Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

When an ad campaign is producing big results, there will usually be complaints from the public.When an ad campaign is getting poor results, the public rarely complains.What makes people hate an ad?1.   It’s hard to ignore.Any ad that makes its point sharply will be an irritant.But sharp-pointed ads are also the most effective.2.   It presents a tightly focused perspective.Any ad that makes assumptions about the experiences of the customer will be judged as presumptive. Persons whose experiences are otherwise usually hate these ads.But presumptive ads connect powerfully to customers whose personal experiences are accurately mirrored in the ad.3.   It’s given a lot of repetition.There is such a thing as too much repetition. And the sharper the ad’s point, the less repetition will be required. But “too much repetition” is often the charge that’s leveled against an ad that’s annoying for reasons 1 or 2.“Hello, I’m a Mac.”“And I’m a PC.”Very few people are ambiguous about the “Get a Mac” TV campaign:“Apple's mean-spirited new ad campaign… Ad Report Card Grade: C+… And isn't smug superiority, no matter how affable and casually dressed, a bit off-putting as a brand strategy?” – Seth Stevenson “I don’t know about you but I have had about enough of those Mac TV commercials that consistently rip on Microsoft and the PC. Any company that needs to badmouth the competition in an effort to sell their product is a company I don’t want anything to do with.” – ElectroGeek“The Los Angeles Times has a big article for you about Justin Long, aka the Mac from the 'Get a Mac' ads… [The article goes on to explain that Justin Long is a 'smug little twit.'] Also of note: There are apparently 20 more of these ads in the can, ensuring that everyone will be sick of them eventually.”– Tim Nudd“Reporting a $546 million profit on Wednesday, Apple also said that it shipped over 1.6 million Macs representing over 30 percent growth from the year-ago quarter. According to Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer, this represents the strongest quarter in the company’s history.” – Jim Dalrymple, reporterComplain about me all you want. Just leave the 546 million with my butler at the front door.Are your ads getting complaints? If not, why not?A:  Do you have no sharp points to make?B:  Or are you just afraid to make them?Turn the poles of a magnet North to South and CLICK, they connect. Turn the poles North to North and they'll repel each other just as powerfully. Advertising, like a magnet, is subject to the Law of Polarity: Your ad’s ability to attract customers cannot exceed its potential to repel.Most ads aren’t written to make a point sharply. They’re written not to offend.How are your ads written?Roy H. Williams

1. Hidden Profit Centers are the new MarkupLow-cost providers such as Sam’s Club and Best Buy are selling “in-store exchange” policies at the cash register to supplement the manufacturer’s warranties they don’t honor. In other words, you can’t take a faulty purchase back to the retailer if there’s a problem – you have to contact the manufacturer directly – unless you bought their “in-store exchange” policy.2. “Hard-to-find” items are no longer hard to find.Just Google it.3. A huge in-store selection can be counterproductive.When buying locally, a shopper confronted with too many choices can go into analysis paralysis. Successful stores stock only those items that represent the best value for the money. And they make sure never to run out of those items. The best stores stock only what’s hot. They may offer just one vacuum cleaner, but it’s the one that everyone is buying.4. Traffic is in declinebecause comparison-shopping is in decline. A customer who used to go to 3 or 4 stores to gather information is now going to just 1 or 2. When a customer goes to just one store, second place is the first loser. Don’t be number two on their list.5. Intrusive visibility is more important than ever.Intrusively-visible locations are destined to become even more important as media fragmentation continues. But don’t confuse visibility with mere traffic count. Seeing you is altogether different than driving past you.6. Hype doesn’t sell anymore.The effectiveness of artificial urgency is in sharp decline. People are no longer naive. Companies that were built on high-impact ads are finding their dwindling, traditional customer base won’t respond to anything but high-impact offers and new customers won’t take them seriously. These stores are closing their doors and no one is noticing.7. Attention spans are shrinking.Too much to do, too little time.8. Clarity is more important that creativity.Web surfing has taught us to quickly appraise whether information is relevant to us. The most effective ads are short and clear.9. Details matter.Quirky and cute ads were effective in the 90’s because they made corporate America warm and approachable. People still like these ads and may even compliment you on them, but they’re no longer driving traffic. Buying decisions are increasingly based on logic. Give customers a no-loopholes warranty and a story that rings true and they’ll respond.10. Speed is essential.Customers don’t complain when you waste their time. They just don’t come back.Yo. Wake up. It’s a brand new day.Roy H. Williams

The old assumption in advertising was that the customer didn't know, and wouldn't know unless you told them.This is no longer a valid assumption. Today's customer enjoys access to information far beyond what any of us saw coming.You're aware of how quickly and easily you gather information online each day, but has it occurred to you that your customers expect information about you and your products to be found just as quickly and easily?What do your customers find when they enter your category and town into a search engine? Do they find the answers to their questions?What do they assume when you provide minimal information and someone else provides much more?Better Question: What do you assume when minimal information is provided by a company you're researching online?What about those times when you're researching a purchase and the seller chooses not to put prices online? How does that make you feel? What do you assume about the seller?Are you likely to:1. call them,2. email them, or just3. search for that product from a different provider?The first time we designed a promotional plan for a website was in June, 2000. I'll never forget it. We put together a great product, a catchy name and a media plan we knew would drive traffic to the site. That was where it all fell apart.The client decided it would be best to “capture all the contact information” before revealing the price of the item. In essence, a customer had to commit to purchase the item before the price was revealed. That website had hundreds of thousands of visitors but made very few sales. The company is now defunct, even though their product was excellent and their prices were great.The best websites answer all your questions.Does your website answer all your customer's questions, or is your plan to “make them” contact you so you can “get more detailed information” about their budget, their preferences and their requirements?The customer is far more likely to contact you after they've found the answers to all the questions you didn't have to have their personal details to provide.The hardest part about crafting a website is anticipating the unspoken questions of your customers.The most successful of the Wizard Academy websites is FreeWeddingChapel.org. Miraculously, it took us only about 6 months to bring that website to its current level of seamlessness. Our advantage was a daily telephone-parade of anxious brides calling with nervous questions. Few decisions are accompanied by the degree of anxiety as the decisions that accompany a wedding. These daily questions allowed us to quickly refine our info-stream. Any time we answered a new question by telephone, we'd instantly add the answer to the ones we provided online.That website now functions like a well-oiled machine. Brides comment the website “felt like it was reading my mind.”This is what happens when you diligently:1. harvest the questions of your customers, and then2. insert all the answers into your web copy.Now get to work on that website.Need some help?Roy H. Williams

“I'm in the furniture business. Which media should I use?”“I'd like to target people who are afraid of the dentist. Can you recommend a good mailing list company?”“My uncle uses television ads to attract new customers and they work really well for him. Television ads have made him rich. What's your opinion of TV?”“No one in my town listens to the radio anymore. Everyone has satellite or an iPod.”“I tried advertising. It doesn't work for my kind of business.”People say things like this and expect me to have an intelligent response. What usually happens is that I stand there, dull-eyed, with my mouth hanging open. These are not my favorite moments.When my brain finally recovers and I tell them the truth they need to hear, they act as though I've sidestepped their question.Here's the truth they needed to hear. Maybe you need to hear it, too:Relevance is what determines whether an ad works or not.Every media fails when it delivers a message no one cares about.Have you ever run an ad that failed?Let's pull aside the curtain and look backstage to see what really happened:1. The ad was so predictable that few people even noticed it.SOLUTION: Get a new ad writer or remove the handcuffs from the one you've got.2. Prospective customers noticed the ad, received the message and understood it perfectly. They just didn't care.SOLUTION: Dump the irrelevant subject matter. Discover what people actually care about and talk about that instead.3. The ad's message would have been relevant, but it was unclear.SOLUTION: Remind your writer that creativity often gets in the way of clarity. Remind your layout artist that the prettiest ad is rarely the most effective. You're running a business, not a magazine. Make sure the dynamic duo understands that their continued employment depends on creating ads that sell the product.4. You committed to an ad campaign that was shorter than your product selling cycle. If people buy your product once a week, don't expect your ads to return a profit during the first week. If people buy once a month, don't expect to break even on your advertising during the first 30 days. If your product selling cycle is longer than 2 years, you can expect to lose money on your ads – even if they're good – the first 4 to 6 months. You'll start pulling ahead during the second six months. Your real growth won't happen until you begin reaching that same group of people for a second year.SOLUTION: Commit to an ad campaign that's longer than your product selling cycle.5. The listener failed to be engaged because the ad was written from a cultural perspective other than the customer's own. (This is why Anglo-conceived Hispanic campaigns usually fail. Translating language is easy. Transferring cultural perspective is nearly impossible.)SOLUTION: Hire a different ad writer to create the second campaign. Make sure the writer is from the cultural background he or she is trying to reach.Bottom Lines:Ads that fail in one media would usually have failed in any other.The media is not the message.The message is the message.And the message is what matters most.To deliver a pointless message powerfully is the definition of hype.To deliver a powerful message pointlessly is the result of weak creative.To deliver a powerful message powerfully is the first step in making a fortune.Now go do it. And good luck.Roy H. Williams

If I were to ask you what's limiting your growth, you'd likely tell me, “Traffic. If we had more traffic, we'd make more sales. What we need is more traffic.”But traffic is rarely the problem. It's simply the byproduct of a problem you haven't been able to see.These are the Four Most Common invisible problems that limit your selling opportunities:Problem 1: Your ads aren't convincing.SOLUTION: Write better ads.Do your ads speak to what the customer actually cares about, or do they speak only to what the customer ought to care about? Let's face it: you're an expert in your business category. You can't think like your customer thinks because frankly, you know too much.Have you given your ad writer explicit permission to push you beyond your comfort zone? A good ad writer will always ask questions that you feel are irrelevant. “You don't understand,” you'll say, “That's not what matters. THIS is what matters.” And thus you'll steer your ad writer into writing irrelevant ads.When it comes to ad writing, naiveté is a virtue. The best ad writers don't know any more than the customer knows.Problem 2: Your ads aren't reaching your prospects with sufficient repetition.SOLUTION: Focus your ad budget.Most business owners sprinkle their ad budgets across a wide variety of opportunities because they “don't want to leave anyone out.” The result of this strategy is that they reach too many people with too little repetition.Bill Bernbach said it best: “Would you rather reach 100 percent of the people and convince them 10 percent of the way, or 10 percent of the people and convince them 100 percent of the way?”The longer your product purchase cycle, the more repetition is required to drive traffic. How often does the public buy what you sell? An ad for groceries will generate traffic with less repetition than an ad for refrigerators because we buy groceries more often than we buy refrigerators. Do you sell jewelry, appliances, dentistry, or provide an in-home service? Focus relentlessly on a smaller group of people and make yours the name that pops into their head when they finally need what you sell.Problem 3: You're already selling everyone who likes to buy what you sell in the way you like to sell it.SOLUTION: Expand your business model to appeal to a new category of customers, or begin selling your current customers an additional product or service.It's often the most successful businesses that complain the loudest about low traffic because they're no longer growing like they used to grow. If you focused your business on a niche market, has the same focus that created your initial success now got you bumping your head against a glass ceiling? You know there are more customers in your product category; you just can't seem to get them in your door.You're going to have to expand your definition of “your customer.” There's not an infinite supply of the customer profile you've been targeting. It's likely that you're going to have to sell products – or customer profiles – you would have preferred not to sell.4. Your reputation has slipped, or your product is no longer in demand.SOLUTION: Reinvent yourself. Become relevant to the customer again.Would better advertising have saved 8-track tapes, or was it simply a technology whose time had passed?The marriage rate is declining in America. So why are jewelers surprised that engagement ring sales have declined by a similar percentage?Customized online news aggregators gather only those stories that each of us likes to read. So is anyone surprised that newspaper readership is waning?Now let's talk about your business: Is your marketplace changing beneath your feet? Move with it.Or risk falling down.Roy H. Williams

I owe my optimism to my mother, a single parent whose ironclad confidence kept my sister and I from ever suspecting how poor we really were. We felt like Mom could do anything. She made us feel like everything was going to be okay.And amazingly, it was.I owe my business to my wife, Pennie, who never worried or complained or suggested that I get a real job, even when the cut-off notices began to arrive from the utility companies. My prayer for our sons throughout their lives has been that they would each marry a wife who would give them the same freedom and support I've gotten from Princess Pennie since we were both 18.The older son has been married for 2 years now and I'm delighted to report that God answers prayer.I owe my love of literature to an Oklahoma public school teacher named Linn Ball in whose English class I was privileged to sit as a junior and senior in high school.These are three of the women who shaped my life. Who were the sculptresses of yours?Keith Miller reminded me of Linn Ball recently when he said, “Roy, we've got to preserve the almost-forgotten wisdom.”That conversation ended with Wizard Academy agreeing to host an important event this summer, but we can't do it without your input. Here's what we need from you:1. Think of a teacher that is truly gifted. “This world would be a different place if every teacher was like (who?).”2. Contact that teacher and tell them you'd like to submit their name as a possible candidate to be invited to a national summit on education.3. Send us – with their permission – the teacher's contact information along with the reasons why their name is the one you'd use to finish that sentence. Tell us exactly what this teacher did that rocked your world. A simple name and recommendation isn't enough. We need you to remember a specific incident that illustrates how this teacher does things differently.The result of this conference is going to be a book filled with innovative teaching techniques and true-life stories that will be shared with educators across America.This is not a money-making proposition. It's a focused effort to rescue a generation in need of teachers who can fan the flames of flickering intellect until it blazes into a conflagration of knowledge.Teachers who light fires do things differently. We're going to extract the fiery sparks from these gifted teachers and put them into a book other teachers will use like a box of matches.Right now you're thinking of a teacher, aren't you? Please contact him or her. Do it now.This can turn out 2 ways:1. You can plan to do it, mean to do it, promise to do it and then get ambushed by the urgencies of daily life and say, “Oh well, I'm sure they got lots of names and stories from other people.” The result will be no conference, no preservation of the almost-forgotten wisdom, no rescue of a generation that is fading fast.2. Or you can track down the teacher, explain to them that Wizard Academy is a credible think-tank and that yes, this conference will be chaired by Keith Miller himself, that legendary author of bestselling books that rocked America throughout the 70s and 80s. (I'll be there, too, but your teacher is a lot less likely to have heard of me. Just ask them if they remember The Taste of New Wine or Habitation of Dragons or any of the other bestsellers by Keith Miller.)Our promise of a book emerging from this conference isn't just a daydream. If the conference happens, the book will happen. And your teacher will be part of it.You gonna call your teacher? We really need you to do it.Email your 500 to 1,000-word narrative and teacher contact information before midnight, April 30, 2007, to [email protected] now I'm going to put Jodie Gateman's name on the list along with Dr. B.C. DeSpain and then find out whatever happened to Linn Ball. We haven't spoken in 30 years.But we're about to.Roy H. Williams

