a Berkshire hog. But Balmy did, as often as there was a mudhole in her path and a trusting rider on her back, though what pleasure she got out of it none of us ever knew. She was a little like the eccentric genius who, after being asked by his host why he had rubbed the broccoli in his hair at dinner, apologized with a bow from the waist and said he had thought it was spinach.”Hemingway was right. It really is a bloody wonderful book.Roy H. Williams

Business Personality Disorder (BPD) is characterized by at least two distinct identities or dissociated personality states that show up in a company’s behavior.BPD emerges when unrelated teams work independently in the areas of (1.) Advertising (2.) Web Presence (3.) Sales Training.If a person encounters your ads, then visits your website, then comes to your place of business, will they feel they have encountered a single personality three times, or three personalities once?Advertising rarely makes the sale. It merely engages the customer in the early stages of a conversation. If the reader/listener/viewer of your ad has purchased from you in the past and had a good experience, it’s possible the ad will cause him or her to make immediate contact with your business.But customers who are less familiar with you will hope to extend the conversation and learn more about you by visiting your website. And they will expect to encounter the same personality they met in your ads.Will that happen?Or will they encounter an entirely different personality crafted by your website team?Does your website continue the conversation begun by your advertising, or does it stand alone, as though that conversation never took place?To what degree is your website disconnected from your advertising? That will be the degree of disconnection experienced by your customer.If by some miracle, the personality, tone and style of your website agrees with the personality, tone and style of your advertising, your biggest problem remains. Will your people continue the conversation that was begun in your ads and continued on your website? Or will they introduce an entirely different company than the one your customer was hoping to meet?Relational Marketing depends on Integrated Messaging.Integrated Messaging begins withWe Believe(Statements that capture the Personality and Promises, Processes and Benefits of your company.)Personality makes the customer feel they know you.Promises make the customer feel secure.Processes give credibility to your Promises.Benefits are what the customer is hoping to experience.(Your Origin Story is essentially the backstory of We Believe. We spoke of this in last week’s MondayMorningMemo.)Brandable Chunks(memorable identifiers and phrases extracted from your We Believe statements.)Deliverables(Advertising, web copy, content marketing, and signature phrases used by your people, all built from the same list of Brandable Chunks) These deliverables include 5, 10, 15, 30 and 60-second radio ads, billboard copy, email subject lines and body copy, digital marketing text, memorable identifiers for truck and van wraps, store signage, etc.)You’d like to see some examples, I know.You’ll find them in Chapter Ten of Be Like Amazon: Even a Lemonade Stand Can Do It. You can read that chapter by following the hyperlink in the previous sentence, or you can wait for the book to be published in a couple of months.The audiobook is in production right now. It’s going to be the first ever of its kind; a business book presented as dialogue.Roy H. Williams

There are two kinds of advertising.The goal of the first is to make yours the company the customer thinks of immediately and feels the best about when they – or any of their friends – need what you sell. This is called a “relational” ad campaign. It works better and better with each passing year.The goal of the second kind of advertising is to cause the reader/listener/viewer to buy something from you immediately. I began my career writing these “transactional” ads. I was good at it. This type of campaign is called “direct response.” Transactional ads work less and less well the longer you run them.Today I write only the first kind.If you have the staying power to build a relational ad campaign, you’re going to need to remember your origins. You’re going to have to write your Genesis Story.There are two kinds of staying power. The first is financial.Here’s my advice: Don’t launch a relational ad campaign so big that you would not be able to sustain it indefinitely. If you say, “I can fund this for 6 months, but by then it needs to be self-supporting,” then you’re spending more than you can afford. It’s impossible to predict the moment of breakthrough, that moment when all your previously fruitless efforts will begin to radiate results like a newborn sun.This is why you have to have the second kind of staying power: emotional staying power. Three or four months into your campaign, you’re going to begin to panic. But the only thing worse than never launching a relational ad campaign is to launch one and then abandon it.Relational ad campaigns are never about having the lowest price. A customer who switches to you for reasons of price alone will just as quickly switch from you for the same reason. And there is nothing that some other company can’t do a little worse and sell a little cheaper.People don’t bond with companies so easily as they bond with people. We bond with people we like, people we feel