Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

“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

Successful advertising touches the hungers, wants and needs of a person. My job as a professional ad writer is to identify these needs and speak to them.If you have a heart beating in your chest, you have hungers, wants and needs.We can intellectualize our conscious needs, but we cannot intellectualize our unconscious ones.All your friends, all your neighbors, all America, all the world has an unconscious need for encouragement right now.The reason history repeats itself is because we pay too little attention the first time.When people are frustrated, frightened or angry, they elevate a strongman to become their leader. We smile in memory of England’s blustering Winston Churchill, a devoted servant of his nation, and our own thundering Teddy Roosevelt, a devoted servant of our own. And who can forget the swaggering Douglas MacArthur wading to shore in the Philippines? Or steely-eyed George S. Patton who encouraged his men, his allies and his nation when he said, “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”We are encouraged by the swagger of the strongman.But not all strongmen are good.Russia was frustrated, frightened and angry when she turned to Josef Stalin in 1929.Germany was frustrated, frightened and angry when a strongman overturned their democracy in 1933.Japan was frustrated, frightened and angry when the boy they believed to be a god sent airplanes to bomb Pearl Harbor.Frustrated, frightened and angry people gave power to Manuel Noriega of Panama, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Uganda’s Idi Amin.It seems that everyone, everywhere today is frustrated, frightened and angry; the people across the street and around the corner; the people across the sea and around the world.January 27, 2017: Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union, said, “It looks as if the world is preparing for war.”The antidote for frustration and fear is encouragement.The antidote for anger is to listen, smile, and extend a hand.I’ve decided to make this my year of encouragement.I believe it’s what people need right now.Will you join me?I’m going to be unreasonably optimistic, ridiculously cheerful and oblivious to fear. Or at least that’s my plan. And I’m going to hand out sincere and honest compliments everywhere I go.Encouragement can be conjured from the scantiest of materials.If you do this with me, I can assure you that people will say we’re being foolish and naive and many of them will accuse us of seeing the world through rose-colored lenses. They will tell us we’re not being reasonable.“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard ShawYes, they’ll tell us we’re being unreasonable.I’m okay with that.Are you?Roy H. Williams

Some lessons we never learn.For me, the familiar face of failure hangs like a Royal Portrait above the grand staircase of my social behavior.Lest my meaning be obscured by that flowery metaphor, I am simply stating for the record – before God, the world and you – that my greatest recurring mistake is that I often disappoint my friends.Not my casual friends. No, never those. I disappoint the friends I care about the most.This happens because I allow the merely urgent to displace the truly important.In fact, I’m doing it right now. I should be answering emails sent to me by Garrett and Dan and a friend I’ve called “Other Roy” for more than 25 happy years. But this is the day the trash service comes, so I’ve got to wheel our trash and recycling carts to the curb right now so Princess Pennie won’t worry that we’ll miss the truck. After I do that, I’ll write thoughtful and well-crafted responses to Garrett and Dan and Other Roy… as soon as I write the four ads I promised to have to my client by 8AM. But just before I do that – just to get them out of the way – I’ll pop off a few 5-word and 12-word answers to 26 other emails that really don’t matter at all.You can see where this is headed, right?I’ve had “Email Garrett” near the top of my to-do list for exactly 21 days. “Email Dan” has been just above it for 63 days. And I’ve put off responding to so many of “Other Roy’s” emails that I’m surprised he’s still speaking to me. And those are just 3 of the names on a list that stretches the full length of our grand staircase.I don’t want to give half-baked “quickie” answers to these good friends, so they wind up getting no answers from me at all.I speak recklessly but I write carefully. Much too recklessly and a little too carefully, if we’re being altogether honest. So people who know me through my writing have met me at my highest and best, and people who know me through my speaking have met me at my lowest and worst. I judge myself by my writing. I suppose this is why I am reluctant to write quickly to the people I care about the most. I don’t want them to read a poor representation of me, so I delay responding and trust they will forgive.I’m hoping someday to outgrow these bad habits. (Indy is laughing as he reads this over my shoulder because he knows we’ll soon be celebrating the 29th anniversary of my 30th birthday.)Oh, well. That’s me.What about you? Do you have a recurrent shortcoming, a familiar face of failure?Send it to [email protected] would tell you to send it to mebut we already know how that would turn out. ARoy H. Williams

