Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

If success were the result of a formula, we would achieve it more consistently.Every business has its little formulas for success.These formulas, however, are always incomplete because they were reverse-engineered by connecting the dots after success had been achieved: the second thing (success) followed the first thing (cable TV ads, or raising your prices, or handing out coupons at the front door,) therefore we assume the second thing (success) was caused by the first thing (cable TV ads, or raising your prices, or handing out coupons at the front door.)Logic then whispers into our ear, “If you connect these dots prior to your next attempt, success will surely follow.” This seductive logic has been frustrating humanity for so many years that it has a fancy Latin name: post hoc, ergo propter hoc.“Success is not a dog that can be led about on a leash.”No, that’s not the interpretation of the Latin phrase. It’s just something that popped into my head just now and I decided to share it with you. Actually, post hoc, ergo propter hoc is translated as “after this, therefore resulting from it.”Analysis and ego and weasels with calculators use post hoc, ergo propter hoc logic to assert that we can map our way directly to success without making any wrong turns along the way. But if you keep your eye on these data-weasels, you’ll see them make as many wrong turns as the rest of us. And most of the weasels never arrive at the destination at all.In truth, the variables that contribute to the creation of success cannot be fully calculated in advance. This is due to “the third body problem,” a mathematical conundrum that governs anything that would attract and hold another. Are you trying to attract and hold the attention of your customer? Welcome to “the third body problem.”This same third body problem can also be used to your advantage if you have the courage, but we’ll save that discussion for when we have at least 3 uninterrupted hours together.If you’d like to try to figure it out for yourself, just Google “Henri Poincare third body problem.”Another common misdiagnosis of success – and one that’s much easier to explain – occurs when we judge results too quickly. We see the early stage of success and call it failure.This is because when you’re doing exactly the right thing, the results will often get worse before they get better.I’ve always attributed this to the law of seedtime and harvest, but my friend John Marklin prefers to call it the J-Curve.Roy,In the grocery industry, which is the world in which I live, a key component… is the J-Curve. For example, I built a ground-up store 4 years ago and was told I would do “X” in sales.For two years I did 60% of X in sales. As I came out of the J-Curve I gained momentum and hit the budgeted number in year three.J-Curves happen any time there is change and sometimes they defy logic.For example, in one of my stores my meat sales sucked. So I doubled the size of the meat case and added variety. The result was lower meat sales. It took about 30 days for people to accept the change. Once they did, they liked the added variety and selections. Slowly sales increased and today they’re at the desired level.Very few people speak of the J-Curve.If you wish to discuss more, I would love to do so while on campus at the Valentine weekend.Thank you.John MarklinThe front side of the J-Curve is what I privately call “the little death” and publicly call “the chickening-out period.” The backside of the J-Curve is what my friend Chip calls “hockey stick growth.”I’ve seen a lot of companies abandon brilliant ideas that would probably have led them to hockey-stick growth but they chickened out during the late stages of seedtime when they misinterpreted the early dip of the J-Curve to be failure.Sigh.But here’s where the J-Curve gets really messy: when you’ve made a mistake and you’re doing the wrong thing and sales begin to fall as a result, it looks exactly like the J-Curve before hockey stick growth.How do you know when to hang on and when to bail out?The only solution I’ve ever heard of is to take a deep breath, close your eyes and click your heels together as you whisper again and again, “The J-Curve is a bitch. The J-Curve is a bitch. The J-Curve is a bitch…”I wish you success and joy in your adventure.Come see us if you’d like to have some companions.Roy H. Williams

“Happiness is a choice.”Unhappy people get angry when I say “Happiness is a choice” because most of them have happily assigned their unhappiness to their circumstances, or their past, or an evil someone somewhere. It irritates them when I suggest they can simply choose to be happy.I’m not saying it’s easy, but it can definitely be done.Now let’s talk about you.How often have you said, “I’ll be happy when…”But then the desired circumstance arrives and it doesn’t bring real happiness.Psychologist Shawn Achor says we tell ourselves,If I work harder, I’ll be more successful. And if I’m more successful, then I’ll be happier.”“The problem with this is that it’s scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. First, every time your brain has a success, you change the goalpost of what success looks like.You got good grades, now you have to get better grades.You got into a good school, now you have to get into a better school.You got a good job, now you have to get a better job.You hit your sales target, we’re going to change your sales target.If happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. What we’ve done is we’ve pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society.”“But the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order. If you can raise your level of positivity in the present… your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, what we’ve found is that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You’re 37 percent better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster and more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully, as we’re able to work harder, faster and more intelligently.”I said, “Happiness is a choice,” an act of your will.Will you let me prove that? We’ll need only a few minutes a day for 21 days.Here’s what I need you to do:Write down three new things you’re grateful for each day.Three new things a day, seven days a week.According to Shawn Achor, as you approach the end of those 21 days your brain will start scanning the world, not for the negative, but for the positive first. Make this a habit and your happiness level will rise. Guaranteed.Each day, send an email to a friend describing something good that happened to you in the past 24 hours. It can be anything. Sharing it with a friend allows you to relive that moment.You do realize that we’re re-training your brain, don’t you? All it takes is an act of your will. It will be awkward at first, but it will get easier. Stick with it.Send an email to someone – anyone – telling them what you like best about them, how they’ve inspired you, or taught you something valuable. Let that person know they’re important to you. Pick a different person each day.One last thing. None of those emails can be sent to me.Will you give it 21 days?I’m going to go write down 3 things for which I am grateful and then I’m going to send 2 emails.What are you going to do?Roy H. Williams

To accomplish the miraculousyou must attempt the ridiculous.Before you attempt the ridiculousyou must announce it to the world.If you don’t have the courage to announce it,you must at least whisper it in the dark.Because it must be spoken.You’ve got to hear yourself say it.And then you’ve got to take action.Are you sufficiently ridiculous to do this?You’ve never heard of Columbus, Indiana. Not Ohio. Indiana.And you’ve not likely heard of J. Irwin Miller. But perhaps you’ve heard of Cummins. The Cummins diesel engine? Cummins is headquartered in Columbus, Indiana, a town of about 40,000 people.I’ll begin at the beginning.Nine months and ten minutes after America’s soldiers came home from World War II, the Baby Boom began. The first of those children started school in 1953.J. Irwin Miller was the CEO of Cummins at the time. When Miller saw the plans for the sadly uninspired school buildings the government was planning to build, he said something that many people considered ridiculous:Every one of us lives and moves all his life within the limitations, sight, and influence of architecture – at home, at school, at church and at work. The influence of architecture with which we are surrounded in our youth affects our lives, our standards, our tastes when we are grown, just as the influence of the parents and teachers with which we are surrounded in our youth affects us as adults.American architecture has never had more creative, imaginative practitioners than it has today. Each of the best of today’s architects can contribute something of lasting value to Columbus.”Miller then set up a foundation that would pay all the architectural fees for any public building to be built in Columbus, Indiana. You could hire the finest architects on the planet and Cummins would cheerfully pay them on your behalf. The only condition was that you had to build the building those architects drew for you.The first building to be designed with a Cummins grant was Schmitt Elementary School. This was quickly followed by the McDowell Adult Education Center, Northside Middle School and Parkside Elementary School. Each of these buildings is a spectacular work of art.Today, more than 50 of the world’s most beautiful buildings can be found in this little town of 40,000 people. It’s known among architects as “The Athens of the Prairie.”The American Institute of Architects ranks Columbus, Indiana, as the 6th most important city in America for architectural innovation and design, right behind New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, DC.J. Irwin Miller is my kind of ridiculous. I stand and cheer for people like him. He could have followed the crowd and supported one of the big national charities but he didn’t. He chose something that mattered to him, personally. And whether or not people agreed with him or even understood what he was hoping to do, well, none of that seemed to matter to him.But can’t you hear the suggestions?Why not do this in a larger city so that more people can enjoy the beauty?”“Why not spread your gift across several struggling towns as a way to restore their local pride?”“Why not do something to ease human suffering instead of just making the scenery prettier?”Have you ever noticed that most suggestions are really just complaints wearing a cheap disguise?I never met J. Irwin Miller, but I’d like to believe that he gave these people a big, beaming smile as he said, “That’s a fabulous idea and you should definitely do it! Yes, you should do what you feel is right, just as I’m doing what I feel is right.”What do you feel is right?Have you said it out loud?Have you taken any action, or are you still just talking?When you’re ready to take action, I know of a place where you’ll find encouragement and insight and valuable advice learned the hard way by other people like yourself, people who have chosen to do more than just make suggestions.Come. Introduce yourself to the rest of the tribe and tell us about the difference you plan to make, whether it’s in business, in art, or in the world.Roy H. Williams

Roughly 10 percent of the American population is worried about having enough money to pay the rent and enough food in the pantry to make it until payday. A good day is when their biggest fear is whether or not the car will start and get them to work. This is called living “hand-to-mouth.”I did it for years. Perhaps you’ve done it, too.Another 10 percent of America has these basic needs met but a dysfunctional household – or perhaps a troubled neighborhood – keeps them from feeling safe. These unhappy souls wear the dark handcuffs of fear and dread as they walk silently through what David called, “the valley of the shadow of death.”I don’t pretend to have a solution.At the other end of the spectrum are the 15 percent whose biggest concern is whether or not they’re getting sufficient recognition from the people whose opinions matter to them.And then there are the rest of us, the 65 percent in the middle who are “figuring-it-out-as-we-go.” Usually, our greatest need is that we’re searching for where we belong. Each of us is looking for the mirror tribe who will finally see us and know us and value us and miss us when we are absent.Pennie and I spent the last 15 years building a place for that tribe to meet. These Monday Morning Memos are a sort of homing beacon…Okay, I’m back now. I had to wipe a tear from my cheek as the gushing memory of a friend flooded my mind. I wasn’t thinking of him when I began this piece, but the words “homing beacon” burst the dam of a memory I’ve decided to let flow.More than a dozen years ago I decided to teach a class about unleashing your Intuition. We called it “Free the Beagle.” As is my custom, I opened that class by having each of the 30 students stand up and tell us their names and a little bit about themselves. The last person to stand was a white-haired man sitting in the far corner of the back row.My name’s Keith Miller.” He stopped and his stern gaze swept the room. “As I sat here and listened to you introduce yourselves, I realized that never in my life have I been surrounded by so many weirdos… misfits… mavericks… renegades… rebels and rule breakers.” The room went silent as a tomb. “It’s almost as if the wizard sent out the mating call of the albino monkey and this is the strange group that answered that call.” Then he shouted with happy joy, “And I just can’t tell you what a privilege it is to be counted here among you!” The room exploded with laughter and applause.When I saw how masterfully he had handled the room without telling us anything about himself, I wondered, “Could this be that Keith Miller?”During the first break, I slipped into my library and pulled out a hardback, The Taste of New Wine, a monumental book that sold more than 4 million copies when it was released in 1965. I handed it to Keith privately and said, “Could I convince you to sign that?”His eyes fell and he frowned a little. He had hoped he would not be discovered.I chose not to inquire about the sequence of events that led Keith to seek the shadows of oblivion. That’s one of the markers of our tribe; we don’t hold you accountable for your past. We know you only by the future you’re trying to create. Keith’s enthusiastic involvement in the academy for the next 10 years made it clear he had found a home. He passed away in 2012 at the age of 84.God, I miss him.Each of us needs to know we belong.If you believe traditional wisdom is often more tradition than wisdom…If you can happily embrace a friend whose religious and political views differ wildly from your own…If you want to make a difference…If you want your future to be brighter than your past…If you have the courage to let your choices dictate your actions…There’s a strong possibility that you might be part of The Albino Monkey Tribe of the late Keith Miller.I never again taught that class. Free the Beagle was a one-time thing, although a number of people who were there that day have since told me it was their favorite class of all time.Should we do it again? You can vote Yes by sending an email to [email protected]. To vote No, do nothing. If enough of you want to do it, perhaps he’ll add it to the Wizard Academy schedule for 2015.This isn’t what I planned to write about today, but the memory of Keith swept me away.I know you will forgive me.Because that’s what albino monkeys do.Roy H. Williams

I have a theory about people who succeed: they cheat. And I’m in favor of it.I saw you recoil from that word a little, so I’ll say it more delicately: they’re quick to embrace an unfair advantage.Exceptional marketing gives a business an unfair advantage. Businesspeople who embrace this advantage are usually the ones who succeed.Here’s why I call it “an unfair advantage”: marketing doesn’t improve the product or the service you provide but it can make a customer choose you anyway, even when your competitor is offering a better value.Your competitor’s problem is that he doesn’t know how to win attention and create a memorable impression. He’s expecting his product to speak for itself.Products rarely do that.A strong location gives your business a second unfair advantage.Choosing a location is one of the most important marketing decisions you’ll ever make. A strong location wins attention and creates a memorable impression. A weak location doesn’t do that.Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg spent the past 12 months leading a team of programmers in the development of an online tool that helps you choose the ideal spot for your business. All you have to do is type in an address and the system will instantly evaluate more than 15,000 different metrics for that location, including demographics, psychographics, social signals, traffic patterns, search traffic, area competition and beneficial anchors.The blind tests they ran produced mind-boggling results.The first test involved a restaurant chain who provided the address and sales volume of their strongest location along with the address and sales volume of their weakest location. The IdealSpot software then accurately predicted precisely how all the other locations in the restaurant chain would rank. When Bryan pointed at the results page and said, “the location at this address should do 85% of the volume of the leading store,” the COO looked at his records and said, “that store does exactly 85% of the volume of our leading store. How could you possibly know that?”The brothers did the same thing for several other chains of stores and in every instance, the IdealSpot software accurately predicted what the owners of those stores already knew and were able to confirm.Remember those 15,000 metrics the software is pulling down from Big Data? One of them is “pet ownership,” so it really shouldn’t surprise you that the IdealSpot system was able to accurately predict the performance of every location in a chain of pet supply stores.Technology provides an unfair advantage. Whether or not you choose to embrace that advantage when choosing a location is up to you.When I wrote The Wizard of Ads trilogy more than a decade ago, I included a chapter called, “How to Calculate an Ad Budget.” My formula is unique in that it considers your cost of occupancy (rent) as part of the cost of marketing. Entrepreneur magazine published our formula in February 2004 and it created quite a stir. In my 35 years of experience I’ve never had reason to back away from my statement, “Expensive rent is the cheapest advertising your money can buy.”Make sure you get the most for your money.The IdealSpot website went live just last week. The company is still in its infancy. You’re one of the very first people on earth to know about this new technology.My suggestion is that you take a look at IdealSpot.com and then bookmark the website in your browser. The odds are high that you’re going to bump into someone who really needs to know about this.Choosing a location is a big decision.My advice? Embrace the unfair advantage.Roy H. Williams

Do you sometimes identify with Don Quixote, the self-appointed knight-errant who set out on his horse, Rocinante, along with his friend Sancho Panza on a donkey, to right the world’s wrongs and change the course of history?He was a delusional, but happy old fart.You and I are not the first to identify with him.John Steinbeck saw Don Quixote as a symbol of himself. Thus, he traveled to Spain and La Mancha in 1954 out of a special affinity for the place, and began his journey to rediscover the soul of America in a camper he affectionately christened Rocinante. The fruits of his journey – Operation Windmill as he called it – eventually found expression in Travels with Charley.”– Stephen K. George,  A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia, p. 55Travels with Charley, Steinbeck’s diary of his journey to see America with his dog, was published in 1962. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature later that year.Steinbeck’s 1960 GMC pickup with camper is on display at the Steinbeck center in Salinas, California.I decided that you and I should have our own Rocinante to park beneath the trees along the path to Engelbrecht House.We’ll run electricity to it so that it can be heated and cooled and offer it as a room on campus for any adventurous alumni who wants to travel with Steinbeck and Charley.”Vice-Chancellor Panza, I mean Whittington, agreed with me and we enthusiastically set out to find our truck.As it turns out, most of the 1960 GMC trucks we found online had already been sold, many of them more than a year ago. And the trucks that were available needed vast amounts of restoration. Uh-oh. This was going to be harder than we thought. But we couldn’t give up because a group of Wizard Academy alumni had already donated more than $6,000 toward the effort.Two weeks ago Pennie showed me 17 photographs of what can only be described as a 1-in-300,000,000 unicorn. Seriously, what are the odds that a professional mechanic would buy the same pickup and camper as John Steinbeck – brand new – and then keep it in his garage for more than 50 years?He ran the engine periodically, but drove the truck only once a year on a hunting trip with his son. That truck has only 20,000 original miles. Certified. It looks like it just drove off the showroom floor and it runs like the day it was born. What are the odds of this truck actually existing?I promise I’m not making this up. The old mechanic passed away and his son is selling the truck.Do you want to go along on this adventure?Photos of the proposed truck and camper can be found in the rabbit hole. Just follow Indiana Beagle at the top of this page. A click is all it takes.Three more bits of extremely, very excellent news:(1.) A romantic, Valentine’s Retreat, February 13-14 (Fri-Sat.) Stay on the Wizard Academy campus with your special someone for 2 days and 3 nights. Good food, new friends, and fabulous sessions with our beloved Dr. Richard D. Grant and Chairman of the Board, Jean Backus. This is going to be magical, especially the music, the insights, and the dress-up banquet. Laugh and snuggle and be happy. And with 2,000 bottles of wine in the cellar, I doubt that we’ll run out. Discount Code: Type “alumni” and save 50 percent.(2.)We’ve made big progress on Secrets of the Wizard Academy Campus, the comprehensive, pictorial guidebook we’ve been promising for the past 6 years. It contains backstories and explanations and interpretations of the artistic and architectural symbols of our campus and it’ll be available before the Academy’s 15th anniversary in May. In a couple of weeks we’ll give you a link to the online version-in-progress so you can make sure your name is spelled correctly in all the right places. The story of Rocinante II and the names of Steinbeck’s 100 will also be in that book.(3.) To help complete this pictorial guidebook, Wizard Academy is hosting a 2-day/3 night Photographer’s Round Table, April 8-9.  The price of tuition is that you must donate the photos you take while you’re here. Other than that, it’s free. If you’re a professional photographer or an accomplished amateur and would like to be part of this year’s Round Table, just send an email to [email protected]. Tell us a little about your experience and show us a bit of your work. We can only accept 18 photographers and 6 of those have already been invited, so we can’t make any promises, but it’s definitely worth sending in your application. We’re going to teach you some amazing things and you’re going to demonstrate that you understood by taking photos using those techniques during lab time. Those photos, of course, will be used in our guidebook.Gosh this is a fun place.Here are some other fun classes on the near horizon, including a marvelous half-day course this Friday with Chris Maddock and a 2-day