good about, people we think we know.Here are three examples of well-told stories of origin:“My Dad was a house painter. He taught me to sand and scrape old paint until my fingers were aching and raw. But I wanted to make him proud, so I always worked hard. I’ll never forget the day we opened our brown bags at lunchtime and he said, “Son. I’m proud of how hard you work, but I hope that someday you’ll get a job where you can wear a tie.” And because I wanted to make him proud, I decided to open a jewelry store. I watched as my Dad took his last seven hundred dollars out of his sock drawer to help me get started. But he never got to see that store. He died just before it was open. I lived on wieners and beans for the next 11 years until I finally figured it out:  Lose the tie… And be a regular guy just like your Dad. That’s when things turned around for me. I’ve been sharing the story of that 700 dollars with young entrepreneurs in High Schools and Colleges for years. America’s newest and best Kesslers Diamonds is about to open in front of Cabela’s next to the Rivertown Mall in Grandville. I’m Richard Kessler, and I’m hoping to become your jeweler.”Your origin story doesn’t have to be your first ad. Some of the most successful stories of origin have been introduced after the advertiser had already become a household word.Tom Heflin was a railroad conductor. His wife had a sister. That sister had two little boys. One day she took those boys on a train to Winslow, Arizona to spend a few days with them. Tom took those boys out into the desert to collect rocks. One of the little boys grew up to be a pediatrician. The other just kept pickin’ up rocks. I’ve never been able to explain what got into me that day …but it’s never left me. It has something to do with how the beauty of nature is made permanent, and becomes transferable, only in natural gemstones. Blood-red rubies. Piercing blue sapphires. Emeralds greener than the greenest grass. And diamonds …rocks that are perfectly colorless, clear and pure. Rocks! Call me crazy. Call me naïve. But I don’t think gemstones are here by accident. I think God put them here. And he made them beautiful, and he made them rare, and he made them hard to find, so that you and I might give them as symbolic gifts to those rare and hard to find people who are beautiful in our own lives. You know who I am. And that’s all I’ve got to say today.The power of your origin story doesn’t depend on your category of business.I was a ten year-old boy holding a flashlight for my Dad while he worked on an air conditioner for a customer. His name was Duncan Goodrich. He didn’t talk much. But there’s a certain kind of magic that happens when a son holds a flashlight for his father. I held it steady and quiet and Dad talked to me while he worked. He said, “When a person needs help, you respond right away. Not when it’s convenient fo

Four words have echoed in my head for several days.“Not everyone. Not always.”Why do such thoughts leapsparkling like swordfishfrom the dark watersof the mind?I can’t be sure, but I suspect my heart is responding to all those authoritative voices making silly statements about “the customer” with misguided certainty. They whisper to us from websites, blogs and business books.How can they teach us about “the customer” when every person has two different customers inside them?When you are in “Transactional” shopping mode, youare thinking short-term.care only about today’s transaction.look forward to the process of shopping.fear only paying too much.plan to become expert through extensive research.are willing to spend lots of time investigating.are highly focused on price.When you are in “Relational” shopping mode, youare thinking long-term, hoping to find a permanent solution provider.consider today’s transaction to be one in a series of many.aren’t in the mood to comparison shop or negotiate.fear only making a poor choice, “buying the wrong one.”hope to find an expert you feel you can trust.consider your time spent shopping to be part of the purchase price.are likely to become a repeat customer.“Time and money are interchangeable.You can always save one by spending more of the other.”– Princess Pennie WilliamsA person in transactional shopping mode is more willing to spend time than money. A person in relational shopping mode is more willing to spend money than time.Customers in transactional shopping mode make high demands on your staff and on your time. Transactional customers are the source of about 80 percent of all your problems.Customers in relational shopping mode go straight to the provider they think of immediately and feel the best about. If this provider has a reasonable solution to their problem, they purchase it and are done. None of the competitors to this provider were ever given a chance to make the sale. In fact, they were never even aware this customer was in the market to buy. Relational customers are the source of about 80 percent of all gross profits, even though they represent only 50 percent of the shoppers in any given category on any given day.You buy the cheapest eggs because “eggs are eggs.” The grocer makes very little profit on this sale. But 3 seconds later you reach into the milk case and happily pay double the price of the cheapest milk because this particular brand of milk combines a unique set of production circumstances that you offer consequential benefits. No Bovine Growth Hormones!The person