“Don’t need a Buddha head.” What are those 5 words telling us?Are we being warned that “need” is the antithesis of Zen? Are we being told that a desire to think like Buddha is the opposite of thinking like Buddha? “Don’t need a Buddha head?”Or are those 5 words a repudiation of Buddhist beliefs? Are we being told of someone’s inspection and rejection of Buddhism? “Don’t need a Buddha head.”We often seek meaning where there is no meaning.This is the foundation of all fine art and the fundamental premise of Gestalt Theory.The real truth is that Pennie and I were scrolling through an auction catalog on our computers when she said, “Look at 296.” So I did. It was an antique piece of garden statuary, a carved sandstone Buddha head.I said, “Don’t need a Buddha head.”Hearing the rhythm of those syllables and the obstruent d and t of “Don’t,” the d of “need,” the b and d of “Buddha” and the d of “head,” I smiled and said it again. “Don’t need a Buddha head.”A moment later it became a chant. “Don’t need a Buddha head. Don’t need a Buddha head. Don’t need a Buddha head. Don’t need a Buddha head.”Pennie just smiled and kept scrolling through the catalog.We see a face in the shadows on the moon.We equate a minor key with sadness.We want to dance to songs with 120 beats per minute.And we find deep symbolic meanings in phrases that, on the surface, are nonsense.If only one of us did that, he or she would be crazy. But since a majority of us do it, we call it art. We call it beautiful. We call it subtle. We call it deep.Song writers, Ad writers and Poets depend on this.Wichita Lineman, Galveston, and By the Time I Get to Phoenix made Glen Campbell rich and famous.But all 3 of those songs were written by Jimmy Webb.Up, Up and Away is the song that made The Fifth Dimension rich and famous.But it was written by Jimmy Webb.Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park lifted an actor named Richard Harris to the top of the Billboard music charts. Ten years later Donna Summer sang it to the top of the charts again. It has been recorded by Frank Sinatra, Waylon Jennings, Andy Williams, The Four Tops, Glen Campbell and Maynard Ferguson. It’s been played countless thousands of times and heard by hundreds of millions of people.The lyrics of MacArthur Park are often called stupid and ridiculous, “the worst song lyrics ever written.” And I have no argument with that.“Spring was never waiting for us, girl. It ran one step ahead as we followed in the dance between the parted pages and were pressed in love’s hot, fevered iron like a striped pair of pants. MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark, all the sweet, green icing flowing down. Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don’t think that I can take it, ’cause it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have that recipe again. Oh no! I recall the yellow cotton dress foaming like a wave on the ground around your knees, the birds, like tender babies in your hands, and the old men playing checkers by the trees…”In an October 2014 interview with Newsday, Jimmy Webb explained, “The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw… Back then I was kind of like an emotional machine, like whatever was going on inside me would bubble out of the piano and onto paper.”His wife, Savini, a Public Television host, says, “When people see he’s my husband, that’s always the first question I get: ‘What’s MacArthur Park mean?’ And I always say it’s an abstract painting, an impressionist painting. It’s art, but in a musical form. You make it what you want it to be. Jimmy plays it down, but it’s a heartbreaking song when you listen to just him sing it and you hear all the words without all the orchestrations. It blows your mind — oh, my God, all the pain in that song.”The clear-eyed mind sees silly nonsense,but the tear-filled eyes of the heart seebeauty and majesty,pain and remorse,love and lossin MacArthur Park.Do you want to become a highly paid ad writer?This is all you need to know:Win the heart and the mind will follow.The mind can easily create logic to justifywhat the heart has already decided.Thanks, Jimmy.Roy H. WilliamsPS – When I read what Savini said about hearing Jimmy sing the song without all the orchestration, I asked Daniel Whittington if he would do that for us. Just click Indy Beagle and he’ll take you to where you can hear it on PAGE ONE of today’s rabbit hole. Prepare to be amazed. – RHW

I was in the middle of a storm at sea last week when my lover, wife and partner of 40 years spoke some wisdom into my life. She said, “Tell me what happened, step-by-step, play-by-play.”So I did.She said, “Honey sometimes when you’re talking with someone face-to-face, you think you’re being clear when you’re really not.”And then she gave me some examples.And then she asked the questions that my adversary should have asked. She said, “Roy, you slammed the door on that relationship pretty hard. So what are the odds of this being worked out? Is there any chance at all? Give me some numbers.”I said, “His odds are about 50/50.”She said, “That’s what you need to tell him, immediately, the next time you talk.”And then she asked me several more questions and demanded detailed, specific answers. And in every case, she said, “He deserves to have that information. Trust me. You’re much harder to read than you think you are.”Forty years is a long time. You’re sort of required to listen to a person who has shared the majority of your waking moments with you since Richard Nixon was President. Pennie and I have been together through Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And 4 of those guys served 8 years each.In the end, I had a follow-up conversation with my friend and everything is fine now. But we agreed to use a code language as a form of insurance.When both people know the code, all a person has to do is ask, “How strong are your feelings about that?”People deserve to know when they’re walking into a minefield.The code was taught to me 36 years ago by my friend Richard Exley. I should use it more often than I do. Would you like me to teach it to you?It all comes down to assigning a number to the strength of your feelings.ONE: “No emotional attachment.”TWO: “I have an opinion.”THREE: “I have feelings on this subject that cannot be changed, so be very, very careful.”When two people know the code, at any point in a conversation a person might say, “I’m at about a 1.5 on this. Where are you?”The other party might then say, “I’m at like 1.0.”In that exchange, the first person said, “I don’t really have an opinion that I’m willing to defend. In fact, this whole subject doesn’t really matter much to me at all. I’m just sharing some things that are popping into my head.”And the second party – the one who had a 1.0 – basically said, “I’m just trying to hold up my end of the conversation. In reality, I have no feelings on this subject whatsoever, so I’m fully prepared to let someone else make the decision.” In this instance, the code helped both parties understand they were discussing something that neither of them cared about.If both parties tell the truth, the system saves a lot of time and it helps to reduce misunderstandings.When you say you have a “number one,” you are saying, “You can ignore this completely. You can laugh at it, mock it or kick it to the curb, just please don’t judge me by it because I haven’t put any thought into it whatsoever. In fact, it may actually be a really stupid idea.”When you say, “This is a number two,” you’re saying, “I need you to take this seriously and not just blow it off. I have an opinion and I have some feelings attached to it, but I’m open to hearing your thoughts. I believe this needs to be discussed.”I’ve never heard anyone say, “That’s a number three with me,” because to have a true number three is to say, “I have a loaded pistol aimed at your head with the hammer cocked. If you so much as blink, this relationship is over. So if you care at all about remaining my friend, you won’t say another word.”I’ve had people tell me they were at a 2.8 or a 2.9, but no one has ever said, “Number Three.” And I’ve always appreciated knowing that I had stumbled into an area where there was essentially no room for discussion.My friend and I very nearly parted ways forever because he stumbled blindly into an area where my feelings run deep. So I shared a couple of stories with him, thinking that he would understand what I was telling him. When he didn’t respond correctly, he crossed a line.My life-partner helped me understand that my friend hadn’t even known the line was there.Does any of this sound familiar to you?Is there a chance that a person who wounded you, offended you, or made you furious had no clue they had walked into a minefield?Or maybe you’re a person who was blown to bits because you had no idea you were walking on someone else’s holy ground.You canSave time,Avoid misunderstandings, andArrive at conclusions more quicklyif you know the code.And now you do.Share it with people you care about.Roy H. Williams