Although he lived more than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci drew pictures of machines that would not be invented for more than 400 years. His paintings of the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and the Vitruvian Man are perhaps the most widely recognized images in the world.WIKIPEDIA says Leonardo “was an Italian painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest polymaths of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.”“Leonardo da Vinci” is an idea that is larger-than-life in our minds. But when I show you a photograph of the house in which he died, he becomes more of an actual human being.That photo of the house is what I call “a reality hook,” a point of contact that connects the world of abstract imagination to the world of concrete fact.You can buy a print of the Mona Lisa on Amazon.com for less than ten dollars and the image will be identical to the original. But the value of the original is beyond estimation because Leonardo da Vinci actually touched it.An original work of art gives you a point of contact with the artist.An historical artifact gives you a point of contact with a specific moment in time.Understand this, and you understand the heart of every collector.Just as Leonardo da Vinci became more “real” when you saw the house in which he died, he comes into chronological focus when I tell you that Ferdinand Magellan, Christopher Columbus and King Henry VIII shared his lifetime. Leonardo becomes gut-wrenchingly real when I tell you that his diaries speak of a “gang of four” that raped him repeatedly when he was a boy.BAM. Reality hook.Stories and descriptions become more believable when you give them context.There are four ways to create reality hooks:Connect to something the reader/listener has already experienced.“Have you ever bought a car and then began seeing cars like yours everywhere you went?”Use terms of description that are specific and highly visual; shapes, colors, and the names of familiar things. “A man pulling radishes pointed my way with a radish.”Include details that can be independently confirmed. These bits that can be confirmed lend credibility to those parts of your story that cannot be confirmed. “There’s a restaurant in Austin at 4th and Colorado called Sullivan’s. It was there that I met Kevin Spacey and Robert Duvall.”Make logical sense. People are quick to believe things that seem correct, even when those things are not true. “If your advertising isn’t working, it’s because you’re reaching the wrong people.”Later this morning (Monday, January 12, 2015 at 11AM CST) I’ll spend the better part of an hour presenting examples of each of the 4 categories of reality hooks and talking about when and how to use them.Reality hooks are the hammer, screwdriver, pliers and duct tape of an ad writer. You can use them to fix practically anything.I really should have told you about today’s webcast a week ago, but it didn’t occur to me.Sorry about that.Here’s how I’ll make it up to you: the next time you come to a class at Wizard Academy, tell Vice-Chancellor Whittington that you’d like to see my examples of reality hooks and we’ll figure out a way to make that happen for you (and anyone else in your class that wants to join you.)2015 is going to be a year unlike any other.Hang on tight.Roy H. Williams

Andy Warhol’s greatest work of art was Andy Warhol. Other artists first make their art and then celebrity comes from it. Andy reversed this. For me the Factory was a place of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, for some of the others it was: from ferment comes art.”– Nat Finkelstein, Andy Warhol: The Factory Years, 1964-1967The son of a Coney Island cab driver, Nat Finkelstein was a Brooklyn boy who entered Andy Warhol’s Art Factory as a photographer in 1964 and remained there as a photojournalist for 3 years. His photographs are famously iconic of the times.In 1966, Finkelstein was taking photos of Andy for a proposed book project when it became obvious that everyone in the room was jockeying to be included in the background of the photographs.Warhol said, “Everyone wants to be famous.”Finkelstein answered, “Yeah, for about fifteen minutes, Andy.”A year later, when Warhol was interviewed for a 1968 exhibition in Stockholm’s Museum of Modern Art, he quipped,“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”The reporter dutifully wrote it down and it was included in the program handed out to attendees of the exhibition.Although he was just repeating a funny line in the hopes of saying something quotable, it would become the most famous thing Andy Warhol ever said.But Andy, you said more than you know. Hundreds of millions of us walk the streets today with little calculators in our pockets the size of 8 cigarettes placed side by side.These pocket calculators also function as televisions that let us watch any TV show or movie anytime we want. They’ll even work in moving cars.Our little calculators also function as movie cameras. We use them to make movies we broadcast to the entire world for free.And it’s also a typewriter – we can use it to type a note.And it’s a telegraph – we can send that note to any group of people in the world and it will instantly appear on their little television screens.And it’s a telephone – we can use it to call anyone on earth, even when they’re not at home.Our little 8-cigarette televisions – movie cameras – typewriters – telephones – are also photography cameras that use no film. These photographs don’t need to be developed so we can send them to anyone, anywhere, instantly.The same device gives us instant access – 24 hours a day – to the collected knowledge of the world. And we can add our own thoughts and photographs and movies to this collected knowledge store anytime we want. Since they travel at the speed of light, it takes only one millionth of a minute to deliver our creations to every person in the world.Andy, the future you described in 1968 has finally arrived, but our 15 minutes of fame is given to us in microbursts of one millionth of a minute.Fifteen million flashes of worldwide fame take quite a while to create.As it turns out, a lifetime.So I’m not sure what, exactly, has changed.Roy H. Williams

You can hope the value of a stock will rise, but when you invest money in that stock, your hope becomes faith. Did you make a foolish commitment?Time will tell.We believe the sun will rise because we’ve seen it rise day after day.It is a repeatable observation.We believe what we have seen.We believe it will rise.Belief is not faith.Belief is rational.Faith is irrational.Belief is based on evidence.Faith is based on hope.This is where it gets tricky.When our hope compels us to action, our faith is made evident.Not just to others, but to ourselves.Without action, our hope is just wishful thinking.Faith is hope that has written its name in the wet cement of time.Faith is that realm where actions speak louder than words.Like I said, this is where it gets tricky.One thousand and twenty years ago – 1095 to be exact – Pope Urban II decided that christians should reclaim all the geography related to the life of Jesus. In 1291, these Crusades were abandoned with the fall of Acre, the last christian stronghold in Israel.You’ll notice that I’m spelling christian with a lower-case c. This is because I believe those actions taken in the name of Christ were not, in fact, sanctioned by him. In essence, the leaders of christianity were signing his name to checks he did not write.Sadly, leaders of movements tend to do this.It would be easy to declare – as many have done – that faith is foolish and evil and the world would be better off without it. Heck, John Lennon’s most popular song, “Imagine,” is that very idea set to music.Imagine there’s no heaven.It’s easy if you try.No hell below us,Above us, only sky.Imagine all the peopleLiving for today.Imagine there’s no countries.It isn’t hard to do.Nothing to kill or die for.And no religion, too.Imagine all the peopleLiving life in peace…”Juergen Todenhoefer is an international journalist who interviewed a leader within ISIS after 300 of their fighters took the Iraqi city of Mosul, even though more than 20,000 Iraqi army soldiers were stationed there when that attack was launched.So you also want to come to Europe?” Todenhoefer asked him.“It is not a question of if we will conquer Europe,” the man said, “just a matter of when that will happen. But it is certain … For us, there is no such thing as borders. There are only front lines. Our expansion will be perpetual … And the Europeans need to know that when we come, it will not be in a nice way. It will be with our weapons. And those who do not convert to Islam or pay the Islamic tax will be killed.”“What about the 150 million Shia, what if they refuse to convert?” Todenhoefer asked.“150 million, 200 million or 500 million, it does not matter to us,” the fighter answered. “We will kill them all.”Have you ever wondered how 2 Christians can read the same Bible and walk away with entirely different understandings of what they have read? Well, the same is true of Moslems and the Koran, I think.John Steinbeck may have been thinking the thoughts of God when he wrote,[The reader of my book] is just like me, no stranger at all. He’ll take from my book what he can bring to it. The dull witted will get dullness and the brilliant may find things in my book I didn’t know were there. And just as he is like me, I hope my book is enough like him so that he may find in it interest and recognition and some beauty as one finds in a friend.”Each of us takes from ancient scripture what we bring to it.Angry persons find an angry god.Demanding persons find a demanding god.Forgiving persons find a forgiving god.Happy persons find a happy god.Peaceful persons find a peaceful god.You will notice that I haven’t suggested an answer to the problem of ISIS aggression. This is because I don’t have one. I’m just saying that faith is not the problem.2015 will be a year of surprises.Remember to celebrate the happy ones.Roy H. Williams

You don’t need to go to college to become successful.What Americans call education is usually just the passing along of traditional wisdom, which, when you think about it, is essentially a deepening of the status quo: conformity, indoctrination, groupthink.When students can imitate their teachers perfectly, we claim they have achieved excellence. But aren’t they just imitating the norm, the average, the standard?If this is excellence, where will we find progress?I’m not the only one who feels this way.Laszlo Bock is the head of people operations at Google.In a conversation with Tom Friedman of The New York Times reported by Max Nisen at Quartz, Bock made a startling series of statements about what Google has learned from studying its own employees:Graduates of top schools often lack “intellectual humility”“They commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved.”People that make it without college are often the most exceptional.“When you look at people who don’t go to school and yet make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people…. What we’ve seen [at Google] is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’”Learning ability is more important than IQSucceeding in academia isn’t always a sign of being able to do a job. Bock says that college can be an “artificial environment” that conditions students for one type of thinking.Want to hear something silly?Professors in American business schools usually have no experience in running a successful business. They’re just repeating what they were told by someone else who was taught it by someone else who learned it from an endless string of bloodless people holding chalk in front of blackboards in drab little rooms.Why do we revere the graduates of these places? It would seem to me that the very definition of mediocrity would be, “a highly developed ability to repeat what you were told.”But you don’t just repeat what you were told. You think for yourself.Mistakes don’t frighten you. You learn from them.The smell of mediocrity does not follow you.You are not average.You have imagination and courage and humility and a marvelous sense of humor.You, my special friend, are a wonderful and valuable brand of crazy.Merry Christmas.Roy H. Williams

The Grand Illusion of AdvertisingDecember 15, 2014ListenAYou own a business.You sell a product or a service.Your growth is limited by one of two things:The right people haven’t heard about you. Because if they had, they would surely be buying from you.The right people have heard about you. They just didn’t care.The grand illusion of advertising – perpetuated by every seller of ads – is that your problem is #1: the right people haven’t heard about you.But the painful truth is probably that the right people heard but didn’t care.Your mind recoils from that a little, doesn’t it?Don’t let it. Good news is on the way.Your problem is that you’ve been trying to find a date for your sister by telling your friends,She’s really pretty in the face.”That qualifier, “in the face,” is a deal-killer. The only way to make it worse would be to add,… and she’s got a really good personality.”Yes, men appreciate pretty faces and good personalities. That’s not the point. The point is that you qualified your recommendation in a way that made it seem like you were hiding something.Are you selling at “competitive” prices? Is your location “convenient” and do you have “an impressive selection?” Do you talk about how your “friendly” and “expert” sales associates really “care about finding the right solution?”Dude, your sister is never getting a date until you modify what you’re saying about her. There is no recommendation quite so damaging as faint praise.“Too good to be true” is another language of Ad-Speak that’s exactly the opposite of faint praise:My sister is drop-dead gorgeous and a lot of fun but no one wants to take her out.”Here’s how that sounds in business: “Highest quality at the lowest prices.”“We absolutely MUST sell 400 Toyotas this weekend!” “Prices too low to advertise.”Most ads are ignored because every customer has a mental filter that evaluates and dismisses both of these languages of Ad-Speak with a single question: “What are they not telling me?”Everyone hears what you’re not saying.My sister moved to town last week. She’s the new director of the animal shelter. Here’s a picture I took of her when we had dinner last night. It would be good if she had someone besides her brother to show her the city. Are you up for it?”Great ads close the loopholes.Loophole #1: Is she attractive? “Here’s a picture I took of her last night.”Loophole #2: Is she intelligent? “She’s the new director of the animal shelter.”Loophole #3: Why does she not have a boyfriend? “She moved to town last week.”Sure, I’d love to show your sister the city. See if you can get her on the phone right now and introduce her to me.”You’ve been reaching the right people all along and it was the same sister in all 3 ads. But you’ve been talking Ad-Speak.Come to Wizard Academy. We’ll make sure you never use Ad-Speak again.Your sister is going to be so happy.Roy H. Williams

Since the year 2000, the cognoscenti of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop have happily endured the fanfare and pageantry of my 3-day explanation of Third Gravitating Bodies. It remains the most highly attended class at Wizard Academy.For the uninitiated, a Third Gravitating Body with a high degree of divergence and an explicit moment of convergence is the single common characteristic shared by every mass-appeal success.Every one of them. No third gravitating body, no mass-appeal success.Third Gravitating Bodies make good things GREAT.And that’s the reason they’re so rarely discovered.1. You’ve created something that’s obviously good.2. Why would you risk adding something that doesn’t belong?A Third Gravitating Body is an element that doesn’t belong, but fits.When Francis Bacon said, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion,” the strangeness to which he referred was a Third Gravitating Body.Thou Shalt Not Argue with Francis Bacon.*The importance of Third Gravitating Bodies was demonstrated by Henri Poincare in 1887 when he used them to mathematically answer the nagging question of King Oscar II of Sweden, who for some weird reason felt he just had to know, “Is the solar system stable?”Here’s what I wrote about Third Gravitating Bodies in 2002.Here’s what a Cognoscenti of Magical Worlds wrote about them in 2006.Here’s what I wrote about them in 2012.But now, finally, after 15 years, I’ve figured out how to logically explain Third Gravitating Bodies in a single, highly condensed hour-long webinar.That magical hour will happen on Saturday Morning, April 4th, 2015. But due to the vagaries of Kickstarter, you’re going to have to pull the ripcord that opens your parachute before January 7th.If you want a detailed explanation of what will be happening and why, here’s some additional information.But if you’re a riverboat gambler with half a Franklin – or if you just inexplicably trust me – I believe you’ll be delightfully entertained, confused and titillated by this strange and unusual page on Kickstarter.And thus another adventure begins.Roy H. Williams

In 1879, Ferdinand Cheval was a postman in France who tripped on a strangely shaped stone and stumbled awkwardly forward. He was 43 years old.This would not normally be news but Cheval continued to stumble awkwardly forward each day for 33 more years. His was not the 10,000 hours to excellence championed by Malcolm Gladwell. Cheval stumbled forward for more than 10,000 days. The miracle he left behind in his garden is protected by France as a cultural landmark and admired by more than 120,000 visitors each year.Ferdinand Cheval was our brand of crazy.Just like you and me, Cheval initially dismissed his strange idea for fear that people would think he was crazy. But when the idea came back to him like a boomerang thrown by an Australian shepherd boy, he said, “Screw it. Let’s do this thing.”The next day, Cheval gathered cement and wire and picked up rocks while walking his 18-mile postal route.In a dream I had built a palace, a castle or caves, I cannot express it well… I told no one about it for fear of being ridiculed and I felt ridiculous myself. Then fifteen years later, when I had almost forgotten my dream, when I wasn’t thinking of it at all, my foot reminded me of it. My foot tripped on a stone that almost made me fall. I wanted to know what it was… It was a stone of such a strange shape that I put it in my pocket to admire it at my ease. The next day, I went back to the same place. I found more stones, even more beautiful, I gathered them together on the spot and was overcome with delight… It’s a sandstone shaped by water and hardened by the power of time. It becomes as hard as pebbles. It represents a sculpture so strange that it is impossible for man to imitate, it represents any kind of animal, any kind of caricature. I said to myself: since Nature is willing to do the sculpture, I will do the masonry and the architecture”AIn the 8th Psalm, David considers outer space and then asks a question of God:When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,The moon and the stars, which you have ordained,What is man that you are mindful of him,And the son of man that you visit him?For you have made him a little lower than the angels,And you have crowned him with glory and honor.You have made him to have dominion over the works of your hands;You have put all things under his feet…”The 8th Psalm doesn’t tell us whether God answered David’s question that day, but if he had, I think God’s answer might have gone something like this:David, David, David… Have you never considered the laughter of little girls or heard the songs of singers singing or read the words of men unafraid or seen the magic that leaps from the heart of every carrier of messages?”Ferdinand Cheval took his inspiration from where he found it, even though it was ridiculous.My Christmas hope for you is that you might have the courage to do the same. You, too, are a carrier of messages.Tell me, what is your ridiculous dream?Roy H. Williams