behind you buys the cheapest milk because “milk is milk.” The grocer makes very little profit on this sale. But 3 seconds later, they reach for eggs and happily pay double the price of the cheapest eggs because THESE eggs were laid by free-roaming, never caged, vegetarian hens that deliver higher levels of B12, B2, A, and B5, plus selenium and folate! And these yolks are a deep golden yellow!Each customer bought one item transactionally, one item relationally.You have a transactional mode of shopping and a relational mode of shopping and so does everyone else.Now this is the part that might stick in your throat a bit: I’ve never found a product or service category in which the ratio of customers in transactional mode versus relational mode wasn’t approximately 50/50. This holds true even for groceries and new cars, although grocers and new car dealers have a difficult time swallowing it. The problem, you see, is that customers in transactional mode are the vocal ones up in your face, making threats and demands, while the relational customer slips invisibly in and out, leaving only a pile of money behind as evidence they were ever there.The only way to target the relational customer is through your ad copy.Do you know how to write it?Dr. Roger Sperry was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his documentation of brain lateralization when he demonstrated that we don’t have a single brain divided into two halves so much as we have two separate, competing brains.Transactional mode is largely a function of the logical, rational, sequential, deductive-reasoning (and suspicious) left hemisphere of your brain. Relational mode is a function of the intuitive, pattern-and-connection seeking (not suspicious) right hemisphere.Are you beginning to understand why I’m uncomfortable with authoritative voices making silly statements about “the customer” as though every customer makes decisions according to the same criteria used by every other customer? Heck, we don’t even use the same criteria from moment to moment!I probably should have wrapped this up and concluded today’s memo 4 paragraphs ago, but I want to give you another fun bit of evidence of the never-ending tug-of-war between the left and right hemispheres of our brains.Got another minute?“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”– George Santayana (1863 – 1952)“Proverbs

Hi, everyone! My name is _____________________.Because Wizard Academy appreciates your generous donation to help keep Chapel Dulcinea open, free and beautiful, I’m going to take you on a 4-minute walk to Wizard’s Tower, where we’ll enter the underground art gallery, then go straight up to the Star Deck where I’ll tell you a 2-minute story, then you’ll have 15 more minutes to take photos and enjoy the view from nearly 1,000 feet above downtown Austin. Follow me, please.[Start walking.][Pausing at The Old Man and the Sea…]AThis is Ernest Hemingway’s“The Old Man and the Sea”by Jane DeDecker.If you remember that Nobel prize-winning novel, you’ll remember how the old man fought the giant fish – and then the sharks – for 3 days and 3 nights before sailing home.[Pointing now at the statue above the art gallery as you walk toward it…] The counterpoint to this symbol of the heroic, masculine struggle is Jane DeDecker’s symbol of feminine determination – “Into the Wind” – a living figurehead on the bow of a ship sailing above the art gallery. We’ll take a closer look in a moment.[Stopping briefly at the bronze plaque with the footprints on it….]bThis is the Laughlin Stone. If you place your feet on those footprints at night[Pointing now at the sword at the top of the tower….]you’ll see the North Star hovering just above the hilt of that sword. Since the North Star is positioned directly above the axis of the earth, it’s the only star that doesn’t move across the sky during the night…The Star Deck – just behind it ­­– is where we’re headed.[Begin walking again toward the tower….]rThe famous psychologist, Carl Jung, believed that life is a journey on water. Above the waterline is the conscious mind. Below the waterline is the unconscious, a shadowland of nonverbal symbols and music and mysteries.[Point up at “Into the Wind”….]You’ll notice as we enter the tower that we’re directly beneath the ship of “Into the Wind.” If the old man and his fish are on a beach – and that ship above us is sailing on the ocean, we are now 12 feet underwater, which is where we’ll find the art gallery, the wine cellar and the musical instruments of Wizard Academy, since each of these speaks to the unconscious mind.[Enter the art gallery.]iWizard Academy teaches advertising, marketing and communication to businesses across America and around the world. Our students include Nobel Prize-winning scientists, university professors and best-selling authors, as well as executives at companies like Procter & Gamble, Kellogg, and IBM. But mostly they are the owners of America’s 5.91 million companies that have fewer than 100 employees. Wizard Academy is where these people – people like you – come to learn big things fast, in an environment that feels like summer camp for grown-ups.[Give the group instructions about staying together and NOT going up the stairs.] e[When everyone has arrived on the Star Deck, ring the bronze bell near the stairwell door, then point at the statue of the boy on the paper airplane as you begin walking toward the sword.]If you look behind the base of that statue, you’ll see a little boy reading a book.