Bad ads are about you, your company, your product, your service.Good ads are about the customer and how their sun will shine brighter, the air around them will glitter with magic, and the stars in their darkness will twinkle more richly if they choose to bring you into their world.I’m going to hire an assistant.Hundreds of Millennials have applied for this job and sent me an ad.But not one of them realized that was what they were sending me.They thought it was a cover letter attached to their resume.Hey, Millennial. Here are some examples of the kinds of ads your competitors are sending to employers. (This is extremely GOOD NEWS for you!)“I’m looking for a position where I can grow and continue to learn. My ideal job is somewhere I enjoy working, and enjoying my surroundings.”– Briana“I want to attain a position at your company to enhance my experiencein the medical industry while working towards my degree, andprovide your company with positive energy and improve productivity.”– Leanna“I am a hardworking and self-driven individual looking for full-time employment.”– Jose“I was a cheerleader for basically my whole life so yes! I’m cheerful and a happy person. I love talking and meeting new people.”– Alexis“Working in multiple places of customer service, I have gained key communication skills. Through achieving my bachelors degree I have also develyoped excellent writing, research and organizational skills that are necessary to be successful in this position.”– TreverI promise I didn’t make any of those up. In fact, I gave Trevor ­– the young man who develyoped excellent writing skills – a second chance. Did I mention that he also misspelled his own damn name? (I checked.)Those examples are 5 of the first 10 applications I randomly pulled up from a field of several hundred. Obviously, I’m offering a desirable job. Every person who has served in this position for at least 4 years is now making more than $150,000 a year.So, my Millennial friend, the bar you need to jump is very low indeed. You should be wiggling like a puppy!“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” is a saying you may have heard before.Here’s all you need to do to stand apart from your competitors.This is how to become King in the land of the blind:TIP 1: Send out fewer resumes. Getting a job is not a numbers game. Select a small number of companies and send each of them a cover letter crafted exclusively for that company.TIP 2: There is no such thing as an attention span. The applicant that wins more of the employer’s time than his or her competitors is the one most likely to win the job. So write an interesting cover letter. Long isn’t dangerous. Boring is dangerous. Predictable is dangerous. Orthodox is dangerous. Stand apart.TIP 3: Take a chance. Dustin Hoffman is considered to be one of the most versatile actors of his generation. According to the Goog, he’s made about $50,000,000 since the day in 1967 when he played Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. The problem is that his performance as a button-down college graduate and track star was so convincing that most critics and directors assumed that Dustin had not, in fact, been acting. The prevailing opinion was that his acting range was limited to only that single type of character. And John Schlesinger, the director of Midnight Cowboy, knew the lead character in his film – Ratso Rizzo – was to be precisely the opposite kind of character.This was Dustin Hoffman’s pivotal moment – the big decision – that launched him as one of the great acting talents of the 20th century: Dressed as a homeless person, wearing a dirty raincoat, his hair slicked back and with an unshaven face, Hoffman approached Schlesinger in Central Park.At the end of the encounter, Schlesinger was sold.Dustin Hoffman didn’t assume his career would forever be bright simply because his first movie was a runaway success. He knew the world was full of one-hit wonders. Dustin was worried about being typecast. It happens to all but a select few actors.It seems to me that Millennials want to be understood.Being understood feels good, doesn’t it? But to get a job, to win a promotion, to gain authority and rise to the top, it is better to understand than to be understood.What are the attributes your employer is anxious to find in you?Who do they need you to be?When your attention is focused on your own needs and wants, you’re probably not going to get the job, or the promotion, or ever rise to your full potential.I promise I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m trying to help you.Focus on the employer’s hopes and needs and you’re likely to get the job. Then be the person you promised to be. It may take a year or two, but people are definitely going to notice you’re exceptional.And then you’re on your way.So do the hard thing; quit thinking about yourself.Start thinking about your employer.I really am just trying to help you.Roy H. William