I made the decision 20 years ago that the Monday Morning Memo would rarely be about news or current events. I chose to leave the singing of fleeting facts to a chorus of professional reporters. It is a choir that does not need my voice.But today I’m making an exception.There are four things I’m betting you’ve noticed. Perhaps they’ve raised an eyebrow. I want you to know that you’re not alone.Social Media has become the new blackmail.*Customers are using threats of negative online reviews to extort cash and free products from sincere and honest businesspeople. My office is being bombarded with stories and questions from clients in every business category. I believe we’ll ultimately see an expansion of our libel laws to help curtail this racketeering, but that sort of change requires several years of debate. In the meantime, we’ll likely see the emergence of a new web device that allows businesspeople to respond with their side of the story.No, you’re not the only one being blackmailed by sociopaths.Businesses are struggling to find good employees.Employee recruitment ads are a significant percentage of what my partners and I are writing these days. The upside of this trend is that it’s an indicator of a surging economy. Businesses everywhere need more employees and few people need a job.No, you’re not the only one looking hard for good people to hire.The Witch Hunt has begun.**In the second half of the upswing to the zenith of a “Me” generation (most recently 1973 to 1983,) we elevate heroes and create idols to worship, (Michael Jackson and Ronald Reagan, among others.) But in the second half of the upswing to the zenith of a “We” generation (currently 2013 to 2023,) we subject our heroes to microscopic scrutiny and destroy every idol we can find. The zenith of a “We” is that time when the most innocent observation is likely to be misinterpreted as sexism, ageism, racism or religiosity. I am reminded of the tongue-in-cheek advice of Elbert Hubbard 120 years ago, “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” It was his way of saying, “Don’t let the fear of criticism rob you of the courage of your convictions.”Amen.(Uh-oh, was that sexism? Should I have said Amen and Awomen? What? You say it was religiosity? Can I just back up and start over?)Where did 2014 go?In late October I began receiving emails from a lot of people who don’t know each other, yet each of them chose the same 4 words: “Where did 2014 go?” These emails have continued for about 3 weeks and this does not happen every year. 2014 seems to have somehow vanished before our eyes. Wasn’t it just last month that we were trying to figure out how to navigate Obamacare?Nope. That was a year ago.The problem with living in the future is that it never arrives and suddenly your life is over.No, you’re not the only one looking for a quiet moment, a good friend and a desert island.Roy H. Williams

Phil was nearly 70 when I met him 30 years ago. He’ll be 100 soon. Phil doesn’t know it, but I think of him as one of the people who speaks wisdom into my life.Do you have a favorite word? Phil’s favorite word is balance.Most of us are out of balance and suffering for it.We think we’re in danger from bad things but those bad things rarely materialize. Our problem is that we’re pulled out of balance by our strong attraction to good things.You are resourceful. You get things done. You are a person of accomplishment. You will never be destroyed by those who stand in your way and try to push you back.The danger is from those who stand behind you and push you forward. “Go! Go! Go! You’re almost there! Just a little bit more! You can make it! Hooray! You da’Man! Keep it up! No pain, no gain! You can do this! Woo-hoo!”It’s our nature to take good things too far.A strong work ethic is a good thing. Every unbalanced workaholic has one.Compassion is a good thing. Every burned-out minister knows this.Recognition is a good thing. Just ask any celebrity who has forgotten who they are.We read in the Bible that Jesus would often leave the crowds he was teaching and disappear into the wilderness. My suspicion is that he hung out with Lazarus – the brother of Mary and Martha – during these times because Lazarus cared about Jesus the man more than he cared about Jesus the worker of miracles. I think maybe Lazarus was a “safe” person for Jesus, meaning that he made no demands on Jesus, and that’s why Jesus wept when Lazarus was gone and why he called him back from the grave.At least that’s how it happens in the screenplay I’m writing.Everyone needs a wilderness into which they can disappear. They need safe people to be around, friends who make no demands on them.Although we officially call Wizard Academy “a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious,” our students have laughingly called it “a summer camp for grown-ups” ever since we launched this place 14 years ago. Lately I’ve been thinking they might be right. In fact, we’re so often compared to Peter Pan’s island of Neverland that our next student mansion will officially be called, “The House of the Lost Boys.”Seriously, I’m not making that up.I like to believe that Wizard Academy is the desert island where Jesus would have hung out with Lazarus when he needed to get away from the pressing crowds. And I like to believe this is where you will come when you need to do the same.And one last thing: according to Robert Louis Stevenson, this is the island where the treasure is buried.Come, let’s see if we can find it.Roy H. Williams

I’m talking with a man about his happy future. There will be decisions to make and risks to take, but it’s a future that can definitely be his.And then he says, “I don’t want to get my hopes up.”The air leaves my body and I want to cry. And then I want to slap him, wake him up, shout the question that screams its own answer: “Do you know what happens when you don’t get your hopes up? Nothing! Not a bloody thing!”Lethargy. Apathy. Ennui. Depression. Hopelessness. This is the black water that rushes to fill the emptiness when you refuse to get your hopes up. So for the love of God I’m begging you, “Get your hopes up.”He says he doesn’t want to get his hopes up because he doesn’t want to be disappointed.Sigh.Perhaps the right answer is for him to buy a bigger TV, watch more sports and drink more beer. Yes, that’s the ticket. The clock will tick, the time will pass, and when they wheel his ancient body into a nursing facility, he’ll watch those same sports on a different TV and drink Ensure instead of beer.“Congratulations, friend. You never had to resort to Plan B. You never had to figure out what went wrong or find a way to fix it. You never had to deal with the joys and pains of Life, the only sport worthy of a human being.”Can you believe in things not immediately present? Of course you can. Tomorrow isn’t here, but you believe it will come.Can you have confidence in things you cannot see? Yes, you prove this every time you write a check. You have confidence – faith – that the bank won’t let you down.Is there anyone outside yourself that you care about enough to sacrifice time, energy and money to help them? If so, you have experienced love.I know of a sad woman who got her hopes up once, and things worked out pretty well for her. She became extremely famous and was widely quoted and lots of books have been written about her. She said,Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”Do you have a worthy purpose?That woman couldn’t see the future and she didn’t hear the voice of God saying, “Everything is going to be okay.” In fact, she couldn’t see or hear anything at all. Her name was Helen Keller and she lived with disadvantages so severe that the mind recoils from imagining them.When everything else is gone, faith, hope and love remain.Some people have faith in themselves. Others have faith in something or someone else. Where you put your faith is up to you. Likewise, each of us chooses what or whom to love. But once those choices have been made, faith gives us courage, love gives us energy, and hope is the light that shines in the darkness.Make a difference. Have an adventure. Get your hopes up.Turn on the light.Roy H. Williams

The silent workings of my mind are of little interest to anyone but me, yet occasionally I feel the need to chronicle some small discovery; to write it down so that it might continue to exist after I have been forgotten.Once a year I write a Monday Morning Memothat is more for methan it is for youand this is that one.If you quit reading now, I’ll understand.In Cervantes’ book of 1605, Don Quixote never meets Dulcinea. She exists only in his mind. Psychologist Carl Jung would call her Quixote’s “anima,” the imaginary woman that represents the innermost heart of a man.But in Man of La Mancha, the 1966 Broadway play by Dale Wasserman, Dulcinea is an actual woman, a reluctant prostitute in whom Don Quixote sees only purity, beauty and grace. That play won 5 Tony Awards and ran for 2,328 performances. In 1972, it was made into a major motion picture starring Peter O’Toole as Don Quixote and Sophia Loren as Dulcinea.Dale Wasserman got the credit, but the character relationships and narrative arc of Man of La Mancha belong entirely to John Steinbeck.Follow my trail of breadcrumbs and I will tell you what I know.1952: The prologue to East of Eden tells us that Steinbeck was familiar with Cervantes and Don Quixote. In it, he speaks to his editor and close friend, Pat Covici:Miguel Cervantes invented the modern novel and with his Don Quixote set a mark high and bright. In his prologue, he said best what writers feel—the gladness and the terror.“Idling reader,” Cervantes wrote, “you may believe me when I tell you that I should have liked this book, which is the child of my brain, to be the fairest, the sprightliest and the cleverest that could be imagined, but I have not been able to contravene the law of nature which would have it that like begets like—”And so it is with me, Pat……Cervantes ends his prologue with a lovely line. I want to use it, Pat, and then I will be done. He says to the reader: “May God give you health—and may He be not unmindful of me, as well.”John Steinbeck1953: Ernie Martin, the Broadway producer of Guys and Dolls, asks Steinbeck to write a sequel to Cannery Row so that it might be made into a play.I have in my possession the Christmas gift John Steinbeck sent Ernie Martin later that year, just as Steinbeck was beginning to write Sweet Thursday. It’s a copy of the 1949 edition of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha. Inscribed on the front endpaper of that book is a note written and signed by John Steinbeck.Dear Ernie -:This is required preparation for Project X.John Steinbeck,Xmas 19531954: John Steinbeck publishes Sweet Thursday, a love story between “Doc” of Cannery Row and Suzy, a reluctant prostitute from the Bear Flag Hotel. Steinbeck’s note to Ernie Martin makes it clear that Suzy is Dulcinea.1955: Sweet Thursday becomes a Broadway play called Pipe Dream with a musical score by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The play receives the largest advance ticket sales in Broadway history to that point, $1.2 million, and is nominated for 9 Tony Awards.I think it would be safe to say that Dale Wasserman, a lifelong playwright, would have been very much aware of Pipe Dream in 1955.1957: John Steinbeck writes 114 pages of Don Kehan—The Marshall of Manchon, but he abandons the novel on December 27 of that year. The unfinished book is a delightful retelling of the story of Don Quixote as a gentleman farmer in southern California in 1957. Dulcinea, once again, is presented as a reluctant prostitute. But now she’s called “Sugar Mae.”This is the second time in 4 years that Steinbeck has envisioned a prostitute Dulcinea.1959: I, Don Quixote, a non-musical teleplay by Dale Wasserman, airs only once, as the DuPont Show of the Month on CBS Television. In 1965, when Steinbeck’s health was in decline, that teleplay is adapted to become Man of La Mancha, a legendary hit on Broadway. All the applause went to Wasserman, but that story was clearly Steinbeck’s.Why did Steinbeck see Dulcinea as a prostitute when Cervantes clearly did not?The answer, I believe, lies in the “anima,” that imaginary woman who represents the innermost heart of a man.1959: In a private letter to his agent, Elizabeth Otis, Steinbeck writes,I’m going to do what people call rest for a while. I don’t quite know what that means – probably reorganize. I don’t know what work is entailed, writing work, I mean, but I do know I have to slough off nearly fifteen years and go back and start again at the split path where I went wrong because it was easier. True things gradually disappeared and shiny easy things took their place. I brought the writing outside, like a cook flipping hot cakes in a window. And it should never have come outside.”– John Steinbeck, to Elizabeth Otis  Steinbeck: A Life in Lett

The problem with most websites is that they’re built inside out.It’s an easy trap to fall into, almost inevitable, in fact.You’re on the inside of your company, looking out at your customer.She’s on the outside, looking in.Your website is built from your perspective, not hers. But let’s be fair: your website tells her everything she needs to know to make an informed decision, right? And who knows better than you? After all, you’re the expert.See how easy it is to build an “inside out” website?The effectiveness of Search Engine Optimization in 2014 depends on how well you anticipate and answer your customer’s questions; not the questions you feel she ought to be asking, but the ones she’s actually got in mind.Not only does SEO improve when your website is built “outside in,” but your Conversion Rate – the metric that measures the percentage of shoppers who become buyers – also takes a happy jump upward.The payoffs of an “outside in” website are big.And it’s much easier to accomplish than you think.Buyer Legends is everything you need to know, packed into 20 short pages.A handful of companies were given advance copies. Here’s a sample of what they’re saying:“Before reading this book I had already created some very successful online companies over the last 18 years. Most online business owners find that growth and forward progress become harder to achieve when you have become expert in every aspect of your company. Once you’ve reached that level, the definition of a ‘successful year’ typically means that you’ve maintained the profitability of the year before, or it could mean that you had an increase of 5%.Well, let me tell you that after only a few hours of going over the contents of this book, I was able to increase my sales volume by over 46%. This massive increase in sales and profits took only 3 weeks to implement. As a skeptic myself, I hesitated to provide the actual amount of my business increase for fear that it would look suspicious.As I stated, an increase of only 5% would have made my year a fantastic success, but the results I achieved from the information in this book are breathtaking.”By the way, I can vouch for the truth of that testimonial because it was written by someone who met Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg at Wizard Academy 5 months ago and got an advance copy of Buyer Legends at that time. So when he says “already successful,” you need to understand that he was already doing a few million dollars per year in net profits. Now, after implementing Buyer Legends, “Up 46%.”My favorite testimonial, though, is from someone I’ve not yet met:“Having worked first hand with the Eisenbergs on mapping our customers’ critical paths and creating scenario narratives, I can confidently say the Buyer Legends process works. My team’s focus at Google is on acquiring SMB advertising clients. And if you’ve ever worked with these types of businesses, you know there is huge diversity through the spectrum of small and medium businesses. We’d miss opportunities and gaps by over-aggregating (i.e. taking too high level a view) though often the challenge was in effectively communicating our insights. The Buyer Legends framework allowed us to more effectively focus our efforts, improving the bottom line. And equally important, to make a more compelling case for change with our marketing, engineering and product colleagues.”Paul Jeszenszky,Head of Global B2B Digital Marketing Center of Excellence, GoogleThis 20-page downloadable eBook is only three bucks at Amazon.com and it will open on any device.Seriously, do you need me to say more?Roy H. Williams

When you write ads for a living, you learn that the truth is often the opposite of what people believe.Most people believe an ad will work if people like it, and an ad won’t work if people hate it. But that’s just not true. And we’re wrong about far more important things than that.Take marriage, for instance. You’ve heard it said countless times, “Marriage is just a piece of paper.”But the data clearly indicates otherwise. Not only are unmarried couples more likely to split up than married ones, couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married in front of 200 people.That shouldn’t come as a surprise.But this next bit of truth may indeed surprise you:The less you spend on the wedding, the more likely you are to stay married.According to The Knot, the average wedding in America costs about $30,000. But when you look at their methodology and realize The Knot surveyed only those brides who spent a lot of time on their fantasy wedding website and felt inspired to fill out a wedding-cost survey, this “average wedding” figure becomes somewhat suspect. Added to that, The Knot needs its advertisers to believe, “There’s gold in them thar hills.”I’m sure you’ll forgive me for not swallowing the hook.Better data would suggest the average American wedding costs between five and ten thousand dollars.According to Dr. Hugo Mialon and Dr. Andrew Francis of Emory University, if a couple spends 10 to 20 thousand dollars on their wedding, they increase their likelihood of divorce by 29%. Couples who spend more than $20 thousand are 46 percent more likely than average to divorce.When you spend less than average for your wedding, you increase your odds of staying together. Statistically, a couple is 18% less likely than average to get divorced if they spend between 1 thousand and 5 thousand on the wedding. And a couple is 53% less likely than average to get divorced if their wedding costs less than a thousand dollars.Interesting, huh?One last thing: that little factoid that “half of all weddings end in divorce” has never been true. The divorce rate in America has never exceeded 41% and that number is trending downward. In reality, the odds of staying married today are nearly 2 to 1 in your favor.Passion does not create commitment.Commitment creates passion.To whom, and to what, are you committed?Roy H. Williams