Filippo Beccari is an Italian dance teacher a long way from home. Hoping to enrich the lives of 62 orphans, he visits the orphans daily and encourages them to move to the music as he hums or plays. The year is 1773.Three years later Paul Revere rides through Boston shouting “The British are coming! The British are coming!” just as Beccari's orphans glide onto stage and stun a crowd of dignitaries with their debut performance. Each of the 62 children has become a magnificent dancer and 24 of them are world-class soloists.And thus the Bolshoi Ballet was born in Moscow during the reign of Catherine the Great.Bolshoi, in Russian, means “big” or “grand.” And indeed it is.I wonder, would the Bolshoi have come into existence had a man been in charge of Russia at the time?Pulitzer-winning novelist James Michener challenged aspiring writers to move to the rhythm of spoken words. He said they “might develop a sense of freedom that way.”Two weeks ago I ignited a firestorm of controversy by suggesting that we embrace Michener's strange advice and post our efforts on youtube.Judging from some of the reactions I received, you'd have thought I had suggested we overthrow the government, outlaw church-going and encourage young children to smoke pot.Men were worried1. that the effort would serve no purpose, and2. that it might become a gateway to “other deviations.”Yes, some people use play as an excuse to lose their minds. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” But the Cognoscenti will recall a 7-minute session called Feynman's Pendulum in which I explain, “The object of play isn't to lose your morals, it's to lose your cares and inhibitions.”People often ask me to help them turn their hobby into a business.But does that make the hobby more fun?Hosea Frank mentions this phenomenon in one of his witty and offbeat Zefrank videos: “And then they started saying that if you put focused energy into something without knowing how it would lead to getting money, you were participating in a hobby. [witheringly] Ohhh… it's your hobby.” – zefrank.comZe made a new video each weekday for a year in the hope of being accepted into the LOA, or League Of Awesomeness. That year ended on March 17, 2007.My son Rex brought Zefrank to my attention a few days ago. Having now viewed a couple dozen of his 260 videos, I think Ze may be our brand of crazy. But before you go clicking these links, be warned: Zefrank is offbeat, irreverent and unrestrained. Which is a fancy way of saying that he is occasionally vulgar.But he is also insightful and fun.Pass or play. The choice is yours.But remember what happened to Jack.Roy H. Williams

About 10 months ago Mike Metzger flew from Clapham Institute in Annapolis to spend a day with us in Austin.“You meet 4 kinds of people on the ocean of life,” Mike said.“Those who drift just go with the flow. The wind and the waves control their speed and direction. The drifter quietly floats along and says, ‘Whatever.'”“Those who surf are always riding a wave, the next big thing. They stay excited until the wave fades away, then they scan the horizon for something new. Surfers don’t usually get anywhere, but they make a lot of noise and put on a good show.”“Those who drown seem to stay in the center of a storm. It doesn’t matter how often you rescue them, they’ll soon be in another crisis, crying, ‘Help me, save me, it’s been the worst week of my life. I don’t know what I’m going to do.'”“Those who sail are navigating toward a fixed point. They counteract the wind and waves by adjusting the rudder and shifting the sails to stay on course. But without an immovable, fixed point in your life, there can be no sailing. There’s nothing for you but drift, surf or drown.”Can you name the fixed point in your life, your immovable object?Metzger’s metaphor reminded me of something Ray Bard once taught me. Bard, that legendary publisher of business books, speaks of 4 kinds of opportunities:“When you’re thinking about writing a book on a subject or considering a business to go into, it’s essential that you find out 2 things:1. How widespread is the public’s interest in it?2. How deep is that interest?”“If interest is not widespread and not very deep, you’re looking at a puddle. Never invest time or money in a puddle.”“If interest is widespread but not very deep, you’re looking at a swamp. Be careful of swamps. They look like oceans at first because everyone is interested. But that interest is shallow, not deep enough to drive action. Investors go broke when they see a swamp and think it’s an ocean.”“If public interest is wide and deep, you’re looking at an ocean. But you’re going to need a platform on which to navigate your ocean. If you don’t have a platform, you’ll drown. And you’re going to need a plan or you’ll drift.”“If public interest is narrow but deep, you’ve got a well. Don’t underestimate it. You can draw a lot of water from a well. I once knew a writer who wrote a book called The Care and Feeding of Quarter Horses. The book held no interest for readers who didn’t own a quarter horse, but those who did had deep enough interest to buy the book. It was extremely successful.”Are you in a puddle, a swamp, an ocean or a well?Are you drifting, surfing, drowning or sailing?Fifteen months ago I taught a student and her daughter how to go sailing in a well. They wrote me recently to say that their family business has since “exploded.”You may recall that I mentioned Dixie Huthmaker as a “doer” in the PS of last week’s Monday Morning Memo. Those who clicked that link were told they could join the Ocean’s 11 and experience a 3-day brainstorming session with the Wizard of Ads.All 11 seats were filled in just a few hours, so we scheduled a second class for October 2-4, 2007.You coming?Yours,Roy H. Williams

Looking to make a change? Remember: transformation happens experientially, not intellectually.We often receive instruction and agree, “I see what you're saying,” but seldom do we actually do the thing we learned. We just agree with it in our minds.This is a problem.Daniel J. Boorstin said, “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.”Boorstin's statement becomes particularly poignant when you learn that he graduated with highest honors from Harvard, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and earned his PhD at Yale. By occupation he was a lawyer, a university professor and the U.S. Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987. Yet Boorstin warned us that the illusion of knowledge was the greatest impediment to discovery.Are you willing to go exploring with Boorstin and Dewar and Michener and me? Tommy Dewar said, “Exploration makes one wiser; even if the only wisdom gained is to know where not to return.”James Michener won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his book, Tales of the South Pacific. He went on to earn more than one hundred million dollars as the author of more than 40 novels.In his memoirs – published just a year before he died at the age of 90 – Michener wrote, “I feel almost a blood relationship with all the artists in all the mediums, for I find that we face the same problems but solve them in our own ways. When young people in my writing classes, for example, ask what subjects they should study to become writers, I surprise them by replying: ‘Ceramics and eurhythmic dancing.' When they look surprised I explain: ‘Ceramics so you can feel form evolving through your fingertips molding the moist clay, and eurhythmic dancing so you can experience the flow of motion through your body. You might develop a sense of freedom that way.'” – This Noble Land, chap.10Michener, a novelist to whose success George Washington testified one hundred million times, instructed thousands of aspiring young writers during his years at the University of Texas and he gave each student the same advice. But do you suppose any of them actually took classes in ceramics and eurhythmic dancing?I doubt it.Would you have done what Michener said? Or would you have thought, “I get it,” and then walked on to seek advice from other experts?Would you have allowed the illusion of knowledge to rob you of the joy of discovery?Roy H. Williams

She judged us one-by-one as we entered the building. Chin held high, she looked down the ridgeline of her nose like she was sighting along the barrel of a gun. A quiet sniff let us know she did not approve.I hope to God she doesn't know how to fire that thing.“You're here for the Dana Gioia lecture?”Her tone suggested this woman was trying hard to be perceived as an aristocrat. Just like the man who spoke from behind me.“Lovey!”Wow. There really are people who talk like Thurston Howell III.It was like we'd stumbled into a costume party where the game was to act bored and superior. Throughout the room every pose, every comment was calculated to deliver an impression of “tut-tut” sophistication. It was a voice-symphony of condescending tones.The little hand was on 7 and the big hand on 12 in a tiny auditorium in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Dana Gioia, (JOY-ah) the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was scheduled to speak. I'd come with 7 students from Wizard Academy's Magical Worlds Communications Workshop.It turned out to be one of the most stimulating nights of my life.Gioia, a Harvard graduate and published poet, bemoaned the modern trend to analyze and critique poetry as though it were an intellectual thing. Throughout Gioia's riveting performance I wondered, “Do the people in this room realize that he's saying they are the problem?Gioia performed his own poems and others. Whether the poetry served as punctuation to his comments, or whether his comments were the punctuation between poems, I cannot say.During the Question and Answer session, a woman asked, “What do you think of these so-called ‘cowboy poets?'”Her loaded question backfired. Gioia got happy as he explained that the first of today's cowboy poets was encouraged by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, “and now there are more than 200 chapters of cowboy poets who meet across America to read their poetry.”The cowboy has found his soul and that makes Gioia happy: “If you don't hear anything else I say tonight, please remember this: The goal of public education in the arts is not to create more artists, but to create complete human beings in an age of technology. We're failing our children, especially our young men. We provide them a cognitive, analytical education, but we are failing to educate their emotions.”David of Israel was a warrior poet. His son Solomon was a scholar poet. Neither of them was considered effeminate. Just ask Goliath. Yet David and Solomon gave us deep treasures of poetry in Psalms and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and the intensely sexual Song of Solomon.It was when Gioia confessed his frustration that night that I began to feel pride for Wizard Academy. “If I had one wish,” he said, “it would be that we immerse our children in a performance of the arts. Let a storyteller or a poet perform in a way that leaves the audience breathless and every child in the room will say, ‘I want to learn to do that.' They'll become better readers, better writers, and more complete human beings.”I was proud of the academy because we're doing what Gioia said needs to be done. Just last week Kim, Peter, Paul and Will taught a class called Making It As an Artist. All four of these gifted instructors perform in public schools at every opportunity. Those of you who have heard me speak publicly will recall that I always perform at least one important poem relevant to the topic of discussion. The audiences are surprised, attention is elevated and people are delighted.Wizard Academy is putting adventure into science, romance into writing, and art into the heart. We're going for Broca.The late poet Robert Graves said, “There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.”If Graves was unable to find money in poetry, it was only because he failed to look where it might be found.Philip Dusenberry said, “I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.” Dusenberry is a successful motion picture screenwriter, was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame in 1994, and is the chairman of BBDO, one of the largest advertising agencies on earth. He began as a copywriter at a radio station.If you're a poet and would like to make your living with words, the secret is to aim part of that energy at ad writing.Here's what some famous men have had to say about poetry. Listen closely and see if their advice doesn't also apply to ad writing:Jean Cocteau said, “The poet doesn't invent. He listens.”The same is true of great ad writers.Paul Engle said, “Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.”Couldn't the same thing be said about great ads?Sigmund Freud, that spelunker into the human psyche, said, “Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.” On another occasion Freud wrote, “Poets are ma

Modern schools teach Journalism and Creative Writing.Study Journalism and you'll write ads that are informative. Study Creative Writing and you'll write ads that entertain. But neither is likely to persuade.Only one school of writing always1. introduces a new perspective,2. causes readers to feel differently, and3. does so in a tight economy of words.And that school is very ancient.Should you ask me, whence these stories?Whence these legends and traditions,With the odors of the forestWith the dew and damp of meadows,With the curling smoke of wigwams,With the rushing of great rivers,With their frequent repetitions,And their wild reverberationsAs of thunder in the mountains?Do you want to speak in full color? Enroll in the school of the poet.Rhythm is essential to us. Feet patter, hearts beat, lungs breathe, planets circle and seasons cycle to a rhythm. Music, poetry and dance are built on it.The rhythm of a poem – the drumbeats of its stressed and unstressed syllables – is called its meter.Meter is music. Meter is magic.Did you feel the Indian drumbeats in the preface to Longfellow's Hiawatha? Those drumbeats are caused by Longellow's careful arrangement of words so that their naturally accented syllables fall into a rhythmic pattern. But Longfellow's poem doesn't rhyme.Meter is more powerful than rhyme.By the shores of Gitchee Gumee,By the shining Big-Sea-Water,Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.Dark behind it rose the forest,Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,Rose the firs with cones upon them;Bright before it beat the water,Beat the clear and sunny water,Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.There the wrinkled old NokomisNursed the little Hiawatha,Rocked him in his linden cradle,Bedded soft in moss and rushes,Safely bound with reindeer sinews;Stilled his fretful wail by saying,“Hush! the Naked Bear will hear thee!”Lulled him into slumber, singing– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)Wow. Henry's been gone 125 years but his word-dance continues to enchant us.The poet hopes to move you, to make you see things differently, to alter your perspective. The poet hopes to persuade.If you don't want to hear any more about poetry and its power to move people, you should plan on skipping next Monday's Memo.Because I'm going to aim an arrow at your heart.And it's not even Valentine's Day.Roy H. Williams

Advertising isn't working like it did a few years ago. You've noticed this, right?Most advertisers are convinced that technology is to blame.TV advertisers will tell you that TiVo and her sister Digital Video Recorders are blocking their television ads. But according to a recent report released by Leichtman Research Group, only 12 percent of American households own a DVR.But TV ad results are down far more than 12 percent.Radio advertisers will tell you that everyone is listening to iPods and satellite radio. But in truth, most of radio's loss has been in the 12 to 17 year-old age group. These pre-adults are now spending only 51 quarter-hours per week listening to commercial radio, down from a zenith of 65 quarter-hours per week during the pre-Internet 80s and early 90s. The rest of us are listening about as much as we ever did. We wake up to radio alarm clocks and listen at work and in our cars. Overall, the audience for commercial radio has declined only about 4 percent over the past 3 years.But Radio ad results are down far more than 4 percent.Online news aggregators gather worldwide news for us and deliver it instantly to our desktops. Traditional Newspaper subscriptions are at an all-time low and so are Newspaper ad results. But the results are declining faster than subscriptions.Yes, technology is to blame. But not in the way that you think.I'm paid according to how much my clients grow, remember? So I don't really care what the problem is. My job is to find it and fix it.Here's what I've discovered, tested and proved:1: Internet surfing has trained us to disregard empty words.2: Relevance has become more important than repetition.Bottom line: Meaningful messages are working better than ever, especially when the fundamental premise of your ad is clearly stated in the opening line. Ads full of unsupported claims and overworked “image-building” phrases are being rejected before they ever enter the brain. So say what matters. Say it tight, say it true.The audience is still there. What's gone is their willingness to pay attention to drivel.You spend about a minute each day going though the mail delivered by the Post Office, right? Before Yahoo and Google came along, those 6 minutes each week constituted your total weekly exercise in the high-speed evaluation of content. But now you're spending more than a quarter-hour per day scanning search engine results and web pages for relevant, meaningful, salient information. These daily quarter-hours are teaching you – and your customers – to more quickly recognize and disregard word-fluff and other irrelevant information. We're learning to filter out hyperbole and empty phrases.Is this beginning to make sense to you?To make your advertising work like it should, you're going to have to:1. Talk about things your customer actually cares about.2. Write your ads in a style that rings true.3. Avoid heroic chest thumping. “We are the number one…” is now considered gauche and passé.4. Close the loopholes in your ads. Offer evidence to support what you say.5. Be specific. Details are more believable than generalities.6. Deliver a real message. Substance is more important than style.Creativity and repetition can no longer cover up the fact that an advertiser has nothing to say. You've got to have a message that matters.Do you?Roy H. Williams