People would rather be angry than bored.Anger is a form of excitement.That explains a lot of behavior, doesn’t it?But if you can choose, choose laughter.“Man is the laughing animal…” 1Anger is dangerous and crying is much less fun.I’m talking about storytelling and communication.I’m talking about books and movies.I’m talking about television and music.I’m talking about romantic attraction.I’m talking about successful ads.If you hope to move people, you must make them laugh, cry or get angry.You ask, “What about fear?”Fear is never the end-game.Fear is merely a fuel that will move you to submission (crying) or defiance (anger.)There is a fourth state of elevated awareness, however, more seductive even than laughter: wonder, mystery, that magical glimpse of a thing too big for us.Wonder is the fabric of religious devotion and romantic attraction.It is the highest goal of any communicator.“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed.”– Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies (1931)You stood in wonder at the cliff’s edge of 2016, looking forward into a vast unknown.“The gift of flight is reserved only for those who leap.”So you did.Happy New Year.May you walk in fields of gold.Roy H. Williams

Henri Poincaré did not discover Chaos Theory but he clearly heard its footsteps in 1887 when he published The Three Body Problem.His math is still used by NASA today.In astrophysics, stars and planets are “gravitating bodies” because they attract and hold mass and alter the orbits of one another.Gravity is a useful innovation model for professional ad writers since our goal is to attract and hold the attention of potential customers and perhaps, even, to alter their orbits.A Gravitating Body is anything that tugs at your attention.Two gravitating bodies with a high degree of divergence are known as Paired Opposites. Employ them and you’ll get attention.But when you add a third gravitating body – something highly divergent from each of the first two – and it fits – you are about to see things get exponential.Its degree of divergence is determined by how unexpected the thing is.Its power of convergence is determined by how well it fits.First Gravitating Body:A musical about the Founding FathersSecond Gravitating Body:George Washington is black and most of the other “white” characters are played by minorities.Third Gravitating Body:The dialogue is delivered in rap music, with each character having their own cadence and style.A third gravitating body with a high degree of divergence and powerful convergence is the ever-present secret of widespread, mass appeal success. Hit songs, blockbuster movies, bestselling novels and the signature dishes of gourmet chefs always have them.A successful third gravitating body doesn’t belong… but it fits.Three gravitating bodies are also the secret of successful ad campaigns. This is a formula is known to every Cognoscenti of Magical Worlds.We can easily imagine a play about the Founding Fathers. But a musical?Be honest. If you were told that a play was to feature ethnic minorities as the Founding Fathers of the United States, you would assume the play to be:(A) a satire(B) a comedy(C) an alternate history about the America we “might have been.”But Hamilton is none of these.The play’s dialogue in rap is divergent because rap didn’t exist during the time of the Founding Fathers. And it’s not the style of speech we associate with venerated historical figures. Rap is associated with passionate, creative people who are downtrodden, overlooked, abused and angry.Wait a minute. The Founding Fathers were all those things. Hamilton’s rap is divergent – highly unexpected – but convergent as well – it makes perfect sense as it brings together all the other divergent elements.Third gravitating bodies seem out of sequence to the brain’s linear, sequential, deductive-reasoning left hemisphere but they feel perfectly elegant to the pattern-recognizing, big-picture right.We are rarely conscious of third gravitating bodies because they always make sense. This is why we don’t realize how much they don’t belong.If you want your business to go exponential, you have to do something unexpected; something that doesn’t belong, but fits.Do you want to make 2017 a bigger year than 2016?The first step is to visit the rabbit hole where Indiana Beagle will tell you a secret.Just click the image at the top of the page and Indy will greet you on the other side.Tell him I said hello.Roy H. Williams

