Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

An unhappy person who talks about “the way things ought to” be has a decision to make.They need to take action, orThey need to shut up and get on with their life.I’m sorry if that sounded cold and harsh. Allow me to explain.“The Way Things Ought to Be” is a fantasy world. Complaining that you don’t live there is pointless.“The Way Things Really Are” is the world you live in. Learn to navigate in that world and you can go anywhere you want.I’m not saying that you have to make peace with the status quo.I’m not saying that you have to accept things as they are.I’m not saying that you are powerless to change things.I’m saying that unproductive whining is pointless.Take action or shut up. Don’t spend your life believing you are a victim and trying to convince everyone else of it.“But can’t I at least tell people how I feel?”It depends on who those people are. Do they have the power to change things? If they do, then yes, tell them how you feel. And then convince other people to do the same. Start a revolution. Create a future that is better than the past. Progress depends on people like you.But if you share your indignation with people who have don’t have the power to change things, and you have no intention of talking to the people who do have the power, you’re just complaining, moaning, and whining.No one likes a whiner.The difference between a victim and a revolutionary is that the victim takes no action beyond complaining to their friends.A revolutionary risks ridicule and defeat. He or she spends time, energy, and money in the effort to make the future better than the past.You can make a difference if you are willing to pay the price.George Bernard Shaw said,“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.”And then he said,“You don’t hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.”Are you willing to fall under the hammer if that’s what it takes to change things?Even when I don’t agree with them, I admire women and men who do more than just complain to their friends.But in every instance I always agree with that delightful person who takes no position unless they are also willing to take action, that person who elevates every conversation to a pleasant topic and makes you feel happy they are around.Roy H. Williams

What is the canvas of your artistic expression?“Pen and ink,” says the writer.“Wet clay” says a sculptor,“Wood” says another,“Stone” says a third.And then the painters chime in,singing, “Oils,” “Pencils,”“Charcoal,” and “Acrylic”in 4-part harmony.“Film” shouts a cinematographer,“Pixels” shouts another,and the photographers beat a steady rhythmon the lens covers of their cameras.Our own Princess Pennieis of that ancient tribe“The Daughters of Eve”who claim the earth as their canvas.The inheritance of the daughtersgoes back to the book of Genesis…Do you believe the Bible to be a message from God,or merely the writings of desert nomads?Either way, it is an interesting book.In the second chapter of that first book,“The Lord God took the manand put him in the Garden of Edento work it and take care of it.”But evidently, Adam wasn’t very good at it,because just three verses later the Lord God said,“It is not good for the man to be alone,”and Eve became his partner in the effort.Dozens of centuries later,daughter Elizabeth Murray observed,“Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint,and the soil and the sky as canvas.”Two hundred and fourteen years ago,the poet William Wordsworth added,“Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art,in some sort like poetry and painting.” 1One hundred and twenty-two years ago, Sidney Hare said,“Show me a city without parks and boulevards and I will show youa people far behind the times in every way. Parks educate the peoplein an art equally as grand as the art of painting or sculpture…” 2In 1941, the immortal John Steinbeck said,“Places are able to evoke moods, as colorand line in a picture may capture andwarp us to a pattern the painter intended.” 3Eleven years later, Steinbeck elaborated,“The spring flowers in a wet year were unbelievable. The whole valley floor, and the foothills too, would be carpeted with lupins and poppies. Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine.” 4And daughter Shauna Niequist adds,“Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter’s deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world’s oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.” 5I agree. It is not good for the man to be alone.Thank God for the women in our liveswho cause rainbows of color to appearfrom lumps of cold, brown earth. 6Roy H. Williams1 In a letter to Sir George H. Beaumont, Grasmere, (Oct. 17, 1805)2 Sidney J. Hare, a pioneer in Landscape Architecture, (1897)3 John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, p. 256, (1941)4 John Steinbeck, East of Eden, p. 4. (1952)5 Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet, (2013)6 Genesis 2:7

My business partners meet twice a year to spend a few days together. A transcription of their discussions during these meetings could easily become a bestselling book.A number of my partners have grown far beyond anything I ever taught them, which makes answering their questions a lot easier for me.I employ a mildly deceptive technique that has been used by teachers throughout history:When confronted with a question for which you have no immediate answer, stall for time by tossing the question back to the students. Keep their discussion moving forward until they have arrived at a solid conclusion. They will never suspect that you didn’t already know the answer.During our last meeting, one of my partners was sharing the secrets of his very successful online campaigns with the rest of us when he said, “When I became a partner 15 years ago, I was hoping that Roy would tell us exactly how the sausage is made. Looking back, I appreciate his wisdom in not doing that.”“What do you mean by, ‘how the sausage is made?’” I asked.“I mean, ‘exactly how to write great ads.’”His answer confused me because I was under the illusion that I had, in fact, taught them “exactly how to write great ads.” But rather than admit that I had no idea what he was talking about, I said, “Let’s talk about the different ways of making the sausage. Sexton, how many ways are there to write great ads?”I asked that question as though I already knew the answer, when in truth, I did not. But I was smart enough to ask the person that I suspected would know the answer.“Two,” answered Sexton. “You can follow a template and search for the information to fill each of the openings within that template, or you can gather information and then organize it however you choose. No template.”His answer blew my mind because he was obviously right, but this idea of “writing to a template” had never once crossed my mind. Startled by his answer, I said to the room, “How many of you write to a template?”About half the hands went up.“How many of you gather information and then organize it? No template.”The other half of the hands went up.The thing that startled me the most, however, was that half of the most accomplished writers in the room were using one method, and the other half was using the other.Even more interestingly, I spent the next several weeks asking a number of highly accomplished business owners which of the two methods they would follow. Again, half of them said “template,” which is another way of saying, “Plan your work, and work your plan.” The other half said, “Gather, then organize,” which is another way of saying, “Work with what you’ve got. Improvise.”Regardless of which technique you prefer, does it surprise you that both techniques seem to work equally well?Who’d have thought it?If you have thoughts, anecdotes, or stories about this interesting duality of Planning vs. Improvisation, send them to [email protected] and we’ll see if some of them land in the rabbit hole. Also, Indy is planning to feature some murals on the sides of buildings in the rabbit hole next week, so if you have a cool photo of an outdoor mural, send it to him with a description of its location, okay?For those of you who don’t know, the rabbit hole is entered by clicking the image of Indy Beagle at the top of each week’s online version of the Monday Morning Memo. (That’s him at the top of this page holding a sausage in his jaws.) Indy’s rabbit hole is an informative, eclectic, wonderful waste of time.“Not long ago, sitting at my desk at home, I suddenly had the horrifying realization that I no longer waste time.”– MIT professor and physicist Alan Lightman in his book, A Sense of the MysteriousIndy has the cure for Alan Lightman’s distress. His rabbit hole usually rambles on for about 8 to 28 pages. Click the image at the top of each rabbit hole page and it will take you to the next page. Anything can happen in the rabbit hole.And it often does.He’s waiting there for you now. (click)Roy H. Williams

People need your encouragement more than they need your advice. A little encouragement at a pivotal time makes all the difference.I am giving you a Christmas gift: When you have opened it, you will become the right person, doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right way.To open your gift, you need only to buy what the kids are selling.Randy Phillips gave me this gift and I’m glad he did.We were in church when Randy went on a little rant.He said, “Buy whatever the kids are sellin’… Buy whatever the kids are sellin’… Sometimes you come out of a restaurant or a grocery store and they’ve got a little table set up, and you try not to make eye contact with’em. It’s like, ‘If I can act like I don’t see’em, I don’t have to buy it.’Get over there! Go to that table. They’ve got that wrapping paper. You can buy it half-price somewhere else. It don’t matter they’ve marked it up 100%. You don’t need it? What you need is not the issue! You go over there and you buy what the kids are sellin’.They got cookies? ‘I don’t eat cookies.’ This is not about what you eat! Buy what the kids are sellin’. Here’s what I do. I walk over to ‘em and ask, ‘What is the largest amount that you’ve sold today? Who bought the most?’‘Well, they bought 5 boxes.’‘Give me 10. I want 10 boxes.’Denise says, ‘What are you going to do with 10 boxes of cookies?’‘I don’t know. Don’t worry about that.’The look on their face when you are building confidence in a kid across the table! ‘This is how commerce works. This is how we do it in America. You have something of value. I give you money. We trade it. And here we go.’We’re teaching those kids! Buy whatever the kids are sellin’.”Encouragement speaks loudest when it is followed by action. Your action.Always buy what the kids are selling. Give a child the gift of encouragement and hope. It takes only a moment. Then you can give away the thing you bought and explain why you bought it in the first place. Kindness is contagious. Perhaps the recipient of your gift will be inspired to do the same.You are a generous person who likes to encourage others.This is the secret to your happiness.Roy H. Williams

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used for measuring departmental performance within a company. The goal of KPIs is continual improvement.The subtle danger of KPIs is that they can lead us to prioritize efficiency over effectiveness, and short-term objectives over long-term.A Police Chief told his officers to prioritize burglaries of multiple-occupancy households because the system would count each occupant as a separate solved crime and lift their KPI.An electrical wholesale group created a KPI competition between its branches which resulted in them undercutting each other’s prices.A shoe company with a 3.5 billion-dollar ad budget (Adidas) admitted they had been “overly focused on digital attribution,” partly as a result of its ability to allow the company to “look at short-term measurements in real time.” Adidas Global Media Director Simon Peel says, “But when you look at econometric modelling it’s telling you something very different…” 1 In a successful company, it takes every department working together to increase top line revenues. But when departments are held individually accountable for department-specific goals, teamwork goes out the window.A business owner recently asked me, “Who is responsible for lead generation?” Before I could answer, one of his branch managers said, “Selling is a numbers game. Double my sales opportunities and I’ll make twice as many sales.”I asked, “Who is responsible for lead generation in a restaurant?”“The marketing department,” answered the branch manager.Looking across that group of 20 branch managers from 20 different cities, I said, “Think of the best restaurant in your city, the one where you’ve got to have a reservation because there is never an open table. Do you see it in your mind? That restaurant hasn’t advertised in 30 years. Their happy customers are their only marketing department.”Looking at their faces, I could tell they had seen the truth in what I had said, so I told them another truth, “Advertising is a tax we pay for not being remarkable.” I let that one soak in a minute.“When our customer contacts us, they meet the Maître D’ of our restaurant. Sometimes it’s a Customer Service Representative in our call center. Other times it’s a team member who responded to an email inquiry, or who interacted with our customer in live chat. If those people do well, they will hand the baton to one of our waiters; a salesperson or a service technician. But wait, we’re not done. Now we have to deliver the food. Will the chef live up to his reputation? Will the product be as good as our customer hoped it would be?”I waited a few moments, then said, “Today’s close rate determines tomorrow’s sales leads. Good advertising is merely the beginning of a conversation with the customer. If they visit our website, they’re reading our menu. If they check our online reviews, they’re asking their friends about us. But here is where things get serious: when that customer encounters our Maître D’, our waiters, and our chef, she is expecting to meet the company she was promised in our ads. Will we be the company we promised her? Or will we be guilty of bait-and-switch?”I said it again, “Today’s close rate determines tomorrow’s sales leads… Every member of our team is responsible for lead generation. We win together and we lose together. Any one of us can drop the baton in this never-ending relay race where the final runner hands it back to the first runner as a referral from a happy customer. You and I have to make every customer glad they chose us.”“Each of us is a point-of-contact with our customer, a channel of communication. When we use the brandable chunks – signature phrases – that were introduced in our mass-media ads and reinforced on our website; when each of us delivers the personality that we promised in our ads, we have channel alignment. When we fall short of this, we are guilty of bait-and-switch.”“In a growing company, the KPI that matters most is top line revenue. To grow, we have to say remarkable things in our ads. To grow, we have to do remarkable things for our customers. Today’s close rate determines tomorrow’s sales leads. And channel alignment increases the close rate.”“Any other questions?”Roy H. Williams

Symbolic thought is commonly expressed through similes, metaphors, and music, allowing us to communicate the unknown and unfamiliar by relating it to the known and familiar.Symbols happen when one thing stands for another.Symbolism plays a role in identity reinforcement. Brands, hobbies, artistic expressions, event attendance, and social connections are symbolic ways of saying, “This is who I am. This is what I do. This is what I stand for. This is what I stand against. This is how I see myself.”Marketing people call these measurements “psychographics.”Symbols are powerful, friendly things that assist us in relating to the world around us. They help us make those difficult choices between two good things. “With which of these two things do I most strongly identify?”Self-determination is a good thing.Cooperation is a good thing.Brexit is Britain’s tug-of-war between those two good things.America is having a tug-of-war of its own.Understanding how symbols can affect the mood of the heart and the attitude of the mind is a natural part of self-awareness. But symbols get distorted and dark when we embrace them too tightly or carry them one step too far.Superstition is the belief that a symbol carries within itself the power to enact change.Pheromones are a series of chemical flags released by animals that signal sexuality, fear, and dominance; moods of the heart and attitudes of the mind.The flag of a nation is a bit of colored cloth on the end of a stick. Its only power lies in the hearts and minds of those who see it. We are unified when we agree on what that symbol stands for. We are divided when we do not agree.The only hard choice is the choice between two good things.When we are deeply divided, we believe our adversaries are stupid and evil. If we are gracious, we call them “uninformed and misled,” which is just a slightly nicer way of saying the same thing.Reconciliation and unity will not begin until we look beyond our polarized reactions to see the good thing the other side believes in. This is the path to productive civil discourse.Frankly, I’m a bit weary of destructive discourse, aren’t you?Regardless of your political beliefs, you have at least one close friend who believes in the good thing that is currently standing in the way of the good thing you believe in. In other words, their political beliefs are not aligned with yours. Is your relationship with that person strong enough, is your trust in that person deep enough, to quietly listen as they explain what they believe and why they believe it? Can you find the good thing your friend believes in?Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened.Remember: Your goal is to see through their eyes for a moment. You want to see what they see. This is not the time or place to make them see what you see. If you cannot restrain yourself from correcting them and interjecting your beliefs, you are likely to lose a friend.The path to peace requires courage, restraint, the willingness to listen, and an open mind.The other path – the exciting one – is the path that leads to war.Roy H. Williams

“The word ‘artist’ is not applied to writers as readily as to musicians or sculptors or painters, because the medium in which they work – our language – is used by everyone without any particular thought or regard for economy or form. Language is the common drudge of every sort of experience and it does not enter the heads of most people to use it with any conscious skill or effectiveness.”“But the serious writer is an artist and language is his medium, and the way he employs it is of the greatest interest. Graham Greene has said that ‘creative art seems to remain a function of the religious mind,’ and it is this quality of awareness of another world…”– Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart, p. 115“When Cervantes invited a new generation of readers to follow his knight into the Sierra Morena, they discovered through their tears of laughter that they had entered a new world. For the writers and readers to come, the pages of a book could never again stand like foreign objects of wonder, to be admired from a distance. From now on, opening a book would mean stepping into a space more like one’s own, a Sierra Morena next door instead of a mythical wood or mystic crag, and even those places of mystery or magic, from Never Never Land to Hogwarts, would always be places in which other versions of our own selves would go to for relief from the pressures, pain, or simply the boredom of our daily lives.”– William Egginton, The Man Who Invented Fiction, p. 136“In my life as a writer I often remind myself – comfort myself – with what William Faulkner said about The Sound and the Fury. The whole novel, he claimed, hung on one image, the glimpse of a little girl’s muddy underpants seen from the ground as she climbed a tree. How can an entire world spin off so small and incidental a hub? Can it be possible that Faulkner conceived his masterpiece from this thin, grubby moment?”“I imagine most writers of novels begin with such a fragment, a shard of experience so compelling, so troubling and unavoidable – always there, on the periphery of consciousness – that around it he or she must construct an elaborate world. This world, this novel, is not merely a container or a means of filing the image away but an attempt to make it comprehensible, and to guard its power.”– Kathryn Harrison, When Inspiration Stared Stoically from an Old Photograph“Fiction is usually seen as escapist entertainment… But it’s hard to reconcile the escapist theory of fiction with the deep patterns we find in the art of storytelling… Our various fictional worlds are– on the whole– horrorscapes. Fiction may temporarily free us from our troubles, but it does so by ensnaring us in new sets of troubles– in imaginary worlds of struggle and stress and mortal woe.”– Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human“Go, then – there are other worlds than these.”– Stephen KingIf you want us to see a different world, it will be your choice of tools that defines you. Oscar Wilde was a playwright. He put his words, like a ventriloquist, into the mouths of actors on the stage. Ad writers, screenwriters and novelists differ only in their ventriloquist’s dummies, the masks they hide behind.Some ventriloquist’s dummies are called “newscasters,” and they are no different than the actors in any other fiction. The question we must ask ourselves is, “Who is hiding behind that mask, and what imaginary world are they trying to sell us?”Roy H. WilliamsPS – At a 1962 dinner for 49 Nobel laureates, President John F. Kennedy quipped that the event was, “the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”Thomas Jefferson was a famous hater of newspapers, though I suspect he would have hated radio, television, and the internet even more. Writing to his friend John Norvell in 1807, Jefferson said, “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”