Are you a one-person company with a lunch-money ad budget?Good News: Time and money are interchangeable. You can always save one by spending more of the other.When money is tight, spend time.(If you don't have any money AND you don't have any time, then you're spending your time on the wrong things.)The key to low-budget advertising is to focus on small groups and individuals.Here are some ways to do it:1. Door-hangers on Doorknobs. If your target is geographically defined, print doorknob-hangers and hang them on doors in your area. Results will be proportionate to the strength of your offer. So make your offer detailed and specific. “Join us for worship this Sunday morning” is less likely to bring visitors to a church than “Single Parent Support Group meets Wednesday nights at 7:00. Childcare provided.” When I was young and in the seamless guttering business, I'd walk yard-to-yard diagramming rooflines on estimate sheets. The homeowner came home to find taped to their door a schematic of their roofline with my detailed bid for what it would cost to install seamless guttering on their home. Worked like magic. COST: Ink, estimate sheets, and shoe leather.2. Flyers under Windshield Wipers. If you need to reach the drivers of a specific type of vehicle, such as pickup trucks, what better way than to walk your doorknob-hanging shoes across parking lots putting flyers under windshield wipers? Yes, you'll occasionally get run out of a parking lot by a security guard in a golf cart and some lonely soul who needs a life will call to complain that you're ruining the environment, but the results are usually worth the hassle.3. Purchased Word-of-Mouth. Ride up and down in the elevators of tall buildings, stand at bus stops, wait at crosswalks or hang around in coffee shops to tell strangers about your business. “Have you heard about _______? It's awesome.” It sounds nuts, I know, but it works. Pay a kid or do it yourself.4. Virtual Showroom. Convert your website to a virtual showroom. Use it as an instantly deliverable, interactive brochure when people call to ask details about your company, your products or your services. “Are you sitting in front of a computer? Good. Now go to BlahBlah.com. Yeah, that's me. Now click the button that says ‘Equipment.' See that second photo?” Think of this website as a place where you sit down to talk with interested prospects. Make sure the virtual showroom is equipped with all the same tools and props as your physical showroom. You'll be shocked what it does for the conversion rate of inquiries.5. Nighttime Silhouettes. You've probably never seen one of these… which means no one else in your town has seen one either. First, locate a tall wall in a part of town that has lots of traffic at night, especially foot traffic. Then arrange with the owner of that building – and the building across the street – to let you install a logo projector. They're effective and cheap. In some situations you can even use an old slide projector to achieve the desired effect.6. T-shirts and Vests. My little ad firm with its 41 offices worldwide was launched in 1978 with a T-shirt advertising a thought-for-the-day recorded on a telephone answering machine. “Take a Break in Your Day. Dial Daybreak. 258-7700.” I could only afford one such printed t-shirt. I wore it a lot. Daybreak evolved into the Monday Morning Memo and a trilogy of bestsellers, then became the foundation upon which Wizard Academy was built. Have you visited our 22-acre campus?7. Hand Stamps. One of my friends recently attended a ticketed event that required a hand-stamp for readmission. The hand-stamp was a delightful little mini-ad for one of the sponsors. Can you imagine a better advertising vehicle for creating personal identification with a brand? There's something about looking down at your own hand and seeing a logo and knowing that the image has value. You're having fun, the brand is there, and it's part of you. The ink might wash off, but the impression doesn't fade so quickly.8. Publicity Stunt. Few things are as powerful as a publicity stunt that wins public attention. Going for inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records requires a lot of work, but holding a world record is extremely cool. Did you hear about the guy who dropped a golf ball at the edge of Mongolia, then whacked it 1,234 miles all the way to the other side? The journey required 12,170 swings of the club, 90 days and 510 lost balls. But he got interviewed by Jay Leno on The Tonight Show followed by The Today Show, CNN, CNN International, CTV, ESPN Cold Pizza, and PGA Tour Sunday. Articles were published about him in the New York Times and the Times of London. Then the Associated Press issued a worldwide story about the exploit. Outside Magazine featured him as one of its 25 Coolest People, the Men's Journal&

Are you anxious to look foolish in front of others?Will you happily submit yourself to ridicule?Are you willing to do a thing badly until you've learned to do it well?Probably not, unless you're the one in five hundred who has what it takes to succeed.“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” – Robert F. KennedyThe lone pioneer plunges ahead and discovers a world while four hundred and ninety-nine settlers whine for maps and roads.America was founded by pioneers.How might we dull a glistening nation?1. Pay the dullest and least impressive to educate the children.2. Create a system of teaching that judges everything as “correct” or “incorrect.” This will allow the dull and unimpressive to easily grade the children's tests.3. Discourage exploration.4. Reward conformity. Teach that inside the box is good.5. Celebrate sports. Make sure the children understand that taller, stronger kids have natural advantages that cannot be overcome. Build stadiums and hire announcers to shout the names of students who display physical dominance.6. Minimize school concerts and science fairs and art shows. Treat them as though they're for losers. Have them in the school cafeteria.Follow these 6 Simple Stepsand you can expect:1. Drop-Outs. Currently, 38 percent of America's children are dropping out of high school and that number is rising.2. Cloned Repetition. Have you noticed that every mall has exactly the same stores as every other mall and that every city has all the same restaurants?3. Death of Industry. The cars of once-mighty GM and Ford no longer excite us. We want cars designed by the children of foreigners.4. Street Gangs. If school taught us anything, it's that physical dominance is the key to reward.An outsider, observing how we educate our children, would be forced to conclude that we value:1. Efficient mediocrity, and2. Going in circlesBut do we really want to become a nation of Wal-Mart shoppers and NASCAR fans?Jeffrey Eisenberg told me that last line would horribly offend you. I hope he was wrong.Princess Pennie said that bright, motivated school teachers would feel marginalized and attacked. This certainly wasn't my intention. I know that every school has two or three dazzling teachers who are committed to doing all they can within the current, flawed system. These teachers know they could earn twice the money in the private sector but they're selling their lives just as surely as any other missionary, and they deserve our respect and admiration. But such teachers are the exception, not the rule.America's school system needs a major overhaul. My goal today is to remind you that, “If we don't change direction soon, we're likely to arrive where we are headed.”GOOD NEWS: Wizard Academy is now recognized by the government of the United States as an official, non-profit educational organization. Thanks to the tireless efforts of board member Corrine Taylor, we've been granted our 501c3.Unleash the hounds.Roy H. Williams

My friend and fellow Worthless Bastard Brett Feinstein occasionally quotes his business partner, Jamie, as saying, “Be for what is.” I think I understand what Jamie is saying.There are basically two ways of seeing:1. the way things ought to be.2. the way things are.Do you find yourself moaning about the injustice of it all and wishing that things were different? Follow the advice of Jamie and Bigteeth Ted, who said, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”Be for what is.I wrote about this in chapter 76 of my first book, The Wizard of Ads. “Weasels are everywhere, incessantly singing their sad little song: If Only. 'If only I had a better education.' 'If only my boss liked me better.' 'If only I had married someone else.' 'If only I had invested in Chrysler when it was fifty cents a share…' There's a little weasel in all of us, and that weasel needs to be slapped. When your ears hear your lips start to sing the Song of the Weasel, you must learn to immediately slap the weasel within.”Now that we've established the wisdom of a pragmatic, clear-eyed worldview, let's examine the equal-but-opposite wisdom offered by that other hemisphere of your brain, the right:What might happen if a person simply rejected the way things are and insisted on seeing them as they ought to be?1. First, the person would be considered irrelevant, an impractical dreamer.2. If persistent, they'd become a nuisance.3. Then a renegade, a rebel, a lunatic and a heretic.4. Finally, a serious troublemaker and a borderline criminal.5. Later, the founder of a movement.Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Mahatma Gandhi. Martin Luther King.“Every man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.” – Mark Twain“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard ShawI'm not trying to be mysterious when I say I agree with both of these equal-but-opposite worldviews. We must Be for What Is if we are to accomplish anything in the short term, and we must Be the Crank with a New Idea if tomorrow is going to be better than today.Wizard Academy is a school for cranks with new ideas. Our plan is to change the world, one perspective at a time. I really can't put it more plainly than that. Is there anything in your world that needs changing? Come to Austin and we'll talk about it.It was my favorite pioneering educational genius from Brazil, Paolo Freire, who said,“Education either functions as1. an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity, or2. it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”Paolo Freire would have liked Wizard Academy.Helen Keller would have been at home here, too. She said, “The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.”Wizard Academy alumni are the creators of tomorrow's orthodoxy in the sciences, the arts, and marketing.I believe Pablo Picasso would have loved it here. “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”You gotta love the Pablo.But I think Robert Frost may have said it best:“Most of the change we think we see in lifeIs due to truths being in and out of favor.”Like me, Frost realized that both perspectives are true. Our society simply moves from one extreme to the other in an arc spanning exactly 40 years. And we've been doing it since the beginning of time.I suppose that's enough rambling for one day. Click the hyperlinks above and below if you want to stay on the trail of the elusive rabbit.Be well.Yours,Roy H. Williams

Silence is a language of context.White space is silence in print ads.Visual saturation is its opposite.Shadow is another language of context.Silence is seen and shadows are heard in the dim-light quiet of the printed word:We had come home.We had discussed whether to go out for dinner or eat in.I said I would build a fire, we could eat in.I built the fire, I started dinner, I asked John if he wanted a drink.I got him a Scotch and gave it to him in the living room, where he was reading in the chair by the fire where he habitually sat….I finished getting dinner, I set the table in the living room where, when we were home alone, we could eat within sight of the fire. I find myself stressing the fire because fires were important to us. I grew up in California, John and I lived there together for twenty-four years, in California we heated our houses by building fires. We built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came in. Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night. I lit the candles. John asked for a second drink before sitting down. I gave it to him. We sat down. My attention was on mixing the salad.John was talking, then he wasn't.– excerpted from The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), Joan Didion's attempt to comprehend her husband's sudden death after 40 years of marriage.The Cognoscenti of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop – next class Mar. 6 – will remember a visual technique called Frameline Magnetism which calls upon the imagination to fill in what was strategically left out. The technique works with words, as well.What did Joan Didion leave out? By stripping away the adjectives, Didion polished and accelerated her words toward greater impact.Here's another example of Verbal Frameline Magnetism:“You can't come in now,” one of the nurses said.“Yes I can,” I said.“You can't come in yet.”“You get out,” I said. “The other one too.”But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-bye to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.– from Hemingway's A Farewell to ArmsAgain, no adjectives. Neither did the following words appear: room, entered, lying there, dead, sadness, love. Yet we saw and felt these things just as surely as if the words had floated above the paper and sparkled with light. Hemingway, like Didion, wrote cleanly, leaving your imagination to fill in what he strategically left out.Here's what the technique looks like when aimed at advertising:You've seen the condos in Myrtle Beach that overlook the ocean.Rich people own those. And when they're not using them, we rent them out to nice families like yours for about the same prices you've been paying for hotel rooms.Put yourself in their shoes.The condo is paid for and empty.Why not let it generate a few bucks?Now put yourself in their condo.We're Condotels. Our job is to welcome you upon your arrival in Myrtle Beach and hand you the keys to your luxury condo. It's as easy as staying in a hotel. But better. A lot better.VacationLikeKings.com# # # #The amateur knows what to include.The expert knows what to leave out.Adjectives are crutches.Clean is fast.Can you writefast and light?Do it. Watch what happens.Roy H. Williams

You're deeply unhappy with the way things are, but you're not quite sure what to change or who to blame. Depression is the name we give to unfocused anger.Grief is the name we give to Anger + Sorrow.Cruelty is the name given to Anger + Joy.And Envy is Anger + Desire.The difference between desire and envy is that desire isn't angry. But if you desire a thing and you're angry that you don't have it and another person does, that's envy.Any theatre actor can portray sorrow. If the corners of the mouth and eyes turn downward, the person is obviously sad. It's an emotion easily communicated. But grief is harder to portray because grief is two feelings at once. An actor who understands this – and knows which two feelings equal grief – is better equipped to deliver it.This technique for portraying complex emotions onstage is just one more application of Thought Particle Theory.Likewise, this same theory of Thought Particles is being used to quantify the 100 touchpoints of the Customer Experience Factor. When you walk into a store and it feels good to you, what are you unconsciously measuring? What sensory factors are being gathered and totaled in this unspoken mathematics of feeling?Using Thought Particle technology, these factors have now been identified and made measurable so that your physical store can be objectively scored in each of the most relevant touchpoints. Would you like to know how your facility compares to your competitors in all the different ways that customers care about but can never quite articulate? Would you like to know how your aggregate score compares to the national average for your specific NAICS category? Would you like to have a list of exactly the changes you'd need to make to take your store to the next level?Readers who love my simpler stuff often sneer at my theory of Thought Particles. Do you?Stay tuned. The beagle is alive and well and on the loose.Would you like to go romping through the woods with us?Roy H. Williams

Glance at the headline above and you think, “Imaginary characters.”Add angels to that list and the category will blur to “Characters who do good” if you're a believer in angels, but will remain unchanged if you consider them to be imaginary.Change it to read “Peter Pan, Superman, Angels and Airplanes” and a new category will emerge, “Things that can fly.”Pattern recognition is an important function of the right hemisphere of your brain.Grouping is a form of pattern recognition.The Atomists of the late 1800's believed the nature of things to be absolute and not dependent on context. Gestalt theorists disagreed. They believed the human mind instinctively creates wholes out of incomplete elements and that the nature of a thing is greatly altered by its context.You've likely never heard of the Atomists. This is because they were wrong.The Gestalt Theorists, however, were right. They said that humanity's instinctive grouping of characteristics causes us to interpret things in predictable ways.The laws of organization that determine grouping are:(1) proximity – items will be grouped according to their nearness(2) similarity – items similar in some respect will be grouped together(3) closure – items will be grouped to complete a larger entity(4) simplicity – items will be organized into simple figures according to symmetry, regularity, and smoothness.Understand these laws of organization* and you will:(A.) enlarge your power to transfer perception, communicate.(B.) accelerate your ability to solve problems.New subject: Can you fly?Can you?Now let me ask differently: In your mind, can you?You probably weren't sure how to answer the first question, “Can you fly?” because you didn't know if I was being literal or figurative. When I asked the follow-up “Can you?” it triggered some doubt and caused you to think that perhaps I was asking if you could actually fly.Context matters. Claude Monet knew the color of an object would change according to the reflections of objects near it. This understanding of context allowed him to unleash a visual phenomenon known as French Impressionism.And great writers know the same thing; the meaning of a word is altered by the reflections of the words near it.John Steinbeck, in a note to his friend, Pascal Covici, said, “It is as though the words spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.”Choose your words according to the baggage they carry. And then pair those words with others that carry similar bags and watch for the reflected colors.Superman + Peter Pan = Imaginary Characters.Superman + Airplanes = Things That Can Fly.Teacher, are you ready to fly? Before you stretch your wings, let your face feel the glow from the words of the Great Ones. John Steinbeck, Tom Robbins, Neal Stephenson…You know your way to the bookstore, right?Happy flying,Roy H. Williams

As we learned in last week's memo, a person can't imagine a personal future without assembling it from stored memories of their past.This means your customer will better understand the new and different when you relate it to the old and familiar.To do this, you must employ Symbolic Thought.(And if you're really good you'll trigger mirror neurons in your subject, causing them to vicariously experience what you describe. But I get ahead of myself…)According to Dr. Ricardo Gattass there are four kinds of thought:Verbal Thought is hearing a voice in your mind.Analytical Thought is deductive reasoning that seeks to forecast a result.Abstract Thought embraces fantasy and all things intangible.Symbolic Thought connects the pattern recognition of the right brain with the deductive reasoning of the left-brain to relate the unknown to the known.If you will educate, encourage, or persuade, you must symbolize the abstract by pointing to a concrete thing that shares an essential attribute with the abstraction you're trying to describe.This can be done using:(1.) Words.“Your life and her life have become intertwined like two ropes, joined in a knot. And that's a good thing. It gives you both something to hang onto. If you're in love, you know exactly what I'm talking about.” These three sentences were the opening lines of a radio ad that sold thousands of a specific item of jewelry.“What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.” Jesus gave the farmers of his day a glimpse of another realm by comparing it to a seed with which they were all familiar.(2.) Pictures.In his book, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud uses graphic sequential storytelling to illustrate how we attach complex meanings to the way simple lines relate to one another. He's not talking about comic books. He's talking about visual symbolic thought. Grasp what he's teaching and you'll hold a lever that will move the world.Buy the book. It's one of those rare, breakthrough books that will make you suddenly see things that have long fluttered at the edge of your consciousness. Or better yet, if you can afford the time and money, join Scott McCloud and me for the February session of Advanced Thought Particles in Wizard Academy's Tuscan Hall.Didn't I tell you that we had some amazing guests lined up for 2007?Come if you can.Roy H. Williams