I still call it Christmas.I’m told you’re not supposed to do that any more.You’re not supposed to do a lot of things.Forget the religion called Christianity for a moment.Ignore the historical blunders of Christians.I’m talking about Christmas.Those opening few sentences are going to land me in real trouble unless you judge me by my motives.1. I still call it Christmas because, according to Luke’s telling1, the angels didn’t appear to government officials or religious leaders. They chose instead to illuminate the darkness of lonely people working the night shift for minimum wage. They appeared to sack-lunch shepherds guarding defenseless sheep.I think that’s cool.The message of those angels was essentially this, “Good news! God likes you and he has a plan to rescue you – and everyone else on this planet – out of this crazy mess you’re in.”Even if you consider these stories to be fairy tales, they’re worth a look. Christmas is our biggest holiday.2. John’s Christmas story2 skips Bethlehem altogether, choosing instead to connect the birth of Jesus to that chapter in Genesis3 where God speaks our universe into existence:“In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God. The Word was in the beginning with God. All things were made by the Word; without Him was not any thing made that was made… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”Wow.3. Matthew4 doesn’t mention the shepherds of Luke or connect the pre-incarnate Jesus to the creation of the universe like John, but his is the only Christmas story that mentions the wise men, the magi. They didn’t see any angels and we’re not told why they chose to follow that star. We know only that they made an extremely difficult journey and never gave up hope. They were foreigners who believed in something the locals no longer believed in.I have an abiding fascination with these wise men, the magi. So did Chesterton.“The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.”– G.K. Chesterton, Christendom in Dublin, Ch.3 (1933)4. I believe magi still walk among us today.Following a bright star of hope, they continue to make difficult journeys.They’re not looking for someone to “make America great again.”They think America – for all its flaws – is pretty great already.They still believe in the American Dream.And if you are wise,you believe in it, too.One day,many years ago,a good person said to your ancestors,“Merry Christmas, immigrants.Welcome to America.”She was a statue on an island, a gift from France.And the poem at her feet whispers to all the earth,“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled massesyearning to breathe free. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”Roy H. Williams

I was 16 during the winter of 1974.Ted was 52.We worked together in a steel fabrication shop in Oklahoma.I was known as “Schoolboy.”Standing near the heat of the coffee pot waiting for the horn to signal the end of our break, Ted would tell stories about World War II. Those stories might as well have been about cave men and dinosaurs because Pearl Harbor had happened 35 years earlier and I was only 16.The story I’m about to tell you happened 42 years ago.It seems like yesterday.ADo you remember Bluto from the old Popeye cartoons? In 1974 his name was Harold and he was 32 years old. Muscular and angry, Harold got what he wanted through intimidation.One day I called his bluff. I told Harold “no.”But Harold wasn’t bluffing.I regained consciousness at the base of the storage racks where we kept the 6-foot aluminum fan blades. Ted told me Harold’s lightning blow lifted me off my feet and landed me 2 yards from where I had been standing. When I went home at the end of my shift my neck was so stiff I couldn’t turn my head.My mother knew immediately what had happened.When I got out of school the next day, Ted was waiting for me in the parking lot at work. He told me not to go inside. Two policemen had led Harold out in handcuffs earlier and his buddies were planning revenge.NOTE: Never hit a minor when he’s being raised by a single mother. Angry moms fight differently than men do.I worked in that steel shop for 2 more years.One day Ted said, “Schoolboy, every person you meet has something they can teach you. Your job is to figure out what their skill is and then get them to share it with you.”Ted, as usual, was right. When you assume that everyone you meet has a valuable skill, you begin to look at them differently.Harold was a different person when he came back to work. Crushing legal bills and the humiliation of jail gave him a beating far worse than he had given me. With Ted’s advice fresh in my mind, I asked Harold the secret of knocking a man off his feet.Harold’s answer surprised me because his technique had little to do with physical strength.A few years later I learned that success in business has little to do with intelligence and success in selling has little to do with being talkative and success in advertising has little to do with the product.Business isn’t about knowing, it’s about doing.Selling isn’t about talking, it’s about listening.Advertising isn’t about the product, it’s about the customer.And knocking a man down isn’t about your fists, it’s about your feet.The next time you’re at Wizard Academy I’ll show you.But only if you want to know.Roy