Jerry Seinfeld is the richest actor on earth. Google it. He’s worth eight hundred and twenty million dollars.You don’t make that kind of money working as a stand-up comedian in Atlantic City. You make it when companies pay to run ads during your hit TV show. Based on the advertising revenues it generated, Seinfeld (1989-1998) was the most successful TV show in the history of television.Fast-forward to October, 2014: Jerry Seinfeld wins a CLIO, an award that’s sort of like an OSCAR in advertising. (In Greek mythology, Clio was one of the nine Muses and a daughter of Zeus. She was the recorder of great deeds, the proclaimer and celebrator of accomplishments, and a source of inspiration and genius.)Jerry accepted his CLIO award from America’s advertising professionals by stepping up to the microphone and proving once again that you can say vicious things to people as long as you’re smiling when you do it. “I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy.” “I love advertising because I love lying.”Like all great comedians, Seinfeld is funny because he has the audacity to say what everyone else is thinking. It’s been his trademark from the beginning. So no, I’m not bothered that he insulted the people who were honoring him. The average American is probably delighted that he did it. After all, those annoying advertising people had it coming, right?That’s one way to look at it.I prefer to look at it through the eyes of Don Quixote who, you will recall, did some amazing things while pretending he was a man who could do amazing things.Yes, I am a professional ad writer but I believe it to be a worthy profession.America did not become wealthy because of its natural resources. If natural resources determined the wealth of nations, Brazil would be the richest country on earth and Japan would be the poorest.Americans enjoy the most robust economy on earth because we’re incredibly good at selling things to each other. If we ever lose our ability to convince each other to buy things, the American economy will fall apart.So no, I’m not embarrassed to be the guy who convinces you to buy things you don’t need. If Americans bought only what we needed, we would never have progressed beyond kerosene lanterns and a hand-pump in the yard.I am embarrassed by companies who take away your right to choose.I am embarrassed by Marriott. (NYSE: MAR)While Jerry Seinfeld was insulting ad writers, the Federal Communications Commission was fining Marriott $600,000 for using high-tech equipment to jam personal Internet access during a convention at its Nashville hotel. If exhibitors or attendees wanted to go online, they had to pay $250 to $1,000 apiece to Marriott.Teddy Roosevelt spanked J. P. Morgan and the other robber barons of corporate America when they conspired to take away the American right to choose.Teddy wasn’t a Socialist, he was a Republican. He didn’t restrain free trade, open markets, capitalism or the American dream. He restrained powerful men who wanted to abandon seduction in favor of rape.God Bless the FCC.I believe Teddy would be proud.Roy H. Williams

When we think of Romeo and Juliet, we think of Shakespeare. But Shakey didn’t create those characters. The source of Shakespeare’s 1594 play was a 3000-line poem by Arthur Brooke, Romeus and Juliet, published 32 years earlier in 1562.Romeo and Juliet didn’t originate with Arthur Brooke, either. He compiled it from a number of Italian Renaissance sources, the earliest of them going back to 1474, ninety years before Shakespeare was born.Brooke’s tedious treatment of Romeus and Juliet was a moralizing, cautionary tale of a young couple engaged in “lust and whoredom,” whereas Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a sad misadventure in which heartbroken young lovers die needlessly.Beginning in the 1660s, British productions of Shakespeare’s play allowed Romeo and Juliet to live on, or had Juliet wake up for a simultaneous death with Romeo. Some theatre troupes went so far as to offer the ‘tragic death’ and ‘happily-ever-after’ versions on alternating nights.I’ll bet you didn’t know any of that. I certainly didn’t. I learned it from my friend, Steve King.I spend a few minutes each day with Steve.But I’ve never met him.Steve publishes a daily newsletter called Today in Literature, “the naïve idea of an English teacher on leave from the classroom.”The contact page of his website says, “It is pleasing to think that Today in Literature helps to keep the world of books alive for so many — especially those two subscribers on Bouvet Island in the Antarctic, whoever you may be. I also live on an island— Newfoundland, Canada— where I help raise two children, amuse my wife, and run this cottage industry. It is a one-man operation and it needs your support.”This is me supporting my friend, Steve King. He has no idea I’m doing it.Interestingly, Steve’s little history lesson about Romeo and Juliet contains a valuable business tip that can save you a lot of time and make you a lot of money. This is the tip: whenever possible, repurpose the proven. Streamline and accelerate something that has worked in the past.EXAMPLE: Approach 10 people with fearless faces and ask each of them, “Can you name a movie directed by Oliver Stone in which Charlie Sheen plays a young man who follows a bad father figure, then turns to begin following a good father figure?” Half of them will say Platoon and the other half will say Wall Street.Oliver Stone discovered a winning pattern and he stuck to it, moving the story of Platoon from the green jungle of Viet Nam to the concrete jungle of Wall Street. Each of the films was a towering success.Repurpose the proven. Find a successful pattern and use it as a blueprint.Henry Ford became the world’s first billionaire by turning the overhead disassembly line of Chicago meat packers upside down to create the Detroit assembly line of the Model T. He needed a quick assembly method because he had discovered the miracle question.Sam Walton echoed the miracle question of Henry Ford, “At what price could I sell a huge number of these?” Like Henry before him, Sam became one of the richest men in the world.Steve Jobs followed the lead of Nike Shoes. Instead of focusing his ads on his product, he turned his camera toward the kinds of people who would buy such a product. This little “mirroring” act made him 11 billion dollars.Nike didn’t follow anybody’s lead. They just did it.No, that’s not exactly true. Nike set out to create a fashion statement that indicated an athletic lifestyle, even if the purchaser had no intention of wearing the shoes for the purpose for which they were designed. According to Nike’s own estimate, 80% of that company’s $28 billion in sales this year will be made to people who don’t have an active lifestyle.Abraham Maslow said the greatest unmet need of Americans was our need for a sense of belonging. We hunger for an identity. We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are. And he chronicled that observation in 1943, 45 years before Nike offered to make athletes of us all.But just as Romeo and Juliet didn’t originate with Shakespeare, the idea that we need constant identity reinforcement didn’t originate with Maslow. In the first chapter of the book of James, we read that a person who hears and understands but takes no action, “is like unto a man who sees his natural face in a mirror: he sees himself, and goes his way, and immediately forgets what manner of man he was.”It appears that Solomon was right. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.” – Ecclesiastes, chapter 1Gene Fowler says, “The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.”Hey, it worked for Shakespeare.Roy H.

I’ve always been puzzled by the fact that businesspeople think of advertising and sales training and customer service as three separate departments within a company.Have you ever developed an impression of a company through their advertising and then gotten a totally different impression of that company when you met them?The external personality of your company is created through your ads. This is what’s perceived by the general public.The internal personality of your company is created by management. This is what your customers encounter when they contact you.If you delegate the creation of your advertising to an outside group but give them no input into your sales training and customer service programs, you’ll create a company with a split personality every time.Are people in your company using those words and phrases created and popularized by your ad writers? Or do they start an altogether new and different conversation with your customer full of new and different words and phrases?That’s a really bad idea.Continue the conversation that was begun in your ads and you’ll see your close rate rise significantly.Each of us has a natural connection with 3 of every 10 people we meet.Another 3 aren’t going to like you regardless of what you do or say. This disconnection isn’t your fault, so don’t let it bother you. The remaining 4 people can possibly be sold, but only if you do and say the right things.Does it surprise you that when all categories of selling are combined, the national average close rate is about 20 percent?Let’s say your staff is well above average with a close rate of 30 percent. This means they’re selling 3 out of 10 opportunities. That’s 50% more than the 2 out of 10 everyone else is selling.Even so, what if we could sell just 1 of the 4 remaining “sellable” customers?Your sales would immediately increase by 33%.What if we could sell 2 of those 4?Your sales would increase by 67 percent.What if, through clear focus and genuine inspiration, we could sell 3 of those 4?Congratulations. We just doubled your sales volume with no change in pricing, no change in inventory, no change in overhead and – most importantly – no additional sales opportunities.The corporate wall between ad writing and sales training has troubled me for 30 years, but I’ve not spoken publicly about the problem until now.Shall I confess?I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to be asked to fix it.Fixing it, you see, would involve talking to the employees of all the companies for whom I write ads. And frankly, nothing on earth could be as excruciating for me as having to smile and listen to well-meaning people tell me what they think I should do differently.Truth be told, I’m not really a people person. Few writers are.But a few months ago it occurred to me: I don’t have to have those conversations myself. I have dozens of partners and thousands of students who are much better with people than I am.One of my partners, Tim Miles, has written extensively in recent months about how to keep your company from becoming schizophrenic. And Tim is a real people person. Bestselling authors Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg have addressed the problem in a new “executive storyteller’s guide” that’s scheduled to be released next month. The Fortune 500 companies that were given advance copies and implemented the advice have responded with enthusiastic reviews. Another partner, Ray Seggern, has put together a marvelous workshop to help you repair the split in your corporate personality.According to Seggern,1. Story is What You Say (external message created through advertising)2. Culture is Who You Are (internal reality created by sales training)3. Experience is What You Deliver (what happens to your customers when they choose to trust you)If any of these 3 is out of alignment, there will be predictable side effects.When story and experience don’t align, you get bad reviews.But when your advertising aligns with your customer’s experience, you have authenticity.When culture and experience don’t align, you have cancer in the building.But when your corporate culture aligns with your customer’s experience, you have employees with high morale.When culture and story don’t align, you have a close rate that’s unimpressive.Get your sales training aligned with your advertising and you’ll need a wheelbarrow to carry your money.2015 is going to be a very good year for business.Roy H. Williams

Jeffrey Eisenberg sent me this 1994 Compuserve ad that talks about delivering “up to 60 messages per month” as though 60 would be the largest number of emails that any of us would ever need to send.Isn’t it interesting how our use of technology always seems to evolve differently than any of us expected to see happen? Yet we continue to be attracted to pitchmen with booming voices and bad toupees who claim to be able to tell us how we’ll use technology in the future.In 1978, Fed-X was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1983, they became the first U.S. company to reach revenues of $1 billion without merger or acquisition. Then when FAX machines became popular, everyone predicted the immediate decline of Fed-X. After all, why would anyone spend ten dollars to send documents overnight when you could send those same documents in a matter of seconds for the price of a long-distance phone call?Fed-X revenues will be about $46 billion in 2014.Not many years prior to 1978, the introduction of electric toasters, gas-powered lawnmowers, self-correcting typewriters, microwave ovens and other “labor saving devices” had the experts convinced that boredom would soon be the biggest problem facing modern Americans. How were we going to spend all that leisure time?No one – absolutely no one – predicted that we would simply accelerate the pace of living, cramming more productivity into each waking hour until we were frazzled and breathless and had to look at our driver’s licenses to remember who we were.We used to tell ourselves that we could become anything we wanted to be. But today we tell ourselves we can become everything we want to be.We’re living multiple lives simultaneously.As a consultant, people ask me to predict the future of advertising. They look at the fragmentation of mass media and the rise of digital technology and ask, “What’s the next big thing?”The only thing I know for sure about the future is that it will happen. But rather than dodge the “What’s next?” question, I’ll give you my best guesses. (You should set an alarm on your phone to remind you 6 years from today to compare my predictions to the realities of September, 2020. We’ll probably both get a big laugh out of it.)1. Audiences will continue to get smaller, but ad rates will increase.2. Micro-targeting will become increasingly popular as predictive modeling through Big Data promises advertisers that they can reach “exactly the right customer at exactly the right moment.”3. Excited by the promise of predictive modeling, most advertisers will continue to focus their efforts on finding the right customer to sell instead of finding the right message to deliver.4. The big rewards will go to advertisers who find the right message to deliver.5. Savvy advertisers will use the Post Office to deliver warm messages to prospective customers for the price of a first-class postage stamp. The most successful of these will be hand-addressed, original greeting cards in numbered editions.6. No, I wasn’t joking about #5 above. I actually believe direct-mail is going to make a come-back, but this time around it will wear better clothes and have a lot more class.7. Broadcast radio (AM/FM) will continue to offer great value to advertisers for at least a while longer. Internet radio continues to erode Broadcast radio, though more slowly than most people assume. The most reliable projections indicate it will be about 8 more years (2022) before Internet radio is as large as Broadcast radio.Indiana Beagle has more details about all of this in the rabbit hole. To enter the rabbit hole, just click the fish in the Compuserve ad at the top of the page. Each click of an image in the rabbit hole will take you one page deeper.Welcome to Wonderland, Alice.Roy H. Williams

Before becoming a poet, a Wizard of AdsTM and a writing instructor, Peter Nevland was an engineer at Motorola.Andrew Backus is a geologist and the living embodiment of Doctor Doolittle. The number of injured animals Andrew has rescued from the roadside would overflow the San Diego Zoo. Andrew and Peter are both cognoscenti graduates of The Magical Worlds Communications Workshop.When I saw Peter talking to Andrew I walked over to where they were standing. This was going to be interesting.Peter looked at me and said, “What makes one storyteller more interesting than another?”Not sure where this was headed, I asked, “Are you asking, or are you about to tell me?Peter said, “I’ve developed algorithms* to help me grade the writing assignments of my students, but I haven’t been able to reverse engineer what makes the basic structure of a story interesting.”I said, “Ahhh. Architecture. So you’re asking, then?”Peter nodded, so I continued. “Stories become interesting when highly divergent components converge. Predictable stories are built from elements with too few degrees of separation between them. That’s what makes the narrative arc (the plot) of those stories feel linear; the listener can easily guess what’s going to happen next. Good storytellers begin with a high degree of separation between the elements in their stories, thereby increasing the listener’s surprise and delight when those elements converge.”Andrew said, “Can you give me an example?”I decided to use a technique called Random Entry that I learned from Mark Fox, one of the instructors at Wizard Academy.**I said, “I want each of you to think back over the past 24 hours and focus on something that has occupied your attention for a period of time, something you felt to be interesting and worthwhile.” A minute later Andrew said, “I’ve got something,” and Peter said, “Me, too.”I looked toward Andrew and he told me about Zoysia grass. “Not only will it grow in dry climates, but it will also grow in the shade.”Peter spoke of a pattern in Psalm 15 that is broken – intentionally, Peter believes – to dramatically emphasize the unique nature of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.I said, “You will agree that those two ideas are highly divergent from one another?”Both of them smiled and nodded.I then told them the story of how God is like Zoysia grass.One of my literary heroes, Tom Robbins, says, “Everything in the universe is connected, of course: it’s a matter of using imagination and research to discover the links and using language to expand and enliven them.”I did the “research” Tom Robbins speaks about as I listened to Andrew and Peter. The key to this research is to probe for the defining characteristics of each story until you’ve clearly identified components within the two stories that can be linked. These are your points of connection. All that remained for me, then, was to build a bridge between Andrew’s tale of Zoysia grass and Peter’s tale of Psalm 15. The points of connection make it possible.Building the bridge is easier than you would think. The points of connection are always there. I know it sounds crazy but, “Everything in the universe is connected, of course.”I continued my explanation to Andrew and Peter. “The bridge that connects highly divergent ideas is like the flow of electric current. It’s powerful and illuminating and it always feels like magic.” * * *Andrew said, “So the bridge is like a third gravitating body?”“Not quite,” I answered. We won’t have a true, third gravitating body until we find a third idea that’s as divergent from Zoysia Grass and the God of Israel as those two ideas are from each other. When a single bridge unites three highly divergent components, you have a tool that will gain and hold the attention of the masses.”If anyone can build that into an algorithm, Peter can.I’m interested in seeing how this turns out, aren’t you?Roy H. Williams* In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a step-by-step procedure for calculations. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning. – WIKIPEDIA** Mark teaches Da Vinci and the 40 Answers twice a year and Systematic Idea Generation when he’s in the mood.* * * We discuss the electricity that flows from the two poles of a duality when they are brought into close proximity in “Sinatra’s Riddle,” the Monday Morning Memo for July 7, 2014.