“The rest of my life has passed quite suddenly. Around ten or twelve I fell into the inevitable logarithms of time. It seems to go faster and faster. I wonder now why we have to have Christmas so often.” – Kary MullisOur friend Kary Mullis died on Aug. 7, 2019, at the age of 74.His first trip to Wizard Academy with Nancy was more than 15 years ago. They were in the same class as (L to R) Chris Lowry of Savannah and Mike Greene of Asheville and Jane Fraser of Halifax (in teal, below Chris and Mike) along with 20 other delightful people.Kary’s colleagues in science called him “an untamed genius.” His discovery of polymerase chain reaction in 1983 opened the door for us to study DNA and won him the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.I agree with Kary’s observation concerning the inevitable logarithms of time, don’t you?Wasn’t it just a few months ago that you and I walked across an open field and spoke of what we would build together? That campus is nearly finished now.Do you remember when 106 of the cognoscenti of Wizard Academy worked together on a book called Accidental Magic? I pulled my copy off the shelf just now and marveled at it, as I have done at least once a year for the past 18 years. I do the same thing with your book, People Stories: Inside the Outside. Your talent continues to amaze me.Do you remember when Ray Bard arrived with those 200 hardbacks of Accidental Magic just as your book-release party began in 2001? You had already landed in Austin and were on your way to the Academy while Ray was still sitting anxiously at the airport, waiting for the first printing of your book to arrive.This summer, Avital Rotbart worked nonstop for several weeks on our long-promised book, Secrets of the Wizard Academy Campus. We hope to have those available on May 2, but as we have learned, printers often have schedules of their own.Likewise, we expect to be able to unveil The Ad Writer’s Masters Class. Working at the speed of light, a person could – in theory – complete that class in a year, but in reality, it will take most people two years.You will instantly be able to recognize an Ad Master when you meet one. I’ll tell you how on May 2 when we gather for an unforgettable campus tour and celebration. It will be epic. We’ll feast like kings.When a person reminisces as I have done in today’s Monday Morning Memo, we usually assume they will soon be departing and are singing us a soft goodbye. Let me assure you this is not the case.We’re simply hosting a catered half-time show.Let us know if you plan to come.Roy H. Williams

Each of us creates our own reality from our interpretations of the things we observe. A systematic pattern of interpretations is called a cognitive bias.This is how a cognitive bias works: If you believe that elves cause rain, then every occurrence of rain is proof of elves.Cognitive biases can be miniscule or massive. Wikipedia has 192 of the most common of them organized alphabetically in their List of Cognitive Biases. Here are a few of my favorites:Third-Person Effect – Belief that mass communicated media messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves.Cheerleader Effect – The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.Halo Effect – The tendency for a person’s positive or negative traits to “spill over” from one personality area to another in our perceptions of them. This is similar to the Physical Attractiveness Stereotype, in which we assume that people who are physically attractive also possess other socially desirable qualities.And then, of course, there are some tragic cognitive biases, such as:Compassion Fade ­– The predisposition to behave more compassionately towards a small number of identifiable victims than to a large number of anonymous ones.Naïve Realism – The belief that we see reality as it really is – objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who don’t are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased.But there is one pair of cognitive biases that isn’t on Wikipedia’s list, and these biases run so deep in us that they form our beliefs about the nature of reality and how the universe works.This pair of cognitive biases would more accurately be called a duality, since the closer you move toward one of them, the further you move away from the other.Let’s call them“Cause-and-Effect”“You Can’t Know for Certain Until You Get There.”“Cause-and-Effect” assumes that we live in an organized universe which can be predicted with certainty if only we have enough data. “Cause-and-Effect” is the world of Newtonian Physics and cooking with a recipe. “Plan your work and work your plan.”The opposing belief is that we can calculate probabilities, but “You Can’t Know for Certain Until You Get There.” This is the world of improvisation, Plan B, and the ability to cook something wonderful from whatever you happen to find in the pantry. “Work with what you’ve got.”Physicists have been trying to reconcile these belief systems since 1927 when General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were discovered to be mutually exclusive, although both can be proven unconditionally.Einstein, the champion of “Cause and Effect” said to Niels Bohr, “I, at any rate, am convinced that God does not throw dice.”To which Niels Bohr, the champion of “You Can’t Know for Certain Until You Get There,” replied, “Quit telling God what to do with his dice.”Physicist Stephen Hawking would later add, “Not only does God play dice, but he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.”Your internal, unconscious belief system dictates whether you willA: create a recipe, a step-by-step plan, and then seek to acquire the elements to actualize that plan, orB: acquire whatever is available to you and then figure out how to organize it for maximum effect.Both systems have proven to be profoundly effective.Never try to convince a practitioner of the opposite system that their way of thinking is stupid, foolish, or self-limiting.They probably have a long list of accomplishments that will prove you wrong.Roy H. Williams

Karl Marx famously said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”No, let’s be more accurate. What he actually said was, “Die religion ist das opium des volkes.”Before I continue, let me say that my belief in God is a choice not based on argument or evidence. I freely admit that I choose to believe.Those, like Karl, who choose not to believe, often say that my beliefin an immortal souland a life after this oneand in a Creator who gives us both of these,is nothing less than escapism.Escapism is an interesting subject.Lovers of nature take long hikes to escape the artificiality of the indoors.Lovers of travel take trips to escape the predictability of their surroundings.Lovers of sport watch games to escape the monotony of daily life.Lovers of literature read books to escape the chair in which they’re sitting.Lovers of nicotine and alcohol smoke and drink to escape their current mood.Lovers of science gather data to escape the idea of a world that is beyond understanding.In his book, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature, C.S. Lewis writes about moaning to his friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, about those condescending pragmatists who dismiss fiction with a sniff and a wave of the hand:“I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”I vote for escape.Escape what you dislike by doing what you like.In the words of Charles Baudelaire,“And if sometimes you wake up, on palace steps, on the green grass of a ditch, in your room’s gloomy solitude, your intoxication already waning or gone, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, the clocks, ask everything that flees, everything that moans, everything that moves, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is. And the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, will answer, It is time to get high! So as not to be martyred slaves of Time, get high; get high constantly! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”If you love nature, get high on nature. If you love travel, sports, literature or science, get high on those. And if you love God, get high on him.I will end with a quote from Oscar Wilde: “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”Democrats and Republicans, are you listening?Roy H. Williams

(A.) “It was hot outside.”(B.) “The angry sun glared down at me.”Which of those sentences do you feel was more interesting?Personification is a technique used by writers and speakers to excite the imaginations of their readers and listeners. Personification gives human attributes to non-human things.Twenty-five years ago I wrote, “As Edmund Hillary surveyed the horizon from the peak of Mount Everest, he monitored the time on a wristwatch that had been specifically designed to withstand the fury of the world’s most angry mountain….”Later in that same ad, the jeweler says, “You’ll find your Rolex waiting patiently for you to come and pick it up… at Justice Jewelers.”Here are some other examples of personification:“The shattered water made a misty din.Great waves looked over others coming inand thought of doing something to the shorethat water never did to land before.”– Robert Frost, opening lines of Once By the Pacific “Have you got a brook in your little heartWhere bashful flowers blow,And blushing birds go down to drink,And shadows tremble so?”– Emily Dickinson, Have You Got A Brook In Your Little Heart?You may have noticed that both of those examples were by famous poets. This was neither an accident nor a coincidence. I have long believed that good poets are the best teachers of powerful ad writing. A poet can change what we think and feel, and do so in a brief, tight economy of words.Did I hear you say “songwriter”? What is a songwriter but a poet who also writes music?I consider personification to be part of a larger category called Magical Thinking, a type of writing characterized by elements of the fantastic – woven with a deadpan sense of presentation – into an otherwise true story.Magical thinking is best evidenced in a writing style known as Magical Realism, and it is best exemplified by Gabriel Garcia Marquez:“As soon as José Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol shot echoed through the house. A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.”“’Holy Mother of God!’ Úrsula shouted.”– Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, ch. 7But not everyone has the gene that allows for magical thinking.Consider this famous song by England Dan and John Ford Coley. Do you remember these lines?“I’m not talking ’bout movin’ inand I don’t want to change your lifebut there’s a warm wind blowin’ the stars aroundAnd I’d really love to see you tonight.”People who lack the magical thinking gene hear:“…but there’s a warm wind blowing, the stars are out, and I’d really love to see you tonight.”The value of magical thinking is that it stimulates the imagination and puts listeners in a frame of mind to consider new and different things. Magical thinking does not appeal to the linear, sequential, deductive-reasoning left hemispheres of our brains. It appeals to our right hemisphere, which does not separate fantasy from reality; that’s the left brain’s job. The realm of the right brain is a land of infinite possibilities, where anything and everything can happen.Film franchises such as The Hunger Games, Star Wars, Star Trek, Die Hard, Twilight, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Jason Bourne, John Wick, The Matrix, Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Pirates of the Caribbean, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Lord of the Rings exist entirely in the realm of magical thinking.Marvel Studios built an empire on it, as did Disney and Pixar.Magical thinking is not to be confused with mere exaggeration. Liars and conmen exaggerate. But persuasive storytellers enchant us with magical thinking, stating the obviously impossible as though it is perfectly reasonable.The next time you need to persuade someone, might it be useful to put them in a frame of mind to consider new and different things? Do you think it might be helpful to entice them into the realm of infinite possibilities, where anything and everything is possible?If so, I have only two words for you to consider:“Wizard Academy.”Roy H. Williams

I grew up believing that everyone had equal opportunity, and what we made of that opportunity was up to us. I believed I was the product of my choices, and you were the product of yours. People struggled only because they made bad choices.I continue to believe in the vital importance of individual choice.But we are not offered the same choices.These days, when I look at my own modest accomplishments, I see them as byproducts of my natural skillset, my interests, my circumstances, my opportunities, and my friendships. I don’t think of myself as “a winner” or “a loser.” I think of myself as a writer.I no longer see life as a game played against others. Have you ever known a person who saw everyone as either “a winner” or “a loser?” I have walked with such people and heard their secret song:“Get all you can.Can all you get.Sit on the can.Poison the rest.”I blame Charles Darwin. Wasn’t it he who told us we are animals? If you believe in this survival-of-the-fittest, “predator and prey” concept of humanity, then Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Epstein did nothing wrong. Winners are predators. Losers are prey. The weak are food for the strong.Let me make this clear: a healthy human mind is not the mind of a predator, or of prey. The sociopath and the psychopath have the mind of a predator. And the person with “a victim mentality” has the mind of prey.I believe you and I have a higher purpose.Most of us go through a Survival phase where we’re just trying to make ends meet. We have to keep gas in the car, food in the pantry, a roof over our heads, and “Oh god, is that insurance premium due again?”Ever been there?If we are lucky, we later move into an Acquisition phase in which we acquire more money, a nicer home, a better car, and take actual vacations. This Acquisition phase is often ornamented with accomplishments and recognition.If you create ad campaigns, you must understand the difference between the motives of customers in the Survival phase and their motives in the Acquisition phase.The most emotionally healthy among us move into a Distribution phase which is marked by a sort of reverse bucket list. We no longer focus on what we can acquire. Our attention is turned toward what to do with what we’ve got.Emotionally healthy people want to make the world a happier place.It has been my observation that sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists never move beyond the Acquisition phase. Every breath is a hungry gasp for more wealth, power, and fame in the secret hope they might establish a dynasty. People who never move beyond the Acquisition phase of life tend to become increasingly predatory. Every unpleasant task is “someone else’s job.”“You can judge a man’s ethics by the condition in which he leaves a public restroom.”– Fred EisenbergNoblesse oblige is the inferred responsibility of privileged people to act with generosity and nobility toward those less privileged. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have a strong sense of it. Most billionaires do not.In a future, perfect world, those whose natural skillsets, interests, circumstances, opportunities, and friendships elevate them to wealth and power will focus their minds on the creation of jobs for those among us who simply need someone to believe in them.Sadly, we don’t live in a perfect world. In our world, the first obligation is to the shareholders. “Maximize profits.” If there is a second obligation, it is not immediately clear to me.I have noticed that men often tell the truth when they are at the end of their days.The Biblical book of Ecclesiastes is the memoir of Solomon as he approached the end of his life.John Huey sat at the dying bed of Sam Walton. The remarkable book that emerged from those 2 weeks was Sam Walton: Made in America.Lee Iacocca wrote Where Have All the Leaders Gone?John Steinbeck wrote Travels with Charley.And James Michener wrote This Noble Land.Few of us receive a warning that the end is drawing near. But if you do, what advice will you leave for the next generation that will occupy this planet?Roy H. Williams

The Eye of the Storm in the tower at Wizard Academy, under construction in 2009.We are feeling unsettled again.And when I say we, I don’t mean me, I mean all of us.Unsettled feelings are ominous.We are acting as though we have heard the four notes of the Dies irae, that ominous musical phrase* that has signaled impending tragedy for the past 800 years. Being thus unsettled, we are making big decisions with too little information and those decisions will have consequences.Unsettled lions like you and I are dangerous.I’ll not speculate on the specific causes for our feelings of unsettlement, for I suspect we have many different reasons.We were first unsettled on 9/11 when we saw the unhappenable happen.We became unsettled again in 2008 when we were betrayed by Enron and Worldcom and Bernie Madoff and subprime mortgages.I agree with what Leonard Pitts wrote in 2006.“We often talk about Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 in terms of failures: failures of intelligence, failures of planning, failures of communication. But these catastrophes were first and foremost failures of imagination. Did we know that a major hurricane could destroy New Orleans? Yes: it was even part of the tour guides’ spiel. Did we know terrorists wanted to bring down the World Trade Center? Yes: they made a credible attempt in 1993. And what did we do with what we knew? Nothing. Some disasters, I think, are so big and so awful they are literally beyond our power to conceive. So, we dismiss them out of hand, retreat to the ‘knowledge’ that a thing can’t happen because, well, it just can’t.”– Leonard Pitts, July 6, 2006Leonard Pitts was obviously feeling unsettled when he wrote that.We feel unsettled when our beliefs are crushed.“Belief is about collecting ideas and investing in them. Faith is about having your ideas obliterated and having nothing to hang onto and trusting that it’s going to be all right anyway.”– Barbara HallI appreciate Barbara Hall’s perspective.Tragedy is the arrival of the unexpected bad.Serendipity is the arrival of the unexpected good.I say we should begin looking for the unexpected good.What do you say?To prepare for the unexpected bad is to be cautious, and there is nothing wrong with that. But to anticipate the unexpected good is to be hopeful. And that’s okay, too, isn’t it?“If you want to believe in something, then believe in it. Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe in it… Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a [person] needs to believe in the most.”– Hub McCann, Secondhand LionsI write these words to you because I’m seeing solid people make dicey decisions because they are feeling unsettled. They are changing what they can because they are feeling frustrated by what they cannot change.I believe in miracles, but most miracles happen slowly. “There’s magic in the world. There is. People will tell you there isn’t—they just want you to get back to work and be quiet and not ask questions. These are people who don’t know where to look, or who were not blessed with eyes that could see magic. Magical eyes. If you have them, develop them.”– Tennessee WilliamsDo you still believe in miracles? Do you have eyes that can see sparkling magic in the air all around you?Serendipity is the arrival of the unexpected good.I think I hear it twinkling just ahead.Roy H. Williams