We do not remember days. We remember moments.The secret to creating a different future is to remember a different past.Literally.What do you remember about your past? Do you remember the pain? The frustration? The injustice?Unless you want to live these things again, you need to erase them from your mind.No, I haven't become a perky, positive-thinking Pollyanna. I share only what was published last week in the scientific journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.According to lead researcher Karl Szpunar, “Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories.”Szpunar's team used advanced brain imaging techniques to show how (1.) remembering the past and (2.) envisioning the future are connected, as each one triggers similar patterns of brain activity in precisely the same areas of the brain. (These findings help explain why amnesiacs have difficulty imagining a personal future.)The cognoscenti will remember me saying, “A person can take no action until they've first imagined that action in their mind. Persuasion begins when a person imagines themselves doing what you want them to do.”Last week, The National Academy of Sciences added to our understanding by making it clear: Our ability to imagine the future is linked to our memories of the past.Ponder past failure only if you want to recreate it.Do you want a happy and successful future? Remember happy and successful moments.Musicians and athletes have known this for years; “The way you practice is the way you'll play.”In other words, you're probably going to do what you've been remembering.What have you been remembering? If you want to create a better future, you must remember better moments from your past. These moments happened to you. They definitely happened.You just need to remember them.Roy H. Williams

Sorting my email, I came upon a survey sent to me by an acquaintance:I'm about to change the name of my company from The Success Clinic to something else, and I need your help to find the best name.Which of these do you like best?____ Academy of Success and Leadership (ASL)____ Champions Training Institute (CTI)____ American Success Academy (ASA)____ Academy of Champions Training (ACT)Inexplicably, I tapped Reply and placed an X by my answer. Tap. Send.I soon received a follow-up:Hi Roy,Thank you very much for sending me your vote.You don't know how surprised and honored I was to get a response from you.I wasn't sure if you'd remember the time I visited the old Academy and you introduced me to your students as the author of Permission to Succeed and Afformations.I thought you might like to know the results so far:1. This survey produced by far the hugest response from my list EVER.(If you like, I can tell you the story of why I think this is the case and what your readers might like to learn from my experience)2. Leading the way by a huge margin is Academy of Success and Leadership.3. Your vote to me equals 10,000 votes.So I was wondering if I could ask you:Why did you say Champions Training Institute?I would really love to hear your thinking process, because I know there's a reason behind your answer (and it goes against the grain of what the “average” person would say).I really do appreciate hearing from you.Thank you again, Roy.Warm regards,NoahYou, reader, were surprised by my choice as well, weren't you?As Noah suspected, I did have my reasons. But whether they constitute method or madness, I cannot with certainty say.Noah,You asked. Here are my answers:1. Champions Training Institute offers a sharp FMI (First Mental Image.)Champions are easy to imagine. They have Succeeded at something and they Lead the way for others. Hence, Champions is an easily visualized word that replaces two words, Success and Leadership, which offer only a fuzzy, ambiguous mental image at best.2. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” I agree. One word, Champions, is more than equal to two words, Success and Leadership.3. Training is a marvelous verb. Now that we've chosen to create Champions, how will we do this? Through training. Academy of Success and Leadership has no verb. It's a passive construct. This makes it sound like a museum.4. The place where the training will be done, “Institute”, comes at the end, where it belongs. It's the LMI (Last Mental Image.) Academy of Success and Leadership inserts the place (Academy) as the FMI.5. You've been asked, “What do you do here?”Strong Answer: “We train champions.”Weak Answer: “We teach entrepreneurs and professionals how to achieve greater success in their chosen field of endeavor. And we teach people how to lead.”6. CTI is a more sparkling acronym than the others, due to its lack of sonorant phonemes.Here's a general overview:Open Big. Close Big. FMI-LMIMake us see it clearly. “Memorable” is more important than “Accurate.” Be accurate if you can. But above all, be memorable.Verbs have magnetism. The most vivid order is Verb First, Object Last. But this is not a likely construct for a place name. “We train champions” is an example of verb first, object last.Modifiers are a mark of weakness. Delete them at every opportunity. Mark Twain said it this way, “Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will edit it and the writing will be just as it should be.”Having said all this, let me close softly: Noah, please name your school whatever feels best to you. I will not feel slighted if you choose to do exactly the opposite of what I've told you. I have no emotional investment in this advice whatsoever. I just felt you asked an interesting question and I was in the rare mood to answer it.Come see our new campus.All the best.Yours,Roy H. Williams

I still don't know his last name.Gille arrived from Michigan in a small jar with his photograph on the lid. His friend had sent an email to Chapel Dulcinea asking if we'd be willing to launch some of Gille's ashes into the breeze that always blows there.We replied we'd be happy to do it.It seems that Gille's parting wish was for his ashes to be scattered at beautiful and interesting places around the world and Chapel Dulcinea was selected as one of those places. So at sunset on December 13, 2006, Tom Grimes, Brett Feinstein and I became the awkward honor guard that entrusted Gille to the winds from the western pinnacle of Dulcinea's diamond foundation.Feinstein rang the big bronze bell as Gille floated northward into forever.How are things with you? Are you ready to begin a new year?This is the time when millions of us pause to look back with regret and forward with hope. As you prepare for 2007, here are some thoughts I hope you'll ponder:It's Always Okay To Begin Again“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.” – G.K. ChestertonPay Attention to the Little Things“It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living.” – Terry Pratchett“No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.” – Agnes De MilleKnow What You Want“I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.” – Mark TwainDon't Think You Know It All“The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.” – Leo Tolstoy“And he goes through life, his mouth open, and his mind closed.” – Oscar WildeDon't Be A Couch Potato“Literacy is a very hard skill to acquire, and once acquired it brings endless heartache – for the more you read, the more you learn of life's intimidating complexity of confusion. But anyone who can learn to grunt is bright enough to watch TV… which teaches that life is simple, and happy endings come to those whose hearts are in the right place.” – Spider Robinson“If I show up at your house 10 years from now, and find nothing in your living room but Reader's Digests, nothing in your bedroom but the latest Dan Brown novel… I will chase you down to the end of your driveway and back shouting 'Where are the damn books?… Why are you living the mental equivalent of a Kraft Macaroni & Cheese life?'” – Stephen King, to the 2005 graduating class of the University of MaineYou're Going To Have Some Bad Days“Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful.” – Annette Funicello“Life is like a train. It's bearing down on you and guess what? It's going to hit you. So you can either start running when it's far off in the distance, or you can pull up a chair, crack open a beer, and just watch it come.” – Eric Forman, on That 70s Show“My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.” – MontaigneHave Courage“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.” – Helen Keller“Those of us who refuse to risk and grow get swallowed up by life.” – Patty HansenLove Your Job“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” – Studs TerkelDon't Forget to Have Fun“Do not take life too seriously – you will never get out of it alive.” – Elbert Hubbard“Life is truly a ride. We're all strapped in and no one can stop it…. I think that the most you can hope for at the end of life is that your hair's messed, you're out of breath, and you didn't throw up.” – Jerry Seinfeld“Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.” – Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker“Don't be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin.” – Grace HansenRemember the People Who Are Important to You“There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.” – George Sand“When you grow up, you have to give yourself away. Sometimes you give your life all in a moment, but mostly you have to give yourself away laboring one minute at a time.” – Gaborn Val Orden“I was fourteen years old the night my daddy died. He had holes in his shoes and a vision that he was able to convey to me even lying in an ambulance, dying, that I as a black girl could do and be anything, that race and gender are shadows, and that character, determination, attitude are the substances of life.” – Marian Wright EdelmanToday Is The First Day of The Rest of Your Life“Life is a journey, and with every step we reach a point of no return.” – Gaborn Val Orden“Many adv

When Too Bigwedges into a head too small,When Too Hardcrowds into a life too soft,When Too Muchhas happened to make sense of it all,I am Sleep.Let me do my work.– Roy H. WilliamsHave you ever been confronted with an idea Too Big, a circumstance Too Hard, or a series of events Too Much?Thank God for the right hemisphere of your brain.You spend about a third of your life asleep because your 5 senses gather data faster than it can be processed. And the half of your brain responsible for fitting these new puzzle pieces into place works best when the other half is asleep.The left brain – logical, sequential, deductive reasoning – gathers information then goes to sleep. But the right brain – data integration and pattern recognition – doesn't sleep but works all night, connecting the dots, seeing the pattern and its possibilities.Intuiting.During the night the right brain takes a step back, puts things in perspective and gives you insight. This is why the wise say, “Let me sleep on it,” and why things always look better in the morning.The left brain demands science and data and facts and justice. The right brain seeks relationships and mercy and meaning and God. This is why you are torn between two opinions. Your left brain or “head” tells you one thing while your right brain or “heart” whispers another.The left brain is about vertical hierarchy, up and down. Dominate.The right brain is about horizontal relationship, near and far. Communicate.Most American men live in the left, worshiping at the alters of technology and sports, sneering at softness, mocking mercy, ridiculing the right. Strictly speaking, men, reading the sports page and the stock market report takes only half a brain.What are you doing with the other half?When a woman says “romance,” she means “right brain stuff.” She's talking about feelings and impressions and reactions that can't be proven and are neither right nor wrong, but are simply “yours.”You have feelings and impressions and reactions, guys. I know you do.How does the music make you feel? How about the painting, the play, the photograph, the book? Tell her. Let her remember why she married you.In just 10 more days Princess Pennie and I will celebrate 30 extraordinary years together. We are extremely married. You should be, too.If today's memo annoyed you a little, will you please let me make one final suggestion?Sleep on it.Roy H. Williams

I've created ads for local businesses from coast to coast for nearly a quarter century and I've studied the population of every place for which I've written ads; more than 100 towns in all. And I've presented seminars in an additional 92. That's a lot of travel.And I've noticed that cities have personalities.Humor can be different, for one thing. The video clip that causes an explosion of laughter in one city may trigger only the slightest giggle in the next. And women wear their makeup differently. The appreciation of art will be narrow in one city and broad in another. And religion can run shallow or deep. The work ethic is different here than there, and risk orientation with it.If you will write ads for a local business, you must first feel the pulse of the place; measure its inhibitions and embrace the rules of its morality.America is young, barely 4 human life-spans. This is why you should always begin your uncovery by asking:1. Why is this city here?2. Who founded it?3. What attracted its original population?As newcomers get involved in a community, they're affected by the town's local culture and begin subtly sliding toward the local norm. Outsiders thus become insiders.Learn the origins of a town and you'll have found a thread that will tie all your other observations together and make your ads much stronger.A town built on a discovery of gold or oil will often continue to have a “get-rich-quick” mentality to this day. Multilevel marketing will be strong there and con men will rock and roll because these cities are optimistic and have an uncanny ability to believe. Such towns are havens for entrepreneurs of every description. Silicon Valley (Sutter's Mill was there,) Denver, Tulsa…A town that originated as a military fort will usually have more grit and testosterone than neighboring cities. Compare Fort Worth to its neighbor, Dallas: Fort Worth began as a military post in 1849. Dallas began as a trading post in 1840. Today Fort Worth is known for its stockyards, aerospace, and Texas Motor Speedway. Dallas is known for Neiman-Marcus and Mary Kay.Likewise, St. Paul originated in 1819 as Fort Snelling and remains the seat of Minnesota government. Neighboring Minneapolis began as a trading post and remains a hub of commerce to this day. Ever heard of the Mall of America?An enthusiastic pair of New York real estate promoters founded Houston, Texas. The hyped-up boys assured investors it would become “a great center of government and commerce,” and then delivered what they promised.Happy Discovery, Militarism, and Energetic Commerce are just 3 of the 32 signals a city can send you to help you write more powerfully to its people.If you would be a journalist or a marketing professional, you must press your ear to the chest of your city, hear its heartbeat and smell its breath. Carl Sandburg did, 42 years before I was born:CHICAGOHOG Butcher for the World,Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;Stormy, husky, brawling,City of the Big Shoulders:They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,Bareheaded,Shoveling,Wrecking,Planning,Building, breaking, rebuilding,Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,Laughing!Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be the Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.Do you understand your city the way Sandburg understood his?If you do, you're well on your way to having a fabulous 2007.Good luck.Roy H. Williams

Happiness rarely triggers commerce. Unhappiness often does.Purchases are triggered by dissatisfaction with the way things are. We purchase when we have a need, a desire, an itch to scratch. We want to change our condition, our surroundings, our state of mind. We buy because we are dissatisfied.And this dissatisfaction is often created by the advertising that offers to remedy it.In his 1957 essay, American Advertising, Marshall McLuhan describes a letter written by an American army officer stationed in Italy after World War II. The officer “noted with misgiving that Italians could tell you the names of cabinet ministers but not the names of commodities preferred by Italian celebrities. Furthermore, the wall space of Italian cities was given over to political rather than commercial slogans. Finally, he predicted that there was small hope that Italians would ever achieve any sort of domestic prosperity or calm until they began to worry about the rival claims of cornflakes or cigarettes rather than the capacities of public men. In fact, he went so far as to say that democratic freedom very largely consists in ignoring politics and worrying about the means of defeating underarm odor, scaly scalp, hairy legs, dull complexion, unruly hair, borderline anemia, athlete's foot, and sluggish bowels.”This crass, commercial outlook described by McLuhan escalated to its zenith in the early 80's, then began to slowly subside.Today's purchases remain an expression of self, but they aren't always selfish. Our favorite brands are usually an extension of our values, a physical expression of our beliefs. This is why millions of us pay slightly higher prices for Fair Trade coffee. It tastes exactly like the coffee sold by heartless corporations, but Fair Trade coffee makes us feel differently.Those who have heard my presentation on Society's Pendulum will remember that 2006 was the 4th year of a new Civic cycle in which we're drawn toward others who believe as we do.“Every brand must have an identity and the most effective identities are those that take on the trappings of social justice: The Body Shop owns compassion, Nike spirituality, Pepsi and MTV youthful rebellion.” – Thomas Frank, (1997)“The great brands have succeeded in conveying their vision by questioning certain conventions, whether it's Apple's humanist vision, which reverses the relationship between people and machines; Benetton's libertarian vision, which overthrows communication conventions; Microsoft's progressive vision, which topples bureaucratic barriers; or Virgin's anti-conformist vision, which rebels against the powers that be.” – Jean-Marie DruYou buy what you buy because you want to scratch an itch. You are dissatisfied in some unspoken way.To increase your sales volume, you must identify the dissatisfaction that lurks in the heart of your customer.And then you must shine your flashlight of words into that darkness.How bright is your language-beacon?Roy H. Williams