[Point now at the larger boy, above.]And this is that same little boy, flying on those wings of paper. It’s called “Journeys of Imagination,” by Gary Lee Price. It’s about the wonderful journeys we take in our minds when we read good literature.I’ll be finished in just 2 more minutes, then you can admire the view.[Finish your talk as you stand next to the sword, facing north.]fLife is a journey on water.The conscious mind is above the waterline.The unconscious is beneath.You only meet 4 people on the ocean of Life, but you meet them again and again.The first person you meet is drifting, pushed this way and that by the winds and waves of circumstances. You know you’ve met a drifter when they say, “Whatever. It’s all good.”The second person you meet is surfing. They seem to be having a pretty good time, but they never really get anywhere. They just paddle around in the ocean, looking for a wave to ride. The surfer is forever looking for “the next big thing.”The third person you meet is drowning.We’re not just talking about “going under” and needing a helping hand.Most of us, if we’re healthy and normal, will occasionally need a helping hand from someone who loves us. We may need to be rescued financially, or chemically, or relationally. This is normal. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about professional drowners. You’ve met them. They say, “It’s been the worst week of my life, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” So you help them. You get them back on thei

I’m experimenting with radio in a way that, for me, is new and different.Many of those who understand what I’m doing won’t agree with the fundamental premise of my experiment. But that’s not what worries me.I’m concerned about those who will agree and then attempt it – and fail. I believe they’ll fail because they won’t do it right.Here’s what’s happening: I’m airing a 5-second ad every hour, 24 hours a day, for 365 days, on each station in a broadcast group in a major city. The result will be 51% reach (18+) with a weekly frequency of 10.4. This means that 51% of the total population in that region will hear one of my ads an average of 10.4 times each week, 52 weeks in a row.That’s right. One 5-second ad per hour, 24 hours a day, on each station in the broadcast group.You can run, but you can’t hide.Here’s why I fear people who attempt this experiment will likely screw it up:They’ll buy too little frequency.“Well, I think a spot an hour is overkill, so I’m just going to buy a 5-frequency instead of a 10+ frequency each week.”They’ll rotate too few ads.I’ll be producing 12 new 5-second ads every 6 weeks. Consequently, even though I have a 10.4 frequency each week, the typical listener is likely to hear 10 different ads, one time each.Their ads won’t say anything worth remembering.The key to success is to make a different, memorable statement in each 5-second ad. You can then open, or close, each ad with a single word that identifies the company. Only one or two ads in every series of twelve will feature the contact info of the company.Here’s what I like about this plan:Reach is double what I used to get for the same money.Frequency is triple what I used to get for the same money.With a 10.4 weekly frequency, I can safely expect a listener to unconsciously “connect and combine” each of my brandable chunks, nuggets and factoids to create a coherent mental image much bigger than the information found in a single ad. In fact, I expect that within a few months a large percentage of that city will be able to recite meaningful amounts of information about my client.The 5-second format – combined with 12 new ads in rotation every 6 weeks – will allow me to dodge the audience burn-out bullet.What will happen if my experiment proves successful?I’ll finally have a way to help advertisers with small budgets in big cities.Give me a schedule of 1 spot per hour, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year on the smallest station in town and it won’t be long before my client is on a second station, then a third.Get enough advertisers to do this and Radio will become happy again.Even if you believe that “a unit is a unit, no matter the length,” you can’t argue with the fact that airing twenty-four 5-second ads would mean only a 2-minute commercial load per hour. This would mean that a listener tuning in to your station would be greeted by a commercial – instead of music – just once in every 30 visits to your dial position, compared to the current 1 in 4.Even if radio stations began airing 36 ads per hour – more than double the number they’re currently airing – I’m fairly certain that listeners would be delighted with just 3 minutes of ads per hour.A radio station with 4 commercial breaks of NINE, 5-second ads each hour would have rollicking, rock-and-roll commercial breaks of just 45 seconds each and I’m convinced listeners would retain a higher percentage of those messages.The weakness of this plan is that so few people know how to write attention-getting, memorable 5-second ads.But don’t worry. We’re putting together a class.Indy says “Hi,” by the way.He just showed me what he put in this week’s rabbit hole for you.You’re going to like it.Roy H. Williams