We eat food every day and we drive cars every day. But food purchases happen on a short purchase cycle and car purchases happen on a longer one.How often does the average citizen purchase the product or service you sell?The purchase cycle of your product determines how quickly your ads will start working.Food and entertainment have short purchase cycles. This is why ads selling food and entertainment can generate big results quickly, even when the advertiser is new and unknown.But to make things happen on a long purchase cycle, you must become the company customers think of immediately and feel the best about.Air conditioning systems and engagement rings have long purchase cycles.I’ve learned not to discuss purchase cycles in public forums because at least one marketer will immediately get red-faced and say, “But people buy air conditioning systems and engagement rings every day. My advertising is aimed at the people who are in the market for those products right now.”This is their logic: “When a person is ready to buy a product, they’re going to go online and do some research. This is the zero moment of truth. Show up BIG in that moment and you will dominate your product category.”I agree that people are going to go online. Google is the new phone book and social media allows us to hear from customers who have already purchased the product. But it is foolish to believe that customers enter this “zero moment of truth” without prejudices, preferences, and predispositions.330 million Americans will purchase 2 million engagement rings this year. This means that 1 American in 165 will buy an engagement ring.But a year has 365 days.This means that just 1 American in 60,225 will purchase an engagement ring today.In a long purchase cycle, you must win the hearts of tomorrow’s customers with a memorable message – relentlessly repeated – and then wait for them to need what you sell.Use the seductive repetition of extremely cheap advertising to reach tomorrow’s customers along with all their influencers. Purchased wisely, mass media can reach the same individual 3 times each week, 52 weeks a year, for about 40 cents.156 repetitions of a 60-second ad will be heard by that individual this year.Did you hear the part about the 40 cents?$40,000 a year gives you top-of-mind awareness with about 100,000 people.Calculate the percentage of the public you can afford to reach, never forgetting that three-times-a-week repetition is essential if you want to become a household word. Don’t reach 100% of your city and convince them 10% of the way. Reach 10% of your city and convince them 100% of the way.Advertise the why. Wait for the when.The longer you do this, the better it works.You’ll gain momentum, year after year.Your online conversion rates will skyrocket.Your online costs of marketing will plummet.You’ll deepen your relationship with customers, year after year.They will develop a strong predisposition toward you.They will feel like they know you.They will consider you an ally and a friend.Marketers who subscribe to Google’s theory of the “zero moment of truth” are sprinters. They believe in waiting until the customer is actively, consciously, currently in the market for the product. Sprinters make decisions on a short time horizon. I think of them as “twitchy little bastards.”If your category has a long purchase cycle, I suggest that you embrace the inevitable time horizon.Become a long-distance runner.Fly the flag of Team Tortoise.Roy H. Williams

“You train them, remind them, and incentivize them, but they still don’t do what you trained them to do.” This is what business owners say to each other about employees.Can you relate to it?Frances Frei is a famous professor at Harvard Business School who advises senior executives who are embarking on large-scale change initiatives in the hopes of achieving organizational transformation. Professor Frei tells these executives, “You cannot change a person’s behavior until you first change their beliefs.”Frances called me a few years ago when she was about to publish her book, “Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business.”Beliefs drive behavior.I was first exposed to this idea 18 years ago when Paul Schumann attended Wizard Academy. Paul spent 30 years at IBM as a futurist. Like Professor Frei, his specialty was “forecasting potential future scenarios, and creating innovative strategies for competitive advantage.”When I asked Paul to share a few insights from his rich experience, he warned us of the dangers of “corporate cultural inertia.” Unfamiliar with that term, I asked Paul to give us an example. His answer startled me. He said, “You can win the full support of everyone at the C-level – CEO, COO, CFO, CMO, all of them – and then be brought to your knees by middle managers who simply choose not to implement what they have been told to do. In a big company, culture eats strategy for breakfast.”“Can you introduce me to Dewey Jenkins? I’d love to meet him.”This is a question I’m asked at least once a week, usually by the owner of another big company.“I’m sorry, but no. I have, however, convinced Jonathan Bancroft to write a book that will contain the answers to every question you’d like to ask Dewey. I’ll give you a heads-up when that book is about to be published.”The first printing of that book, “Mr. Jenkins Told Me…” was 30,000 copies. Almost 28,000 of those have already been sold and the book has only just been released.The average business book sells just 5,000 copies in the life of the book. “Mr. Jenkins Told Me…” is not the average business book.Jonathan Bancroft went to work for Mr. Jenkins 21 years ago as a technician’s helper/trainee. A few years ago, he became president of the company.I can’t arrange for you to speak with Dewey Jenkins, but you’re only a few clicks away from the answers to every question you’d like to ask him.You’re wearing the ruby red slippers, Dorothy, and you’ve been told how to finally achieve the one thing you’ve been trying to do since the movie began.Are you going to begin clicking? Or do you want to go back to fighting those flying monkeys?Roy H. Williams

For more insightful comics visit xkcd.comMy strange education was purchased with tens of millions of dollars of other people’s money.This is how it happened. When I turned 20, I spent the next 2 years asking business owners 3 questions:“Have you ever done any advertising that you felt really worked? Tell me about it.”“Have you ever been excited about an advertising plan that you later felt was a waste of money? Tell me about it.”“Are you still doing the thing that you felt really worked? Why not?”I crafted those questions because the things I was being taught about advertising made no sense to me.When a 20-year-old says he is “studying advertising” and asks if you will share your observations and experiences with him, most people are happy to do it. Within two years, the advertising mistakes everyone was making became blazingly obvious.Most people had followed the same logical path to arrive at the same wrong answer.We study successful businesses because we believe we can become successful by doing what they did. We ignore failures in the foolish belief that they have nothing to teach us.When failures become invisible, the seductive mistakes that caused those failures become invisible, too. This is why everyone tends to make the same mistakes in advertising.Important lessons are learned from failure, not from success.As a young man, I harvested the lessons of hundreds of business owners whose collective experience totaled dozens of centuries and tens of millions of dollars.Does it surprise you that the mistakes made by those business owners are just as common today?When we focus our attention on those who succeed – and ignore the lessons of those who failed – we tumble headlong into “survivorship bias,” a dangerous but invisible fallacy of logic.Study only those who survive the selection process.Ignore those who did not survive.Congratulations. You just tumbled into survivorship bias.When the Center for Naval Analyses evaluated the bullet holes in aircraft returning from missions during WWII, armor was recommended for the areas that showed the most damage. An engineer, Abraham Wald, popularized the term “survivorship bias” when he pointed out, “These are the planes that were able to return to base. The areas we need to reinforce are the areas that are undamaged on these planes, because those are the areas where damage makes it impossible to return.”Most of us unconsciously do what everyone else is doing. But what if everyone else is wrong?The reason history repeats itself is because we paid no attention the first time.Traditional wisdom is usually more tradition than wisdom.When you insist on being normal, you condemn yourself to being average.Break away from the pack. Conduct an experiment. No matter how it turns out, you will have learned something you didn’t know before.Or you could save yourself all that and just come to Wizard Academy. We’ll work hard all day and then sit together 900 feet above the city on the David McInnis Stardeck and howl at the moon.If that last sentence frightened you, you probably wouldn’t like it here. But if you instinctively knew I was kidding and it made you laugh a little, what are you waiting for?Aroo,Roy H. Williams

I’ve had a special relationship with California since 1992. The basis of our relationship is this: I keep not deserving parking tickets and California keeps giving them to me anyway.One of my goals during last week’s excursion with my grandson was to return from California –­ for the first time ever – without a parking ticket.I almost made it home.My transgression was that I drove through an empty space in the parking lot at Seal Beach so that I could be poised “nose out” in the space beyond. In Texas, Pennie and I call this “going for the poise.”Yeah, that’s illegal in California.As I was sitting in the rental car reading my ticket, a man knocked on my window and shouted, “Turn your car around! Turn your car around! If you don’t, they’ll give you a $64 ticket!” And then he held up his ticket to prove it. I smiled and showed him mine, thinking we’d have a laugh together. But no, this was a man on a mission. He was off like a rocket to warn the next person.I watched him for the next few minutes. Every time a car pulled though a space to go for the poise, he would run up to that car, tap on the window, and warn the driver of his or her impending doom. God bless that guy. He may still be there, even now.The idea that something regarded as common sense in one state is illegal in another reminds me that we Americans are a haphazard people. We name our months after Roman gods. We count our years from the birth of Jesus. We print ‘In God We Trust’ on all our money. But when someone publicly mentions God, we think that person to be a naively superstitious rube.Every time I mention him, I get a look that makes me feel the listener wants to pat me on my head like I’m four years old.I think the current, politically correct name for God is “the universe,” as in, “the universe is telling me to take this job,” or, “the universe is telling me to quit eating red meat.”One young man in California mentioned God to me just before we drove to the airport, and it turned out to be one of the brightest moments of a delightful trip. We had checked out of our hotel and presented the claim check for our car to the valet stand attendant who handed it to a slender young man who took off running toward the parking garage.Throughout my life, I’ve harbored the secret belief that you can brighten the day of waiters, waitresses, hotel maids, and parking valets by giving them unexpectedly generous tips. The only evidence I’ve had that my secret belief might be correct are the bright faces and happy smiles of waiters and waitresses when they see Pennie and me walk through their door.Yes, I am encouraging you to continue being generous to the people who bring you food, clean your room, and park your car.Anyway, when the slender young valet arrived with our car, he handed me the keys and I handed him a twenty. He looked down at it, then back up at me. Then down at it again, then back up to me. “God bless you sir! I’ve never gotten one of these! They told me there was a guy here that was tippin’ twenties, and I said, ‘Please, God, let me bring that guy’s car to him!’ And here you are! Thank you, sir. Thank you.”No one has ever said anything like that to me before, but I like to believe that I’ve brightened the days of thousands of strangers by letting them know they are recognized and appreciated.Many years ago, an old gentleman named Percy Ross was a client of mine. He’s gone now, and I miss him dearly. His newspaper column, “Thanks a Million,” appeared in more than 800 newspapers across America and I helped him syndicate his daily radio show across more than 400 radio stations.One day after lunch, Percy left our waitress a startling amount of money, then winked at me and said, “He who gives while he lives, knows where it goes.”He entrusted that bit of wisdom to me 34 years ago.And now I’m entrusting it to you.Roy H. Williams

Twenty-five years ago, I did three important things.The second-most-important of these was the launching of the Monday Morning Memo, even though no one can remember what it’s called. “I’ve been reading your Monday thing for more than 10 years,” is the opening line to my favorite song. I never get tired of hearing it.The third-most-important thing I did in 1994 was fall asleep on a motorcycle and then get run over by a car as I lay unconscious in the middle of the road. “Induced hypothermia” is the medical name for involuntarily falling asleep due to your body temperature plummeting quickly.It was the first Wednesday after Thanksgiving – November 30 – and every retailer on my client list needed reassurance that Santa had not been kidnapped and Christmas had not been cancelled. My day started with ad writing at 2AM and ended with me climbing onto my 1000cc BMW at 10PM to ride home from the office.The sun had fallen far below the horizon and a cold front had swept the warm air away. Jacketless, I shivered as I climbed onto my bike, “Four miles, no stoplights, no traffic. I’ll make it home in record time.”An hour and a half later, I woke up in the emergency room with lots of broken bones, none of which could be set. They kept me overnight – about 12 hours – to make sure I had no internal injuries, then I was back at work at 10:30AM. Christmas and retailers cannot be delayed.I typed with one hand – my uncoordinated left – for more than a year. When my right arm ached, I would reach over with my left hand to pick it up and lay it on the table. But that motorcycle wreck was the least consequential of the 3 things to happen that year and the creation of the Monday Morning Memo was number two, even though the first 100 of those memos would soon become the first book in the Wizard of Ads trilogy.The most important event of 1994 – by far – was that Pennie and I told our sons that each of them could choose any city in the world and I would take them there for a week while the other brother stayed at home with their mom.Rex was 13 that summer. Jake was 11.A week alone in a strange city with your Dad is a fascinating rite-of-passage. It is probably the smartest and best thing I’ve ever done.Allow your son or daughter, grandson or granddaughter, friend or neighbor, to choose their city with no guidance, no hints, no suggestions of any kind. They must make the decision all on their own and then announce it.I am amazed at the cities people choose and for the reasons behind their choices.Rex decided he wanted to spend 3 days in Las Vegas, then fly on a tiny airplane to the Grand Canyon where we would spend another 3 days in a series of misadventures.Jacob chose Juneau, Alaska where we went deep-sea fishing, ocean kayaking, panned for gold, landed in a helicopter on the Mendenhall glacier and then wandered dangerously around on the slippery ice as melting water gathered and gushed into infinitely-deep holes big enough for a human to fall into. We spent a week wandering around in that beautiful Alaskan town accessible only by air, water, and rail. Juneau has just 27 miles of pavement and a big part of those miles are the road to the airport. But more than 150 miles of gold mining tunnels hide in the mountains.Rex’s son, Hollister, turned 13 this summer. He chose Long Beach, California. If you’re reading this on Monday, August 19, 2019, Hollister and I are still here. Indy Beagle promised he would post photos of us in the rabbit hole.Hollister’s brother, Gideon, will choose a city two summers from now. Their little sister, Edie, will choose her city in 2029 and Jacob’s son, Vance, will choose his in 2030.Jewish boys look forward to a bar mitzvah when they turn 13, and their sisters look forward to a bat mitzvah at 12 or 13, depending on the tradition of their family.Our family tradition didn’t have a name when Rex and Jake chose their cities 25 years ago, but Princess Pennie and the older grandkids refer to this event as the Poobah Mitzvah.Some men are known by Grandad or Grandpa or some other term of endearment. I am Poobah.A Poobah Mitzvah is like the Monday Morning Memo; it doesn’t matter what you call it. The only thing that matters is whether you do it.No, it isn’t too late. The people in your life are never too old to have an adventure with you and the city you visit together doesn’t have to be far away.But there can only be two of you. This is one of those rare experiences where three is a crowd.If you decide to do this with someone you love, send a paragraph or two with photos to your favorite beagle, [email protected] suspect he’ll put them in the rabbit hole.I almost forgot; Indy says Aroo.Roy H. Williams

Sometimes we buy online to save time.Other times we buy online to save money.So what, exactly, is the “one big thing,” the unique selling proposition of online business?When we can’t wait the day or two for Amazon Prime, we buy from brick-and-mortar companies to save time. And when those stores are having a price-driven event, we buy from them to save money. So what is the “one big thing,” the unique selling proposition of brick-and-mortar?When we have no chosen provider in a product or service category, we look for reasons to have confidence in one company above the others. We’re hoping to find a provider we feel won’t let us down.Did you notice that phrase, “When we have no chosen provider…?”The goal of advertising is to become a person’s chosen provider. They need what you sell. They think of you. They buy from you. The end.During the 25 years I’ve been writing these Monday Morning Memos, I’ve discovered that most of the time my readers agree with me. My writings confirm their suspicions and give voice to their long-held beliefs. But when I play the role of myth-buster, I get an altogether different reaction. I played the role of myth-buster 2 weeks ago.Will you give me a second chance to make myself clear?I profoundly disagree with the belief that Hedgehog Thinking – focusing all your efforts on “one big thing” – is the key to category dominance.But I do agree that singleness of vision, “one big thing,” gives you focus and clarity.Focus and clarity give you energy, enthusiasm, optimism, creativity, problem-solving ability, and stamina. When you lack focus and clarity, you drift aimlessly in the darkness. Jesus spoke of this principle in his famous Sermon on the Mount in the good news of Matthew chapter 6: “When your eye (vision) is single (focused,) your body is full of light. But when your eye is clouded (unclear) your body is full of darkness. And if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”When Jesus spoke about “one big thing,” he wasn’t talking about category dominance. He was talking about the joy of having a purpose, and the passion that follows.Your passion motivates you.But your passion does not motivate your customers. They have passions and motives of their own.Never let an ad writer convince you that customers will choose you because you are passionate about “one big thing.” It simply isn’t true.We don’t fall in love because of “one big thing.” We fall in love because of “many little things.”Customers will choose you because they like you. And there are many little things that can make them like you. This is why storytelling – advertising – should always come from the “many little things” perspective of the fox.Translated into the language of the ad writer, “many little things” is called benefit stacking. “Many little things” also form the narrative arc of storytelling. And telling stories is how you create customer engagement through advertising. It is how you become the chosen provider.Let your customers see a reflection of themselves in you and they will choose you every time. Your passion is priceless. It is golden. It gives you a sense of purpose. Your passion comes from having an eye that is “single” – focused on one big thing. Your passion is what drives you.Your passion does not drive your customer.Category dominance is rarely determined by passion, or even by quality. You can easily name ten product and service categories whose leaders are not the most passionate companies in their categories, or even the best. Category leaders dominate because customers choose them. They dominate because they connect with more people and make more sales.Do you want to be happy? Live like a hedgehog.Do you want to be wealthy? Advertise like a fox.Roy H. Williams