Suffice it to say that last week's memo had precisely the effect I had anticipated.We'll speak no more about it.I will not dissect my own writing like a formaldehyde frog in the dim light of your monitor. But I will, for your benefit, gently press my scalpel into a paragraph written by England's brilliant Roy Clarke:“The thing about growing up is that you get fewer scabs on your knees, but more internal injuries. Do you remember the day when that little yellowhammer flew straight at the window? You picked it up. It had a drop of blood on its beak. Identical color to ours. Just one drop, like a bright bead. And then there were all those brightly plumed kids who left school, flying cheerfully and didn't get far. Ran smack into World War II. Little Tommy Naylor lying in Africa somewhere, blood on his beak. Identical color to ours.”– monologue of Peter Sallis as Norman Clegg, Last of the Summer Wine; Getting Sam Home, (1983) written by Roy ClarkeWe're not told the yellowhammer collided with the window. Neither do we read the words “dead” or “death.” Yet we know the little bird hit the window and died because of the line, “You picked it up.”We come to this conclusion on our own. This technique of “revelation by inference” pulls us into the narrative by making us fill in its blanks.Next the author shares a memory, a vividly phrased mental image: “Just one drop, like a bright bead.”The yellow cone of a bird's beak adorned with a glistening sphere of red is a sadly beautiful combination of color and shape. But we, as readers, continue to hang on to the opening statement about “growing up.” We await closure of that thought.Clarke moves us from birds to persons – and childhood to adulthood – through the metaphorical phrase “brightly plumed kids… flying cheerfully.”And then he closes the circle:“Little Tommy Naylor lying in Africa somewhere, blood on his beak.”Clarke has taken us from the scraped knees of childhood to a dead Tommy Naylor in the space of just a few seconds, our minds filling in the blanks along the way. Little Tommy never did grow old. He was one of us.“Identical color to ours.”And his death could have been our own.Read the passage again and witness the brilliant restraint. Roy Clarke flashes just a few slides onto the movie screen of our mind and we fill the gaps between them. We conclude:(1.) A yellowhammer is a bird.(2.) It hit the window and died.(3.) Tommy Naylor was a schoolmate.(4.) Tommy grew up and went to war.(5.) Tommy died in Africa in WWIIBut none of this is told to us directly. Yet we know it just as surely as if it had been.I am boring and pedantic when I say too much.I am mysterious and deep when I say too little.To hold the attention of intelligent people you must require them to fill in the blanks in your narrative. Here's another good example:“There were ripe blackberries in the hedgerows and, as the shadows lengthened, fox cubs skittering at the edge of the fields. A few miles on and the evening had almost shaded to night, but he could smell the sea now and he imagined that he could hear it, sucking and surging on the Dorset shingle. This was the ghost time of day when the souls of the dead flickered at the edges of men's sight and when good folk hurried home to their fire and to their thatch and to their bolted doors. A dog howled in one of the villages.”– Bernard Cornwell, Vagabond, p.164Have you ever known someone who took too long to say too little?Have you ever been someone who took too long to say too little?Yes, I am feeling literary. It happens to me in the fall. I hope you don't mind.Ciao for Niao,Roy H. Williams

Standing at your bedside, I don’t know if you’re dead or only sleeping.Soon our friends will lay pennies on your eyes to pay Charon for your passage. A silly ritual, our friends will do it anyway.But you were dead long before you died.Something caused life to shrivel in you, bloodless and pale, until you began to smell of despair. Did fear of failure run so deep in you?I was troubled by your passivity. I did not understand it. You refused encouragement. You sneered at good advice. You drank self-pity until it pickled your soul.Did you never realize that He who gently made the lamb made the tiger also? Who strangled the tiger in you? Was it faulty religion? An overbearing parent? Wounded pride?The tiger who fails is still a tiger. We do not laugh at it. A tiger is spectacular.You understood the Jesus who turned water into wine at the wedding feast to save the young couple from embarrassment. You believed in that Jesus, the one who was kind and anonymously generous. But you never quite believed in the Jesus who braided a whip to drive the businessmen from the temple, who flung aside the tables of the moneychangers and scattered their cash and stampeded all their livestock.Was there human blood on the whip when he was done do you think? Or did he just wave the whip over his head like a baton twirler in a halftime show and request that all the nasty, bad men please leave the premises immediately?Jesus wasn’t Gandhi. Jesus said that when someone jolted your jaw, the right thing to do was look them calmly in the eye and stick out your chin to give them a clean swing at the other side. This is how a tiger says, “Is that your best shot? You want another swing? Here, let me make this easy for you.”Turning the other cheek isn’t submissive. It’s defiant.But you were never into defiance. You were more into whining.I wish I could say I will miss you. But in truth, I’ve been missing you since the day your tiger died.Roy H. Williams

Your prospective customer has questions about you. Where's the first place they're likely to look for answers?Sadly, your wonderful “Big enough to serve you, small enough to know you” public image probably isn't going to be enough to walk that customer out to their car and drive them to your store so they can ask your friendly and knowledgeable staff.They'll probably just walk to the nearest computer and invest a few keystrokes, don't you think? And if your website doesn't deliver answers, they'll find them:1. on someone else's website, or2. a discussion string where you risk being reduced to what a detractor said about you, or3. they'll fill in the blanks using information gathered from the shadows of their own suspicious mind.Think like your customer for a moment: A company's website is silent on a subject. Why might this be? “At best, they're out of touch and behind the times. At worst, they have something to hide.”How many people do you suppose are looking for answers online?Clear Channel Communications, the world's largest mass-media company (with 1,100 radio stations and 870,000 billboards) is currently courting suitors for a possible takeover. Google, an internet search-engine company launched in 1998 by two college kids, is on the short list of possible buyers. Clear Channel's market value is currently 17 billion dollars. Google's market value is currently 145 billion dollars.So let me ask you again: How many people do you suppose are looking for answers online?Does your website provide these answers?In 2007, your website will need to deliver: Information. Clarity. Truth.Your website should be a window into the soul of your company:1. Anticipate your customer's question.This is why you must embrace persona-based writing.2. Answer the question transparently.Statements that don't ring true will score against you.3. Make the answer easy to find.This is a function of website architecture.Does it surprise you to learn that most website programmers think exactly backwards from how customers think? An organizational hierarchy that's perfectly logical in the mind of a programmer is often frustratingly illogical in the mind of a customer.Your website architecture dictates your customer's experience. Architecture has nothing to do with graphics. Did your website have an architect? Or was it designed by the programmer? By the graphic artist? By you?A programmer asks, “Does it function?”A graphic designer asks, “Does it 'feel right' and represent us well?”An owner asks, “Does it say what I want it to say?”An architect asks, “Did the customer find their answer?”Mass media says, “Create traffic first. Answer their questions after they arrive.”Search engines say, “Create answers first. Store traffic will be created by the answers you provide.”Your website should be a relationship deepener. Having already interacted with your expert, open-all-night website, customers will walk into your store the next day already sold. We're seeing it constantly.Are you?CONFESSION: Most of what I've shared with you today was gleaned from my daily chats with the Eisenberg brothers. A few minutes with these guys saves me a lot of time and money.You may recall that earlier this year Jeff and Bryan's newest book exploded onto all four bestseller lists: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and USA Today. These brothers consult many of the largest and most successful companies on earth.Would you like to experience 3 days worth of face-to-face training with them? Jeff and Bryan are donating 3 days to help build everyone's business who helped build Engelbrecht House with a donation of at least $1,000.Why are they doing this? Because we believed in them 6 years ago when they launched their company from the basement of their parents' home. The world-famous Eisenbergs are first-year AcadGrads who remember the old days when they were struggling and we were there for them.With their help, you can look back on 2006 as the old days when you were struggling and they were there for you.The door is closing soon. Jeff and Bryan and I would love for you to be here at the Academy Nov 29 – Dec 1.You coming?Roy H. Williams

“Savannah's squares may be public, but they feel private. Their massive, gnarled oaks – dripping with Spanish moss – create an insular mood, not to mention a deep shade… So lazy and calming are these ancient parcels that they act as a narcotic. The temptation is to lose yourself in reverie, to slip irretrievably into a gossamer world of indifference and fantasy.” – Jolee Edmondson, writing of her hometown in Sky magazineDid I think the idea would make money? No.Did I believe it would change the world? No.Was it part of a popular trend? No.When I asked 2 rare musicians to spend a year together, it was because I knew their music needed to exist. Do you sometimes wake up in the morning and know exactly what you're supposed to do? This was one of those days. “Put Mark Huffman and Phil Sheeran into a studio together and listen to what wafts out.”Huffman's mournful, alto flute calls deep to the shadows beneath the trees when the air is warm and there is no breeze; a dark chocolate tunnel exhaling rich, medieval tunes to slow the pulse and quiet the mind, lowering you ever deeper into the narcotic embrace of Savannah's moss-laden giants on a sultry, summer afternoon.Conversely, Phil Sheeran is a Latin Jazz guitarist who makes his strings sing crystal; sharp notes tripping brightly on tiptoes, glittering in the sunlight, twinkling and sparkling like ice along a blade.I'd heard them separately. Now I wanted to hear them together. It would be like watching an episode of Mister Rogers Neighborhood with a zigzagging Zorro slicing the air into confetti about him.That music needed to exist. And now it does.Is there something you believe needs to exist?Don't let yourself talk yourself out of it. Take the time. Steal it from things that are merely urgent. If you wait for “a better time” you'll never do it. Whatever small, symbolic start you can make this instant, make it. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Take that first step.Mark the flutist, Phil the guitarist, Dave the audio tech and Sean the graphics guy are happy they stole the time from their too-busy schedules to bring DeepFlute Dulcinea into existence.Like them, you'll probably have to steal the time from other projects that scream in your face how they're far more urgent and much more important. It's tempting to agree with those shrill voices and say, “I really can't afford to chase a silly rabbit through the forest right now. I'll do it later. Just not right now.”Are you willing to make an irrational commitment? Are you willing to Free the Beagle?Arooo! Aroo-Aroooo!The rabbit is disappearing into the green.You will now run toward the forest, or run away from it.Which will it be?Roy H. Williams

Irrational commitment is a powerful thing. It is the stuff of heroes. Legends live because of it.And like anything powerful, it can be turned toward darkness.But let us look toward the light.Francis Bacon (1561-1626) made a fascinating observation during the days of Cervantes (1547-1616): Philosophy is based on reason and is, therefore, rational. Faith is based on revelation and is, therefore, irrational. Consequently, the greater the impossibility of the thing you believe, the greater the honor to God.Faith is an irrational commitment of the heart, the pattern-recognizing right brain, not the deductive-reasoning left.In Cervantes’ book Don Quixote de la Mancha, our hero makes an irrational commitment to a common village girl who doesn’t even know he exists. To the rest of us, there’s nothing special about Aldonza Lorenzo. But in the mind of Quixote she embodies everything that is good and right and true. He sees in her a princess and calls her his lady Dulcinea.Quixote’s irrational commitment to Dulcinea gives him vision and focus and purpose.Do you make your commitments in your rational mind, or in your irrational heart?Quixote makes himself a fool for Dulcinea, and in her name accomplishes many impossible things.Doing the impossible is easy when you’re utterly committed and have pushed aside your logical mind.Here’s an example of an irrational commitment made by 56 men, 230 years ago:“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”Lady Liberty was their Dulcinea.Here’s another irrational commitment:“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America…”America is a Lady, not a place. And many have given their lives for her honor.But here, I believe, is the best irrational commitment of them all:“…for better, for worse,for richer, for poorer,in sickness and in health,to love and to cherish,till death us do part.”In case I haven’t made it clear: I am in favor of irrational commitment. “It is not good… to be alone.”On June 7, 1947, Paul Compton made an irrational commitment to Jean Johnson and in later years he would be called to deliver on his promise: Alzheimer’s disease stole Jean from Paul, but left her frail body in his care. Strengthened only by the memory of their years together, Paul faced the never-ending job of caring for her empty shell 24 hours a day. And he did it without complaint for 20 long years.I’ve never known a better man.Paul and Jean had 4 daughters, all of whom work shoulder-to-shoulder with their husbands and have done so for more than 30 years. Miraculously, each of the girls is still married to her first husband, though none of those husbands is a prize. Trust me, I know them all. I’m the 18 year-old boy with no money and no future who married the youngest daughter.If you would taste truth and beauty and grace, you must reach for the fruit of a tree planted deep in the soil of irrational commitment.I wish you good fortune on your journey.Roy H. Williams

Sigh… We get asked that question a lot.No, we don't have anything to do with witches, warlocks, séances, Harry Potter or Halloween. We're simply a school of the communication arts.Our mission is to improve the creative thinking and communication skills of educators, ministers, authors, inventors, journalists, business owners, architects, artists and musicians. Not surprisingly, a lot of salespeople, public relations professionals, internet consultants and ad writers are attracted to our school as well.Any student of language will tell you that “wizard” simply means “wise man.” A person who cowers is a coward. A person always drunk is a drunkard. A person who is dull is a dullard. A person who is wise is a wisard.Since the “s” is pronounced as a “z,” it came to be spelled with a “z.”Any person who gathers and catalogs information so that he or she might be able to give good advice at critical times is a wise-ard, or wizard. The insights they provide might seem like magic, but they're merely the result of careful investigation fueled by curiosity.Arthur C. Clarke describes the function of wizards in his famous Three Laws of Technology:“1. When a scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.3. Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic.”At Wizard Academy we push the boundaries of what is known. From these efforts emerge insight, knowledge and new technologies. It only seems like magic.Sadly, the translators of the 1611 King James Bible opted to use the word “wizard” throughout the Old Testament to describe persons who speak to demons or the dead. Please know that we neither practice nor teach these things at Wizard Academy.Now before you get all holier-than-thou and say something silly like, “If the King James Bible was good enough for the apostle Paul, it's good enough for me,” remember: these same King James translators used the word “spirit” to describe a frightening apparition, (Matthew 14:26) and “ghost” to describe the presence of God. (Matthew 1:20 and throughout the New Testament.) Today these words have precisely the opposite meanings, do they not? Ghost is the frightening apparition and Spirit is the presence of God.Remember John Milton of Paradise Lost? Barely 21 years old, Milton stayed up all night on Christmas Eve in 1629 to write On the Morning of Christ's Nativity. It was the first thing he ever wrote. This is the fourth stanza:“See how from far upon the eastern roadThe star-led wisards haste with odours sweet:O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,And lay it lowly at his blessed feet.Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet,And join thy voice unto the angel quire,From out his secret altar touch'd with hallow'd fire.”Obviously, Milton was speaking of the magi (magicians) or “wise men” spoken of in Matthew chapter two who somehow knew that star to be a sign that Christ had been born. These wise men, or wizards, received no annunciation from an angelic choir. The angels appeared to “shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night,” remember?Yet not only did these wisards know that Christ had been born, they knew exactly what gifts to bring: Gold, the gift given to a king, Frankincense, burned as an offering to God, and Myrrh, resin harvested from the skin of the commiphora tree, used to embalm the bodies of the dead. The wise men believed that this newborn baby was king, that he was God, and that he was born to die.And they came to worship him.Here's the exact passage from the King James Bible:“Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, 'Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him…' And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh.” – Matthew chapter 2, King James Bible, translated in 1611Happy Holidays.Roy H. Williams