Some of you are going to feel like I’ve spit on your shoe or mocked your religion or told you that your baby is ugly, so I’d like to apologize in advance for what I’m about to say.Teamwork in business is highly overrated.There, I’ve said it.I realize those 6 words are going to disturb some of you, but if my goals were merely to buy an arched eyebrow and a scornful frown and trigger an email of rebuttal, I would be just another sensationalist trying to yank a reaction from his audience.But those are not my goals.My goals are to make you more productive, help you reduce your mistakes, shorten your learning curve and raise the height of your success.To do these things, we must look at what’s hiding in your blind spot.I appreciate that you’re still reading.I was at lunch recently with 3 incredibly bright businesspeoplewhen I smiled cheerfully at them and said, “I think teamwork in business is highly overrated.”All three of them stiffened as though I had said something truly shameful. After a moment, the business owner sitting directly across from me looked down at his plate and said quietly, “Well, you’re entitled to your opinion.”We had not been talking about teamwork. There was no reason for any of these people to feel personally challenged or attacked, yet that’s exactly how they reacted. The cultural myth of Teamwork is anchored deep within the American soul, beginning, I believe, with Thomas Jefferson and “We the People” and the launch of this grand experiment called Democracy.I spent the next hour swatting down every example of successful “teamwork” they could throw at me. At the end of that hour they universally agreed that “teamwork” is an illusion created when the individual components within a human system accomplish a goal that is credited to the collective, rather than to the individual efforts of the components.What might appear to be teamwork in a relay race is, in truth, just a series of individual runners, each of whom begins their effort with an advantage or a deficit that was handed to them by the previous runner. If a runner increases that advantage or shortens that deficit, he or she was successful. It is only when they are rewarded collectively that we create the illusion of a team.Individual responsibility brings out the best in us.If you remove individual responsibility, you create a committee.Every bureaucracy begins as a well-intentioned committee.Leaders and managers have different functions.A leader encourages the members of a tribe to deliver their best individual efforts. A manager holds each individual responsible for delivering the outcome that he or she has been assigned.Steve Jobs did not invent the Apple computer.Steve Wozniak invented the Apple computer.Although I admire the abilities of Steve Jobs, he was merely the popularizer, the face, the dynamic leader, the pitchman, the philosopher, the high priest of the Apple religion. Without Wozniak, Steve Jobs would likely have been just another California techie bouncing from company to company in sneakers and ripped blue jeans.Wozniak said, “Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”John Steinbeck said something similar in 1952, when Wozniak was just 2 years old. “Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”The great David Ogilvy made a similar observation when Wozniak was in high school. “Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.”I believe committees are formed when no one wants to accept individual responsibility for the outcome. I believe this is also the motive that lurks behind our current fascination with “big data.”“Big data has become the X factor of modern marketing, the hero of every marketer’s story. But it’s a promise at risk of letting you down. You may be thinking that data will magically turn bush-league marketing into a winning ‘Moneyball’ performance. But that’s an artifact of our big data obsession. Data, alone, isn’t what makes marketing move the needle for business.”“Data can play a leading role in developing strategy and bringing precision to execution, but it does nothing — absolutely nothing — to stir motivation and create the desire that makes cash registers ring. Data is important, but it’s content that makes an emotional connection.”– Harvard Business Review, February 25, 2014, “What Data-Obsessed Marketers Don’t Und

Targeting is impotent.That wasn’t a misspelling.If you want to waste a lot of money on advertising, just target exactly the right audience and then make an offer that fails to move them.Targeting isn’t the answer.Having the right message is the answer.Most ads underperform because they say, “Here’s what we do and here’s how we do it. You should buy it.” Tedious and predictable ads always talk about what and how. But if you want to engage the imagination, you’ve got to start talking about why.Ads that change hearts and minds say, “This is the belief that wakes us up in the morning. It’s why we come together. Here’s how we live our belief. Do you believe what we believe?”The selling of products and services is the selling of ideas.And now you know how Apple became the 5th largest company in America.According to Simon Sinek, most computer companies say, “We make great computers. They’re beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?” That’s how most of us communicate in our ads. We say what we do and how we’re different and better than our competitors. What and how are always boring. But Apple begins by telling us why they do what they do.Apple says, “We believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?” In other words, Apple sells you their belief system before they try to sell you their computer.Apple generated $43.7 billion in sales during the first three months of 2014. That’s more than Google, Amazon, and Facebook COMBINED. Apple’s iPhone revenue alone is bigger than Microsoft and their iPad revenue alone is bigger than Facebook. And those are just two of their products. We haven’t even touched laptops or iTunes or Beats by Dre.In his TED talk, How Great Leaders Inspire Action, Simon Sinek says,“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. If you don’t know why you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you do, then how will you ever get people to vote for you, or buy something from you, or, more importantly, be loyal and want to be a part of what it is that you do? Again, the goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it’s to hire people who believe what you believe. If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money, but if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.”“Dr. King wasn’t the only man in America who was a great orator. He wasn’t the only man in America who suffered in a pre-civil rights America. In fact, some of his ideas were bad. But he had a gift. He didn’t go around telling people what needed to change in America. He went around and told people what he believed. ‘I believe, I believe, I believe,’ he told people. And people who believed what he believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told people. And lo and behold, 250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak.”“How many of them showed up for him? Zero. They showed up for themselves. And it wasn’t about black versus white: 25 percent of the audience was white. We followed, not for him, but for ourselves. And, by the way, he gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech, not the ‘I have a plan’ speech.”Simon Sinek speaks of leadershipbut his principles apply equally well to advertising.Great ads – like great leaders – tell you why, not just what and how.Indy will post a couple of examples from Apple in today’s rabbit hole and I’ll explore an hour’s worth of examples during next week’s session of Wizard of Ads LIVE. “Speaking to Why” is also a new module in Brandable Chunks, the workshop taught by Jeff Sexton and Chris Maddock and me at Wizard Academy.Communication is what happens when you cause another person to see what you see. Persuasion is what happens when you cause another person to believe what you believe.When you have a plan and people reluctantly agree to it, you’re doomed. But when you have a belief – when you have a dream – you’ll find it to be highly contagious. People will take ownership of that dream and make it their own. What do you believe that might echo in the hearts of your customers? What difference do you dream of making in their lives?Put that in your ads.Let the magic begin.Roy H. Williams

If you were to ask 1000 people to name the behavior that marks93 percent of all successful companies, what do you suppose they would tell you?I didn’t ask 1000 people but I did ask Google, which is sort of like asking the whole world. Here’s what the whole world told me:“Successful companies focus on what they do best.”“They invest in their people.”“They’re passionate.”“They anticipate the future and stay ahead of the curve.”“They never quit learning.”“They have discipline and a financial roadmap.”“Blah, blah, blah.”I was staring at a list of 86 different characteristics when the truth finally hit me: “Half of these people are guessing and the other half are just preaching a sermon about their personal values and core beliefs. Not a single one of these writers has actually gathered the facts.”Then I stumbled onto a book review written by Eric Barker of Time magazine.Amar Bhidé went to Harvard, became a proprietary trader for E.F. Hutton, a consultant for McKinsey and Company, and then a college professor and a world authority on capitalism. In his third book, The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses (Oxford University Press,) Bhidé brought all the rigor of academia to his investigation of the characteristics of successful companies.God bless Amar Bhidé.What he found was that 93 percent of all successful companies had to abandon their original business plan — because the original plan proved not to be viable. “In other words,” wrote Eric Barker of Time, “successful companies don’t succeed because they have the right strategy at the beginning; but rather, because they have money left over after the original strategy fails, so that they can pivot and try another approach.”Mary Whaley summarizes Bhidé’s book by saying the winners in business “survive and prosper because of an ongoing ability to adapt to opportunities and problems, are subjected to many detours, and stumble often along the way.”Successful companies have an ability to improvise.Unsuccessful companies blindly “stick to the plan.”The principal difference between hope and a planis presumption about the future.The intended plan is deliberate.The improvised plan is emergent.According to Eric Barker, “Deliberate is what’s in the business plan, the PowerPoint deck, the list of goals. And that’s what ends up changing 93% of the time. Emergent is what you find along the way. It’s when your baby nephew ignores the gift you bought him… but LOVES the shiny wrapping paper. The heart medication research… that ends up becoming Viagra.”“Intel’s decision to accept an order from Busicom, a second-tier Japanese calculator company, started the company on its path to microprocessors. Sam Walton’s decision to build his second store in another small town near his first one in Bentonville, Arkansas rather than in a large city, led to Wal-Mart’s discovery of the attractive economics of building pre-emptively large stores in small towns.”– The Processes of Strategy Development and Implementation,Clayton Christensen and Tara DonovanNovelist E.L. Doctorow once said, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” The same thing is true of running a business.There’s a line in Psalm 119 in which the writer says to God, “Your word is a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path.” When I was a very young boy, one of my teachers pointed out that a footlamp provides only enough light to see the next step. You can’t see further until you’ve moved forward in the light that you have.I’m betting E.L. Doctorow has read that verse.One step at a time.And when something unexpectedappears in the light, always be ready to improvise.Roy H. WilliamsPS – When I asked Princess Pennie to proofread this memo before I sent it, she read it carefully, then look at me and smiled, “Even God had Plan B.” – RHW

Thirty-one years ago, David Ogilvy wrote, “In some developing countries radio still reaches more people than television. Yet even there nobody really knows what kind of commercials make the cash register ring. Isn’t it time somebody tried to find out?”– David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1983, p. 116Sleep well, David. We found out. And by “we,” I mean the Wizard of Ads partners.As Indy points out in the illustration above the title of today’s memo, opening with a pop culture reference from 50 years ago followed by a quote from a man that’s been dead for 15 years could easily lead you to believe I’m a dinosaur left over from that bygone era when cars still ran on gasoline.Would I point out how old and potentially out-of-touch I am if I didn’t have complete confidence in what I’m about to say?A lot of business people are listening to their kids right now and getting all lathered up in the belief that the Internet has made TV and radio ads obsolete. In fact, I just received an email from a client in Syracuse who is positively fretting about the future of radio. What makes his email especially funny is that we’ve been using radio exclusively for the last 3 years and it’s made him so wildly successful that he’s currently expanding into cities nationwide.I believe in the web. In fact, I’m using it to deliver this message to you.The Internet killed the yellow pages, the newspaper and encyclopedias and now it’s revolutionizing the distribution of books and music. Born in 2005, YouTube has become a magnificent lottery that doesn’t pay its winners in cash, but with worldwide recognition and a few weeks of fame.I may be YouTube’s biggest fan. I am enthralled by it.Have you ever bought any pay-per-click ads? Shortly after Google announced their AdWords program I spent more than $100,000 of my own money just to learn what does and doesn’t work. My only goal was to get a hands-on education. I didn’t want to risk my clients’ dollars until I knew exactly what I was doing.In the end, I figured out how to drive qualified traffic to a target website for just a nickel a click. But that seemed expensive to me, so I abandoned it.The average 30 or 60-second radio ad needs to be heard by the same person 3 times within 7 nights sleep. This currently costs my clients less than 2 cents per week. In some cities, that 3-frequency costs us only about a penny a week. We can do the same for you if you want.When I talk about mass media, young advertising people often look at me with pity and scorn. I can almost feel them patting me on my head.That’s why I got such a kick out of watching a YouTube video of Bob Hoffman speaking at an advertising conference in Europe:“One of the problems with our advertising experts is that they have a free pass. They go around to conferences. They talk to the press. They write stupid blogs. And they make profound statements, and confident statements about our industry. And no one ever goes back and checks up on them… We begin our little journey in 2004, about 10 years ago… Seth Godin, the bestselling guru of marketing said, ‘We have reached the end of traditional advertising.’ He apparently forgot to tell Toyota and Coke and McDonald’s. Then Advertising Age, the top advertising trade publication in The States, said, ‘The post-advertising age is underway.’ Bob Garfield, a columnist at Advertising Age, said in 2009, ‘The present is apocalyptic. Any hope for a seamless transition, or any transition at all, from mass media and marketing to micro-media and marketing are absurd. The sky is falling. We are exquisitely, irretrievably, fucked.’ Bob is a nice guy but I really think he needs a hug. And according to the nonprofit think-tank, FutureLab, they just came out and said it, ‘Advertising is dead.'”“Another of the fairy tales of the advertising industry was that ‘interactivity’ was going to make advertising more engaging and effective. Interactive advertising was going to ‘disrupt’ the old forms of advertising and make them obsolete… It turns out that people have no interest whatsoever in interacting with advertising. In fact, online banner ads have a click-through rate lower than one in a thousand. This is not interactivity. This is absence of interactivity. The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from ads was going to joyfully click her remote to interact with them is going to go down as one of the all-time great advertising delusions.”When David Ogilvy died in 1983, I was a 25-year old radio executive about to be handed a 100,000-watt FM signal and a staff of 32 people in a city of a million. The ads I wrote were so productive that business owners all over the city wanted to buy advertising from me. So in what might be the world’s best example of The Peter Principle personified, I was promoted to General Manager. In effect, my network

Todays memo is a long one, but I promise you it's worth it.Advertisers are attracted to online media when they’re not entirely happy with their investments in traditional broadcast media. To understand the reasons behind their disappointments, we need only to revisit the subject of last week’s Monday Morning Memo:“Linear, no-threshold thinking” assumes that every statistic is scalable. It’s what causes advertisers to assume they can “test the waters” with small investments, then increase their financial commitments if the test results are positive.If an ad needs to be encountered only once to trigger a sale, it’s a direct-response ad. Congratulations! You’ve successfully crafted a high-impact offer for a product with a short purchase cycle. Direct-response ads are scalable, meaning sales increase proportionately to the number of people reached. But not everything can be sold with a direct response ad. The simple truth is that most products and services require that their ads be encountered again and again.Pepsi has been a household word since before we were born, so why do they keep advertising? Couldn’t they reduce their mass media spending and still maintain their sales volume?In a word, no.We know this because Pepsi tried it.Bob Hoffman was the keynote speaker at the 2014 European conference of AdvertisingWeek:“In 2010, Pepsi cancelled all its TV advertising and its Superbowl advertising to great fanfare and bet BIG on the largest experiment in social media marketing ever attempted, ‘The Pepsi Refresh Project.” TIME magazine quoted the CEO of a New York brand consultancy, ‘This is exactly where Pepsi needs to be. These days brands need to become a movement.’ Well, they became a movement all right. I estimate The Refresh Project cost them between 50 and 100 million dollars. It got them 3.5 million Facebook likes and a 5% loss in market share, which they seem to have never recovered. That year, they dropped from the second best-selling soft drink in the US to third. Pepsi’s marketing director said, ‘The success has been overwhelming. We have more than doubled our Facebook fans. We have more than 24,000 Twitter fans.’ The L.A.Times didn’t see to agree. They called it ‘a stunning fall from grace.'”Hoffman went on to say that TV and Radio are best at creating demand, while the web is terrific at fulfilling demand. The interviewer then challenged Hoffman by saying, “But it is changing. And it’s changing fast. Ten years ago 93 percent of the public got their news from television and only 7 percent got their news online. Today it’s 26 percent online.”Hoffman’s response reflected his 40 years of experience directing ad campaigns for McDonald’s, Toyota, Shell, Nestle, Blue Cross, Chevrolet and Bank of America:“What we often confuse is the use of digital media with its power as a marketing or advertising entity. The fact that more people are using online for news is not a de facto proof that it’s a good advertising medium. Let me give you an example of that: the old-fashioned telephone. Everyone in the world had a telephone. It was a hugely popular means of communication. That didn’t make it a good advertising medium. It was a lousy advertising medium. The fact that people us it for communication or to get information or to have conversations doesn’t necessarily make something a good advertising medium.”Now let’s get back to the subject of why so many advertisers are frustrated with their TV and Radio campaigns.In last week’s memo we described motorcycles going out of control when their riders accelerated them beyond the “safe speed” threshold while navigating an S-curve. Trips through the curve below the safe threshold speed are uneventful, but trips through the S-curve above the threshold are dangerous. In other words, the ratio of crashes to speed isn’t “scalable” because the motorcycle behaves very differently at speeds above and below the threshold.The skill of the rider is another variable, of course, but although skilled riders might navigate the curve at higher speeds, there’s always a threshold at which even they are going to crash.Thresholds are inevitable when measuring human response.We must also keep in mind that humans attach complex meanings to sound. This is what makes TV and Radio effective at influencing people who aren’t currently, immediately in the market for your product or service. TV and Radio win the heart’s preference, then patiently wait for the customer to be ready to buy.The motorcycle safety threshold is all about(1.) speed and(2.) the skill of the rider.But mass media advertising is all about(1.) repetition and(2.) the impact of the message.TV and radio campaigns that deliver minimal results in the first few months often become highly effective when they’ve crossed the repetition threshold of the listen