Most non-fiction books are written as reputation builders. We write them because we want to be seen as experts. We want more speaking opportunities, more customers, more recognition. These “how to” books appear to be about the subject matter, but they are really about the author.This sort of reputation-building was the motive behind my Wizard of Ads trilogy.There is a second, less-populated category of non-fiction books whose authors have a different motive. These books appear to be about the author, but look closely and you’ll see they are about the reader.Memoirs, when well-written, reveal the brokenness, the triumphs, and the tragedies of the author. They describe an event-filled journey.Memoirs inspire us and make us believe that we can make a difference. They encourage us, showing us how someone else passed through this dark forest and how we can pass through it, too.We laugh at the silly mistakes, cherish the faithful companions, cry at the suffering and loss, cheer the little victories, and feel that we know the author.Memoirs are not written as reputation builders, but as relationship deepeners.If you want to write a good memoir, you must make yourself vulnerable, revealing all your fears and flaws and secrets. If you don’t, you will be guilty of the sin of Margot Asquith:“The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.”Dorothy Parker, in her 1925 New Yorker book reviewof The Autobiography of Margot Asquith.Even worse, they might say of you,“He is a self-made man and he worships his creator.”Vulnerability is the price of intimacy. Confession is the price of trust.Never trust the advice of a man who doesn’t limp.It is our belief systems and our scars that make us who we are.Do you want to build a strong culture in the company you founded? Write your memoirs.Do you want your customers to feel like they know you? Write your memoirs.Do you want to cast your bread upon the waters, pay it forward, help thousands of people you will never meet? Write your memoirs.Do you want your descendants to know who you were, the clay from which they were formed? Write your memoirs.Other people will be faced with the fears you have faced.Other people will make the mistakes you have made.Other people need to know the lessons you have learned.Do you have the humility – the vulnerability – to tell us how you got your limp?Roy H. Williams

In about 650 B.C. the Greek poet Archilochus wrote, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”The renaissance scholar Erasmus quoted Archilochus in 1500 in his famous Adagia, saying, “Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum.”In 1953, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin expanded on Archilochus and Erasmus in his often-quoted essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox.In 2017, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Philip Tetlock completed a 20-year study that contrasted the abilities of the one-big-thing “hedgehog” experts against the many-little-things “fox” non-experts to make accurate predictions about geopolitical events.Does it surprise you to learn that the “fox” non-experts outperformed the “hedgehog” experts by an overwhelming margin?What Tetlock discovered will help you tell the story of your company in a way that will cause customers to feel like they truly know you.American businesspeople tend to believe that every successful business is built on a single big idea, “one big thing.” But sadly, that bit of traditional wisdom is more tradition than wisdom.“One big thing” is hedgehog thinking. But foxes roam freely, listen carefully and consume omnivorously. Foxes know “many little things.”Customers will love the “many little things” story of your company told from the perspective of a fox. The story you need to be telling is the real one, a fascinating tale of hopes and dreams and failures and successes and realizations and refinements.Don’t worry, we’re going to help you write it.In 2011, the fox-like director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, used 100 objects in his museum as prisms through which he told the entire story of our world. That book, A History of the World in 100 Objects, became a wildly popular radio series and a blockbuster New York Times bestseller. The Wall Street Journal called it, “An enthralling and profoundly humane book that every civilized person should read.”The fascinating, riveting, highly-engaging story of your company is hidden in 10 objects that lie within your grasp.Bring those objects with you to Wizard Academy. It is time for “Show and Tell.”Dr. Richard D. Grant is a founding board member of Wizard Academy. Chris Maddock has been a Wizard of Ads writing instructor for 22 years. Tom Wanek is a Wizard of Ads partner with a particular talent for helping people discover wonderful stories that have been hiding in plain sight. These three masters will help you unleash the pivotal moments captured in your photographs, artifacts, and documents, and turn them into the fascinating story of your company’s origin and evolution.This wonderful adventure through time and imagination will happen November 5-6.We’ve only got room for 18 people.Roy H. Williams

Have you ever casually started down a path and then the journey got a life of its own?The White Rabbit appears in chapter one, inexplicably wearing a waistcoat. So what does Alice do? She follows him down the rabbit hole. There’s just no turning back after a decision like that.The journey is alive and it’s bigger than you.At twenty, I followed a White Rabbit and became an ad writer.At forty, I wrote The Wizard of Ads and it became Business Book of the Year.At sixty, I announced I was going to create The Ad Writers Masters Class for The American Small Business Institute and that its graduates would be qualified for admission into The Ad Writer’s Guild.The journey got a life of its own.Becoming an AdMaster will be like becoming a Black Belt in the art of ad writing.I expressed my biggest fear about that 52-week online class in last week’s Monday Morning Memo. Did you read it?“I sometimes worry that we have an instant-gratification attitude regarding education. We believe that when we have learned from an expert how a thing is done, we now have the ability to do that thing expertly. But there is a long and winding road to be traveled from Information to Proficiency. And then there is a second long and winding road from Proficiency to Authority.”My partner Jeff Sexton read that and immediately sent me a video featuring Ira Glass, the producer and host of the award-winning public radio program This American Life.“Nobody tells people who are beginners – I really wish somebody had told this to me – is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But for the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. Okay? It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite good. But, your taste – the thing that got you into the game – your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell what you’re making is a disappointment to you.”“A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit. The thing that I would say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting, creative work, went through a phase of years where they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short.”“Everyone goes through that, and if you’re going through it right now, you’ve got to know it’s totally normal, and the most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap. The work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.”“It’s going to take you a while. It’s normal to take a while, and you just have to fight your way through that. Okay?”When I followed up on that idea of becoming a black belt, I learned that it was a far more accurate comparison than I had realized. WIKIPEDIA says,“In Japanese martial arts; the shodan black belt is not the end of training, but rather a beginning to advanced learning: the individual now ‘knows how to walk’ and may thus begin the ‘journey.'”When The Ad Writers Masters Class is finally announced, I hope you’ll consider it. And if you decide to pursue your black belt in ad writing, I hope you’ll remember that there’s a long and winding road from Information to Proficiency.In the meantime, you can learn How to Become a YouTube Influencer. Not that it’s any easier. But that class is fully polished and coming up in September.Indy said to tell you “Aroo,” and that he’ll see you in the rabbit hole.You know the way.Roy H. Williams

Pennie and I have criteria we use to judge the success of Wizard Academy. In a recent meeting of the board of directors, they asked us to share those criteria with them.I began by saying, “A non-profit educational organization would be foolish to judge its success by its revenues. And we would be equally foolish to judge our success by the number of people who attend classes. When we complete The House of the Lost Boys, we’ll be able to accommodate 24 students per class. But we have just 40 classes per year. Nine hundred and sixty students per year is our self-imposed maximum and we’ve been hovering at that number for a long time. The goal is the high-touch sharing of valuable insights, processes, formulas, tips and lessons with self-selected insiders who had to pass through a lot of filters to even hear about this place and then cross a lot of barriers to get here.”“So how, exactly, do you measure success?” asked one of the board members.“Three things, ” I answered.“Number one is how often we hear reports from students saying they went home and implemented the things they learned and it made a gigantic difference.”“Number two is how often they return for additional classes. Because this tells us they had a great experience the first time.”“Number three is the number of newcomers who were told to come by someone who had already been here.”“Results, Returns, and Referrals,” echoed 38-year-old Ryan Deiss as he nodded his head in affirmation.“I thought I made those criteria up!” I said. “Are you telling me they’re a known thing?”“They’re not widely known, but all the better schools use those criteria,” he said.Manley Miller is another 38-year-old that the board has asked to fill the position of a member who has been serving for 20 years and has announced he will be retiring next year.In Manley’s not-yet-published book, he writes,“When you have a talent for something, you have an aptitude. But when you become a master of it, you have proficiency.”“When you have something to say that is worth hearing, you have wisdom. But when people are willing to listen to you, you have authority.”Manley says he learned that from reading the Bible. “Jesus spoke with wisdom in the Temple when he was 12 years old, but when he was 30, he spoke with authority. You’ve got to add a lot of experience to your wisdom before you can speak with authority.”A few days later, Rex Williams, another 38-year-old board member said,“We judge ourselves by our intentions, but we judge others by their actions. Likewise, we judge the value of our thoughts and opinions by the depth of our feelings, but others judge the value of our thoughts and opinions by our words.”Rex went on to say,“Millions of people are involved in social media, podcasting, video blogging, ad writing, book writing, speech writing. Everyone wants to be heard, but few learn how to be heard.”Listening to these 38-year-olds, I had a revelation.Let’s say you have an aptitude for communication, (because you probably do.)You’re still going to need:Information, which becomesKnowledge, which leads toExperience, which leads toProficiency, which gives youWisdom, which gives youDeeper Experience, which gives youAuthorityI sometimes worry that we have an instant-gratification attitude regarding education. We believe that when we have learned from an expert how a thing is done, we now have the ability to do that thing expertly.But there is a long and winding road to be traveled from Information to Proficiency.And then there is a second long and winding road from Proficiency to Authority.I believe this is a message every high school and college graduate needs to hear. Because when we fail to tell them, we condemn them to learn these things the hard way.Indy says Aroo.Roy H. Williams

When you’re in “inside” sales, customers come to you.When you’re in “outside” sales, you go looking for customers.When I was a baby ad-man in outside sales, I had the good fortune to spend a day with Gene Chamberlain. He taught me three things that day that made me a lot of money. Today I’m going to teach those things to you.A: When You’re in Outside Sales, You’ve Got to Prune Your Account List.There are only 24 hours in the day and no way to get any more. Outside salespeople run out of time long before they run out of opportunity.If you’re in outside sales, this is how to prune your account list:Look at your total billing for the past 12 months.Divide that dollar amount by the number of accounts on your list.This will give you an “average annual yield” per account.Give away every account that spent less than that amount with you last year.Sell no new accounts that are going to spend less than that amount with you this year.When you run out of time again, repeat this exercise.Follow these steps and you’ll see your sales volume spiral higher and higher.B: Always Add, “Which Means…”No matter how well we understand features and benefits, we too often name a feature and assume our prospective customer knows the benefits. What I’m about to teach you will increase the impact of your sales presentations and the effectiveness of your ad copy, even when your customer does already understand the benefits of the feature you named.Always add “which means…” after every feature you name. You can add these words verbally, or you can add them silently, but this habit will bridge you into language the customer can see in their mind.“This blade is made of Maxamet steel which means you’ll never have to sharpen it.”“This is a 52-week schedule which means your name will become the one people think of immediately and feel the best about.”“I’m going to write your campaign in a conversational style which means the customer will categorize you in their mind as a friend.”C: When Asked, “How much?” the First Digit of a Number Should Always be the First Syllable Out of Your Mouth.I was one of only a few advertising people in the room on that fateful day I met with Gene Chamberlain. He said, “When a customer says the word ‘How’ followed by the word ‘much,’ there is only one intelligent way to answer that question: Take a breath and name a number and then – without pausing – name everything that is included in that price at no extra charge.”Most of the crowd sold mobile homes, so Gene used their industry in his example.“A man wants to buy a mobile home, so he drives up and down mobile home row, then back to his office. He saw two mobile homes he liked, never realizing it was the same model on two different lots.”“So he calls the first mobile home dealer and asks, ‘How much is the mobile home next to the road?’ The first dealer said, “Sir, you have an eye for quality! That’s a Northwind mobile home. Those are made in Minnesota where it gets really cold, so they’re extremely energy efficient. That mobile home is made with 2 by 6 lumber instead of 2 by 4s, and it comes fully furnished and fully carpeted and with all your major appliances…” Gene stopped in mid-sentence and said, “The customer was no longer listening, he just wanted off the phone. He was thinking, ‘That mobile home is overpriced and the salesman knows it.'”Gene looked at us for several seconds before he continued,“So the man calls the second dealership and asks, ‘How much is the mobile home next to the road?’ ‘Thirty-four thousand two hundred and seventy dollars,’ the second salesman answered, ‘which includes at no extra charge, vaulted ceilings and a wood-burning fireplace in an open-concept floorplan, every room furnished with your choice of Bassett or Broyhill furniture, granite countertops in the kitchen and bathrooms, Kohler fixtures, mini-blinds and draperies on every window and we also deliver it, set it up, and tie it down at no extra charge, then we build a 20 by 30-foot redwood deck outside your back door along with a two-car carport for you to park under. And that’s just the beginning. Would you like to hear everything else you get for just thirty-four, two-seventy, or would you like to come down and walk through it first?”The more things you list that are “included at no extra charge,” the cheaper the price becomes. But only if you name the price first.Gene Chamberlain is gone now, but I honor his memory by passing along the best advice on selling I was ever given. My only regret is that I didn’t tell him ‘Thank you’ before I left the room.Roy H. Williams

I was bagging my groceries when the checker handed me my receipt and said, “Happy Yesterday.” Unsure of the correct response, I just smiled at him and nodded.A few moments later I realized he had said, “Happy rest-of-your-day.” But that brief exchange put my mind on an interesting track: can we choose to have a happy yesterday?Strangely, we can. According to a number of studies published since 2012, we don’t really remember the events in our lives. We remember only our last memory of those events. Events in our memories alter and morph with each retrieval until, finally, we are “remembering” things that never really happened.The first of these studies was conducted at Northwestern University and published in the Journal of Neuroscience.On September 19, 2012, journalist Marla Paul wrote,“Remember the telephone game where people take turns whispering a message into the ear of the next person in line? By the time the last person speaks it out loud, the message has radically changed. It’s been altered with each retelling.”“Turns out your memory is a lot like the telephone game, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study. Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time.”“‘A memory is not simply an image produced by time-traveling back to the original event,'” says Donna Bridge, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the paper on the study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience. ‘Your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval.’”In a subsequent article in Psychology Today, we read,“Not only are our memories faulty, our memories change each time they are recalled. What we recall is only a facsimile of things gone by. Memories are malleable constructs that are reconstructed with each recall. What we remember changes each time we recall the event. The slightly changed memory is now embedded as ‘real,’ only to be reconstructed with the next recall. Memory isn’t like a file in our brain, but more like a story that is edited every time we tell it. We attach emotional details with each re-telling. Not only do we alter the story, we alter our feelings about it.”We unconsciously choose to alter these emotional details and feelings for better, or for worse. To make ourselves happier, or more miserable.I vote for remembering happiness. “Have a happy yesterday.”“But Roy,” I can hear you say, “you’re saying that we should lie to ourselves.”No, I’m simply saying that you’re already lying to yourself when you believe that you recall past events accurately.The simple, scientific truth is that you colorize events each time you recall them. I’m merely suggesting that you consider the colors you are choosing.Will they be dark, sad, angry colors? Or will they be warm and happy ones?Roy H. Williams

Vertical thinking is step-by-step, procedural, outcome-focused. It helps you get things done.Always asking, “What is the obvious next step?” vertical thinking leads to incremental evolution and refinement. It is a ratchet that maintains what you’ve accomplished, then “click,” gives you a little bit more. The Japanese call it kaizen, “continuous improvement.”Vertical knowledge is narrow and deep. Specialized. Expert. Orderly.Horizontal thinking is boundless and broad. It is a searchlight that spots anomalies in a sea of similarities. It is the network of intersections in a map of metaphors. It is a detective that solves puzzles by seeing patterns, connections and relationships.Intuitive and instinctive, horizontal thinking leads to innovations by asking, “What doesn’t belong, and why?” It is a magnet that pulls the needle from the haystack. Linguists call this the Aha! moment or the eureka moment, that common human experience of suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible problem or concept.Horizontal knowledge knows a little bit about everything. It is chaotic, pattern-seeking, creative.Every healthy person thinks vertically and horizontally, though most of us tend to prefer one or the other.The most effective partnerships have one partner who prefers to think vertically and another who prefers to think horizontally. These partners are the makers of miracles when they’re not driving each other crazy.Do you have a strong preference for one type of thinking? The first major milestone on your journey to success will be to find a partner who is your opposite. A person who brings the Willy to your Wonka.But that’s the easy part. That hard part is to respect that person’s opinion and take action on it, even when your instinct is to dismiss it out-of-hand as “irrelevant.”Chances are, you’ve got that person in your life already. Probably more than one. So here’s a suggestion: the next time they offer an opinion, or a possible solution, look at it as a valuable gift that needs to be opened and examined.You’re going to be surprised at the difference it makes.Roy H. Williams