Advertising is what you buy from the sales department of the media. Public Relations (PR) is what you get from the news department for free.How many ads do you suppose a good news story is worth?Q: Which of the following statements is false?1. Thomas Edison invented electric light.2. Guglielmo Marconi invented radio.3. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.Regardless of which statement you think to be untrue, you're exactly one-third correct. Because all three statements are false.Thomas Edison was a great inventor. No one is saying otherwise. His first invention was a stock ticker that was purchased by the New York Stock Exchange. With the money he made from that invention, Edison hired a staff and set up his famous laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey.Joseph Swann in England and William Sawyer in the US were also brilliant inventors, though neither of them understood the press. Like Edison, Swann and Sawyer were both working to produce electric light by running a current through a filament in a vacuum. When Edison learned they were both further along in their experiments than he was, he simply announced that he'd perfected the light bulb and immediately received all the fame and recognition.Did you know that Edison made his famous announcement more than a year before he actually produced electric light? By the time Swann and Sawyer announced their inventions, electric light was already old news, even though Edison hadn't yet actually done the thing he'd claimed.Edison's statement to the press bought him the time he needed to complete his experiments. Edison understood the power of PR.Nikola Tesla invented radio in 1893 when Marconi was just 19 years old, then wrote a series of scientific papers about exactly how to build one. Underrated to this day, Tesla was perhaps the most brilliant scientist to stride the earth since Leonardo da Vinci.But it was 19 year-old Guglielmo Marconi who knew how to talk loud and draw a crowd. Marconi read Tesla's descriptions, then built a radio and claimed it to be his own invention. Newspaper stories everywhere began touting the young genius Marconi.How certain are we that Marconi stole the credit for Tesla's invention? Nine months after Tesla's death in 1943 the Supreme Patent Court of the United States announced its decision: “Nikola Tesla is the father of wireless transmission and radio.” The Court considered Marconi's argument, examined the evidence, and concluded that Marconi was lying. Case closed.So what about Alexander Graham Bell? Was he simply another poser who knew how to work the press? At the risk of sounding harsh, I'll answer in a word: Yes.The telephone was invented by an Italian immigrant named Antonio Meucci who died penniless and without heirs. Meucci didn't know how to talk loud and draw a crowd. Alexander Graham Bell did.How certain are we that Bell stole the credit for Meucci's invention? In 2001, the 107th Congress of the United States of America passed House Resolution 269. In a nutshell, that resolution acknowledges that “Meucci invented the telephone, Bell stole it from him, and we all feel real bad that Meucci got screwed.” Antonio Meucci had been dead for 112 years.During those 112 years, Bell Telephone became one of the largest and richest companies on earth.Evidently, it pays to understand the press.Like anything powerul, PR can be aimed at good or evil.Do you understand the press and how to get their attention?Would you like to?Roy H. Williams

Toward the end of last week's Monday Morning Memo I promised, “Next week I'll teach you how to increase the magnetism of a message by referring to unseen action.” Mischievously, I preceded that statement with a subtle example of the very thing.Do you remember the quote that preceded my promise? “Thoughts are the threads that bind us to deeds. Deeds are the ropes that bind us to habits. Habits are the chains that bind us to destiny.' – inscription carved on the West Wall at the palace in Maygassa”Where is Maygassa? Who carved the quote? How large is it written? How long has it been there? These are the questions that immediately spring to mind, right? By referring to an unseen act – an event in an untold story – a writer stimulates curiosity, elevates interest and heightens awareness.Are these things you'd like to know how to do?A famous paragraph written by Ernest Hemingway opens by saying, “They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard.”“What cabinet ministers of what country, for what crime, or for what historical movement, and with what justice, or with what miscarriage of justice, we are never told… these elements were rigorously excluded from the writer's art, in order to intensify the descriptions of pure pain and horror.” – Maxwell Geismar, July 1, 1962Another quote mentioned last week was taken from The Engines of God. Here's a second one (p.271) from that same book, lifted from the diary of Janet Allegri, “I've been thinking a lot about my life the last few days, and I have to say that it doesn't seem to have had much point. I've done well professionally, and I've had a pretty good time. Maybe that's all you can reasonably ask. But tonight I keep thinking about things not done. Things not attempted because I was afraid of failing. Things not got around to. Thank God I had the chance to help Hutch throw her foamball. I hope it gets out. It's something I'd like to be remembered for.”“Thank God I had the chance to help Hutch throw her foamball.”Who is Hutch? Why did she throw a foamball? Who did she aim it at? Why did she need help throwing it? What is a foamball, anyway?And aren't you just a bit curious about Janet Allegri and what else might be hiding in that diary?Dang. I did it to you again.Referring to an event in an untold story is a powerful technique, rarely used. Most writers just don't have the guts.Here's a radio script written by the great Adam Donmoyer in which he obliquely refers to a couple of untold stories. See if they don't leap off the page and bang you on the snout:Do you remember what it was like before you met her? Seriously, do you remember all those girls who seemed okay at first, but later – whoa!But now you're beginning to understand what they mean by “happily ever after,” right?Do you have any idea how many guys are out there still lookin' for exactly what you have?Don't screw this up, man. Remember what happened to Leeroy.You need to think about lifting up the top of an engagement ring box while you're down on one knee. That's really not such a scary idea when you imagine that it's her you're giving it to, right?The scary part is shopping for a diamond. You don't want to go swimming in those shark-infested waters. No, no, no. You want to go where it's happy and safe. You want to go to Preston's [Guitar Stinger] Rocks.No pressure, no hassle. Just great prices, the hottest styles of engagement rings and financing if you need it.They don't call us Preston's Rocks [Guitar Stinger] for nothing. We do diamonds better than anybody, because diamonds are all we do.Back behind the Arby's on 96th, just west of I-69.# # # #If you'd like to hear that radio ad in its final form, just go to http://www.MMMemo.com/PrestonsAd.htmAnd don't forget to bang the wonkus.Roy H. Williams

Persona-based writing is the new Targeting. According to what we've seen so far, ads that employ persona-based writing are outperforming yesterday's demo-targeted ads by an average of 81 percent.Website copy, direct mail letters, radio scripts and magazine ads that use persona-based language are pulling buckets of gold from the dwindling rivers of mass media.Persona-based ad writing is rooted in self-definition, that life-long process by which we determine who we shall be in our minds.If you understand what I just said, you can see that not only does self-definition provide the familiar image in the mirror of persona-based writing, but it is the strength behind branding as well.1. Self-definition begins with a perception of family and our place in it.At an early age we begin answering the question, “Who am I, what is my place?”Am I my parents' Reason for Living? (Common among only children)Am I the Protector of my sibling? (Common among eldest children)Am I the Protected, mischievous one? (Common among second children)Am I the Guilty one? (Common among abused children)NOTE: These are, of course, just a few of the many possible perceptions of familial relationships in childhood. Please don't feel limited by them.2. Self-definition is further influenced by our companions.“Who am I, what is my place?” Am I the Fast Runner? Am I the Quiet One? Am I the Comedian? Am I the King? Am I the Outcast? Am I the Sidekick? Who am I?3. Self-definition is reinforced by feedback from our teachers.Their words and attitudes shape us far more than we, or they, suspect. To pay teachers poorly is to hold them in low esteem. It ensures that the best and brightest among us will likely choose a profession other than teaching. And the next generation will be greatly diminished because of our lack of vision.4. Self-definition is molded by media.Continually confronting us with its own definitions of “good” and “bad,” we are forced to consciously reject the media each day or it will modify our unconscious self-perception. “Are my armpits dry enough? Am I supporting our troops? Do I have gingivitis?”5. Self-definition is expressed through our choices; actions, words, and purchases.Yes, we buy much of what we buy to remind ourselves, and tell the world around us, who we are. Our choices of footwear, clothing, hairstyle and automobile are statements of self-definition, assuming of course that we chose these things ourselves.“Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.” – Maggie Tufu, The Engines of God, p. 398Remember Maslow's Hierarchy? According to most estimates, 60 percent of us are stuck in that third level from the bottom. We're still trying to figure out what we want to be when we grow up. Our Need to Belong is our greatest, unmet need.Does it offend you that I believe we are flawed creatures capable of flashes of brilliance, heroism and amazing wisdom, but following these fine, few moments we lapse into the cloudy self-definitions we've carried from childhood like woolen blankets fresh from the dryer?“I suppose I do sound crazy,' Binnesman admitted. 'But everyone has a touch of madness, and those who can't admit it are usually farther gone than the rest of us.”“In choosing one path we ignore others. And wonder what might have been.” – Binnesman“Many adventures await you upon the road of life. Enter these doors, and take your first step…” – from a placard above the Horn and Hound Pub“Life is a journey, and with every step we reach a point of no return.” – Gaborn Val Orden“Thoughts are the threads that bind us to deeds. Deeds are the ropes that bind us to habits. Habits are the chains that bind us to destiny.” – inscription carved on the West Wall at the palace in MaygassaNext week I'll teach you how to increase the magnetism of a message by referring to unseen action.I'm glad you came on this walk through the woods with me.Till next week, Arooo! Aroo-Arooooo!Roy H. Williams

Every Nazi believed every other Nazi had character and integrity. Likewise, the Ku Klux Kooks and the Taliban believe themselves to be the high defenders of all that is holy and true.Your judgment of the “character and integrity” of others is rooted in the values you hold to be self-evident or in the religion to which you subscribe.Is it only those who believe as you do that have “character and integrity?” That question lies at the feet of the survey I introduced last week. I promised you I would share how we were going to use the information we were gathering. Do you remember?Actually that information has several uses. But we'll put them in chronological order:Monday, 9:47AM: There it was. Shortly after the MMMemo went out, I found it in my inbox, right on schedule; the first nitpick, an unintended put-down of me by one of my friends: “Roy – I find it remarkable that character/integrity didn't make it on your list of admirable attributes. The rest are quite a few rungs down on my list. – RS”It appears that my friend was disappointed in me. By leaving character/integrity off the list, I obviously didn't have any.It doesn't seem to matter that – in anticipation of this – I gave one last instruction at the top of the survey: “One final point of clarity before we begin. You'll notice that certain qualities aren't represented on the list. As an example, “sensitive and artistic.” The underlying question is this: What do you appreciate most about the artist? Is it their skill, the physical ability to do the difficult thing? Is it the impact, the spiritual clarity of the message they're communicating? Is it the fame they've achieved because of their efforts?”I responded to my friend by email: “Character/Integrity falls solidly in the category of ‘Spiritual Clarity – Inner confidence, people who know who they are and what they believe and are willing to identify themselves as such. (Can be religious or non-religious)'I apologize that I didn't define the categories more clearly. – Roy H. Williams”That particular friend was merely the first who wrote last week to critique, correct, or instruct me.What have we learned so far?1. Looking into an objective mirror makes us uncomfortable when it comes to matters of self-definition. We crave to control the criteria by which we are judged.2. When communicating with a tribe, the language of that tribe is incredibly important. (This is the foundation of Persona-Based Marketing and Selling by Personality Type.)3. The things you don't say are often more important than the things you do say. What you choose to leave out reveals your focus. (The Cognoscenti will recall this as Frameline Magnetism, the seven-eighths of Hemingway's iceberg that is underwater, one of the three principles of Being Perfectly Robert Frank.)4. Every positive attribute has its negative side. Look again at that list of six categories and you'll see an equal number of positive and negative manifestations for each.I realize that today's memo may be hard to understand at first. But is it possible that it's valuable enough to warrant a second or third read?If you are willing to do a frightening thing, if you are willing to run toward the sound of the guns, if you would fight with all your strength against self-righteousness: step out of yourself and see the truth your adversary sees.I ask you to do this only because I love you.Roy H. Williams

Will you tell me the truth about yourself if I let you do it from behind a mask?I'm collecting impressions today and I'm willing to share my collected data with you. My hope is that we'll both will get a glimpse into how we measure ourselves, our friends, and our heroes.Want to give it a try?Which of the following characteristics do you most admire? Which trait is number two?Physical AbilityOutstanding athletes, highly skilled tradesmen, the marksman who can hit a target from a great distance.Physical AppearancePersons with striking features, enhanced by hairstyle, clothing and the way they move.Financial AchievementSuccessful entrepreneurs, savvy investors, wealth creators.Intellectual ProwessGeniuses, bestselling authors, Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners, persons with advanced degrees.Spiritual ClarityInner confidence, people who know who they are and what they believe and are willing to identify themselves as such. (Can be religious or non-religious)Famous NameDistinguished by birth, relationship, or any other achievement. Recognized around the world for who they are.Now before you go to the survey landing page and rank these six in the order of their relative importance to you, I want to remind you that your anonymity is guaranteed. It's going to be fun. It's going to be enlightening. I promise.Immediately upon ranking your sixth and final characteristic, the website will tell you what percentage of the population sees as you do.Soon I'll tell you exactly how you and I are going to use this information.Thanks for coming out to play when I called your name.Ciao for Niao,Roy H. Williams

Why does every branch of medicine have pediatric specialists? Are kids a different species than adults?In a word, “yes.”According to Dr. David Nichols, “Children are susceptible to different diseases than adults. Their basic anatomy is the same as ours, but they experience a whole different set of problems.”Business life-cycles are like that, too.When young, a business must embrace fundamental change. To survive and thrive, it must:(1.) Differentiate itself from its competitors in a way that appeals to customer preferences, and(2.) Substantiate those claims with something beyond mere ad-speak. We're talking about creating a believable, fundamental brand essence.Consequently, a young business often grows by large percentages. Mature businesses rarely do.But there are advantages to maturity. Mature businesses have:(1.) repeat customers,(2.) referral customers, and(3.) reputationto keep them humming. In other words, they can coast. This is why mature businesses usually think in terms of incremental change: “Tweaking.” “Refining.” “Getting to the next level.”Be careful not to bite into the illusion of permanent success, Snow White, lest you fall asleep and be eaten by piranha.You can be sure you've slipped into sleepy, incremental change when:(1.) you feel you've essentially perfected your business model, and(2.) your newest competitors are doing something significantly different than you, and(3.) all your people are telling you that “targeting the right customer” is the way to get to the next level, and how “a rifle shot is better than a shotgun blast.”But if rifles with cross-haired scopes are so superior, why don't we use them when shooting skeet or hunting dove, quail, geese or duck?Might it be because they're moving targets?Are your customers moving targets?Rifles and scopes are for big-game hunters, those marketers who target rich people. (Use data-mining to get them in your crosshairs and then mail them something, call them on the phone, or drive to their offices and leave gifts with their receptionists. The current name for this technique is clienteling.)Me, I prefer to keep both eyes open and the whole horizon in view. This is why I most often use the shotgun of mass-media to tell the world about my clients. To be successful, I must make sure my ads differentiate my clients from their competitors and that we substantiate every claim we make.Don't worry so much about who you're reaching. Worry about whether or not they're impressed.Is the public impressed with your product when they hear your ads?If you want to experience tunnel vision, just close one eye and look through a tube. Congratulations, now you're targeting.Has the time come for you to think young again? Are you ready to embrace fundamental change?Open the other eye.Roy H. Williams