We encounter “meta” most often in the word metaphor.We create metaphors when we see the same pattern in two, unrelated things.Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”But Shakespeare wasn’t the first to see the similarity between the world and a stage. Seneca the Younger – sixteen hundred years before Shakespeare – wrote, “Life is like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.”In his marvelous new book, Metaphors Be With You, Dr. Mardy Grothe reveals the importance of metaphors in everyday communication:“Metaphor is the energy charge that leaps between images, revealing their connections.” ­– Robin Morgan“Effective metaphor does more than shed light on the two things being compared. It actually brings to the mind’s eye something that has never before been seen.”–Rebecca McClanahanThe poet Robert Frost said, “An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.”“Metaphor isn’t just for poets; it’s in ordinary language and is the principal way we have of conceptualizing abstract concepts like life, death, and time.”– More Than Cool Reason, George Lakoff and Mark Turner“Meta” has recently evolved a second meaning.It now refers to things that are self-referential. Ben Zimmer tells of a librarian named Lauren Dodd who recently tweeted, “Just saw a librarian shush other librarians at a library conference.”(Indy Beagle is chuckling his signature, “Heh, heh, heh,” after reading that over my shoulder.)Educational psychologist Jerome Bruner talks about “how to get students to reflect, to turn around on themselves, to go ‘meta,’ to think about their ways of thinking.”Yep, “to think about your ways of thinking” would definitely qualify as self-referential.In his book, Tilting Cervantes, my friend Bruce Burningham says,“We delight in the notion of a stand-up comedian named Jerry Seinfeld who creates a sitcom on NBC in which he plays a stand-up comedian named Jerry Seinfeld who eventually creates a sitcom on NBC in which he plays a stand-up comedian named Jerry Seinfeld.”If triple-meta were a recognized designation, I believe Bruce Burningham’s sentence would qualify.To understand a thing that is new and different, you need only search for what it is like.Monkfish is the poor man’s lobster.Success is a bastard with many fathers, but failure is an orphan.America is a melting pot.You are my sunshine.He drowned in a sea of grief.Every new concept, invention, innovation or idea reflects an established pattern.That pattern has just never been used in this application before.Contemplate a metaphor. See the pattern. Consider how it might be used as a solution to your problem. Do this again and again and your spinning brain will soon be flinging ideas like a grinding wheel throwing sparks at the darkness.Perhaps you’ll discover a miraculous solution. Perhaps you’ll just have fun.Give it a try and see.As Indy walked away just now, he called to me over his shoulder, “Anything you can do, I can do meta.”I’m going to have to ponder that one awhile.Roy H. Williams

If you don’t understand the title of today’s memo, just ask a 12 year-old boy. (If you didn’t grow up in the South, your 12 year-olds may be more familiar with “He who smelt it, dealt it.”)With a title like “The Smeller’s the Feller,” does it surprise you that today’s memo is about a tried-and-true management tool?A couple of days ago, my partner Tim Miles made a brilliant suggestion about how we might begin the 3-day Business Growth class we’re having in March. (Sorry, completely full.)I first heard about Tim’s idea when I got a funding inquiry from the Wizard of Ads group director. Tim had suggested something really awesome. Expensive, but awesome.I sent Tim an email. “Fantastic idea, Tim! You’re in charge.”TIP: Always assign responsibility for follow-through to the person who had the idea. Give the fun of chasing the rabbit to the dog who sniffed it out of hiding. (In essence, the smeller’s the feller.) AHERE’S WHY:1. No other person will have quite the same vision in their mind or enthusiasm in their heart.2. No one has more to gain – or lose – than the person who had the idea.BONUS BENEFIT: Word will spread, and it will slow people down from coming up with so many things “YOU” ought to do.When we were constructing the buildings at Wizard Academy and a group of people would arrive on campus, at least one of them would pull me aside and say with excitement, “Here’s what you ought to do…”PROBLEM: I was already as busy as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest, as stressed out as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs and as uptight as a frog on a freeway with his hopper stuck. So one day I impulsively shook the hand of the person who had made the suggestion and said, “Great idea! You’re in charge!”They asked how much money they could spend and I said, “As much as you can raise.”Amazingly, they raised the money, refined the idea and brought it to full execution.When I saw how well their idea turned out, I said to myself, “Make a note: do that more often.”When my partner Tim got my email, he replied tongue-in-cheek, “Man, as long as I’ve been around, I really should have seen that coming.”I say “tongue-in-cheek” because Tim has made numerous suggestions over the years, and he’s always been willing to take full responsibility for implementation.“Great idea! You’re in charge!”  is one of the guiding principles of the Wizard of Ads partners. It has also become a tradition at Wizard Academy.I suggest that you test this technique within your own company.It’s the perfect way to determine if you’re surrounded by the right kind of people.Roy H. Williams