Back in those days you didn’t shoot nobody unless they really needed shootin’.So when someone showed you a gun, you knew there was a reason. You didn’t always know what that reason was, so the polite thing to do was ask.“What’s with the hog leg?”“Keeps folks from takin’ the cash box.”“I just want a watermelon. You sellin’? Or just sittin’ here showin’ em off?”The truck was a 1950 International Harvester that had been ugly since the day it was born and the boy was a 1955 Hatfield with a homemade haircut that wasn’t gonna win no prizes, either. He looked to be about eleven.“We’re sellin’. Seventy-five cents.”I dropped three quarters into the slot in his tackle box and heard the slosh of a hundred others when he slid it under the truck seat where he’d been sleeping.“Take your pick,” he said.“You choose.”“They’re equal good.”I flipped him another quarter and he dropped it in his pocket. Barefoot, he clambered to the top of the pile and reached to a spot behind the cab. It was worth the extra quarter.“Truck not runnin’?”“We always sell a few after dark and this is a good spot. Didn’t want to give it up.”“Your daddy’s smart.”“Don’t have a daddy.”“Granddaddy, then.”“Don’t have to be smart to stay parked in a good spot. Just common sense.”“He’s smart for teaching you how to flash that hog leg without pointin’ it.”“Illegal to point it.”“I know. And your granddaddy’s smart for makin’ sure you know.”He held it out to me on an open palm. “Walker Colt. Belonged to my granddaddy’s daddy.”I looked at it and nodded, “Nice one,” but I didn’t touch it. My granddaddy taught me, too.I said, “Want some watermelon?”“Whatcha thinkin’?”“Sell me one for 35 cents and I’ll split it with you.”“Eat it here?”I nodded. He reached into his pocket and with a quick flick of his wrist produced a slender, 7-inch blade.“This time you choose,” he said. Two minutes later I laid my fingertip on a melon and made eye contact. He smiled. “You picked a good one. What’s your name?”“Roy.”“I’m Mack.” He quartered the melon and then with a barely perceptible motion folded the blade against his hip and slipped the knife back into his pocket. The hand became an open palm. “You owe me 35 cents.”I dropped a dime and a quarter into it. We both sat on the tailgate and began eating melon. “I’m named after my granddaddy. You named after your granddaddy, Mack?”He laid his hand on the knife in his pocket as he shook his head slowly from side to side. “After my daddy.” Mack changed the subject. “You don’t look old enough to drive,” he said.I smiled, “The police think I do.”“You fifteen?” he asked. I nodded.I let the subject of his daddy lay for a few minutes as we ate the heart of the melon in silence. When we were done eatin’ and I had put my 75-cent melon in the passenger-side floorboard, Mack said, “Your mama didn’t raise no fools, Roy.”“Why do you say?”“Most people put the melon in the seat. Then when they hit the brakes, the melon rolls into the floorboard and busts.”“How do you know?”Mack smiled, “’cause they always come back and buy another melon.”I started the car, put it in reverse, and started to sing softly, “Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear. And it shows them pearly white.”I heard Mack’s voice in the darkness, “Just a jackknife has old MacHeath, babe. And he keeps it, out of sight.”I turned on the headlights but Mack was already lying down in the seat of the truck again, falling asleep with his great granddaddy’s hog leg pistol and the knife his daddy left him.Roy H. Williams

Amateur ad writers assume everyone makes decisions based upon the same criteria they use. This causes them to unconsciously frame their messages to reach people exactly like themselves.Professional ad writers frame their messages to speak to the felt needs of a specific consumer.People are multi-dimensional. We make decisions to purchase based on a variety of criteria, but two of the big ones are Time and Money.“Time and Money are interchangeable.You can always save one by spending more of the other.”– Pennie WilliamsA person who feels they have no money and no time is buried in financial and relational obligations.A person who believes they have more time than money is a bargain hunter.A person who has more money than time is overworked and highly paid.A person with lots of money and time is looking for something to do.Consciously or unconsciously, every ad is framed to speak to one of those four perspectives.It isn’t really about whether we can afford to spend the money. It’s about whether we FEEL we can afford to spend it. A person may feel they have the time, but not the money, to purchase a product in one category, but later that day feel they have the money, but not the time, to purchase a different product in a different category.We evaluate messages – news, information, and advertising – based on Relevance and Credibility:Relevance: “Does it matter to me? Do I care about this?”Credibility: “Do I believe it?”A message high in relevance but low in credibility is hype.“I would be interested if I believed you.”A message low in relevance but high in credibility is a tedious waste of time.“I believe you, I’m just not interested.”Are you speaking to the felt needs of your customer, or are you speaking only to yourself?Are the things you’re saying believable, or do they sound like unsubstantiated hype?Identity Reinforcement and Self-Expression:We buy much of what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are. A surprisingly high percentage of purchases are about self-expression.We bond with organizations that show us a reflection of our best self-image. When we perceive that an organization shares our outlook and our beliefs, we prefer them and their products.Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.Indy said to tell you “Aroo,” and that he’s waiting for you in the rabbit hole.Roy H. Williams

The Jewish Sabbath begins each Friday at sunset because the fifth verse of Genesis reads, “And the evening and the morning were the first day.”Every beginning starts with an ending.Thirteen colonies became 13 “united states” when our fight for freedom ended and our government under a Constitution began in 1789. This was the beginning of the first America, a land of freedom and opportunity.Those “united states” became somewhat less united during our Civil War of 1861 to 1865. More about that later.In 1880 and 1881, Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington headed west to capture memories of a time they saw to be ending. Their paintings and sculptures of the Wild West now sell for millions of dollars.Teddy Roosevelt took the last traces of the Wild West to Cuba in 1898 when he led his “rough riders” to the top of a now-famous hill during the Spanish-American War. His arrival on that hill signaled the ending of the Wild West, the ending of the Spanish Empire, and the ending of the first America.The second America began when Teddy Roosevelt became President in 1901. America was now a land of achievement, a World Power, a nation of cars and department stores and Coca-Cola, electric lights, running water and tract houses.We fought two World Wars, Korea, Viet Nam, and Desert Storm before the end of that century and we taught our children that anyone could work as a tradesman, but if you wanted a “good-paying job” you needed to go to college.It took 112 years to move from the end of our fight for freedom to Teddy Roosevelt’s land of achievement and the beginning of the second America in 1901.In 2013 – one hundred and twelve years after Teddy took the White House – we saw the unwinding of achievement and the beginning of the third America, a land of virtual reality, virtual currency, and virtual ownership. Massive multiplayer online games, Bitcoin and Uber, Facebook and Twitter, Google and Airbnb.*2013 also marked the halfway point in the upswing of society’s pendulum toward the zenith of our current “We.”The halfway point in the upswing of a “We” is where we begin to take a good thing too far. We shift from “fighting together for the common good” to simply “fighting together.” Western Civilization has done this every 8th decade for the past 3,000 years.I wrote at length about this in Pendulum a number of years ago. Do you remember that book?1783 marked the ending of our Revolutionary War.1783 was the zenith of a “We.”1863 marked the middle of our Civil War.1863 was the zenith of a “We.”1943 marked the middle of WWII.1943 was the zenith of a “We.”2023 will mark the zenith of our current “We.”I wonder what we’ll be in the middle of, then?It is important to remember that the swinging of society’s pendulum between the zeniths of the “Me” (1983) and the “We” (2023) is a sociological swing, not a psychological one.Sociology is the study of the values and beliefs and motives of people groups. Psychology is the study of the values, beliefs, and motives of the individual.Let’s talk some more about endings. And sociology.Scientific American recently published the definitive explanation of why the final season of Game of Thrones fell short of the mark set by George R.R. Martin. According to Zeynep Tufekci, we loved the first 7 seasons of the show because, “it was sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual… This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter.”A little help on how to “deal with our world and the problems we encounter,” would be welcome right now, don’t you think?Tufekci then goes on to warn us, “The overly personal mode of storytelling or analysis leaves us bereft of deeper comprehension of events and history. Understanding Hitler’s personality alone will not tell us much about the rise of fascism, for example. Not that it didn’t matter, but a different demagogue would probably have appeared to take his place in Germany in between the two bloody world wars in the 20th century. Hence, the answer to ‘would you kill baby Hitler?,’ sometimes presented as an ethical time-travel challenge, should be ‘no,’ because it would very likely not matter much.”It’s easy to blame WWII on the psychology of one man because that’s how we prefer to tell stories in America; we like to zoom in so close that the picture and the story become pixelated. But if you pull that camera back to see the bigger, sociological picture, you watch an entirely different story unfold.With a much better ending.America’s problem – whichever one it is that has you most concerned – wasn’t caused by one of us. It was caused by all of us.And its solution will depend on all of us, as well.Roy H. Williams

Life is a series of unintended consequences.Things almost never turn out the way we plan.I remember this single-panel cartoon I read many years ago. Two men on a sidewalk are carrying briefcases. One of them says to the other, “Here’s an idea. Let’s buy a grocery store tabloid and bury it in the park with a copy of our 5-year plan. Then we’ll come back in 5 years and dig them both up and see which one is funnier.”I don’t have “goals” and I don’t have “plans”; because I don’t want to live with the pressure, guilt, and bondage those words seem to always bring with them.Plans are based on assumptions that wiggle away like greased piglets when you try to hang onto them.Detailed plans are the wishful thinking of a scientific mind.Instead of goals, I have objectives.Goals have deadlines, objectives do not.When we began building the Wizard Academy campus 16 years ago, I thought it would take us about 5 years. Right now we’re hoping we can be finished in the next 12 to 18 months. Okay, so it took 3 and 1/2 times as long as I thought it would, but that’s fine because we didn’t have a “goal” and we didn’t have a “plan.” We had an objective that we pursued in accordance with a guiding principle: Never borrow money.For sixteen years people have asked me about the timeline and the budget for building our campus and they always seem confused by my answer, “It will take as long as it takes and it will cost what it costs.”We built when we had money. We quit building when we did not. The final outcome was never in question. The only variable was how long it would take.Here’s another guiding principle: “When something really matters, don’t worry about how long it will take. The time will pass anyway.”My more disciplined friends tell me that putting timelines on their goals puts a healthy pressure on them to perform. These same friends also complain about the debilitating stress they face every day.Do you have plans that aren’t proceeding as planned? Are your goals wiggling away from you like a greased piglet? Consider the advice of Arianna Huffington, “Just change the channel. You are in control of the clicker.”When I was 20, a wealthy man gave me this advice: “Plan your work, and work your plan.”A couple of years later policemen led him away from his home with his hands cuffed behind his back. I doubt that being arrested for financial crimes was part of his plan.Today I offer you this advice: Choose what you hope to change and make a tiny bit of progress toward it every day. When you commit to a daily action – not an outcome – you will find that passion and hope and serendipity will soon come knocking at your door. You’ll find yourself in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing, in the right way. Not because you had a detailed plan, but because you made a commitment and you followed it up with daily action.By the way, changing the balance in your bank account isn’t an objective, it’s merely the consequence of daily actions. So make your commitment to something bigger than that. And remember the words of Wes Jackson, “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”Roy H. Williams

My 9-year old grandson, Gideon, asked a big favor of me the other day.“Poobah, I have 11 imaginary friends who need to start staying at your house.”“Okay. Can they all sleep upstairs?”“They could, but I doubt they’ll ever all be here at the same time.”Gideon told me what I needed to know about each of them and which ones would often go out wandering for days at a time – and not to worry about it – and which ones would come and go through the windows and who would sleep exactly where.There was only one imaginary friend who was going to continue staying at Gideon’s house.I am no stranger to imaginary friends. Indy and I have several of them.I, myself, am an imaginary friend.Brian Scudamore, Erik Church, David St. James, and James Alish are the primary leaders of O2E Brands. I write ads for their four franchises. A number of years ago, these guys began bringing groups of their top-performing Franchise Partners to meet “the wizard in the castle on the mountain in Texas.”Okay, I can play that role. All I have to do is unlock the majestic tower Pennie created and give a tour of the magical campus she created that surrounds it.But Brian and Erik and David and James had an altogether different plan.Unbeknownst to me, they told their Franchise Partners that every newcomer was required to present me with a gift when they met me. And that the gift had to be deeply meaningful. And they had to tell me a story about it when they presented it. And if their gifts and stories were acceptable, I would invite them upstairs to spend some time with me.I was, of course, embarrassed at first, but this little ritual in the underground art gallery became precious as time went by. These awkward encounters taught me the importance of the imaginary people in our lives.The people you admire from a distance – the authors you read, the actors who entertain you, the voices on the radio that sing to you, and the faces on Youtube that peer into your eyes – are imaginary people that inhabit your world.The character is always bigger than the actor who brings it to life.I recently received an illustrated letter containing 7 questions from a young boy named Bennett.I will conclude today’s memo by answering Bennett’s questions:Can you make 2 suns?No, I cannot speak 2 suns into the physical world, but I can speak 2 suns into your mind. “As Bennett stood in his front yard in the middle of the night, the darkness on his left melted away when a glowing, silver circle began to rise up out of the ground. When that circle of light was as high as his left shoulder, a golden ball began to rise out of the ground on his right. And when the light from the gold ball touched the silver, 12 sleeping flowers lifted their heads, 9 hummingbirds flew away, 6 big dogs barked in Spanish, 3 policemen blew their whistles, and one old rooster crowed cock-a-doodle-do.”Can you make a copy machine?Yes. If I press special numbers on my telephone and say, “I want a copy machine,” a copy machine will appear the next day.How many floors are in your castle?Five: The Art Gallery, the Banquet Hall, the Eye of the Storm, the Library Floor, and the Star Deck.Can you make a camera?Yes. When I touch a certain button on my computer, a camera will appear on my front porch two days later.Can you make a crayon box?Yes, I make crayon boxes the same way I make cameras.Do you have a wizard family?Yes, there are 46 other wizards in my family. Indiana Beagle will put some photos of them in the rabbit hole for you.Do you have any comments?Yes. This is my comment: You are a very brave boy, Bennett. You do things that other people only think about doing or talk about doing. You drew me a nice picture and you wrote me a good letter. Because you have courage, and because you are a doer, and not just a talker, you will be successful at whatever you choose to do. I look forward to meeting you when your Dad brings you to Austin.Yours,Roy H. Williams

Have you ever seen a photographer look through a rectangle of forefingers and thumbs to “frame” a potential shot?Framing is even more important when using words to capture images.Advertising, like every other kind of storytelling, should always begin with a framing sequence.From what angle will you approach your subject?What will be revealed?What will be excluded?Most importantly, what will be only partially revealed, requiring your reader to supply the parts that are missing?In the prologue of John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, a character explains the attraction of the partial reveal: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”“Mr. Jenkins?”“Yes, Bobby.”“How much should a hamster weigh?”We know from this framing sequence that Bobby respects the wisdom of Mr. Jenkins and feels comfortable enough around him to ask whatever is on his mind. And because Bobby feels comfortable, we feel comfortable, too. We find out later that Mr. Jenkins owns an air conditioning company.Another ad opens like this:“Mr. Jenkins told me…”“Mr. Jenkins told me…”“Mr. Jenkins told me to work on every system like it was for my mom.”These 3 employee voices frame Mr. Jenkins as a person who loves his mother and who hires people who love their mothers. We also know that Mr. Jenkins believes his customers deserve care, concern, and commitment. But the ad doesn’t make these claims; we come to these conclusions on our own because of the partial reveal.“I think I know why Ken Goodrich hired me to run his plumbing company.”The famous owner of an air conditioning company is now in the plumbing business, too. And the person who runs that company for him is straightforward, plainspoken, and willing to tell us what he thinks. We arrive at these conclusions after just 14 words of framing. This is how the public was introduced to Zach Hunt.The next ad begins:“Zach, have you ever heard of the 7-year itch?”This 10-word frame skyrockets our curiosity. We want to hear Zach’s answer and learn where Ken Goodrich is headed with this question.“Five years before Teddy Roosevelt led the Rough Riders, Simon Schiffman stepped off the train to stretch his legs.”Two heroic icons of American history 125 years ago… An unknown man steps off a train… Framing has set the stage. Now captivate your customer’s attention by surprising them with what happens next.Roy H. Williams

Have you found your identity?Do you know your purpose?Are you ready for your adventure?Identity: Who am I?Purpose: Why am I here?Adventure: What must I overcome?Identity is your self-image; a composite of your beliefs, your preferences, and your relationships. Bits and pieces of your identity will evolve with your experiences, but other bits are carved into your bones, unseeable and unchangeable.Advertising moves you when it connects with your identity.Purpose is like a strobe light, revealing an ever-changing series of tableaus that demand your attention. But that intermittent, guiding light comes from a single place. And that place is your identity.Who are the people inside your circle of light?In one instance, your purpose is to lend a listening ear, to make sure a person knows they have been heard. In another instance, your purpose is to defend someone who is unable to defend themselves. In a third instance, your purpose is to give guidance to someone who needs it.If you don’t know why you are here – or if you have no clue what to do – it’s because you don’t know who you are.“Finding your passion” is you focused on you.“Finding your purpose” is you focused on others.Quit looking for your passion. Step up to your purpose and let your passion find you. All it takes is commitment.When we’re having an adventure, we wish we were safe at home. But when we’re safe at home, we wish we were having an adventure.Adventure is just a fancy word for trouble.Dewey Jenkins told me that trouble presents itself as a problem to be solved and our adventure lies in finding a way to overcome it. If you ignore the problem, hide from it, rage against it, or cower in fear before it, it will just return again and again until you have finally learned how to defeat it.Mr. Jenkins told me that’s when it’s time to celebrate, celebrate, celebrate! Now that you’ve learned how to defeat it, you’ll never have that problem again. But don’t worry, a new and different problem is coming up the trail to meet you and it’s wearing an evil grin.The defeated person sees life as a series of difficulties, disappointments, and dilemmas. The victorious person sees life as an adventure consisting of puzzles to be solved, battles to be fought, and problems to be overcome.Do you think this is all just a mind game; that all we’re really doing is giving our problems a new name and looking at them from a new perspective?How very perceptive of you! That’s exactly what we’re doing.But which of those two people do you think is happiest?Roy H. Williams