A visual image is a simple thing, a picture that enters the eyes.But a mental image is more complex.Assembled in the mind from information real and imagined, mental images are complex composites of sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, opinion and mood, combined with associative memories, both conscious and unconscious.A visual image in the hand of an artist is merely a tool to trigger a mental image. The mental image is what we're after. Whether speaking in the language of Shape, Color, Music, Symbol or Word, our goal is always to trigger a mental image.The visual image above the headline of today's memo is the stylized drawing of a home. If you noticed the baseball replacing the sun in the sky, the drawing made a different statement. It may have been confusing for a moment, but then you remembered ‘home plate' in the batter's box, or of how baseball represents Mom and Home and Apple Pie, or of how the game's players were once called “the boys of summer.”The drawings of the home and the baseball were selected to trigger an assortment of mental images. Likewise, the words themselves – “home” and “baseball” – trigger mental images equally rich in tangental and associative memories.Here's an example of what I mean. In the words of the late Bart Giamatti, “There is no great, long poem about baseball. It may be that baseball is itself its own great, long poem. This had occurred to me in the course of my wondering why home plate wasn't called fourth base. And then it came to me, ‘Why not? Meditate on the name, for a moment, ‘home.'' Home is an English word virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and accessibility, the aroma of inclusiveness, of freedom from wariness that cling to the word ‘home' and are absent from ‘house' or even ‘my house.' Home is a concept, not a place; it's a state of mind where self-definition starts. It is origins, a mix of time and place and smell and weather wherein one first realizes one is an original; perhaps like others, especially those one loves; but discreet, distinct, not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate, and it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it were ever to occur, would happen. All literary romance, all romance epic, derives from the Odyssey and it is about going home. It's about rejoining; rejoining a beloved, rejoining parent to child, rejoining a land to its rightful owner or rule. Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things. And ‘going home' is where that restoration occurs, because that's where it matters most. Baseball is, of course, entirely about going home. It's the only game you ever heard of where you want to get back to where you started. All the other games are territorial – you want to get his or her territory – but not baseball. Baseball simply wants to get you from here, back around to here.”Wow. Who knew that two simple words, baseball and home, could conjure such a rich array of mental images? Words and pictures can do that. This is why we must select them carefully when our goal is to trigger a mood or change an opinion.If you want to experience still yet another – slightly disturbing – mental image of what ‘home' can mean, take a look at the famous painting by Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World.If you found today's memo interesting and would like to learn how to stack shape, color, music, symbol and word so that you deepen the public's perception of your message, or if you'd like to learn how to use contradictory signals to elevate people's interest, you need to be in Austin next week for a class that will blow your mind.Or, you can stay home and be bored:)I hope to see you here.Roy H. Williams

Contrary to popular belief, Americans don't hate advertising.We just hate ads that sound like ads.Do your ads sound like ads? Are you guilty of Ad-speak?Ad-speak is filled with polished words and filtered phrases that deliver no information and have no relevance. Ambiguous claims give Ad-speak a hollow sound.Do your ads mention your superior service, your friendly staff, or name the number of years you've been in business?Let me know how that works out for you.A meaningless statement remains meaningless no matter how often it's heard. Repetition has become a blunt instrument. Top of Mind Awareness isn't enough anymore. Today's customer expects meaningful information and lots of details.Have you heard of this new thing called the internet? It's giving people new expectations. It's allowing them to become their own expert. Knowledge lies anxious at their fingertips. Gloss over the truth in your advertising and you'll quickly be dismissed as a poser.I apologize if that last paragraph seemed hateful or rude, but the truth is I'm exhausted, bone-weary from wrestling with advertisers who have no real message and want to compensate for it by “targeting the right customer.”Writing good ads is easy when you have something to say. Do you have something to say? Something we don't already know? Something that matters?We're only 8 months into it, but 2006 has already marked itself as a pivotal year, a year we'll never forget. With ever-increasing frequency, we're seeing ad campaigns stumble and fail because they carry no real news to the customer.But advertisers whose ads brim with things that matter are enjoying record growth.Time is currency. Information is power.Don't ask the public to give you their time and and then give them nothing in return. Pay them for their time by giving them relevant information in your ads.The future of your business depends on it.Roy H. Williams

Do you feel that something might be wrong with your business but you're not quite sure what it is?Solving the problem is the easy part. The tricky part is getting clarity on exactly what the problem is.Careless doctors treat symptoms. They don't worry about why your head is hurting, they just give you a painkiller. “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.” But good doctors identify the cause of the pain, knowing that if they treat the root, the symptoms will disappear on their own.Short-term marketing is like aspirin. It temporarily takes away the pain without ever addressing the disease. But when the gravity of pain becomes too strong to be overcome with a discount event or a celebrity appearance, the sucking spiral begins. Deeper and tighter, the same scenery showing up again and again, the water grows cold and the darkness sets in. “When will this bad dream end?”Good doctors use diagnostic tools to shine a bright light on your problem. Sure it's embarrassing for a moment. But now you get to breathe again.Here are a few diagnostic tools developed by my partners and me that you can use for free:1. The Advertising Performance Equation will help you identify your problem. Use the equation and have confidence that you've looked in every corner of your business where a solution might be found.2. How to Calculate an Ad Budget is a free download at Wizard AcademyPress.com. It will tell you… well… how to calculate an ad budget.3. How to Measure the Strength of a Brand is another download in the Freebies section at WizardAcademyPress.com4. Is your advertising copy, email message, or website text focused too much on you instead of your customer? Hook into Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg's Customer Focus Calculator and your message will be instantly evaluated… for free.5. Have you been defining your customer too narrowly? Answer the four short questions within the Eisenberg's Complexogram and you'll instantly see how you can subtly change your message to appeal to twice as many people.6. Have you seen the new TV ads where the Macintosh meets the PC? Strong brands have personalities like characters in a movie. Do you want to refine your brand personality? Acadgrad David Freeman is a successful author, a world renowned screenwriting coach and the inventor of Emotioneering. And he's got a free download for you: Refining Your Brand Personality.7. A new tool that will be unveiled at the Wizard Academy reunion in October is the ICUBU Customer Experience Index. Spelled “I see you be you,” the ICUBU index will measure scientifically the tactile, Personal Experience Factors that are being measured unconsciously by your customers every day. Your business will be scored in 100 different touchpoints with each score compared against the national average for your business category. The ICUBU Customer Experience Index will tell you exactly where you excel, where you're falling short, and precisely what to do to raise your score in each touchpoint.The first step in exceeding your customer's expectations is to know those expectations. This is what the ICUBU will tell you. And then it will tell you exactly where and how you're falling short.Business Diagnostics lift you up to the next level; the one that has been just beyond your grasp.Are you ready to go that high?Let us know if you need a hand.Roy H. Williams

I was planning to write When Marketing is a Mirage, but that's going to have to wait. Because today I'm hearing the voice of John Steinbeck as he mumbles to his poodle, Charley, and ambles toward his pickup truck:“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.”Have you ever felt that Steinbeckian restlessness?John's jitters are fully upon me today. I can think of several reasons why this might be, but none of them really matter. I only know that I am to go, and I shall do my best to take you with me. Are you willing to come?In one of his Paradigm videos, Joel Barker explains how Pioneers differ from Settlers. According to Joel, Pioneers are they who plunge ahead into uncharted wilderness and blaze trails for the more cautious settlers to follow. Wisely waiting in the security of town, the Settlers watch from a distance until the destination is reached, the enemies are subdued, and the beckoning trail sparkles westward in the morning light. The sensible Settlers raise cupped hands to their mouths and call down the trail, “Is it safe out there?” And the Pioneers call back, “Yes! It's wonderful. Come on.”Then the Settlers in their canvas-covered wagons follow the trail cut through the wilderness by the Pioneers.There is much wisdom in being a Settler. A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether.Let me tell you plainly, friend, the money is in being a Settler.But the fun is in being a Pioneer.Mark Fox tells our students at Wizard Academy, “If you have a truly new idea and people don't hate it, they weren't listening.” Mark prepares us to be successful Pioneers, going to new places in the mind, discovering new answers, finding new ways to communicate all the things in life worth saying.Takagi Masakatsu is a young Pioneer in Kyoto, Japan. Richard Minsky is a Pioneer from upstate New York. Pioneer Scott McCloud is wandering the highways of America in the footsteps of Steinbeck and Charley. I'm hoping to bring them all to the Academy. They'll tell us what they've seen in their parts of the wilderness, and we'll share what we've seen in ours.I hope you can be here. We'll want to hear what's happening in your part of the woods, as well.Who is coming… when they'll arrive… and what they are coming to do. Just keep an eye on WizardAcademy.org.Roy H. Williams

To go from one state of consciousness to another…To move from an old opinion to a new…To travel from ignorance to insightand darkness to light…requires a portal.A portal is a transitionary device of sight or sound that functions as a sort of third gravitating body between the this and the that, pulling us toward itself, allowing us to bridge into the unknown from the known.Persuasion, in all its forms, requires a portal. If your goal is to educate, motivate, evangelize or sell, you're going to need a portal to succeed. Without a series of known portals at your disposal, you're just talking to yourself in the dark. A portal allows you to connect to the need being felt in the heart of your student, your employee, your convert, your customer.Portals can be colors, shapes, symbols, rituals, words, or music. The Cognoscenti will remember that I talk about portals for about 10 short minutes during the 3-day experience known as The Magical Worlds Communications Workshop.Portals in literature include the red pill that takes Neo into the Matrix, the tornado that takes Dorothy into the Land of Oz, the wardrobe that takes the children into Narnia, and the rabbit hole that takes us into Wonderland.We look deeply into these and dozens of other portals – visual, literary, and musical portals – during one of the 90-minute sessions in the newest class at Wizard Academy, Advanced Thought Particles and Third Gravitating Bodies.I'll also be sharing this 90-minute session with all our guests at the Academy Reunion on October 21. It's an avalanche of knowledge, illustrated by examples in sight and sound certain to make you dizzy.The red pill is strong, the tornado is terrifying, the wardrobe is inexplicable and the rabbit hole is deep.And there are monsters in the deep. Are you sure you're ready for Wonderland?Advanced Thought Particles and Third Gravitating Bodies picks up exactly where the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop leaves off. Both classes are selling out faster than ever.The Wizard Academy Campus has nine buildings scattered across its Campus in various stages of construction and seven of them will be complete by the time you get here in October for the Wizard Academy reunion.The bad news is that seating limitations allow us to accept only the first 200 registrants.You snooze, you lose. You study long, you study wrong. The early bird gets the worm. Doubtless there are other platitudes and euphemisms that would be appropriate, but I'm sure you get the idea.For more information, visit WizardAcademy.org.We'll see you when you get here.Roy H. Williams

Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are both accepted as scientific fact even though they’re mutually exclusive. Albert Einstein spent the second half of his life searching for a unifying truth that would reconcile the two.Einstein was searching for String Theory. It not only reconciles General Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, but it reconciles Science and the Bible as well.Listen to a group of physicists talk about String Theory and it will slowly dawn on you that they’re explaining the entire universe as nothing but the quivering, dancing echo of the voice of God. “Let there be light.”String Theory describes energy and matter as being composed of tiny, wiggling strands of energy that look like strings. And the pitch of a string’s vibration determines the nature of its effect.In essence, String Theory describes space and time, matter and energy, gravity and light, indeed all of God’s creation… as music.Strings of gravity vibrate at a different frequency than strings of light. The strings that make up protons vibrate at a different pitch than the strings that make up electrons. Strings composing the strong nuclear force vibrate differently than the strings composing the weak nuclear force. And electromagnetism vibrates at its own unique frequency as well.We’ve known for a while that matter is made of protons, neutrons and electrons – which are themselves made of quarks. Now String Theory comes along to whisper in our ear that quarks are made of vibrating, wiggling strings of energy that are unimaginably small. According to Brian Greene, a Columbia University physicist educated at Harvard and Oxford, “If an atom were enlarged to the size of the solar system, a string would only be as large as a tree.”Greene goes on to say, “Just as different vibrational patterns or frequencies of a single cello string create what we hear as different musical notes, the different way that strings vibrate give particles their unique properties, such as mass and charge. For example, the only difference between the particles making up you and me – and the particles that transmit gravity and the other forces – is the way these tiny strings vibrate. Composed of an enormous number of these oscillating strings, the universe can be thought of as a grand, cosmic symphony.”According to String Theory, what appears to be empty space is actually a tumultuous ocean of strings vibrating at the precise frequencies that create the 4 dimensions you and I call height, width, depth and time. We live in these 4 dimensions and know them well. But String Theory (M-Theory) describes an additional 7 dimensions beyond our ability to perceive.Suddenly the idea of an invisible world isn’t quite so hard to believe.Physicist David Gross of the University of California in Santa Barbara says, “It’s as if we’ve stumbled in the dark into a house which we thought was a 2-bedroom apartment and now we’re discovering there’s a 19-room mansion at least, and maybe it’s got a thousand rooms and we’re just beginning our journey.”So what can String Theory teach us about art and advertising, journalism and truth, persuasion and seduction?Come to the inaugural session of Wizard Academy’s new class on Advanced Thought Particles and Third Gravitating Bodies and we’ll do our best to open your eyes to a whole new way of looking at communication.Read the details at WizardAcademy.org.Roy H. Williams

Last Thursday the Wall Street Journal published a story about a new book written by two of our faculty members, hinting strongly that if the biggest advertising agencies on Madison Avenue would just buy a copy and read it, they would find the answers to all the questions that have eluded them. That story was a very big deal. On Friday the Wall Street Journal bestseller list revealed Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg's Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? to be the top-ranked business book in America.Six years ago, Jeff and Bryan were regular folks. Struggling. Hopeful. Doing the best they could with limited resources.Sound familiar?Jeff came alone his first visit to Austin because the brothers had only enough money for one plane ticket. He sat in the small meeting room of our old facility with a couple dozen other people who had come for a free public seminar. Jeff and I spoke briefly that day. He shared his dream and I encouraged him. A couple of months later, Jeff was back for a 3-day class and he brought his younger brother, Bryan. They obviously grasped the essence of what Wizard Academy was teaching, so when they asked permission to expand my work and apply it to the Internet, I said, “Delighted to see you do it.” They smiled. I smiled. And in that moment I was sure of something. “Someday your company is going to be a whole lot bigger than mine,” I said. They had no company at the time.When Pennie and I launched Wizard Academy Press, the Eisenbrothers turned in a manuscript called Persuasive Online Copywriting. We published it, sold some copies on Amazon.com and kept our fingers crossed that a real publisher might take an interest and give the book brick-and-mortar distribution. It never happened.When I flew to New York to visit them in their cramped little office in the basement of an old house in Brooklyn, they showed me their fancy new coffee maker. They were really proud of it. I sipped a cup and talked about how all their hard work would someday pay off. Soon their strange, new methods began paying big dividends for clients and thousands of people began to lean forward with their hands cupped behind their ears. The Wizards of Web curriculum was born when the brothers presented us with a fabulous syllabus for a course on Internet marketing.Their second Wizard Academy Press book, Call to Action, made the bestseller lists a year ago in spite of the fact that it also had no brick-and-mortar distribution. Finally, the brick-and-mortar publishers began to take an interest. Last week's trumpeting of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, published by Thomas Nelson, couldn't possibly have made Wizard Academy more proud. Today Jeff and Bryan's client list includes many of the largest companies in the world.Craig Arthur, Chris Maddock, Michele Miller, Mike Dandridge, David Freeman, Dave Young, Holly Buchanan, Juan Tornoe, Thomas Tucker, Mark Fox, Walter Koschnitzke, Lisa Davis, Steve Rae, Jeff Sexton, Sonja Howle, Steve Clark, Michael Drew, Chuck McKay, Peter Nevland, Ron Love, Paul Finley, Clay Campbell, Sean McNally, Tim Miles, Greg Farrell and others have graduated from Wizard Academy, pursued independent research in an area of interest, created something for Wizard Academy Press, then gone on to become extremely successful.Wizard Academy throws gas on the fire and Wizard Academy Press fans the flames, but you've to provide the spark.Have you got a little fire that burns within you? If so, you, too may someday own a fancy coffee maker.And then we'll have a cup.Roy H. Williams