Reliable data tells us exactly how many motorcycle riders have died trying to navigate an S-curve at 100 miles per hour. The straightforward logic of traditional accounting, with its linear, no-threshold thinking, predicts one-tenth as many deaths at 10 miles per hour.But we know this is ridiculous. The number of riders that die at 10 or 20 miles per hour is likely to be zero. There is a threshold speed at which the curve becomes dangerous. Any extrapolation that crosses that threshold is certain to be inaccurate.If you understand the concept of “extrapolations that cross the threshold,” you have the key you need to understand why financially focused businesspeople often make breathtakingly bad decisions in business.The rules of accounting make it counterintuitive for a financially trained person to perceive a numerical threshold at which the laws of math are suddenly altered. But keep in mind the threshold speed of the motorcycle in the S-curve: deaths at speeds above that numerical threshold will have no correlation to deaths at speeds below it. In effect, the laws of math are suddenly altered.You and I know that an invisible force, momentum, is affecting the motorcycle and causing it to careen out of control. Although momentum can be measured, there’s no column for it on a financial spreadsheet.Momentum in business can be positive or negative, pushing your company forward or back. Advertising, public relations, word-of-mouth and social media provide momentum to a business. But a threshold called “the experience of the customer” will dramatically alter these efforts, accelerating them forward or holding them back.If your typical customer’s experience is delightful, your communication efforts will be highly effective. But if that experience falls short of delightful, advertising, public relations, word-of-mouth and social media will no longer have the desired effect.Financial types like to “hold advertising accountable,” because it’s easy to blame poor advertising for every decrease in sales opportunities. But no calculation is ever made for the cumulative impact of un-wowed customers. Financial types never consider the threshold of disappointment at which once-loyal customers abandon ship.When Michael Eisner came to Disney in 1984, he was initially perceived as a golden boy of finance, making Disney wildly profitable during a time when its rivals were faltering. He worked his miracle by putting Disney’s greatest cinematic treasures on DVD, milking every last dollar from the rich heritage that had taken the Disney brothers half a century to build. Within a few years, video sales were providing almost all the profits for Disney’s movie division and, by 2004, Disney had raked in $6 billion from video and DVD sales. But then the Disney cow was dry.Michael Eisner looked at assets and opportunities through a financial lens. He had none of the whimsy of adventure, none of the imagination or commitment to excellence that had guided the Disney brothers. While busily milking the cow and making himself more than a billion dollars in the process, Eisner quietly abandoned the values and traditions of Disney.“A company without values and traditionsis a train without a track, unable to gain momentum.”– The Monday Morning Memo for July 14, 2014“In 2003, Roy E. Disney resigned from his positions as Disney vice chairman and chairman of Walt Disney Feature Animation, accusing Eisner of turning the Walt Disney Company into a ‘rapacious, soulless’ company (against everything Walt Disney believed in and stood for.) ‘You can’t fool all of the people all the time. Nor can you succeed by getting by on the cheap,’ said Disney, referring to his accusations that Eisner slashed spending on the Disney theme parks, leading to closed rides, peeling paint and unhappy customers.”– disney.wikia.com/wiki/Michael_EisnerThe cow was angry at being milked dry.Eisner was out. Bob Iger was in.As the new CEO of Disney, Bob Iger“put an end to the practice of making cheap direct-to-video sequels of old favourites, such as ‘Cinderella II: Dreams Come True’ — Disney’s equivalent of frozen food.”– The Economist, Apr 17th, 2008, “Magic Restored: Under its new boss Disney has staged an impressive creative turnaround—and is making synergy work.”Writing for Time magazine on March 21, 2014,Kevin Kelleher maintains that whoever follows Bob Iger“will have a tough act to follow. Under Iger, Disney’s brand and business is as strong as it’s been in four decades and there is no clear path to maintaining the double-digit profit growth Disney has been enjoying… Under Iger’s leadership, Disney has seen its stock rise 250% – five times better than the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Iger has shut down, sold off or cut back properties like Touchstone and Miramax and bought others like Pixar for $7.4 billion and Marvel for $4 billion. Iger’s Disney is closer

for Recommending You to Their FriendsAmerican retailers learned some interesting things last year. Although consumer confidence was higher during Christmas 2013 than it was during Christmas 2010, ShopperTrak tells us that in-store, holiday foot traffic declined by almost half during those three years. But don’t assume sales volume declined by half for those retailers or that half their customers bought online. A 50% decline in foot traffic simply means that we’re making half as many trips to the store.We no longer feel that we have to visit the store to learn what we need to know.A 2013 Harris Poll reports that 46% of us have shopped a brick-and-mortar store for information, then gone online to find a better price. But that same Harris Poll says that a far higher number of us – 69% – have done exactly the opposite; researched online, then bought from a local brick-and-mortar.If the result of our online research is that we visit just one store instead of two, a 50% decline in foot traffic will be the direct result.“In many instances, customers have access to more information online than when talking to an in-store sales associate. Online reviews and price comparisons enable them to feel more confident in their buying decisions…”– Jeremy Bogaisky, Forbes, Feb. 12, 2014A 2013 McKinsey & Company report echoes those findings. “Our research shows that for the average consumer, peer recommendations carry ten times more weight than recommendations from salespeople.”Of course you want your customers to recommend you to their friends; a friend has 10 times the influence of a salesperson. But before you get all excited about creating a rewards program for customers who send you their friends, please know that such schemes are almost always counterproductive.Here’s an example of why:A client told me that a buddy of his invested in a particular company and then said to him, “It’s going to skyrocket. I invested $250,000. You really ought to get in on this.” My client took his buddy’s advice and likewise invested $250,000. My client would probably have recommended that investment to everyone in his inner circle, but a disturbing betrayal made any such recommendation impossible. As he handed over the check for his investment to the financial officer of the company, the man said, “If you know anyone else who might want to invest, just keep in mind that we’re paying 10 percent to whoever sends them in.”When my client realized that his buddy had made $25,000 by “recommending” the investment to him, he felt a lot less good about the investment.And a lot less good about the buddy.My client immediately knew that if he recommended the investment to any of his friends, they would be made the same offer that he had just been made. There’s just no way that he was going to risk that.Let me say this plainly: If you try to bribe your customers, they’ll think less of you.Friendship is built on trust. A friend makes a recommendation because they believe it will be good for their friend. They don’t do it to benefit themselves or the company they’re recommending.That wouldn’t be a friend at all.That would be a salesman.To win the recommendations of customers, you must impress those customers with your performance. Focus your efforts on being consistently and truly remarkable. It’s the most effective thing you can do.Word of mouth isn’t new; it’s as old as the human race. Friendship isn’t new. Integrity isn’t new.What’s new is digital technology and the way it amplifies and accelerates everything you say. But if you look closely, you’ll see this digital knife cuts both ways. People are losing their jobs, their friends and their freedom because of things they tweet and put on FaceBook.The amplification and acceleration of digital technology is not something you can directly control. The best you can do is try – very hard – to make sure your customers have good things to say.The only reward your customers want for recommending you to their friends is for you to make those friends happy.Roy H. Williams

Michael participates in our monthly Wizard of Ads LIVE webinar. Last week, Michael asked for a method that would let him create fewer leads, but better leads.I responded by telling Michael that broad targeting can be donegeographically by zip code,financially by income,demographically by age and gender, orpsychographically by targeting specific “personas” derived from affinity groups and previous purchase histories.Anyone who knows anything about targeting already knows those things. But then I told Michael what few people know:“The key is to make sure that your leads are coming to you for the right reason. You want them to be coming to you for that thing you KNOW you can deliver better than anyone else. If they’re coming for any other reason, it’s a lower quality lead. The key is to target through ad copy. The key is to use brandable chunks.”We’ve spoken about brandable chunks before but I didn’t give you a clear explanation.Ray Smith asked, “How is a brandable chunk different from a slogan, a tagline, or a positioning statement?”I said, “Slogans and taglines are usually white noise, adspeak, something you wish people that would believe even though they probably won’t. But a good positioning statement differentiates you from your competitors in a meaningful way. The problem is that positioning statements are usually about the BIG picture. They tend to be all-encompassing, relating the totality of your company to the totality of your competition. A brandable chunk is a memorable, micro-positioning statement about JUST ONE ASPECT of your business. Consequently, you can easily have a dozen or more meaningful, brandable ‘chunks’ of highly memorable message.”Brandable chunks are memorable, micro-differentiators. They are refined from average advertising in the same way that hi-octane gas is refined from crude oil.Brandable Chunks:1. create vivid mental images.2. employ unusual word combinations.3. communicate features and benefits succinctly4. have meter (rhythm) so they tumble off the tongue.If you have the discipline to repurpose your brandable chunks in your web copy and through your face-to-face and voice-to-voice communications, your brandable chunks will bring your advertising, your web presence and your customer experience into perfect alignment. Your brand identity will be strengthened and your close rate will rise. Your customer will finally see you in 3D.We’re now going to lift some brandable chunks from a couple of better-than-average radio ads that I’m told are working quite well for a business in Michigan:TIME… IT’S THE MOST PRECIOUS THING YOU CAN GIVE SOMEONE. SPENDING TIME WITHOUT CELL PHONES, VIDEO GAMES OR ELECTRONIC DEVICES IS EVEN MORE PRICELESS. GRAND RIVER BAIT AND TACKLE WANTS TO KNOW IF YOU’VE BEEN FISHING YET…AND… WHO TAUGHT YOU HOW TO FISH? IT’S AN EXCELLENT WAY TO SPEND TIME WITH SOMEONE. STOP IN TO GRAND RIVER BAIT AND TACKLE AND BE READY TO FISH. THEN, GO OUT TO THE WATER AND LEAVE DISTRACTIONS BEHIND. YOUR MEMORIES START AT GRAND RIVER BAIT AND TACKLE IN OLD TOWN… LIKE ‘EM ON FACEBOOK. GRAND RIVER BAIT AND TACKLE… REEL EM IN!Here’s the shorter, tighter ad we refined from it:Time…it’s the most precious thing you can give someone.Especially if you make sure it’s uninterrupted.No cell phones. No video games. No electronic devices.Just a tackle box and a couple of fishing poles. And time.Grand River Bait and Tackle believes there’s no time like the present, and no present like time. Step through their door and you’ll feel time stand still.It may look like they sell bait and tackle, but what they really sell is the perfect day. Grand River Bait and Tackle in Old Town. Just add water.Here’s a second, original ad from that same campaign:WHETHER YOU’RE A CATCH AND RELEASE EXPERT OR JUST OUT TO CATCH DINNER… THE EASIEST WAY TO HOOK EM IS WITH FRESH LIVE BAIT! GRAND RIVER BAIT AND TACKLE HAS THE FRESHEST LIVE BAIT IN TOWN… THEY GET 2 SHIPMENTS A WEEK!!! (REEL FX) YA GOTTA BE CONFIDENT WHEN YOU FISH…MAYBE YOU HAVE A FAVORITE ROD AND REEL… IS IT READY TO HANDLE ALL THE FISH YOU’RE GONNA CATCH THIS YEAR? GRAND RIVER BAIT AND TACKLE CAN MAKE IT “CATCH-A-WHOLE-LOTTA-FISH-READY”. STOP IN TO GRAND RIVER BAIT AND TACKLE IN OLD TOWN AND GET READY TO FISH. LIKE ‘EM ON FACEBOOK TOO. GRAND RIVER BAIT AND TACKLE… REEL EM IN!Here’s the ad we refined from that one. We used only 85 words compared to the original 114 so that we can have a relaxed, easy-going delivery:Fresh, live fish prefer fresh, live bait.And the really BIG fish prefer that you get itfrom Grand River Bait and Tackle in Old Town.Your luck will change the moment you step through that door.You can actually feel it happening.Time slows down, your neck muscles relax and the radio plays better music.It may look like they sell bait and tackle, but what they really sell is the perfect day.Grand R

Her plan was obviously brilliant, so why wasn’t it working? Susan was as confused as a termite in a yo-yo. I was about to suggest an answer when she said it herself; “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”Every experienced consultant knows that a third-best plan that will be executed is better than the first or second-best plans that won’t.The first time I heard the phrase, “Culture eats strategy for lunch,” was 14 years ago when another student at Wizard Academy was explaining why he resigned his position as Chief Visionary Officer in a Fortune 500 company in which he had labored for 30 years:“Time after time I’d have all the C-level executives* in agreement with me, only to find that the rank and file would choose not to implement what the executive team had decided. In a small company you can simply replace those workers who won’t comply, but when you have more than 200,000 employees, culture eats strategy for lunch.”Another name for culture is corporate memory. And the anthem of corporate memory is, “That’s not how we do it here.”But this isn’t really about Susan or my friend from corporate America. It’s about you and what you’re trying to do.Values and traditions are the left and right rails of the railroad track that will determine the direction of your company. Moving those rails is extremely difficult and it’s impossible to do so quickly.Your company is the train that rides on those rails. A company without values and traditions is a train without a track, unable to gain momentum.Strategy is a motorcycle exploring the territory ahead.The train can easily push the motorcycle.The motorcycle can’t push the train.It’s not the job of the strategist on the motorcycle to move the railroad tracks. And only a foolish strategist would pretend those tracks don’t exist.The job of the strategist on the motorcycle is to prepare the passengers on the train for all the hills and valleys and tunnels that lie ahead, suggesting which window might offer the better view, and when they might need to turn on the lights.The job of the copywriter is to ride behind the strategist and cry out to the citizens of the countryside about the glories and wonder of the train that is about to pass their way.Roy H. Williams

1. Bring positive and negative into close proximity.2. Resist the temptation to clad them in insulation.3. Witness the flow of electricity as it leaps between the two.Speaking in 1980 of his songwriting experience with Paul McCartney, John Lennon said, “He provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes.”– David Sheff, All We Are Saying“The work John initiated tended to be sour and weary, whereas Paul’s tended to be bright and naive. The magic came from interaction. Consider the home demo for “Help!” – an emotionally raw, aggressively confessional song John wrote while in the throes of the sort of depression that he said made him want ‘to jump out the window, you know.’ The original had a slow, plain piano tune, and feels like the moan of the blues. When Paul heard it, he suggested a counter-melody, a lighthearted harmony to be sung behind the principal lyric – and this fundamentally changed it’s nature.”– Joshua Wolf Shenk, The Atlantic, July-August 2014, ‘The Power of Two,’ p. 80We’re talking about the magic of duality.We’re describing the foundations of transformative thought.“When he began to write songs, Paul [McCartney] wasn’t thinking about rock and roll. He wanted to write for Sinatra.”– Joshua Wolf Shenk, The Atlantic, July-August 2014, ‘The Power of Two,’ p. 80Lennon’s McCartney was Sinatra’s Riddle.I bought Why Sinatra Matters mostly because I was curious why a bestselling novelist would write a biography. Sure, Sinatra was a great singer, but since when does a great singer really matter? And why Sinatra instead of some other singer, actor, writer or photographer?What I found was that Hamill’s book isn’t so much about a person, but about a time.“Frank Sinatra was the voice of the 20th-century American city.”– Pete Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters, p.94In the beginning, Sinatra was merely a teen idol, the heartthrob of teenage girls. Twice he tried to enlist as a soldier in WWII, but was rejected each time because of a punctured eardrum. As the other young men went off to boot camp or basic training there were a lot of lonely women left in the land. Sinatra was every girl’s boyfriend singing of his loneliness.“…in the music he professed a corrosive emptiness, an almost grieving personal unhappiness. The risk attached to his kind of singing was that it promised authenticity of emotion instead of its blithe dismissal… His singing demanded to be felt, not admired. It always revealed more than it concealed.”– Pete Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters, p.130When the soldiers came home from WWII, Sinatra’s career fell flat.“One thing is certain: for many of those who came back from WWII, the music of Frank Sinatra was no consolation for their losses. Some had lost friends. Some had lost wives and lovers. All had lost portions of their youth. More important to the Sinatra career… the girls started marrying the men who came home. Bobby socks vanished from many closets. The girls who wore them had no need anymore for imaginary lovers; they had husbands. Nothing is more embarrassing to grownups than the passions of adolescence, and for many, Frank Sinatra was the passion.”– Pete Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters, p. 133-134Sinatra became Sinatra when his Riddle arrived.“Sinatra started out with far more female than male fans. He ended up with more male fans. This happens to very few pop singers.”– Pete Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters, p.127Sinatra’s Riddle had a name: Nelson. What Paul McCartney was to John Lennon, Nelson Riddle was to Frank Sinatra.The first product of the Nelson Riddle/Frank Sinatra partnership leaped out of the radio with a beaming smile on April 30, 1953. “I’ve Got The World On A String” became a runaway hit.“Lightness shines as the primary ingredient of the Riddle style… Riddle always manages to make everything sound light; that way, the weightiest ballad doesn’t become overly sentimental and insincere.”– Will Friedwald“I love how Riddle used Ravel’s approach to personality,” said Quincy Jones, who has written arrangements for everyone from Count Basie and Ray Charles to Michael Jackson. “Nelson was smart because he put the electricity up above Frank. He put it way upstairs and gave Frank the room downstairs for his voice to shine, rather than building big, lush parts that were in the same register as his voice.”Paul, if you’re reading this, I’d like to suggest that when you were young, you weren’t really admiring the dark vocal voice of Frank Sinatra as much as you were admiring the light musical voice of Nelson Riddle.Riddle “put the electricity up above Frank”just like you put the sparkle above John.If I’m right about you being affected by the arrangementsof Nelson Riddle, please let me know.And please knowthat we miss Joh

Institutions of higher education offer a degree path, a specific series of classes that will prepare you for the journey you’re about to take. Wizard Academy’s board of directors is preparing a similar map for those happy adventurers who come here for refreshment, instruction and advice.Dr. Oz Jaxxon and space shuttle scientist Mark Fox prepared an initial list of core curricula to present to the rest of the board of directors at last Tuesday’s board meeting. It triggered an interesting conversation.I looked at the list and said, “I like it. Some of these classes are informative – giving students a new set of skills that will take them to the next level. Others are transformative – opening their eyes to new perceptions – giving them a new set of stars to shine brightly among the shadows of the mind, allowing them to navigate with greater confidence.”Dennis Collins said, “Navigate?”Knowing that Dennis had spent 40 years in advertising, Princess Pennie answered, “In advertising, navigation is strategy; finding the message that will have the greatest impact.” Dr. Nick Grant added, “The informative classes help you externalize your strategy.”I was so jarred by the next statement that I can’t remember whether it came from Corrine Taylor, Dr. Lori Barr, or chairman of the board Jean Backus. All I can remember is that a woman’s voice said, “But isn’t that communication?”“Yes!” I thought, “Public Speaking 101, Advanced Wordsmithing, Writing for Radio and the Internet and the other informative classes help students implement what they learned in transformative classes like Magical Worlds, Escape the Box and Da Vinci and the 40 Answers.”Speaking and writing, singing and acting and all the other arts flash into existence when you externalize an internal realization.Transformative classes load you up with internal realizations.Informative classes equip you to externalize those realizations.And externalized realizations are called “communication.”Dr. Grant spoke up again. “Transformative classes give you a new operating system. Informative classes give you cool applications that run on that operating system.”Small realizations make incremental differences: Evolution.Big realizations make exponential differences: Revolution.Which do you need right now?Have you decided?Good. We have a class for that.Roy H. WilliamsA