Paul Compton and “Jackie” Floyd walked to grade school together in 1934. Their mothers, Clara and Ruby, rented rooms in the same boarding house in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.Paul Compton was Princess Pennie’s father.It was Pennie’s grandmother, Clara, that answered the boarding house telephone on October 22, the night the bad news came.Paul Compton’s friend, Jackie Dempsey Floyd, was interviewed on television twenty-eight years ago. Jackie was 68 years old at the time:“When I was born, I was born at my aunt’s house – my mother’s aunt – and it was during the wintertime, and my father went to the mirror with me and held me up to the side of his face and says, ‘Oh, look! He looks just like me!’ And you know how kids will do their hands? I was doing my hands like that and he said, ‘Oh look, he’s going be a fighter. We’re going to call him Jack Dempsey.’ But my mother wouldn’t go for it. She went for part of the name, but I thought that was kind of nice, that he did that.”Jackie’s father was born in 1904, three years before Oklahoma became a state, back when it was still called “Indian Territory.”“My father had a nice sense of humor. He’d always keep people laughing and everything. And in the short time I got to be with him, I got to know him pretty well. And he was always kidding around with my mother and everything, and keeping her laughing, and he’d cook for us. I remember one time he took me fishing. So we went up in the mountains somewhere to a lake, and we couldn’t get the fish to bite, but it was a very clear lake and we could see them, and he said, ‘You know what we ought to do? We ought to shoot those fish, if we can’t catch them.’ So he let me shoot the gun into the water like we were going to shoot a fish, but we didn’t get one, but he thought it was something I might like to do.”Jackie Floyd was born not many years and not many miles from where Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.“And my mother was always afraid that I was going to be kidnapped, for some reason or other, but anyhow, these larger boys had a pulley in one tree and it went down to another. And you could get up in this bucket and ride from one tree down to the other. Kind of like a carnival ride or something. It was fascinating fun and I stayed after dark. And I went home and my mother was scared to death. And she told my father, ‘You know, you’ve never given him a whipping. It’s your turn to discipline him.’ And it had been raining that day and I had a raincoat on, so he said, ‘Okay, I’ll whip him.’ So he took me in the bathroom and said, “You take that raincoat off and put it over the toilet stool, and every time I hit it with the belt, you yell.’ So he was beating the raincoat and I was yelling and my mother was trying to break the door down. She said, ‘I didn’t tell you to kill him, I just told you to give him a spanking!” But he didn’t hit me. Never in his life did he ever hit me.”When Paul Compton’s mother, Clara, answered that boarding house telephone on October 22, 1934, “the night the bad news came,” she was informed that Jackie’s father had been shot and killed by the FBI.“You’re constantly running and hiding and you don’t know when you’re going to get to see anybody. You might have to sleep in the woods. It’s just a miserable life. It might look exciting to somebody, but you look at the end, the way it came down and everything: he was constantly on the run. He might have had a lot of money at one time or other, but it never did him any good. And you’ve no place to go and really relax or have fun, like you should be able to.”But Jackie understood why his father did what he did.“This bank had taken his grandfather’s money – which he had in the bank – and his grandfather had asked the banker, the day before the bank went bad, if his money was safe. And he told him it was. And evidently the bank started up again. So my father went to his grandfather and told him, ‘Grandpa, I want you to sit across the street over there at the depot and watch as I’m going to rob the bank here today.’ So he robbed the bank and the next time he saw his grandpa, he said, ‘Grandpa, did you see me rob the bank?’ And he said, ‘No, it was nice and warm and I went to sleep and missed the whole thing.'”The stock market crash of 1929 triggered the Great Depression. Small-town banks that had taken people’s money were closing their doors, but not before they also took their family farm.“The banks were going under and taking people’s money and foreclosing on farms and everything, and I think the people felt that my father was just one of them, kind of striking back for all of them… and it was kind of like they were pulling for him to stay at large instead of being killed. He was probably the only criminal I ever heard of that people wanted for him to stay alive and at large, instead of being captured.”“But a lot of people started using his method of operation and dressing like him, and he got blamed for a lot of banks that he really

Talent is Unconscious Competence; a superpower you were born with. People born with a superpower usually have difficulty teaching it to you.Skills are Conscious Competence; acquired excellence, learned behavior. People who acquire their skills through study and practice usually make excellent instructors.Talented people are tricky to manage. If you tell them what to do, they will do it to the best of their ability, but the outcome won’t be nearly so wonderful as it might have been had you simply inspired them instead.To inspire a talented person, describe – in abstract terms – the impact you desire. Fill your description with similes and metaphors, such as, “I want people to feel springtime and butterflies and the first kiss of puppy love. I want them to feel new beginnings, forgiveness, fresh hope, and a clean slate.”Your talented person will then surprise you with something you never imagined.I stumbled onto this technique by happy accident in 1980 when a start-up needed a logo. Pennie and I had recently met a graphic artist at a church event, so I contacted him for guidance. When it came to shapes and colors and symbols and signals, Jim Collum lived in a world of his own.He was tentative, reclusive, and moody. But I can speak those languages.Have you heard of Portals and the Twelve Languages of the Mind, the class on multidisciplinary communications at Wizard Academy? I can trace the beginnings of that class back to the 5 or 6 conversations I had with Jim Collum 39 years ago.He agreed to design my logo for $500, exactly the amount I had budgeted. My new problem was that I had to tell a professional artist who was twice my age what I wanted, and I had no idea what I was doing.I was swimming in waters too deep for me, so I did the only thing I knew how to do; I gave Jim a list of metaphors and asked him to design a logo that communicated their common denominator.“Jim, have you ever played Monopoly?”“Sure.”“You know the guy on the cards with the top hat and the monocle?”“The Monopoly Man doesn’t have a monocle. You’ve got him confused with Mr. Peanut.”“Okay, imagine the Monopoly Man wearing the monocle of Mr. Peanut. To me, a top hat and a monocle say, ‘generations-old money’. A dark grey Mercedes sedan. A diamond tie tack. An ivy-covered country club. Safe. Established. Zero-risk. Exclusive. Like a Swiss bank account.”“Got it. Come back in a week.”Somewhere in the detritus of my disorganized life I have a copy of that logo. I wish I could find it for you. It was a perfect square made of 4 smaller squares that were separated by a narrow, void margin: an intersection graph.Three of those quadrants were a darkish, silvery-grey, but the upper-left square was black. And the lower-right quadrant of that black square was 24-carat gold; the glint of light off a monocle. A diamond tie-tack.It was a purely abstract logo that communicated everything I had said to Jim. Everyone who looked at it saw, ‘old money… safe, established, zero-risk, exclusive, like a Swiss bank account.’That golden square was just one-sixteenth of the logo but it commanded all the attention. It was the upper-left quadrant of an invisible square you perceived at the center of the logo.It was the glint of light you see at the edge of the pupil in an eye.Jim never explained any of this to me, but I saw it immediately and so did everyone else.I believe everyone is a genius. Everyone has a superpower. Every person has a hidden talent.Your job is to uncover that talent and inspire it. We do this for our children and grandchildren.Perhaps we should also do it for our co-workers and our friends.Indy is waiting for you in the rabbit hole.Roy H. Williams

One hundred and seventy-four years ago, America’s 11th president sent John Slidell on a secret mission to Mexico, authorizing him to pay the Mexican government up to $25 million for their territories in New Mexico and California. When Mexico refused to consider the offer of President James K. Polk, he sent 4,000 troops to occupy land near the Rio Grande—a region Mexico claimed as its own.Mexico responded by sending troops, and on April 25, 1846, an American patrol was attacked by Mexican cavalry. Polk loudly accused Mexico of shedding “American blood on American soil!” and congress immediately voted to declare war on Mexico.Freshman congressman Abraham Lincoln argued that President Polk had goaded the Mexicans into a fight on Mexican soil, and that the war was “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the president.” He labeled “Mr. Polk’s War” a shameless land grab, and introduced a series of resolutions demanding to know the location of the “spot of soil” where that first battle of the war took place.Lincoln’s furious “Spot Resolutions” made his reputation as a politician, but damaged him with his with pro-war constituents. One Illinois newspaper even branded him “the Benedict Arnold of our district,” and his own Whig party did not allow him to be renominated at the end of his congressional term.The Mexican–American War was the first American war to be covered by mass media, creating widespread public interest and support. Telegraphed reports of victory from the battlefield sparked wildfire excitement and kept Americans emotionally united when they read about those battles in the penny press.1.  New York City celebrated the double-victory at Veracruz and Buena Vista with fireworks and a grand procession of 400,000 people.The Mexican-American War had a higher rate of casualties than WWI or WWII. It was a nasty, brutal war, with diseases killing as many as did cannons, rifles, and swords.In late 1847, President Polk sent a State Department clerk, Nicholas P. Trist, south of the border to negotiate a peace treaty with the Mexicans. The talks proceeded slowly, so Polk ordered Trist to end the talks and return home. But Trist, believing he was on the verge of a breakthrough, disobeyed the president’s order and sent home a 65-page letter defending his decision to continue his efforts toward peace.Polk was furious. He said Trist was “destitute of honor or principle!” and tried to have him removed, but was unable to stop the negotiations in Mexico. Two months later, Trist finalized the miraculous Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo. In that treaty, Mexico relinquished all claims to Texas and awarded Trist all or part of the future states of California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Kansas.President Polk reluctantly accepted the deal, then fired Trist the moment he returned to the United States.I share these things to cheer you up.Did you think our current political climate meant that we had lost our way as a nation? Don’t worry even a little bit. A clear-eyed study of history reveals that no nation of people has ever lived up to its potential.We are no more – and no less – screwed up than we have always been.L’chaim.Roy H. Williams1. Beginning in 1830, inexpensive newspapers became possible following the shift from hand-crafted to steam-powered printing. Famous for costing one cent while other newspapers cost around 6 cents, penny press papers made the news accessible to the masses.

MANLEY: I’m making things more efficient.DAVE: How?MANLEY: Abbreviations.DAVE: Give me an example.MANLEY:  LOL. I text that to my plumbers to remind them to LOOK…OUT… for LEAKS.DAVE: You’re texting that?MANLEY: Yep. And sometimes the guys text back “D-K.” That means DRAIN… CLOGGED.DAVE: But clog is spelled with a C.MANLEY: Not in internet talk, Dave. Other times they text me that the WATER… TANK’s… FINE.DAVE: Do they ever text LMAO?MANLEY: Sure. That means LOOKIN’… MIGHTY… A-OHDAVE: A-OH?MANLEY: That’s short for “A-Okay.” Dave, you need to learn internet talk.© 2019, Roy H. WilliamsWe were only 18 words into that exchange when you realized one of the characters owns, or manages, a plumbing company. You figured that out even though the character never said it.You walk into the middle of conversations every day and quickly figure out what’s happening. When you’re writing banter in advertising, you must allow your audience to do the same.And did you notice that neither character said “WTF?” It was you that said WTF after the plumbing company owner said, “WATER… TANK’s… FINE.” That was the moment you participated in the ad. Marketers like to call this “engagement,” but a more accurate word is “participation.” You want your readers, listeners, and viewers to participate in your ads by filling in what you left out.Is the manager of the plumbing company really that dull-witted, or is he just having fun with his friend? You’ve got to figure that out for yourself.Are you beginning to see why well-written banter is difficult to ignore?Ad campaigns built around the banter of memorable characters never get old. Instead, they get stronger with each passing year.You won’t learn to write banter by studying advertising. Instead, you must study screenwriters and novelists.This passage from Sea Swept, by Nora Roberts, is a good example:CAM: You can’t buy decent socks for twenty these days.ETHAN: You can if you don’t have to have some fancy designer label on them. This ain’t Paris.CAM: You haven’t bought decent shoes in ten years. And if you don’t pull up that frigging seat, I’m going to –PHILLIP: Cut it out! Cut it out right now or I swear I’m going to pull over and knock your heads together… I’ll dump your bodies in the mall parking lot and drive to Mexico. I’ll learn how to weave mats and sell them on the beach in Cozumel… I’ll change my name to Raoul, and no one will know I was ever related to a bunch of fools.SETH: Does he always talk like that?CAM: Yeah, mostly. Sometimes he’s going to be Pierre and live in a garret in Paris, but it’s the same thing.The best advice I can give you about putting banter in ads is this: Don’t start writing until your characters have come fully alive in your mind. You’ll know this has happened when one of them says something unexpected.Write that down. And then listen to what the other character says in response.If you ever force an imaginary character to say what you wish they would say, that character will immediately die and your ad will sound like an ad.Worse than that, the rotting corpse of your dead character will make your ad smell like an ad. So trust your characters to know their jobs. Sooner or later one of them will say something unexpected about whatever it is you need them to help you sell.A boring, annoying person says exactly what you expected them to say.“Boring and annoying.” Describes most ads, doesn’t it? Please don’t let it describe yours.When your imaginary characters have come fully alive, you’ll enjoy spending time with them, and the audience will look forward to your next ad.I’ll see you when you get here.Roy H. Williams

When our oldest son was an infant, I would hold a spoonful of baby food in front of his mouth, smile my most radiant smile and say, “It’s a good one.”I learned this, of course, from watching Princess Pennie.Later that spring I was sitting across from him when he pulled a lollipop from his mouth, pressed it against my lips and said, “It’s a good one.” Pennie and I laughed until we had tears streaming down our cheeks.I don’t pretend my story is unusual. Every parent has a hundred like it. The weird part is that Pennie and I still use that phrase every day and have been doing so for more than a third of a century.When we’re headed out to something we’ve been looking forward to, “It’s a good one,” is an exclamation of anticipation. When we’re leaving an event we enjoyed, “It’s a good one,” is a declaration of satisfaction. When we’re having a great time, “It’s a good one,” is a reminder to capture that moment and tuck it safely away in the treasure chest of the heart so that we might relive it on a rainy day.The creation of private jargon is one of the benefits of marrying your best friend.Do you have a private jargon understood by only the people closest to you? If you don’t, I encourage you to capture a phrase the next time everyone is laughing. It will be there, dancing in the air for as long as the laughter continues. Just reach up and snatch it. The only permission you need is your own.Private phrases make wonderful pets.Another interesting thing that happened that spring – and I mention it only because today is April 1st – is that my friend Cheerful Charlie gave me a strange new Bible because he thought I’d find it interesting. And I did.It was called The Reese Chronological Bible. It had all the same verses as every other Bible, but they were radically rearranged in what was purported to be chronological order. According to Reese, our universe was spoken into existence on an April 1st and Jesus was born in Bethlehem on another April 1st, many years later. Reese claimed that early Christians celebrated Jesus’ birth on April 1st and were consequently mocked by their detractors as “April Fools.”You heard what I said about it being “a strange new Bible,” right?There was no way to know whether Reese’s theories were true, and it didn’t really matter anyway, but Charlie knows that I’m always willing to lend an ear when someone challenges traditional wisdom.The part that fascinated me is that no one knows the origin of April Fool’s Day. History.com has this to say, “Although April Fools’ Day, also called All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for several centuries by different cultures, its exact origins remain a mystery.”Reese’s theories got so little traction that it’s almost impossible to find online references to him. But even if Reese was wrong, spring has sprung, birds are flirting, squirrels are chattering, and the flowers are strutting their stuff.But maybe, just maybe, Reese was right.And if so, “Merry Christmas.”Roy H. Williams