About 15 years ago I concluded that a medium-impact broadcast ad should be replaced only after the typical listener has heard it at least 12 times, and a low-impact ad should be replaced after achieving a frequency of 20. I arrived at these conclusions by carefully monitoring the results of radio campaigns of clients around the country.But the times have changed, and so have you and I. It appears that the media filters we carry in our heads are like computers: they've been forced to get faster in order to keep up with the demands our high-speed society puts on them.My most current research clearly indicates that today's moderate-impact broadcast ad begins to show diminishing returns after achieving a frequency of only 8 to 10. Let a listener hear the same ad 12 times or more and you'll see clearly diminished effectiveness after achieving a frequency of 8 to 10. It appears that our brains have learned to more quickly recognize what we've heard before, and to subconsciously tune it out.Dang. This is means we've got to write 20 to 50 percent more ads in every 52-week campaign if we're going to keep our message at maximum effectiveness.One thing that hasn't changed, though, is that we still have to hear the new ad 2 or 3 times before it begins to affect us, even when we're already familiar with the advertiser in question and have a positive opinion of them. What this means is that the first week of every new series of ads will continue to yield softer results than you can expect to see in weeks two and three.Neurologically, all of this happens in the phonological loop, one of the 3 functions of Working Memory just forward of Heschl's Gyrus and Broca's area in the dorsolateral prefrontal association area of the left hemisphere of your brain. Broca's area is also known as Brodmann's area 44. And just interior to it is the Nucleus Accumbens, the pleasure center of the brain.Okay, I'll admit it… I said all that just to impress you. I wonder why I do that. Do you figure perhaps I'm insecure about my lack of education? Or is it just that I like to show off? I should probably give that some thought.Oh well. That's pretty much all I've got to say today.Oh! One last thing: Wizard Academy is offering a Free, Public-Sampler Seminar on Saturday afternoon, August 19 in palatial Tuscan Hall. I'll be delivering a tantalizing series of multimedia previews and teasers about each of the new, upcoming courses at Wizard Academy. It's going to be lots of fun. We won't be starting until 2 in the afternoon, so you'll have plenty of time to fly into Austin on Saturday morning from wherever you happen to be. We'll keep going until probably 9 or 10 that night because we want you to see how magical the Wizard Academy campus becomes after dark. But don't worry, we're going to provide a nice evening meal for you. No charge. We know you'll be back to take some classes later. We just take the cost of it from our ad budget.And that, my friend, is what you call “transparency.”I hope you approve.Roy H. Williams

We buy what we buy to remind ourselves and tell the world around us who we are.“Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being.” – Bill Bernbach, legendary ad writer“I am irresistible, I say, as I put on my designer fragrance. I am a merchant banker, I say, as I climb out of my BMW. I am a juvenile lout, I say, as I down a glass of extra strong lager. I am handsome, I say, as I don my Levi’s jeans.” – John Kay, columnist for The Financial Times“In the factory we make cosmetics. In the store we sell hope.” – Charles Revson, maker of RevlonYou’ve heard it said throughout your life: “Birds of a feather flock together.” So what is the feather, what are the characteristics, of the birds who flock to your brand, your product, your company? Beyond the fact that they all chose to do business with you, what do these birds have in common? Answer that question and you’ll discover the truth of your brand and earn yourself a copy Bible, a dialogue Bible and a comprehensive brand manual.Do you want true brand power? Then you must quit writing to a particular type of customer and begin writing to specific, representative customers. In their current bestseller, Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg call this technique “writing to personas.” (Yes, the boys did it again. Their new book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? leaped onto the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists as quickly as did Call to Action, their 2005 bestseller.)According to the brothers, correctly identifying your customer personas is the foundation of Persuasion Architecture™ and the beginning of Six Sigma optimization in marketing.Sharing a glimpse of what they plan to teach at the Wizard Academy Fundraiser this November, Jeff Eisenberg says,“Anything that results in a lower level of customer satisfaction or a lost customer is a defect, a flaw in the sales process. When a person doesn’t convert, your marketing has a service defect and your processes don’t deliver on your promise to customers or to prospects. At least, that’s how you’d look at things if you applied the Six Sigma discipline to your marketing. Think of these defects as holes in a leaky bucket.When you use Persuasion Architecture™ in your marketing, you are predicting your customer’s behavior based on assumptions you’ve made about their motivation. If he or she does what you modeled, then you understood the customer’s needs. But if what they do differs from what you planned, there can be only two possible reasons:(1.) You correctly understood their motivations but your execution was bad. Correct your execution.(2.) If these changes in execution fail to improve results, then your original assumptions were probably wrong. Correct your assumptions.Either way, using Persuasion Architecture™ personas in your marketing is the best way to bring accountability to your ad budget.”Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg were among the earliest graduates of Wizard Academy and have since become important faculty members. Will you be here in November when they whisper unpublished secrets to their Wizard Academy family?Yes, we are taking over the world.Roy H. Williams

Colorful and interesting people surround you in life, but in a graveyard, everyone becomes boring: “John Smith. Devoted Husband, Loving Father.”That's it? That's a life remembered?Where do they bury the interesting people? Where do they bury the reckless daredevils and tender poets and seductive femmes fatale? Where can I find their stories?When Dad died a year ago, my friend Woody Justice cancelled a world of commitments to be at his funeral. Woody knew my father well. Thinking back about him, the Woodster smiled that day and said, “He was a colorful old son-of-a-bitch, wasn't he?” I looked up and smiled and nodded. “You know what I think he'd like?” Woody chuckled, “the biggest grave marker in the cemetery. And on it the words, ‘Larger Than Life, Even in Death.'”That was Dad. Always the center of attention. The kind of guy who would pay any price for any thing, as long as you could draw a big enough crowd to watch him buy it.A few months ago I shared with you the note Dad scribbled when he knew he was dying. “All the little things in life add up to your life. If you don't get it right then nothing else matters. It gets lonely in the promised land by yourself.”But no one should be remembered only for their dying regrets. So after a year of pondering, my sons and I sat down on Father's Day, 2006, to decide what to carve on my father's oversized tombstone. They give you the first 30 characters for free.We went over the limit by 1,037.We feel sure that my Dad will be the center of attention in that cemetery for as long as those carved letters remain on the face of that granite. People will shout and say, “Come and see what I've found!” They'll have their pictures taken next to him. They'll go home and tell other people about him. They'll read his stone and smile and say, “He was certainly a colorful old son-of-a-bitch, wasn't he?”And that's exactly how Dad would have wanted it.But I'm not talking just about my father today. I'm talking about you, and I'm talking about making money.Do you have a business you believe in? Would you like to see that business grow?You need to do for your business what my sons and I did for my father. You need to embrace the amazing wisdom of Bill Bernbach, the legendary ad writer who said, “I've got a great gimmick. Let's tell the truth.”Telling the truth is powerful. Telling the truth is scary. Telling the truth will always cause complaints.Don't let it bother you. Small people complain. Let them stand in the dark of your shadow.Come visit us when you can.Your colorful friend,Roy H. Williams III

Each letter of the alphabet represents a phoneme, a tiny sound that joins with other tiny sounds to make the more complex sounds we call words.Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.Numerals are images of amounts. But the amounts they represent are real.You see a person when you look in the mirror that no one sees but you. Other people see a person when they look at you, but you're not that person, either.Dulcinea was the image of feminine perfection in the mind of Don Quixote. In reality, she was a common, earthy village girl with nothing special about her.“I think the idealization of women is indigenous to men. There are various ways of idealizing women, especially sexually, based in almost every case on their inaccessibility. When a woman functions as an unobtainable love object, then she takes on a mythical quality. You can see this principle functioning as a sales device in advertising and in places like Playboy magazine. Almost every movie you see has this quality, because you can't embrace the image on the screen. Thousands of novels use this principle, because you can't embrace a printed image on a page.” – James Dickey, Self Interviews, p. 153Bible illustrator Barry Moser says, “I think when people have illustrated the Bible, most of them have been devout Christians. Because they're devout Christians they can't separate themselves from the work. They get mired in piety, so they can't see the darkness. They only see the light of salvation. But if you don't have the darkness to contrast with the light, then what are you offering but cotton candy for Sunday school children?”Moser goes on to say, “The truth I see is that the Bible is populated with people like you and me. People who are flawed and imperfect. People who have crooked teeth and bad skin. Who have stinky breath and dirty feet. Who don't always know the difference between right and wrong. Who are self-serving and capricious. People caught in the conflict and dichotomy between good and evil, between the sacred and the profane, between beauty and ugliness, and between the bright and the moronic. People who hope – and many believe – that they are made in the very image of God.”Do we tend to believe in a god whose attitude reflects our own? In her book Bird by Bird Anne Lamott speaks of a friend named Tom who said, “You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”By the way, a single copy of the deluxe edition of the Bible illustrated by Barry Moser sells for about $30,000. Want to take a look at it?In 1971, Marshall McLuhan spoke about the gap between image and reality in politics. “Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.”Whether it's women… or politicians… or God… we tend to believe in images that aren't entirely accurate.But McLuhan wasn't the first to note the fact that we Americans tend to vote for a romanticized reflection of ourselves. H. L. Mencken, writing for the Baltimore Evening Sun on July 26, 1920: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”H.L. Mencken, a journalist, wrote those words 85 years and 11 months ago.Human beings are creators, flinging powerful images into the minds of their fellow men. And all of these images are built of tiny particles of thought.Knowing how to sculpt vivid mental images from particles of thought is a very powerful thing. In reality, it's the basis of every form of art, including sculpture, photography, architecture, speechwriting, advertising, poetry, website design and all the visual arts, including filmmaking.Wizard Academy is a school of these communication arts. Advanced Thought Particles is a new class at Wizard Academy, the long-awaited sequel to the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop. Check it out at WizardAcademy.org.Roy H. Williams

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain“I too have had my dreams: ay, known indeed the crowded visions of a fiery youth which haunt me still.” – Oscar WildeDo you have a plan that makes you feel half crazy and the other half scared? Are you attempting to do something that's far bigger than you are? Tell me about it in an email. Send it to [email protected]. I don't promise to help you. Heck, I don't even promise to respond. But I do promise to read your words and smile. Or maybe shake my head in amazement. Or perhaps even mumble a prayer for you.While speaking at the Sorbonne in Paris, April 23, 1910, audacious Teddy Roosevelt looked the French coldly in the eyes and delivered his famous admonition, “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”And you wondered why the French tend not to like Americans.Tell me the audacious thing you're attempting to do. Send a tale that would make Teddy proud.Roy H. Williams

BANG. Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg's new book hits the shelves of every bookstore in America today. Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?Well, are you?Many of you have heard me speak about society's 40-year pendulum and how we're currently in the middle of a 6-year transition from an Idealistic “Me” society to a more Civic-minded “We” perspective. If you've experienced my 90-minute Time Tunnel presentation, you know how it answers deep, nagging questions while it brings bubbling to the surface a bunch of new ones. This book begins answering the new ones. (Hello to all the new readers who experienced the Time Tunnel in Las Vegas last week. This is the book I told you to pre-order.)This newest hardback from the Eisenbrothers contains much of the latest thought from Wizard Academy. In it, you'll find me quoted a couple of times, along with board member Dr. Richard (Nick) Grant and our resident screen-and-fiction-writing genius, David Freeman. Mostly though, the book is an explanation of why yesterday's successful marketing techniques aren't working anymore, with expert advice about how to get in step with today's finicky, cat-like public.SURPRISE! Packaged inside the cover you'll find an 80-minute video CD that was shot a couple of months ago in Wizard Academy's Tuscan Hall. View it and witness a brutal peer review as America's most forward-thinking marketers from several of the most powerful companies in America grill Jeff and Bryan about the strange new ideas in their book. Would you like to see a one minute and twenty second glimpse of this 80-minute video that comes inside every copy of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?Buy the book at your local bookstore today. Or order it online.Is fiction more your taste? Did you ever read The Secret Life of Bees? If you liked that book, you'll like The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. The characters are well crafted and the unfolding is intriguingly bizarre, almost Tom Robbins-like. (I won't tell you the identity of the omniscient narrator, but trust me you'll be surprised.) Here's one of the little sidebar comments made by the narrator throughout the book:* * * SOME FACTS ABOUT RUDY STEINER * * *“He was eight months older than Liesel and had bony legs, sharp teeth, gangly blue eyes, and hair the color of lemon. One of six Steiner children, he was permanently hungry. On Himmel Street, he was considered a little crazy. This was on account of an event that was rarely spoken about but widely regarded as ‘The Jesse Owens Incident,' in which he painted himself charcoal black and ran the 100 meters at the local playing field one night.”As long as we're on the subject of literature: Jacob, our 22 year-old younger son, expressed his concern to me last week about the name of the new course I'm teaching at Wizard Academy, Da Vinci and The 40 Answers. “Dad,” he asked, “don't you worry that people will think you're jumping on the Da Vinci Code bandwagon?” I explained to Jake that part of my reasoning behind the course's name was to reclaim the misappropriated identity of Leonardo da Vinci.Yes, I read Dan Brown's book, The Da Vinci Code. Its pace kept me breathless and I was entertained in the same way that Bruce Willis entertained me in Die Hard. But neither of them is great literature.The Da Vinci Code is all story arc, no character arc.Me, I'm a sucker for character arc. Remember the evolution of the Jack Nicholson character in the movie, As Good As It Gets? Or the transitional journey of the unlikely trio in The Station Agent? Those, my friends, were vivid examples of character arc.I realize that I'm a minority voice on this Da Vinci Code issue and about 30 million people disagree with me. But no matter. Novelist Stephen King, at least, is on my side. Speaking to the graduating class of the University of Maine in 2005, he said, “If I show up at your house 10 years from now, and find nothing in your living room but Reader's Digests, nothing in your bedroom but the latest Dan Brown novel… I will chase you down to the end of your driveway and back shouting, 'Where are the damn books? Why are you living the mental equivalent of a Kraft Macaroni & Cheese life?'”Well said, Stephen. Well said.Yes, I realize that I'm a literature snob. Though I grew up happily in Oklahoma, I somehow never developed a taste for NASCAR, hunting season or Budweiser, but have always been drawn to fine art, theater on Broadway and a fragrant glass of wine.Uh-oh. I criticized the Da Vinci Code.Can we still be friends anyway?(Big smile. Bright eyes. That's me, grinning for your forgiveness.)Your Friend,Roy H. Williams