Cedric Yau is one of a handful of geniuses I know.In our most recent conversation, Cedric opened my eyes to a truth I had not previously encountered, but it reinforced everything I know about ad campaigns and it’s about to make Cedric a billion dollars.I’m not exaggerating.You’ve seen long lines of ants carrying food back to their hives, right? So where is the centralized intelligence that brings such sophisticated synchronization to their actions? If you dig even a little bit, the mystery of ant behavior moves very quickly from interesting to miraculous to intoxicatingly impossible.Consider: You and I are more than 1,800 times as tall as the ants that live in our yards. The mowed grass through which they walk would be for us a jungle 600 feet high. A single ant colony forages for food each day across an area that would be 1,156 square miles for you and me.Here’s the zinger: If you and I and all our friends are scattered across 1,156 square miles and one of us finds some food, how does that one notify the rest of us who are scattered across 1,156 square miles? Ants have no telepathy, telephones or radios and there are no bosses to give them instructions.But they do have 3 unifying principles that synchronize the entire colony.Does your business have unifying principles?Viewed in high speed at the macro level, ant behavior seems to be guided by chaos theory as their movements create a pattern too vast for the unaided mind to comprehend. But when mapped on a computer, what at first appeared to be randomness becomes a beautiful fractal image built upon the unifying principles of self-similarity.Fractal images are maps of highly organized chaotic systems and their patterns seem to mirror the behavior of the stock exchange and population fluctuations and chemical reactions. Using chaotic math, computers today are producing images that look exactly like the beauty found in nature… ferns and clouds and snowflakes and bacteria. These maps can also resemble mountains and the human brain and the frost that forms on a windowpane.Ant behavior goes from intoxicatingly impossible to seductively predictable when the principles that bring an ant colony into unity are reverse-engineered. Here are the ingredients of ant-magic:1. If you find food, take some home and leave a scented trail.2. If you find a trail, follow it and add to the scent. If that trail leads you back to the hive, turn around and follow it the other direction.3. If you don’t know where food is and you don’t where a trail is, wander.That’s what the miracle of the ant-line looks like when you reduce it down to its unifying principles.But Cedric wasn’t studying ants so that he could better understand advertising or team motivation. Cedric has an altogether different use for these insights. My closing words to Brother Yau were these: “Based on what you’ve told me, it should take about 2 years for you to quietly put one billion dollars into your bank account.”“That’s right.”“My suggestion is to then publish exactly what you did and how you did it. Spend a few months being interviewed on talk shows and then come and teach a class at Wizard Academy.”“That’s exactly what I had in mind.”We’ll keep you posted.Roy H. Williams

Have you ever gone shopping only to come home with something entirely different than what you had planned to buy?Of course you have. We all have.“Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say,‘these are the conditions, now what happens next?'”– Richard Feynman, (winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize)Advertising people can be like that, too. We like to believe that we can ask, “What does the customer want?” and an answer will be forthcoming. But in truth, what the customer wants is in a constant state of flux.Decision is a destination, a tangible place of certainty, but the multiple paths that will take us there can be faint and foggy and damp. We are confronted by choices unanticipated. We find new information, unexpected options, possibilities we did not foresee.Simply stated, our buying motives can evolve from a tiger to a mouse to a llama to a rhino to a little pink pony in the space of a single hour.Darwin would be made dizzy.Professor Sexton reminded me of all this recently when he discovered that our ongoing “evolution of motive” has a scientific name. And like all scientific names, this one is both confusing and dull: Heterogeny of Ends.Read the WIKIPEDIA entry for Heterogeny of Ends and you’ll learn that“an ongoing behavioral sequence must often be understood in terms of ever-shifting patterns of primary and secondary goals. For example, one may accept the invitation of a friend to attend an art show. Initially, the motive is simply the anticipation of a pleasant evening in good friendship, but in the course of that evening, one encounters a highly desirable work of art and wishes to purchase it. A whole new set of motives now enter the picture and exist alongside – and in addition to – the original motive.”I present this information for your consideration today because I’m concerned about the public’s growing reverence for numbers and measurements and statistics. We seem to have arrived at the silly conclusion that every decision-making process is the same.We human males are small and simple enough to think we can ask, “What does a woman want?” in the belief that someone, somewhere, someday will finally be able to answer us.But a woman will answer that question with one of her own; “Who is the woman and what time is it?”What does the customer want?Your customers want confidence that they’ve made the right decision. The big umbrella answer is confidence. But I cannot tell you what combination of information and events will give a particular customer confidence.I cannot list the little raindrop answers. And when the sad day arrives that someone finally can, human beings will no longer be magical.Roy H. Williams

When Jacqueline Bouvier married JFK she became “Mrs. Kennedy.”She was the Princess Di of her generation.Following her husband’s assassination, Jacqueline’s voice was almost never again heard in public. She quickly became the most mysterious and glamorous woman on earth. When she married Aristotle Onassis, the world’s richest man, she became forever thereafter, “Jackie ‘O’.”“Like so much in her life, the aim of her signature style was concealment. A chemical straightener disguised the naturally kinky hair she hated. The teased bouffant masked a low hairline. Kid gloves covered large, strong, mannish hands… the cut of her suit jacket artfully concealed the breadth of her shoulders and her muscular back and arms. The skirt disguised hips she thought much too broad. The shoes were specially cut to make large feet look smaller and more feminine. Sunglasses hid brown eyes set so far apart that her optician had to special-order a suitably wide bridge. Dark lenses had the additional advantage of guarding emotions that since childhood she had taken tremendous pains to hide.”– Barbara Leaming, Mrs. Kennedy, (2011)But, oh, she was glamorous.A“One way or the another, all glamour follows the formula laid out by Hollywood photographer George Hurrell, ‘Bring out the best, conceal the worst, and leave something to the imagination.’ Mystery is an essential element of glamour as it provides a blank space for the imagination, a spot where the audience can project its own desires.”– Virginia Postrel, The Power of Glamour Silence, too, provides a blank space and a mystery. It is a type of glamour. Few people use it to full advantage.“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”– Leonardo da VinciNassim Nicholas Taleb, too, understands this power of silence. “Never say no twice if you mean it.”Taleb also observes, “What we call a ‘good listener’ is usually someone with skillfully polished indifference.” And when that same cold indifference turns its face toward you, the silence can hurt like frostbite. “You remember emails you sent that were not answered better than emails that you did not answer.”Roger Lincoln says,“There are two rules for success.(1) Never tell everything you know.Ha! Silence – the voice of Mystery – strikes again.Perhaps we should study it.I think maybe I’ll startnow.Roy H. Williams

Dean Rotbart says you are three different people.The first of the three is the person you see when you look in the mirror;  the person you believe yourself to be.The second is the person other people see when they look at you;  the person they believe you to be.The third is the real you.“Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.” – Allan GurganusGurganus is right. The truth happens to everyone, but stories only happen to people who can tell them.Professor Sexton recently told me about a new definition of reality known as the antenarrative: Ante: prior to, Narrative: the story.It reminds me of that third person spoken of by Rotbart.The antenarrative is the story that no one can tell. Not even the people who were there. It is chaotic, without logic and disconnected. It is the way things actually happen. Narrative, on the other hand, is crafted in retrospect as a storyteller assembles selected puzzle pieces in 20/20 hindsight; the beginning, middle and end of the tale are now a foregone conclusion. If the storyteller chooses skillfully and arranges the antenarrative pieces artfully, his story will sparkle with fairy dust. If the storyteller chooses predictably and organizes the pieces chronologically, the story will smell like cat food.Antenarrative happens to everyone. But stories only happen to people who can tell them. Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for making the narrative of his finely-crafted fiction feel as unvarnished and rough-hewn as antenarrative. In speaking of The Old Man and the Sea, he said,“In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardnesses are easy to see, and they called it style.” – Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir, p. 198Another Pulitzer-winning book, Founding Brothers, is an attempt to look at selected moments of American history through that same spider-web lens. The American antenarrative of 1776 is that those colonists loyal to Britain reviled the conspirators who bound themselves together in a Declaration of Independence. Those conspirators were plagued by doubts, short of cash and argued continually as the success of their rebellion was in constant jeopardy. They never thought of themselves as “The Founding Fathers,” nor did they consider the survival of the American nation to be inevitable.But you and I live under the curse of post facto knowledge,“But of course the American Revolution had to succeed because, well, it just had to.”We never consider how this landmass called 21st century America might easily have remained an extension of England.Post facto knowledge is always troublesome, but especially so in ad writing.Facts are not necessarily believable just because they are true.Facts are not necessarily interesting just because they are true.Facts are not necessarily relevant just because they are true.This is why ad writers never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.Harley Davidson – American by Birth. Rebel by Choice.Volkswagen – Think Small.Walmart – Save Money. Live Better.Adidas – Impossible is Nothing.Levis – Quality never goes out of style.IBM – Solutions for a smart planet.Research the antenarrative of any of these brands and you’ll see exactly what I mean.Now let’s get back to Rotbart’s assertion. Is there a chance that1. what you see when you look at your company  is different than2. what other people see when they look at your company?  And could it be that3. your happiest future might result from a story not yet told?Come to Wizard Academy and we’ll help you find that story.Your future changes every time you come here.Let it out.Let it breathe.Let it live.Roy H. Williams

The next time someone tells you an advertising success story, especially if that success was online, ask to see the ad – the content – that triggered it.Here’s a Really Big Tip for you. You might want to write this down:“The media doesn’t make the ad work. The ad makes the media work.”I’m spending a lot of time these days fielding questions about online marketing. The most fervent of these petitioners are the ones who talk about the amazing response they’ve seen on FaceBook.“Does everything you post trigger a big response?”“No, but when it does work, Wow! It’s awesome.”“Show me something you posted that triggered a lot of interest.”Guess what I’ve learned from these encounters? FaceBook friends pass along only those things they find to be remarkable. And it’s always the message – the content – that is remarked upon. Jeff Greenspan of Buzzfeed says it clearly: “Nobody wants to be a shill for your brand, but they are happy to share information and content that helps them promote their own identity.”Do you sometimes visit a website and then see banner ads for that same company everywhere you go for the next several days? Congratulations, you’ve been “retargeted.”Retargeting is the shiny new object in advertising. (Google’s version of it is called Remarketing but it’s essentially the same thing.) Retargeting reminds me of a boy who stalks a girl after a bad first date, saying, “Give me another chance. Give me another chance. Give me another chance. Give me another chance…”A better solution, in my opinion, is to not blow the first date.Spend your time creating a remarkable offer. When your message is right, whatever media you choose to deliver that message is going to perform like nothing you’ve ever seen.BOOM. Success story.You can sell tickets to watch the fireworks.Bruce Feiler in the New York Times reported a few days ago that a recent study of two billion web visits found that 55 percent of readers spent fewer than 15 seconds on a page.Evidently, David Ogilvy’s decades-old observation remains correct:“Five times as many people read the headline as read the first line of body copy. So when you’ve written your headline, you’ve spent 83 percent of your ad budget.”Scan.Scan.Scan.Scan.Scan. Note. Move on.Scan.Scan.Scan. Note. Probe. Disconnect. Move on.Scan.Scan. Note. Probe. Double-check. Bingo. One-click. Here in 2 days.Ten websites attracted this shopper but only one of them made the sale.Q: What did the others do wrong?A: They focused too much on technology to reach the shopper and too little on what to say after they met.Advertising Doesn’t Fail. Ads Fail.Small business owners are drowning in sales pitches telling them they can “reach the perfect target” digitally. I don’t dispute that claim in the slightest. But each of the nine websites that didn’t make the sale “reached the perfect target,” didn’t they? What did it get them?That New York Times story about 2 billion page visits goes on to say,“In the last few years, there has been a revolution so profound that it’s sometimes hard to miss its significance. We are awash in numbers. Data is everywhere. Old-fashioned things like words are in retreat; numbers are on the rise. Unquantifiable arenas like history, literature, religion and the arts are receding from public life, replaced by technology, statistics, science and math. Even the most elemental form of communication, the story, is being pushed aside by the list.”Let me say this plainly: Wizard Academy will forever remain a guardian of the “unquantifiable arenas,” like history, literature, religion and the arts. We will keep up with technology, but we’ll never look to it for wisdom, emotion, persuasion or humanity.Marketing Miracles are far more often the result of finding a better story than of finding a better technology. Marshall McLuhan was wrong. The media is just the media. The message is the message.Roy H. Williams

Do you have code words and phrases whose meanings are known only to the people closest to you?I laughed a little when I realized the absurdity of some of the communication abbreviations that Pennie and I have developed over the years.Every couple has code phrases, I suppose, and there is doubtless a story behind every one. Are you willing to send us some of your code phrases and their definitions? I think it could be fun to compile a dictionary of them.Here are some of the phrases Pennie and I use most often:“Get official”To change from your work clothes into something ugly but comfortable, signifying that you are now officially home and in for the evening.“Foie gras” \?fwä-?grä\“I would spit this into a napkin if these other people weren’t with us. For the love of god don’t eat any of it.”“Go for the poise.”“Pull through this parking space into the one opposite, thereby leaving the car poised to be driven out forward when we leave.”“One more thing”“Objection. This is not what we originally agreed. You’re changing the deal we made.”“Preliminary weed-eat”An abandoned task you have no intention of completing.“Fox”Obviously artificial. (A mispronunciation of faux, recalling a moment 25 years ago when we overheard a condescending snob say that a piece of furniture had a “fox finish.” We’ve been chuckling about it ever since.)“Paper cigar”A brilliant improvisation crafted quickly to avoid disaster.“Rye grass”A widespread belief that isn’t true.“Don’t make me say Loren L. Lewis”“Of course I can get all this in one load. I am a magna cum laude graduate of the Loren L. Lewis School of Hauling.”Will you send us your code phrases and their definitions? Indiana Beagle will likely publish them in the rabbit hole and if we get enough, Wizard Academy Press will publish a little dictionary and we’ll have an extensive, secret language of our own.Are you in on this deal? Send your phrases with their definitions to [email protected].(I learned that one from Indy. It means “gotta run”)Roy H. Williams

You can do it.I don’t know how long it will take or what you will have to go through, but you can most definitely do it.1. See your objective clearly in your mind. You must see it before you can seize it. It takes courage to focus on your objective.Reach for the courage that dangles in front of you. Don’t fear that it will prove to be a carrot on a stick and you the unwitting mule.Courage is necessary to the seizing of your objective.Reach for your courage. It waits for you.Grasp your courage. See your objective. Identify your adventure.2. Name your objective. Saying it out loud moves it from private to public, from thought to action, from fantasy to reality.When you’ve said it aloud in front of people you care about, you are no longer a spectator. You are a player.3. Know that you will fail and rejoice when you do.Education is theoretical. Experience is practical. Battle scars are the marks of a warrior. Happiest are those moments when you rise from the ashes of bitter defeat to try again, smarter, wiser, unstoppable. Everyone is watching you. Smile at them. Show your teeth.A con man lies to someone who trusts him and walks away with money. A criminal threatens violence and walks away with money. These quick and hollow victories leave both men sadly unsatisfied. Lottery winners are famously miserable. Rich kids are depressingly bored.Yes, rejoice when you fail because nothing is more tragic than winning quickly.4. Cherish the caterpillar. Trust in the butterfly you cannot see. An angel is dressed as a beggar. Wisdom wears the hat of a fool. Power hides behind the eyelids of a quiet old woman.Every miracle wears a disguise.5. Expect evolution. Your objective will be altered by the passage of time. An infant bears little resemblance to the woman she will become, but she is the same girl, surely.Fantasy is frozen and changeless in the mind but a worthy objective is durable and alive. Your objective will grow and mature as you do. Don’t be surprised when it changes, because you are changing, too.You can do this.I don’t know how long it will take or what you will have to go through, but you can most definitely do this.Lift your eyes and see the courage that floats in the air before you.Reach for it.Hold tight.Roy H. Williams

Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women.I borrowed that sentence from Charles Johnson, a storyteller who begins his tale, Middle Passage, with that line. I chose not to enclose it in quotation marks because I didn’t want to alert you to the fact that misdirection was about to slap your cheek.Quotation marks do that, you know. They are animated bookends that wave like semiphore flags, shouting, “These words are special.”Misdirection is half the storyteller’s art.“Justice?— You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”1The other half is resolution: We are surprised to learn that women are a disaster. But after a moment’s reflection, we are not. We are surprised to learn the law is not just. But after a moment’s reflection, we are not.“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”2We are surprised to learn that a woman can turn into the wrong person. But after a moment’s reflection, we are not.Every magician depends on misdirection and resolution.The comedian is a magician of laughter. The greater his misdirection, the greater the orgasm of laughter at the punch line, that moment of resolution when it all comes together.The storyteller is a magician whose stage is the page. Words are the top hat from which he extracts his rabbits and the endless handkerchief he pulls from his sleeve. They are the handsaw he uses to cut the pretty girl in half and the wheels he uses to roll those halves together again.A great communicator says things plainly and brings clarity to the mind. This is difficult. But it is not magic.A storyteller turns the heart this way and that, showing it things it has never seen, things that have not yet happened, things that never will, using misdirection and resolution over and over, touching you in places you didn’t even know were there.Every business, every person, has a story to tell. You know this, of course.But now you face a difficult choice: Will you speak clearly and win the mind? Or will you speak magically and win the heart?Roy H. Williams