The advice I give to others, I rarely take myself.I admonish persons who possess detailed knowledge to “dumb it down” so the rest of us can understand because, frankly, we are rarely interested in the mystery and wonder of the unabbreviated truth.I tell them, “Say it so plainly that you worry you have stripped it of all its truth and beauty.”I tell them, “Simplify it to such a degree that any person who understands the subject as well as you do will think you’re an idiot.”That’s how you make things clear.Today I take my own advice.If you want to be bigger, advertise as though you were bigger. Don’t calculate your ad budget based on the volume you did last year. Base it on the volume you hope to do this year.They call it “mass media” for a reason: it reaches the masses. Consequently, you can’t really target using mass media. (TV, radio, billboards)But don’t worry about that. Use mass media anyway. Targeting is overrated and ridiculously overpriced.Choose Who to Lose. Correctly-written ad copy will filter out the customers you don’t want and attract the customers you do want.Filtering through ad copy is how you “target” when using mass media.Two ways to use mass media:(A.) Used consistently, mass media will cause your company to be the one customers think of immediately – and feel the best about – when they finally need what you sell.(B.) Used short-term, mass media will give urgency and importance to a special event when you purchase high repetition for a period of time, usually between 1 and 14 days.Google is the new phone book. Like the Yellow Pages of yesterday, it is the principal resource for buyers who are currently, consciously in the market for a product or service and have no preferred provider. Like the White Pages of yesterday, Google delivers your telephone number, street address, (and business hours) to customers who have already chosen you as their preferred provider.Customers who come to you through mass media will often be credited to your digital efforts due to the “White Pages” function of Google. They had already chosen you as their preferred provider, but were looking online for your street address, phone number, or business hours.Regardless of how you win them, it is costly to win a first-time customer. Getting that customer to come back a second, third, or fiftieth time is cheap and easy if they had a good experience the first time.Advertising is a tax we pay for not being remarkable. So be remarkable! This is what generates word-of-mouth. You’ve got to impress your customer. If you don’t, your competitor will.Companies that celebrate their victories have happy employees. So find things to celebrate. Happy employees create happy customers.Most customers are repeat customers or referral customers. Mass media is the most efficient way to maintain top-of-mind awareness among these groups. In addition, it will bring you new, first-time customers.Your plan to stay in touch with your customers through social media and email blasts is based on the assumption that your customer is willing to open, read, listen to, or watch what you have to say. Is this actually happening? And if not, why not? (HINT: The Subject Line gets people to open it. The content, itself, gets people to share it.)Thirty-six years ago (1983) David Ogilvy was speaking of newspaper and magazine ads when he wrote, “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” Now look at your open rate. What percentage of your online budget has been spent when you’ve written your subject line?If you have nothing to say, don’t let anyone convince you to say it. Boring, predictable messages make you seem smaller and duller and waste your money. Companies don’t fail due to “reaching the wrong people.” Companies fail due to saying the wrong things.Predictable ads are about you, your company, your product, your service. Persuasive ads are about the customer, and the transformation your product or service will bring to your customer’s life.“I, me, my, we, and our” are self-centered words.“You and your” are customer-centered words.Entertainment is the only currency that will purchase the time and attention of a busy public. Are your ads entertaining?One of the most common mistakes in advertising is to spread your ad budget across several different media so that you “don’t leave anyone out.” But persuasion – in most instances – requires repetition and familiarity. Would you rather reach 100% of the people and convince them 10% of the way, or reach 10% of the people and convince them 100% of the way? Don’t spread your money too thinly by chasing the unicorn of “media mix.”Expensive rent = cheap advertising. Intrusive visibility – a landmark location with signage that’s noticed even when people aren’t looking for it – is the cheapest advertising money can buy. This is true for service businesses,

Every form of communication is composed of 12 basic ideas and each of these ideas, held singularly, is a separate channel of communication in the mind.Like a jet lifting off the runway, these 12 concepts will accelerate and elevate your creative expression: speaking, writing, drawing, painting, persuading, acting, photography, sculpting, selling, singing, landscaping, interior decorating, inventing, filmmaking, engineering, and making music.If I left out your favorite form of expression, just add it to the bottom of the list as you point the nose of your jet toward the sky.Everything can be explained using these 12 languages of the mind, and each of the 12 can be expounded and expanded by the others.Let us begin by defining a couple of terms.Perception: a conscious awareness of a sensation and interpretation of sensations.Communication: a successful transfer of perceptions to another person.The impact of your communication is determined by your mastery of these 12 languages:1. Numbers are a language of the mind.Math is easier to learn when you think of it as a language. There are things that can be communicated in the language of numbers that can be said in no other language.2. Color is a language of the mind.Look at a color wheel. Pink and burgundy agree with red, but that entire family of color is contradicted by green. Add white to a color and you get a tint. Add black and you get a shade. Add grey and you get a tone. Colors, tints, shades, and tones communicate moods and attitudes. Color can be saturated to intensify – or desaturated to drain – a feeling.3. Phonemes are a language of the mind.Every spoken language is made of a specific number of sounds, and alphabets are constructed to represent those sounds. English is composed of 44 phonemes. The vowels of a language are its musical notes.1  The “stops” in English are the sounds represented by p, b, d, t, k, g. (Make those sounds in your mind; not the names of the letters, but the sounds the letters represent.) There are also labial, dental, fricative, and palatal phonemes. Obstruent phonemes give words a hard-edged, angular feel, like “taketa.” Sonorant phonemes give words a softer, feminine feel, like “naluma.”4. Radiance is a language of the mind.Outward radiance is energy expanding. Inward radiance is energy contracting. Hot and cold. Love and indifference. Dark and light. Dim light and shadows are sonorant. Bright light is obstruent. Likewise, pianissimo-soft is sonorant. Forte-loud is obstruent.5. Shape is a language of the mind.Angles are the obstruent phonemes of shape. Curves are sonorant.6. Proximity is a language of the mind.It speaks of the relationship of one thing to another. Large and small. Here and there. Left and right. Up and down. High and low. Near and far. Ahead or behind. Backward or forward. Absent or present. Complete or incomplete. Perspective, or angle of view, is another expression of proximity. Brother, sister, father, mother, cousin, co-worker and boss are words that describe relationship, a proximity measured in a “distance” that cannot be expressed in inches, feet, or miles.27. Motion is a language of the mind.Fast and slow. Curved or angular (shapes of motion). Coming or going (proximity of motion.)8. Taste is a language of the mind.As a biological tool for identifying chemicals dissolved in liquids, the perceptions of the tongue give us a vocabulary that can easily be assigned to non-chemical perceptions, allowing flavor to be used as a metaphor for a wondrous number of other things. “She is a sweet girl, but her father is a bitter old man.”9. Smell is a language of the mind.Smell is a tool for identifying chemicals dissolved in air, so the perceptions of the nose provide us with another vocabulary that can easily be assigned to non-chemical perceptions. “The judge’s ruling in that case stinks like 9 day-old fish.”10. Feel is a language of the mind.Rough and smooth. Dry and wet. Painful and pleasant. Relaxed and tense. Outstretched and cramped. Extended and contracted. The words that describe skin and muscular sensations – pain, pressure, position, movement, and temperature – can be used to describe emotional states as well. Or anything else you want to aim them at.11. Symbol is a language of the mind.Symbols have specific meanings. Facial expressions and body language are symbols. A stop sign is a symbol. An exclamation point is a symbol. A smiley face is a symbol. Each letter of the alphabet is a symbol for a phoneme. And every ritual – communion, baptism, the dubbing of a knight by the king – is a symbol combined with motion, another language of the mind.12. Music is a language of the mind.Music is any sound that carries meaning. The sound of a jet. A dog’s bark. A slither in the grass. A baby’s cry. What we typically think of as music is composed of 1. Pitch (proximity: high and low), 2. Key (shape&nb

“The deer have killed the oak tree! The deer have killed the oak tree!”Forty-year-old Todd – we’ll call him Todd – came running into my office with his second crisis of the day. I expected there would be at least one more.Todd felt it was his job to bring every problem to my attention so that I could tell him how to solve it. Todd was an idiot. His only value was that he gave me a sparkling example of what it means to be an identifier of problems rather than a creator of solutions.When you see a problem, should you bring it to the attention of your boss?Yes, but only if:1. You feel confident that your boss is not already aware of it.2. You have a solution in mind and are ready to suggest it.3. You are prepared to implement your solution if asked.You lower your value when you point out problems without offering to implement a solution.You elevate your value when you are willing to solve every problem you face.If you feel you have sufficient authority to implement your solution without having to get approval, then by all means do so.If you do not have sufficient authority, then articulate the problem along with your proposed solution in the fewest possible words. The less time and attention you require from your boss, the more highly your boss is going to think of you. Within a year or two, your boss will begin bringing you problems you didn’t even know about, along with a request that you solve them.When that day arrives, the only person that can get in your way is a family member of the boss, or some other person to whom the boss owes allegiance.Yes, nepotism is a real thing. It would be foolish to pretend otherwise.This brings up another important point:The key to failure is to hang on to the belief that things have to be “the way they ought to be.” The key to success is to be able to deal with things as they really are.Learn to deal with things as they are. Quit expecting things to be the way they ought to be. Unless, of course, you’re willing to dedicate your life to being a reformer. It’s a high calling, but a difficult one to monetize.I was lucky enough to have a mother who taught me these things when I was in my early teens.Without a high school diploma, she took an entry-level job at 32 years old when she became the breadwinner for our family. I was 11 at the time. Mom retired when she was 54, having been the director of every department of the largest corporation on earth.She was a problem solver.When a department was in crisis, the director of that department would be fired and they would put my mother in charge. Within a year, it would become the top-performing department in the company. She would remain at the head of that department until another one was in crisis and another manager was fired.It didn’t take that company long to see her as a resourceful problem-solver. And it won’t take your company long to see the same in you.Recognition and wealth pursue the person who solves every problem they find.Are you willing to become that person?Poor Todd. Things could have been so much better in his life if he had only met my mom.Roy H. Williams

Tinkerbell’s light gradually dims as she begins to die.Her only hope of survival is an audience that believes in fairies and demonstrates that belief through enthusiastic applause. Tinkerbell’s light has been growing brighter since 1904, when she first appeared in J.M. Barrie’s play, Peter Pan.Everyone believes in fairies enough to clap enthusiastically.The Tinkerbell Effect describes things that exist only because enough of us believe they exist, and behave as though they do.Paper money has value only because enough of us believe it has value and behave as though it does. If we quit believing it has value, it becomes scrap paper.Laws have power because we believe they have power and behave as though they do. If enough of us behaved as though laws had no power, we would live in a lawless society.Our economy is robust when we believe it is robust. But when we become anxious and hunker down in financial hesitation, our economy unwinds in a downward spiral, like a kite falling from the sky.A confident person spends money.Uncertain people delay their purchases.Uncertainty is an enemy of the economy.A lot of people are feeling uncertain.It seems as though every voice in the media believes we need to be instructed about what to believe and what to do. But I am convinced we need encouragement far more than we need instruction.Encouragement brings hope; hope that tomorrow will be better than today, hope that “next time” will be better than “last time,” hope that Tinkerbell will continue to live and twinkle and fly.In last week’s rabbit hole, Indiana Beagle shared a Barbara Hall quote that struck a triumphant chord:“Belief is about collecting ideas and investing in them. Faith is about having your ideas obliterated and having nothing to hang onto and trusting that it’s going to be all right anyway.”In the face of relentlessly negative newscasts, I have moved from belief in America to faith in America.I am not alone.Known for her focus on “Feel Good” news, Ellen K hosts a morning drive show that recently became the largest radio audience in Los Angeles. Evidently, people are looking for someone to make them feel good. I suggest you keep that in mind when writing ads to attract people to your business.If you should ever visit Wizard Academy in Austin, you will notice a bronze plaque on the subterranean path to our tower that overlooks the city of Austin from 900 feet above it. Stand on that plaque in the darkness and look just above the hilt of the sword at the top of the tower. That point of light you see is Tinkerbell. It is the guiding light of the Wise Men in the Christmas story. It is the bright star in The Impossible Dream, of which Don Quixote sings, “This is my quest: to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far…”Now look down and read the plaque. It says, “To Calvin Laughlin.”Calvin was an infant when his parents became major donors to Wizard Academy many years ago. His father is Roy Laughlin. His mother is Ellen K.Congratulations, Ellen.And thanks for the good news.Roy H. Williams

When a business is struggling financially, cost-cutting looks like a brilliant move.But can you shrink your way to success?From what I’ve seen, it’s easier – and healthier – to increase revenues than it is to cut costs.Cost-cutting comes at a very high cost.When I was 16 years old, General Motors was the bluest of the blue-chip stocks. Alfred Sloan was the Steve Jobs, the Jeff Bezos of GM and he sold 50% of all the cars in America. Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac were easily distinguished from one another and what you drove said a lot about you.In the United States, those 5 GM brands outsold Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Ford, Mercury, Lincoln, Chrysler, Volvo, Volkswagen, Subaru, Mercedes, Dodge, Plymouth, American Motors, Jeep, Rambler, Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Renault, BMW, Audi, Citroën, Opel, Peugeot, Ferrari, Jaguar and Porsche combined.During the years I’ve been old enough to drive, GM has fallen from 50% down to just 17% of sales in the U.S.But don’t blame increased competition. Other than Tesla and Hyundai, every brand of car available in America today was available when I was 16.What happened to GM? Cost-cutting.After a long and successful history of choosing CEOs from its manufacturing and sales divisions – Sloan, Wilson, Curtice, Donner, and Roche – General Motors chose a money manager, Richard Gerstenberg, to become CEO in 1972. Two years later, they replaced him with an accountant, Thomas Murphy.Money-manager Gerstenberg and accountant Murphy said, “Why are we spending all this money to design never-before-seen cars every 2 or 3 years? The cost of re-tooling our factories is astronomical. It would be more cost-effective to simply attach different grilles, headlights and tail lights along with a different interior and let each of our 5 brands sell essentially the same car.”“By the 1980’s, Sloan’s design had faded away. General Motors had not only blurred its brands and divisions, it engaged in badge engineering, offering essentially the same vehicle under several model and brand names.” – Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, p. 221On Oct. 11, 1988, the New York Times reported,“Underscoring the need for a distinct image in the era of look-alike cars has been sales performance. Buick sales dropped to 557,491 last year from about 920,000 in 1984, and Oldsmobile sales fell to 714,394 last year after having topped one million in the preceding three years.”Then, just before the end of 2018, we read,“In a move that will save the company $6 billion by the end of 2020, General Motors announced a restructuring Monday that includes chopping its workforce by 15% and shuttering 5 plants next year.”Some people never learn.Rust in peace, GM.I’ve watched this same movie, over and over, in every category of business in America. But no matter which actor is playing the lead, this movie always ends the same.Are you planning to shrink your way to greater profitability?I suggest you try to increase your sales revenues instead.That’s the only movie that has a happy ending.Roy H. Williams

I know what happens when men retire.I do not know what happens when women retire. Perhaps they are plagued by the same maladjustments, discomforts and discontentment as men, but I doubt it. As Michele Miller points out in her audiobook, The Natural Advantages of Women, females of our species are gifted with different neurological wiring that helps them be less obsessive, more able to adapt. She doesn’t use exactly those words, but that’s my interpretation of what the medical research seems to indicate.But men. I do know men.I’ve spent 40 years watching businessmen step up and out to make way for new leadership stepping up and in.Two Things Happen When Men Retire:Most of us lie to ourselves.“I’m going to play golf.” “I’m going to go fishing.” “I’m going to travel.” But as my friend Don Kuhl pointed out recently, these activities get old fast.Within 12 months, most men return to doing what they have always done.I’ve never seen it fail. A successful man will not be happy in retirement until he finds a way to redirect the superpower that made him successful. Warren Buffet calls this superpower, “your circle of competence.” The problem is that most men don’t know what theirs is.Acquired skills are conscious competence. But special talents, instinctive superpowers, flicker outward like invisible tongues of fire from your unconscious competence.Have you ever received instruction from a talented person? They speak poetry and think it is science.Rare is the talented person who is aware of – and can consciously explain – their unconscious competence. But I’ve known a few talented men who were aware, and who could explain it. And each of them was able to move elegantly from one season of their life to another.My father-in-law, Paul Compton, understood all things mechanical. If Paul had kept a sketchbook of his inventions it would have rivaled the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci. It’s little wonder that Paul quickly rose from working in a stone quarry to become an expert repairman of jet engines for American Airlines.When Paul retired, he bought expensive machines at auction that were beyond repair and then repaired them. He made a profit when he sold them, of course, but he wasn’t doing it for the money. It was just a new and different way for him to aim his superpower.Sean Jones is a good friend, a former client, and a genius who consciously understands his unconscious competence. Sean’s superpower is that he can look at a business, any business, and see precisely how to systematize 80% of the recurrent activities so that he might personalize and humanize the remaining 20%. Sean made his first fortune when he bought a small chain of jewelry stores and then used his superpower to skyrocket that company to unprecedented success. He sold that company for the kind of money people fantasize about when they buy lottery tickets, but Sean never-for-a-moment thought of retiring.He is now buying other companies in completely unrelated categories and working his special brand of magic on them, as well.Paul Compton and Sean Jones didn’t retire, they merely redirected their superpowers in new and different ways.Last week I had a 6-hour lunch with a close friend who is about to sell his company. He told me of 3 different things he was planning to do during his “retirement” and then asked me whether I thought he was crazy, because all 3 ideas – on the surface at least – were crazy.I asked my friend if he knew what it was that had made him so successful in his chosen field. He knew. I knew, too. But now that it was on the table, I was able to point to it and show him how each of his 3 “crazy” ideas was just a new way of directing his superpower.He was very happy to hear it.Are you considering changing how you spend your days?Every man has an unconscious competence. When you have identified yours, you will have found the key to your personal success, and an abiding sense of fulfillment and purpose.Do you need some help finding your superpower? It’s easy. Just ask those people who know you best.Ciao for Niao,Roy H. Williams