When Kermit Roosevelt was fifteen, he shared a book of poems he admired with his father, the President of the United States. As an encouragement to Kermit, his father sent a lengthy review of that book to The Outlook, an important publication of the time, saying, “There is an undoubted touch of genius in the poems collected in this volume…”Theodore Roosevelt had six children: Alice the mischievous, Ted Jr. the hero, Kermit the writer, Ethel the visionary, Archie the warrior and Quentin the colorful.Unexpectedly, it was Kermit, the writer, who always appeared at his father’s side when the old President needed a protector. When 51 year-old Theodore walked away from the White House and announced he was going to disappear into the jungles of Africa on a yearlong safari, Kermit dropped out of Harvard to accompany him.Four years later, when Theodore announced he was going to vanish into the jungles of South America to chart the unexplored River of Doubt, Kermit quit his job and left his fiancé to make sure his father remained safe.Had it not been for Kermit, Theodore Roosevelt would not have come home alive.This is not a speculation.Flowing from the mountains of Peru to where it joins the mighty Amazon deep in the jungles of Brazil, the River of Doubt was a mystery. Its length and course were not listed on any map. The only things known for certain were that its shores were lined with cannibals and its waters were full of man-eating piranha, fifteen-foot aquatic lizards and anaconda snakes as long as school busses.Frank Chapman, the curator for the American Museum of Natural History, said,“It may be said with confidence… that in all South America there is not a more difficult or dangerous journey than down the River of Doubt.”Natural History Museum director Henry Osborn wrote to Roosevelt several times pleading with him to abandon his plan.Roosevelt responded to Osborn in a letter to Frank Chapman:“Tell Osborn I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know; I have had my full share, and if it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite prepared to do so.”Fortunately for Theodore, his son Kermit was not prepared that he should do so.After they arrived in South America, the expedition had to cross 400 miles of wilderness before they reached the River of Doubt. But then they plunged into the jungle.“Most of the men were veteran outdoorsmen, and many of them considered themselves masters of nature. They were stealthy hunters, crack shots, and experienced survivalists, and given the right tools, they believed that they would never find themselves in a situation in the wild that they could not control. But as they struggled to make their way along the shores of the River of Doubt, any basis for such confidence was quickly slipping away. Compared with the creatures of the Amazon, including the Indians whose territory they were invading, they were all – from the lowliest camarada to the former president of the United States – clumsy, conspicuous prey.”–The River of Doubt by Candice MillardThe expedition avoided the whitewater rapids by guiding their canoes through them with ropes as they walked along the banks of the river. But when the jungle was heaviest upon them, two canoes broke loose and most of their supplies were lost. The men were forced to stop for several days to build new ones. In an effort to make up lost time they resorted to running the rapids in their canoes. When two canoes got jammed in the rocks in a section of wicked whitewater, Theodore Roosevelt jumped in to free them and slipped, opening a large gash in his thigh.An infection set in that night and for the next several days, he drifted in and out of consciousness, utterly unable to walk. In a moment of clear thinking, Theodore realized he had no chance and was risking the lives of the other men as well. Drawing the American naturalist George Cherrie to his side, he said,“Boys, I realize some of us are not going to finish this journey. Cherrie, I want you and Kermit to go on. You can get out. I will stop here.”Kermit calmly convinced his father that even if he chose to kill himself so that the rest of the men could go on, Kermit would never leave his body behind. Consequently, to kill himself would be to kill Kermit as well.Kermit Roosevelt spent the next several weeks carrying his father on a stretcher through the jungle. His father lost 60 pounds but Kermit brought him home alive.These are just a few of the things for which Kermit never really got credit.Do you remember “Richard Cory,” the poem featured in last week’s Monday Morning Memo? That poem was from the book Kermit shared with his father at the age of fifteen.Kermit Roosevelt sent a pale beam of light into the darkness of poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, but it was enough to lift him from despair, illuminate his talent, win him three Pulitzer Prizes and establi

1. Use Words that have Specific Meanings.“The bug moved along the ground, deciding which way it should go.”“The ant crawled between the blades of grass, peeking left and right at every intersection.”Bug is nonspecific. Ant is specific.“…moved along the ground” is mildly specific, but not vivid.“…crawled between the blades of grass” is specific and vivid.2. Don’t Tell. Show.“…deciding which way it should go,” tells you what the ant was doing.“…peeking left and right at every intersection,” shows you the ant and leads you to conclude that the ant is deciding which way to go. You are, for a moment, seeing through the eyes of the ant. Giving human motives to inanimate objects is a powerful tool known as personification. “Your Rolex is waiting patiently for you to come and pick it up at Shreve and Company.”3. Write Tight and Clean.Short Sentences Hit Harder than Long Ones.Adjectives and adverbs don’t accelerate communication. They slow it down. Use them with restraint.What I’m doing now is giving you an example of a long sentence, (in essence, the kind of sentence often written by persons who are trying to sound educated, although in truth, sentences like this one just make you sound full of yourself,) for the purpose of demonstrating that complex sentences full of commas and parenthetic statements and verbose, multi-word, adjective-stacked descriptions have a much diminished impact and are not nearly so pleasant to read as short, clear statements like the 6-word sentence and the two 4-word sentences that preceded this horrific construction of 135 pompous, tedious and wearisome words that keep going on and on for so very long that by the time you get to the final point, you have forgotten several of the previous ones that were made.4. Let the Subject of the Sentence Take the Action.Passive Voice is a Bad Choice.You speak in passive voice when the subject of the sentence is acted upon: “Wizard Academy is attended by interesting people.”You speak in active voice when the subject of the sentence takes the action: “Interesting people attend Wizard Academy.”Passive voice is noncommittal: “It got lost.”Active voice is confident and clear. “I lost it.”5. Feed Your Pen Surprising Combinations of Interesting WordsIf you inform without persuading, you are hearing a newscast when you write. The goal of the journalist is to inform, not to persuade.If you entertain without persuading, you are hearing creative writing as you write. The goal of the creative writer is to entertain, not to persuade.The poet leads you to think and feel differently. The goal of the poet is to persuade. And the best ones do it in a brief, tight economy of words.I’m not talking about rhyming.I beg you not to rhyme.I’m talking about using surprising combinations of vivid words to trigger assumptions and conclusions in the minds of those who hear you.Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote Richard Cory in 1897. This was when “clean favored” meant good-looking, and how you were dressed is how you were “arrayed.”Richard CoryWhenever Richard Cory went down town,We people on the pavement looked at him:He was a gentleman from sole to crown,Clean favored, and imperially slim.And he was always quietly arrayed,And he was always human when he talked;But still he fluttered pulses when he said,“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—And admirably schooled in every grace:In short, we thought that he was everythingTo make us wish that we were in his place.So on we worked, and waited for the light,And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,Went home and put a bullet through his head.Compare the images contained in that 124-word poem to those in the 135-word example in Point 3. – RHW6. If you would become a better communicator…if you would write better ads, persuade more people and make more money, read Good Poems, curated by Garrison Keillor. You can get the 3 books or visit the online archives.7. Read a poem a day, every day.It will take you about 60 seconds. Think of your daily poem as a vitamin. Don’t worry about understanding the poem. Just rub the salt of it on your mind. You will soon begin hearing a different voice when you write, and find yourself looking into sparkling eyes when you speak.Photos that have been black-and-white are about to become full-color.Roy H. Williams