Retailers are asking, “Why do people buy from my competitors without even giving us a chance?” And I reply, “They gave you a chance. They just didn’t physically come to your store.”Customers carry instant access to all the knowledge of the world in their pockets. They no longer have to visit your store to compare prices and research their options.Why would they drive to a store to get expert guidance when better, faster, more objective guidance is instantly available online?You can argue, if you like, that the information you provide is far superior to the information available online. And you might even be right. But your customers are looking for information immediately. They’re looking for information right this second. They gave you a chance when they went online. Your website just didn’t volunteer what they wanted.If your answer to their query had been available online, Google or some other friend would likely have directed them to it.“Advertising is a tax you pay for not being remarkable.”There are three keys to being remarkable:1: Correctly anticipate the customer’s desire.2: Satisfy it clearly, with nothing held back.3: Package your offer magnetically.These are simple things, but as my friend Jeffrey Eisenberg says, “Simple isn’t always easy.”Particularly “not easy” is this challenge of magnetic packaging: to create an offer that draws attention, an offer that bears repeating, an offer that no one else has the courage to make.Magnetic Packaging begins with strategy. “What would the customer be delighted to hear?” Answer this question resoundingly and you have the beginnings of a successful direct response campaign.Want to know a secret? Next week’s class at Wizard Academy, “How to Write Direct Response Ads,” will be attended by three of the most successful direct response packagers in the world today: (1.) Brian’s website has more than unique visitors per day than most websites will see in 3 years. (2.) Ryan has hundreds of professional marketers paying him significant amounts of money each year just so they can hear what Ryan is currently thinking. (3.) Dan employs 180 people in a full-time direct response effort that brought in 85 million dollars last year. That business will easily exceed 100 million in 2014.Weirdly, all three of these giants want to hear what Jeff Sexton and I have learned about Magnetic Packaging.Dan has agreed to share the technique that allowed him to go from $70,000 in credit card debt to $85,000,000 in sales. Some of you have stayed in the room Dan built at Engelbrecht House. Yes, Dan has been part of the family for a long time, so he’s willing to share things with us that he shares with no one else. Brian and Ryan are also deeply involved with the Academy and even though they’re both attending as students, I’m betting their questions, comments, suggestions and observations will be insightful. Frankly, I’m very much looking forward to this class.All the rooms in Engelbrecht House and Spence Manor are full, of course, but we can definitely find a seat for you if you’re willing to rent a hotel room.This class is May 6-8. I’m definitely going to be there.Are you?Roy H. Williams

“Cream rises to the top” is what we tell talented people who are frightened. It’s a lie, of course, but it makes them feel like they have a chance.Confidence and courage are not the same thing.Confidence is trust in your ability.Courage is to have such security in your identity that you’re willing to risk open failure. “I’m okay with who I am and I know my intentions are honorable. Que sera, sera.”Confidence springs from ability.Courage springs from identity.And the energizing fluid of courage is audacity.Public speaking requires it.Singing demands it.And successful advertising depends on it.The technical term for the fear of speaking – and of being judged by what you say – is glossophobia, from the Greek gl?ssa, meaning tongue, and phobos, fear or dread.We must elevate you above this fear or you will never successfully advertise a business, promote an event, or advance your career.Stage fright isn’t just the fear of performing in front of large groups. It’s also the reluctance to make a presentation to a group of co-workers.Dr. David Carbonell says,“Stage fright is like being heckled mercilessly during your performance, and getting into an argument with the heckler, except that it’s your own mind doing the heckling. You get so involved in your internal struggle that you don’t get involved with the actual performance. Most people with performance anxiety get tricked into focusing on themselves, struggling against anxiety in a vain effort to get rid of it… One of the keys to mastering stage fright is to become truly involved in, and focused on, your material. Not on yourself.”Unless you’re a major celebrity, the audience didn’t really come to see you; they came to hear the material you brought them.It’s not about you at all. It’s about the material. Think about the material. Think about how the audience needs it. Think about the material. Think about how the audience needs it. Think about the material. Think about how the audience needs it.Don’t let anything get in the way of the gift you brought for your audience. It’s not about you at all.You’re only the mailman.I said earlier that courage is, “to have such security in your identity that you’re willing to risk open failure.”But sometimes you need Plan B, so here it is: Commit to delivering the mail. Commitment looks exactly like courage when you’re committed to something more important than your fear. Say to yourself, “It’s okay if the audience isn’t impressed with me, as long as they’re impressed with what I brought them.”Only a fool stands between a mother tiger and her cubs.Be the mother tiger.Roy H. Williams

I should begin with an apology, I suppose, because the secret of great advertising, the secret to great wealth, the secret of status and stature and your name on the lips of all the beautiful people is actually a wee bit disappointing.Yes, it’s a sadly disappointing big secret.The reason the big secret is such a letdown is that you already know it.Are you ready?The secret of great advertising is that you must find something to say that your customer would be happy to hear.You knew this, of course, but most advertisers don’t. If they did, our eyes and ears would not be so continually assaulted with such excruciating drivel.And this goes double for newscasters.Plato was obviously thinking about advertisers and newscasters in 372 BC when he said,“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.”Ad strategy is more difficult to teach than ad copy.Strategy is determining what a customer would like to hear.Copy is deciding how best to say it.Impact in advertising is 80 percent strategy, 20 percent copy. This makes it nearly impossible for good copy to compensate for weak strategy.We create advertising failure when we pretend that creativity can overcome the fact that we really have nothing to say.Morris Hite said it sharply enough to pop a balloon:“If an ad campaign is built around a weak idea – or as is so often the case, no idea at all – I don’t give a damn how good the execution is, it’s going to fail. If you have a good selling idea, your secretary can write your ad for you.”Even more annoying than advertisers and newscasters who have nothing to say are those smug and confident little weasels who preach with passion that the secret of successful advertising is to find the media that reaches the RIGHT CUSTOMER. In effect, the weasels are selling you a treasure map. “The reason you haven’t found the treasure,” they say, “is because you’ve been digging in all the wrong places.”But the treasure isn’t buried at all. It’s in the pockets and purses of everyone you see. And if you offer these people something they’d rather have than their treasure, they’ll hand you their treasure with a smile and say “Thank you.” And then they’ll tell all their friends that they should give you some treasure, too.The media that delivers your message is the least important part of the communication equation. When your message is right, any media will work. When your message is wrong, no media will.During the decade when I lived in hotel rooms and spoke about advertising in 50 cities a year, my least favorite moment was when the airplane landed back home in Austin and the ground crew didn’t immediately throw open the door. Those minutes waiting for them to open the hatch and revive me to life were a dark and hateful hell for me.You did not need to know that. I included it only because I thought it would be weird to talk about “my second-least favorite moment” and leave you wondering about my first-least favorite.But now the mystery is solved, so we can continue.My second-least favorite moment was when an advertiser would follow me into the bathroom and then casually lean over to say, “Mr. Williams, I’m in the furniture business. How do you suggest I advertise? Is it TV? Is it Radio? Is it the Internet?”This happened to me a lot more often than you might think. How would you have answered?Roy H. Williams

When Ann Richards was Governor of Texas, she said, “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.” Governor Richards was slightly militant in her feminism, as was common 20 years ago when she made her piercingly witty statement.But the once-edgy voice of feminism has softened in recent years as Americans have increasingly recognized the abilities of women. America’s 110-year movement toward female empowerment is headed into its final phase:When you want to popularize an idea, romanticize it.The Twilight series of films was launched 5 and 1/2 years ago. Twilight revolves around Bella, a high-school girl who is average in every way, yet she’s accepted, respected and highly valued by immortals of astounding power and wealth. The Twilight films have grossed more than 3.3 billion dollars and it’s not because we believe in vampires.It’s because we believe in girls.In 2012 we were introduced to 16 year-old Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, another successful franchise about an average girl who is called upon to save humanity. Her inner strength, tenacity and fundamental goodness allow Katniss to survive everything that is thrown at her as she quietly wins the day. No fists flung skyward in triumph. No chin jutting forward in defiance. No happy end zone dance.Divergent is the newest of these Joan of Arc films in which an average young woman goes toe-to-toe against strong opponents and wins. The special ability of the Divergent protagonist, Tris Prior, is that she isn’t limited to seeing the world in just one way but is able to respond appropriately in ever-changing circumstances. In other words, Divergent celebrates an ability shared by every woman, everywhere.I don’t believe that Twilight, The Hunger Games and Divergent are changing our perception of women. Movies like these are just mirrors that show us how much our perceptions have already changed.The quietly heroic woman is especially evident in jewelry stores.As recently as ten years ago, approximately half of all men would choose the engagement ring alone. The other half would choose with their partner at their side. It was barely thinkable that a woman would shop for an engagement ring by herself and then bring her partner in to see it later. But this is a common practice today.Do you have any idea how this trend affects the language of engagement ring ads? Most women are gracious enough not to be angered by outdated AdSpeak such as, “Buy her the diamond she deserves,” but is such a statement going to attract a woman to your store?A more elegant observation would be to say, “When you love someone and they love you back, it just doesn’t get any better than that. And a diamond is the symbol of that love.” This statement treats both parties as equals and makes no assumptions regarding gender.But gender-neutral statements are difficult to craft in the English language since we have no gender-neutral pronouns to speak of someone that isn’t me or you. We are forced to say, “He walked across the road,” or “She walked across the road.” We cannot say, “It walked across the road.” Such are the miseries of an ad writer.The first artificial sweetener was dressed in pink and called Sweet and Low; adjectives that perfectly described the American woman of that day. In 1981, Sweet’n’Low was challenged by a new competitor. Equal quickly became the overwhelming choice of women. Men, not surprisingly, continued to favor Sweet… and Low. Then, in 2003, a third sweetener was introduced in gender-neutral yellow and everything has been Splenda ever since.Equal is no longer news and Sweet’n’Low is out of fashion.The point of today’s MondayMorningMemo is so vitally important that I’ll say it plainly in case you missed it: a woman may or may not be sweet, but she will never again be low. Women are making their own decisions and spending their own money. To assume that you need to reach “the man of the house” is slightly insane. Even if you’re selling engagement rings.Roy H. Williams

Nine Voices, Nine MoviesEach of us speaks and writes without thinking. This is why so much of what we say is predictable. Do you want to be more interesting? Choose an unusual perspective and verb tense. A movie begins in the mind of the listener every time you speak or write. At whom is your camera aimed?First Person perspective: “I, me, my, we, us, our.”The person speaking is the star of the movie.Second Person perspective: “you, your”The person listening is the star of the movie.Third Person perspective: “He, she, him, her, it, they, them”A person other than the speaker or the listener is the star of the movie.After you’ve chosen your star, you must decide upon the action. The verbs you use will be past tense, present tense or future tense. You should choose these verbs consciously, rather than unconsciously.Past tense verbs speak of history.Present tense verbs speak of action as it’s happening, play-by-play.Future tense verbs are predictive.Any story can be told with past tense, present tense or future tense verbs.It was the night before Christmas, and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.It is the night before Christmas, and all through the house not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse.It will be the night before Christmas, and all through the house not a creature will stir, not even a mouse.Now let’s look at 9 different movies produced from a single script by using 3 different actors in each of 3 separate timelines.1. I placed my paws in warm water and shivered.(First person, past tense. Personal historical narrative.)2. You placed my paws in warm water and I shivered.(Second Person, past tense. An historical story about the listener.)3. She placed my paws in warm water and I shivered.(Third person, past tense. An historical story that describes the actions of a person that is neither the speaker nor the listener)4. I place my paws in warm water and shiver.(First person, present tense. I’m doing it right now.)5. You place my paws in warm water and I shiver.(Second person, present tense. The speaker describes what the listener is doing as it is happening.)6. She places my paws in warm water and I shiver.(Third person, present tense. The speaker is describing what someone else is doing as it is happening.)7. I will place my paws in warm water and shiver.(First person, future tense. Predictive of the speaker’s future action.)8. You will place my paws in warm water and I will shiver.(Second person, future tense. A story about what the listener will do in the future. This voice is predictive or prophetic.)9. She will place my paws in warm water and I will shiver.(Third person, future tense. A story about the actions of others that have not yet occurred. Again, predictive or prophetic.)The voice of any story is transformed when you change the actor and timeline.You have seen the 9 movies and heard the 9 voices.You have been forever changed. You are different now. You carry magic.You will speak with authority and people will listen.That is my benediction, crafted in the second person, traveling through your past (2 sentences) and your present (2 sentences) and seeing your future (1 sentence) in 5 easy lines.That last sentence, of course, was entirely present tense: confirming my present… to you.Aroo.Indiana Beaglesubstituting for the Wizard of Ads who is on a short sabbatical

Today we call it Data but we used to call it Statistics.Statistics are boring. That’s why a clever boy in Silicon Valley gave them a new and better name.A scientist is willing to change a belief when presented with data, facts and logic.But very few customers are scientists. This is why you must accommodate their perspectives, reinforce their biases, anticipate their preferences and leverage their stereotypes.In his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie said, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”Carnegie was quoting Benjamin Franklin who said it 100 years earlier.Franklin discovered the idea in a satirical poem, Hudibras, written by Samuel Butler 100 years before that, in 1664.That statement, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still,” resonated with Carnegie, Franklin and Butler, just as it does with every person who has vainly attempted to use facts and logic to overcome a belief.In the words of Andrew Lang, we generally use statistics “as a drunken man uses a lamppost, for support rather than for illumination.”This is because data, facts and logic are not the keys to the mind.The keys to the mind are metaphors, connecting the unfamiliar to the familiar, the unknown to the known. Metaphors employ Symbolic thought, the only type of thought that bridges the unconscious to the conscious, the right brain to the left, the category to the specific, the pattern to the purpose.Verbal thought is the sound of words in your mind.Analytical thought embraces data, facts and logic.Abstract thought embraces patterns of events and patterns of answers. It’s a nonverbal, subjective reality built on preferences, prejudices and stereotypes.Symbolic thought is a bridge that begins in the land of Abstract thought and ends in the land of Analytical thought. Parables, music and metaphors are powerful expressions of Symbolic thought. Each is more persuasive than Data.You’ve heard it said that, “Every person is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” Yet we routinely craft our own facts from the fabric of personal experiences, preferences and prejudices.A stereotype is nothing more than a pattern we’ve observed. This pattern isn’t always predictive, but it is a pattern nonetheless and we trust it. We do this in the misbegotten belief that we have correctly interpreted our past experiences and that our preferences and prejudices are, in fact, correct and reliable interpretations of objective reality.We’re a funny, funny species, aren’t we?We’re coaching a basketball game.Cedric makes 4 baskets in less than 2 minutes so we conclude that Cedric has “a hot hand,” he’s “in the zone and has a feel for the basket,” so we instruct the other players to feed Cedric the ball.Does it surprise you to learn that all the data clearly indicates that a player who makes 4 consecutive baskets in less than 2 minutes of game time is no more likely to make his next shot than usual? But every coach, every player and every fan of the sport will continue to feed Cedric the ball.We don’t trust data nearly so much as we trust our heart.Digital marketing is here to stay and it provides us with data beyond imagination. But data doesn’t change the mind. At best, it reinforces a decision that was already made in the heart. Win the heart and the mind will follow. Don’t fill your messages with data. Instead, use metaphors that connect your idea to your customer’s world. Because a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.Some things are slow to change. Some things never do.Roy H. Williams

People will direct their attention to whatever gives them a sense of identity, purpose and adventure.You must always remember this when crafting advertising.The fans of a sports team are the members of a club. Their team gives them identity, purpose and adventure. Political parties, too, give their members identity, purpose and adventure. Religious organizations, book clubs and Twitter feeds give their followers identity, purpose and adventure.A grandmother adores her grandchildren because they give her identity… purpose… and adventure.Do you know what a rock collector gets from his rock collection? Identity, purpose and adventure.Each of us – every one of us – is on a treasure hunt. The differences between us are found primarily in the things we value. When a person doesn’t value what we value, we think a little less of them. They are obviously shallow, stupid, deceptive or evil.Abraham Maslow believed a third of our society lives below the search for identity or above it. Those who live below the search are focused primarily on securing food, shelter and safety. This is their economic reality. Those who live above the search have a clear sense of identity and they know their purposes precisely. This is their emotional reality. Their adventures depend on nothing outside themselves.Those who live below or above the search for identity are effectively immune to advertising. The first group can’t afford what you’re selling and the second group doesn’t care. These people are rarely prospective customers.Fortunately for businesses everywhere, two thirds of us buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are. These two thirds of society are the backbone of the economy. We have needs that have not been met, hungers that have not been satisfied, dreams that have not been fulfilled.Businesses exist to meet those needs, satisfy those hungers and fulfill those dreams.We make and spend money primarily to discover who we are.This would be sadif it wasn’t so much fun.Vie à l’économie.Roy H. Williams