“It was dark inside the wolf,” is how Margaret Atwood believes the story might have opened.Emily Dickinson would agree. “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” was her advice to those of us who want our emails to be opened, our stories to be read, and our voices to be heard.If you want your subject line, headline, or opening line to win attention, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” Approach your subject from an interesting angle.The head-on approach is for journalists without wit.“Elderly Woman Eaten by Wolf but Survives.”You are not a journalist without wit.Are you captivated by a photograph or story?Let me give you the reasons why:1. It represents an idea bigger than itself.2. Part of you feels like you are there.3. Your imagination is called upon to fill in what was purposely left out.4. The subject is approached from an interesting angle.Do you want to secure the engagement of your reader, listener, customer?1. Make your words about something bigger than you and your product.2. Put your reader, listener, customer into your story, your speech, your ad.This is easily done using second person perspective and present-tense verbs. “You are walking through a forest when you hear the shadows of the trees sucking the light from the air around you and notice a four-legged shadow making its way slowly through the trees, coming toward you…”3. Did you see what we left out?We did not say it was a “dark” forest, but you saw darkness anyway. We did not say “ominous” but you felt it when the shadows came alive and began sucking the sunlight from the air around you. We did not say “wolf,” but you saw one in the four-legged shadow making its way slowly through the trees.*4. Questions flood the mind when a story is entered from an interesting angle.Why are we in the woods? Where are we going? What will we do when we get there?Whether spoken or unspoken, questions are the unmistakable sign of engagement.No questions, no engagement.No engagement means no sale, no income, no rave reviews.But you will have all these things and in great supply because you subscribe to the Monday Morning Memo and you understand, and believe, what I have told you.But I will not tell you about our monthly webcast unless you really want to know.Confession: I write ads to attract successful people; perceptive, intelligent readers.I do not write for dull-witted people. My avoidance of false claims, fear-mongering, hyperbole and exclamation points is a form of targeting-through-ad-copy that is more reliable than any customer list money can buy.The fact that you have read these musings all the way to the end makes me think highly of you.Very highly, indeed.Yours,Roy H. Williams

1. You Cannot Measure What Has Not Happened.When you ask a person about an experience that exists only in their imagination, they will give you imaginary answers.You can measure only what has already happened.In other words, you cannot measure what “would” or “would not” work. You can only measure what “did” and “did not” work.2. The Question Influences the Answer.“A question, even of the simplest kind, is not, and never can be unbiased. The structure of any question is as devoid of neutrality as its content. The form of a question may ease our way or pose obstacles. Or, when even slightly altered, it may generate antithetical answers, as in the case of the two priests who, being unsure if it was permissible to smoke and pray at the same time, wrote to the Pope for a definitive answer. One priest asked, “Is it permissible to smoke while praying?” and was told it is not, since prayer should be the focus of one’s whole attention. The other priest asked if it is permissible to pray while smoking and was told that it is, since it is always permissible to pray.”– Dr. Neil Postman, New York University3. Focus Groups are Plagued by a Basic Flaw of Human Psychology.When a person is asked to sit in judgment, they go to a different place in their mind. They react as a critic rather than as a customer.Asking a stranger to be a judge does not qualify them to be one.On page 8 of today’s rabbit hole, Indy Beagle will entertain you with video highlights of two hidden-camera focus groups as they evaluate a potential TV ad for Apple. It is tragicomic to watch these honest, well-intentioned focus group participants reveal their prejudices and inexperience. In the end, both focus groups conclude the proposed TV ad is badly conceived and recommend to Apple that it not be produced, never realizing they were evaluating the script and storyboard visuals for the most successful TV ad in history.4. What People Believe (and Say) They Will Do is Different From What They Will Actually Do.In the words of Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, “The correlation between stated intent and actual behavior is usually low and negative.” Zaltman goes on to describe how Hollywood films and TV pilots—virtually all of which are screened by focus groups—routinely fail in the marketplace, and 80 percent of new products or services fail within 6 months when they’ve been vetted through focus groups.Most of the thoughts and feelings that influence consumers’ behavior occur in the unconscious mind. “Unconscious thoughts are the most accurate predictors of what people will actually do,” Zaltman said in an interview. People think they will make an objective, transactional decision, when in reality they will make a subjective, relational one.We believe we will decide with our mind. But in the moment of truth, we decide with our heart.5. Data can Show You the Outcome of Your Past Decisions, But it Cannot Tell You How to Do What Has Never Been Done.Do not look to survey recommendations when you seek innovation.Innovation is a product of intuition.Was stereo invented because customers said, “Instead of the music coming out of just one speaker, why not have part of it come from a speaker on the left and the rest of it come from a speaker on the right?”Customers did not ask for stereo but after they were exposed to it, they couldn’t live without it.Did Steve Jobs develop the iPhone because customers told him they wanted cameras in their cell phones?Was inventory-on-demand perfected as a result of customers saying, “I think it would be better if you waited to create the product until after I order it?”Did Tony Hsieh invest in Zappos.com because people told him they would like to buy shoes online without first trying them on? Yet 10 short years after Hsieh invested $2 million in Zappos, the company was making so incredibly much money that Steve Bezos bought it for $1.2 billion.Keep in mind that Zappos charges full-price for shoes. So any argument of Zappos having an unfair “price advantage” goes out the window. Zappos elevated customer service to a new level and changed an entire industry.Do You Really Need a Group of Strangers to Give You Permission to Do What You Want?After many years of conducting focus groups for America’s largest companies, Joey Reiman, a founding partner of the BrightHouse Institute, told the New York Times, “Focus groups are ultimately less about gathering hard data and more about pretending to have concrete justifications for decisions that have already been made.”If you have a weak idea that requires no courage and isn’t going to raise any eyebrows or make a difference, surveys and focus groups will tell you that you should definitely go ahead and do it.But when you have an idea that can change the future of your company, those same people are going to tell you it’s a horrible idea and that you have lost your mind.Don’t spend the money on a survey.Save it to buy cham

I ate too much and it made me heavy and slow.Using too many words is like eating too much.It makes communication heavy and slow.Short sentences hit harder.Nouns and verbs are fists that deliver punches.Adjectives and adverbs are gloves that soften the blows.Unless they are unexpected.A brass-knuckled uppercut is an unexpected adjective that modifies a noun you didn’t see coming.“Your soup tastes like old socks that have been marinated in diesel, sprinkled with urine, and baked for three days covered in a sack that’s been used to wipe a donkey’s backside.”– Richard Poole, Death in Paradise, Season 1, episode 6Soup is the subject.Tastes, marinated, sprinkled, baked, covered, used, and wipe are the verbs.Socks, diesel, urine, days, sack, and backside are the nouns.Unexpected words unleash vivid images when they splash onto your mind.We’re driving through Mike’s Express Car Wash in Indianapolis.A 4,000,000 BTU heater ensures the water never drops below 180 degrees. Hot water cleans better than cold water because it delivers more stored energy.Soap unleashes hungry electrons that dissolve the road film clinging to our car.Pressure pumps give the water kinetic energy as it is fired from the nozzles of the guns.Brushes and mitters deliver mechanical vibration, a fourth kind of energy.The soft-water rinse is chased by a tornado that rocks our car and leaves never a trace of moisture.Emerging from the tunnel, we look like we’re driving off the showroom floor.A well-written paragraph unleashes bright colors like a car wash in Indianapolis.Similes and metaphors allow us to use the known and familiar to reveal the unknown and unfamiliar, like a father telling his son about the birds and the bees.Paired opposites give us the power to shine light in dark places and bring wellsprings of water to thirsty deserts.Rhythms of stressed and unstressed syllables make our words memorable. Meter is music. Meter is magic.Alliteration gives us the ability to accelerate all 43 phonemes, like many mumbling mice making midnight music in the moonlight. Mighty nice.The names of shapes and colors and familiar things allow us to project images onto the movie screen of the mind.Words give us the power to speak worlds into existence.What future will you set in motion today?Roy H. Williams

There is, to my knowledge, only one way to profitably put the power of the internet to work for you.It’s simple; just give people what they want.But first you have to know what they want.Let me help you with that.(1.) They want answers, and(2.) they want entertainment.But the answers they seek aren’t usually about your product or service. The answers they seek are solutions to their problems.You must speak directly to the felt need.If you would win the attention of the people, give them the answers they seek.If you would win the attention of the giants, learn to speak their language.Do you understand Natural Language Processing, that algorithmic logic in the binary minds of Google and YouTube and all the other giants in the land? Learn to speak this language and the internet will become your trumpet.We’re always ready to be distracted by something delightful.Entertain us and we’ll give you our attention. Make us feel good and we’ll consider you our friend. Stand for something we believe in and we’ll give you our support. Make a difference and we’ll tell our friends about you. Give us happy thoughts to think and we’ll allow you to guide our minds.Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind can easily find logic to justify what the heart has already decided.Entertainment is the only currency with which you can purchase the time and attention of a too-busy public. This is the essence of customer bonding.If you talk about yourself and why your solution is better than your competitors’, the only people who notice will be your competitors. But if you deliver a thrill of pleasure, the public will gather at your feet.Two young men sat through all the classes at Wizard Academy and learned how to use the life-changing tools of answers and entertainment.And with those tools firmly in hand, they wandered into the untamed wilderness of the internet exactly two years ago. They had no money to spend. None. But they had knowledge and time and energy.They chose to use their tools on YouTube. They could just as easily have chosen one of the other social media platforms, or they could simply have created a blog.The power is not in the platform. The power is in the answers and in the entertainment.They decided not to allow advertisers to attach ads to their daily YouTube show. This means they would receive no revenue from advertising, but it also means no false metrics created by click farms.Two years later, their worldwide audience is spending an average of 457,000 minutes a day watching their show. That’s more “viewing minutes” per day than are contained in 317 twenty-four-hour days. In a couple more months they’ll be receiving more than one year’s viewing time each day.Needless to say, they have become extremely influential in their chosen field and money is raining down on them like confetti in a ticker-tape parade.And they’ve not yet spent a penny on advertising.Roy H. Williams

When someone says, “Figures don’t lie,” know this: Figures lie, and liars figure.Never trust a weasel with a calculator.Do you remember the mortgage meltdown of 2008 and The Big Short, the movie that was made about it? There is a scene in that movie where investors Mark Baum and Vinnie Daniel go to visit Georgia Hale, an employee of the ratings agency Standard and Poor’s:Georgia Hale: So, alrighty, FrontPoint Partners, how can Standard and Poor’s help you?Vinnie Daniel: Well, we don’t understand why the ratings agencies haven’t downgraded subprime bonds since the underlying loans are clearly deteriorating.Georgia Hale: Well, the delinquency rates do have people worried but they’re actually within our models.Vinnie Daniel: Says you.Mark Baum: So you’re convinced the underlying mortgages in these bonds are solid loans?Georgia Hale: That is our opinion, yes.Vinnie Daniel: Did you check the tape? Have you looked at the loan level data?Georgia Hale: What do you think we do here all day?Vinnie Daniel: They’re giving these loans to anybody with a credit score and a pulse.Georgia Hale: Excuse me, sir. What do you think we do here all day?Vinnie Daniel: We’re not sure. That’s why we’re here.Mark Baum: Here’s what I don’t understand,Georgia Hale: We check, we recheck, we check again…Mark Baum: If these mortgage bonds are so stable, if they are so solid,Georgia Hale: Perhaps you should check your friend.Mark Baum: have you ever refused to rateGeorgia Hale: We stand behind them.Vinnie Daniel: That’s delusional.Georgia Hale: We stand behind them.Mark Baum: Georgia, have you ever refused to rate any of these bonds – upper tranche – as Triple-A? Can we see the paperwork on those deals?Georgia Hale: Oh, I’m under no obligation to share that information with you, whoever you might be.Mark Baum: Just answer the question, Georgia. Can you name one time in the past year where you checked the tape and you didn’t give the banks the Triple-A percentage they wanted?Georgia Hale: If we don’t give them the ratings, they’ll go to Moody’s, right down the block. If we don’t work with them, they’ll go to our competitors. It’s not our fault. It’s simply the way the world works.Vinnie Daniel: (after a dumbfounded pause) Holy shit.Georgia Hale: Yes, now you see. And I never said that.It seems to me the principal difference between the unregulated world of subprime loans and the unregulated world of online marketing is that there is no way to “short” the world of online ad fraud. There is no way to make a profit by exposing and ending it.In a widely-circulated news column published the day after Christmas, 2018, reporter Max Reid asked and answered an important question:“How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake…”“In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered…”“Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say).“In response to that story, Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao tweeted,“It’s all true: Everything is fake. Also mobile user counts are fake. No one has figured out how to count logged-out mobile users, as I learned at reddit. Every time someone switches cell towers, it looks like another user and inflates company user metrics.”Also in response to that story, Aram Zucker-Scharff tweeted,“The numbers are all fking fake, the metrics are bullshit, the agencies responsible for enforcing good practices are known bullshitters enforcing and profiting off all the fake numbers and none of the models make sense at scale of actual human users.”Zucker-Scharff is director of Ad Tech at the Washington Post.But none of this is surprising, or even

The average person is afraid of criticism.But the person who has no fear of criticism is more likely to succeed. This lack of fear is what keeps them from being average.The average business owner is afraid their ads will be criticized.Do you want to kill a great ad? Show it to the people you trust.In the words of my partner Mick Torbay,“You need to understand something: the committee is not evil. The committee doesn’t want you to fail. The committee has nothing but good intentions. But the committee can’t innovate. More than anything, the committee wants to look good to the rest of the committee. The committee is afraid of looking stupid… The committee can only spot problems, downsides, possible pitfalls… So don’t be surprised that when you present a really, really great idea to a committee, the only thing you’re gonna get is a reason why that idea won’t work, one reason for every member of the committee. The committee will always pull you to the center. The committee will help you avoid risk, but risk and reward are two sides of the same coin. If you avoid risk, then huge success is now out of the question. Are you okay with that?”Most ads aren’t written to persuade; they’re written not to offend.But even a weak ad will cause your name to be the first that springs into the public mind if you give it enough repetition. This assumes, of course, that your competitors have equally bland ads.And frankly, that’s a pretty safe bet.But repetition costs money.Do you want to differentiate yourself with memorable, attention-getting ads that will accelerate your repetition by unleashing the persuasive powers of wit, humor, identity, and audacity?The first step is to find your corporate mission statement, take it outside into the sunlight, lift it high up into the sky, then lay it down on the sidewalk and set it on fire. When it is finished burning, sweep the powdery ashes into the grass. Paper ash is an excellent source of lime and potassium. This will raise the pH and help neutralize the acid in your soil.You have now put your mission statement to the best possible use.Just out of curiosity, why did you think you needed to write down all those generic things you believe in? Those things you included – the things you stand for – rarely differentiate you since most of us include, believe in, and stand for the same things: Individuality, Informality, Opportunity, Competition, Efficiency, Progress, and Helping Others. It is what you exclude, or stand against, that defines you. To gain attention and win a following, you must stand against the omission of one of these seven things:Individuality: individual initiative, individual expression, independence and privacyInformality: equality, directness, and an open societyOpportunity: ability to change yourself, your business, your country, and your worldCompetition: opportunity to win recognition, status, and material rewardsEfficiency: reduce wasted time, effort, and resourcesProgress: social, economic, and physical mobilityHelping Others: because we’re all in this togetherYou may have used different words, but those are the ideas contained in every mission statement, the ultimate expression of committee-think.You don’t become famous by championing everything.You become famous by championing one thing.The client who grew the most in 2018 stands against inefficiency. His company eliminates stress and frustration by responding instantly when customers call and then doing the job perfectly, making sure the customer’s time and money are never wasted. His local company grew by tens of millions of dollars last year. Most people love his ads but he still gets plenty of criticism.A client whose volume jumped almost as high stands against formality. His frank, unvarnished style of communication makes customers trust his people and his company. His ads are beloved by most of the population but he still gets savaged in social media.Does the client who stands against inefficiency also have ads that are frank, informal, and unvarnished? Of course he does, but it is his stand against wasting the customer’s time that sets his company apart.Does the client who stands against formality also respond quickly and do the job right? Yes, but it is his stand against distance in the relationship between himself and the customer that makes his company special.What is the principal enemy your organization fights against?When I say “principal enemy,” I’m not talking about your competitors. I’m talking about that thing you try so very hard to eliminate for your customer.What is it?Roy H. Williams