Your life is a singular journey; a generation is a collective journey.We’re circling an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet.If this dirt-covered rock we occupy was the size of a standard schoolroom globe covered with a coat of varnish, the thickness of that varnish would represent the air we breathe.Like it or not, we’re all in this together.All seven and a half billion of us.When it gets dark tonight, look up at the stars. You’ll be looking out the window of our spaceship.If we could aim our 11,000-degree fireball at the nearest of its siblings – those things we call the stars – it would take us 63,000 years to get there even though we would be shooting through space at 52 times the speed of an 865 mph bullet.1Right now you think I’m going to talk to you about cultural tolerance or global warming or world peace or some other big idea.But you’re wrong.My goal today is to teach you how to use metaphors to make your data more interesting so that you can persuade more people.I borrowed the metaphor of the earth being a spaceship from Buckminster Fuller and the varnish on the globe came from Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth.A metaphor relates the unfamiliar to the familiar, the unknown to the known, effectively translating your data into a language your listener can understand.A good metaphor sharpens the point of your data.Once you’ve chosen your metaphor, your second challenge will be to select nouns and verbs that carry the voltage of mild surprise.I might have said, “The earth orbits the sun as it moves through space at 0.0004842454 au. (astronomical units).” But I chose instead to say, “We’re circling an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet.”“We’re circling” causes you to see yourself in the story. This is the first step toward reader engagement.“11,000-degree fireball” is more vivid than “the sun,”“shoots through a limitless vacuum” is more exciting than “moves through space,”and “52 times the speed of a rifle bullet” packs more of a wallop than “astronomical units.”Brilliant communication isn’t a product of wit or charm or even talent.Preparation is what it takes to click the brightness of your message up to high beam so that it pierces the darkness like a lighthouse at midnight. In the words of Alec Nevala-Lee, “A good surprise demands methodical work in advance. Like any form of sleight of hand, it hinges on making the result of careful preparation seem casual, even miraculous.”“Like a lighthouse at midnight” wasn’t technically a metaphor, by the way. It was a simile. Metaphor: The earth is a spaceship. Simile: The earth is like a spaceship. A simile feels like a metaphor and can be used to accomplish the same effect.Write down what you want to say. Don’t overthink it. Just get some words on paper.Find a metaphor that relates your information to an idea that your audience already understands.Now look at what you wrote and replace the weary, dull words with energetic, bright ones.Want to know a secret? There’s really no such thing as good writing. There’s only good rewriting.Ernest Hemingway won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Each time he came to a place where the words weren’t flowing, he would set his work aside and answer some correspondence so that he could take a break from, “the awful responsibility of writing” — or, as he sometimes called it, “the responsibility of awful writing.” 2  In a letter to 22 year-old Arnold Samuelson in 1934, Hemingway advised that after writing something you think is pretty good, you should, “leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work. The next morning, when you’ve had a good sleep and you’re feeling fresh, rewrite what you wrote the day before.”Having the courage to write badly is the first step toward brilliant communication. The second step is to look at that first draft and say, “How can I make this better?”One final piece of advice: Read great writing, for “As you read, so will you write.” Gene Fowler said it this way, “The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.”Brilliant communicators develop stronger relationships, achieve higher goals and make more money.Why not become one?Roy H. Williams

You bought it for 50 cents.You sold it for a dollar.You made 50 cents.What was your percentage of profit?You could say “100 percent” because the 50-cent profit you made is equal to your original investment of 50 cents.But if we look at it from the basis of your selling price, you sold it for a dollar and only 50% of that was profit.So did you make 100% or was it 50%? There is a valid argument for each perspective.It’s not my intention to lecture you today about the difference between markup and margin or to fill your ears with chatter about inventory turn or the concept of zero marginal cost.We’re talking about something bigger.We’re talking about your success.Profit is easy to identify, but tricky to measure.Success is like that, too.Does your pursuit of success ever make you feel like you’re chasing your shadow with the sun at your back; no matter how fast you run, you can never quite grasp it? Is success a forever carrot-on-a-stick, just a little further away than the length of your arm?Most of us live with the hope of accomplishing a series of goals, but rarely do I meet anyone who can tell me how they plan to measure their progress toward those goals.How will you measure success?Before you can answer that question clearly, you have to recognize that success comes in three different colors.You can make money.You can make a name.You can make a difference.If you make enough money, it will make you something of a name. But whether or not you ever make a difference is an entirely different question. Many successful people keep their money and their name clamped tightly within their fists.If you make a name for yourself, money will likely follow. But will you then care enough about others to try and make a difference in their lives?My advice to you is to first make a difference. Do what you do so very well that people take notice of it and speak highly of you. The money will quickly follow.What are you trying to make happen?How will you measure progress-to-goal?In what way will you make a difference?Roy H. Williams

Do you sell a product or service that is reassuringly expensive?Ronny is selling $700 vacuum cleaners through a direct-response television campaign he created after attending, “How to Sell Upscale Products and Services” at Wizard Academy.That ad campaign began as a $100,000 experiment.Ronny told me he’s currently spending nearly a million dollars a week on national advertising and making a marvelous return on his investment.Funny thing: we teach that class under the assumption the techniques will be used by brand builders, not direct response marketers. But Ronny proved those same techniques can also work when you have a short time horizon.We taught Ronny something.He taught us something in return.Direct response marketers usually sell products that have a short purchase cycle. They want us to make an impulse purchase. This is why the return-on-investment for direct response ads can be measured accurately and immediately.But not everything can be sold that way.Brand builders are companies whose products or services have a long purchase cycle. The goal of a brand builder is to be the provider you think of immediately and feel the best about when you finally need what they sell. It takes courage, confidence and patience but it works better and better the longer you invest in it.The essence of brand building is emotional bonding.Direct response marketing, on the other hand, is typically intellectual. Features and benefits and added value, “But wait! Order now and you’ll also receive…” It is that world of product demonstrations and money-back guarantees, limited-time offers and upsell incentives.Direct response ads don’t work better and better as time goes by. They work less and less well until you finally have to come up with something altogether new and different.Right now you’re thinking, “But hey, if I make enough money on my direct response campaign, I’ll just retire and live happily ever after.”That sounds like a good plan but I’ve never actually seen it work out that way. Most of us have the fundamental inability to quit while we’re ahead.A glittering city in Nevada is proof of it.Wizard Academy teaches powerful concepts.How you use them is entirely up to you.Ronny is winning and winning big. I like him.He’s already taught me one lesson.I’m hoping he will teach me another.Roy H. Williams

A couple of weeks ago I spent an hour and a half on television speaking to a nationwide audience of several million viewers.They wanted me to talk about Pendulum, the book we published in 2012. Specifically, they wanted me to explain how we knew four years ago exactly what would be happening right now.I chose not to mention Wizard Academy.Does that surprise you?Pennie and Vice-Chancellor Whittington and I agreed that any mention of Wizard Academy would likely flood your school with people who would be coming for all the wrong reasons.Even worse, they would be coming with all the wrong expectations.Wizard Academy uses carefully crafted content marketing delivered through indirect targeting to attract learners into a carefully designed gravity well. Our hope is to win ever-larger chunks of your time until you finally show up in person on our campus. (Sounds sinister, doesn’t it? But it’s actually quite honest and friendly. Perfect transparency inspires confidence, does it not?)Wizard Academy doesn’t consider age or income or educational attainment or gender or ethnicity or zip code or home ownership or any of the other things targeted by most advertising efforts.We want to attract a specific, self-selected tribe that shares our core beliefs:1. We believe traditional wisdom is often more tradition than wisdom.Our quirky books, memos, videos, course descriptions and public art function as marketing filters, attracting some people, repelling others.2. We believe history repeats itself only because we didn’t pay attention the first time.We use case studies to assist you in the hands-on implementation of what we teach, but larger lessons are learned by looking at the timeless, big ideas of physics, agriculture and biology, allowing you to understand and harness sequences of events that have been echoing since the birth of time. (If the study of recurrent patterns appeals to you, you’ll love it here.)3. We believe intuition is the logic of the wordless, right hemisphere of the brain.Dr. Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his documentation of brain lateralization, in essence asserting that we don’t have a single brain divided into two hemispheres so much as we have two separate, competing brains: the logical, deductive-reasoning left and the intuitive, pattern-and-sequence recognizing right.* But the right brain has no language functions. Hence, we often “know” things we can’t explain. The intuitive power of the right brain is essential to the artist, the entrepreneur, and anyone searching for a proven innovation model.4. We believe passion is a by-product of commitment.Chapel Dulcinea, our world famous free wedding chapel, is a symbol of our belief in the power of commitment to transform personal relationships, business outcomes, and destinies. (In October, Dulcinea welcomed wedding parties from France, Scotland, New Zealand, Japan and 88 other places. In 2014 she witnessed 984 weddings. In 2015 it was 999. Will this be the year she sees 1,000?)Did any of the concepts we spoke about today interest you?This Monday Morning Memo was an example of content marketing delivered through indirect targeting to attract a self-selected tribe into a gravity well.Did we affirm your values? Confirm your beliefs? Tickle your imagination? Make you want to dive a little deeper into some of these ideas?If you feel a tug of gravity pulling you toward us,we trust you can figure out what to do next.Roy H. Williams