This is an ad you’ll be hearing soon for the world’s fastest-growing franchise for in-home elder care:When Peter Pan first appeared in 1904, children didn’t understand the significance of the crocodile that swallowed an alarm clock. But as those children grew older, they realized that time is the ticking crocodile that chases us all. Time… we just can’t outrun it. I’m Cathy Thorpe, president of Nurse Next Door. Let us help you fight the crocodile. You can live in your OWN home and get all the help you need. It’s what we do… (two second pause) because we care. Nurse Next Door dotcom.”“Young boys should never be sent to bed. They always wake up a day older. And then before you know it, they’re grown.”– Johnny Depp playing J.M. Barrie in a movie called Finding Neverland.Have you accomplished things that other people said you could never do?Welcome to Neverland. You’re obviously one of the Lost Boys.The Lost Boys are risk-takers who rise above their circumstances, constantly dodging the Crocodile of Time, narrowly escaping the Bear Trap of Tradition, zigzagging away from competitors and fools, always happy, always helping, forever embracing that moment called Now.It is a marvelous tribe. When they get together and tell stories it’s like summer camp for grown ups. So they should have a tree house, right?On the first page of today’s rabbit hole, Indiana Beagle is showing off Marley Porter’s architectural rendering of The House of the Lost Boys – soon to be Wizard Academy’s third student mansion – three interconnected towers facing Chapel Dulcinea from directly across the valley of Engelbrecht. Each of those towers will have two rooms, raising our total number of on-campus rooms to twenty-four.One of the reasons they’re called the Lost Boys is because they’re invisible; you can’t find them.The House of the Lost Boys is being funded by a secret society of men and women who are donating $15,000 each toward the cost of construction. In return, they will attend a special 2-day event on the campus of Wizard Academy each year for the next five years (2015 – 2019) where they will enjoy the edgiest teaching, the most futuristic thinking and the liveliest discussions of the year.The names of the Lost Boys will never be listed. The Lost Boys themselves will be the only people who know the identities of the other members of the tribe. A Lost Boy is free to tell you they’re a member, but they’re forbidden to name anyone else in the group. Cool, huh?The seven Lost Boys who have already stepped forward are an amazingly magnetic group. If I published their names and accomplishments, we’d attract a big crowd of outsiders anxious to donate 15k apiece just to get next to these men and women for a couple of days each year. But we’re not going to let that happen.One of the most deeply embedded traditions of Wizard Academy is that no one tries to do business while they’re here. We’re not a networking organization. We’re a school, a retreat, an island of restoration and stimulation and recovery where interesting and excited people prepare for the next stage of their journey.Yes, we’re a little bit ridiculous.Okay, maybe more than a little bit. But that’s what keeps us safe from people whose minds are narrow and closed.Can I tell you my biggest fear? I worry that someday the wrong people will gain control of our school and rename it the American Small Business Academy. After all, we already own...

Sometimes I think we go through our lives trying to impress an invisible audience called “everyone.”“What will everyone think?”Invisible would be bad enough, but I think “everyone” might also be imaginary. Emil Cioran was probably right when he said, “If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.”“We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.”We buy cars, clothes, furniture and art to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are.Is it possible that everyone isn’t watching? Is there a chance that everyone is under the mistaken impression that is it we who are watching them?It’s funny when you think about it.And it’s also how I make my living. I’m an ad writer.When you have a strong attraction to a brand, it’s because that brand stands for something you believe in. You see in that brand a reflection of yourself as you like to believe you are. What authors do you read? Do you subscribe to any magazines? What type of architecture attracts you? Do you listen to music? What kind?Tell me what a person admires and I’ll tell you everything about them that matters.Does it bother you for me to say these things? Please don’t let it. I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about an “else” named Everyone.There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys.” – Robert Louis StevensonThe hidden mechanisms of explosive ad writing are rarely seen because most people don’t want to believe they need identity reinforcement and affirmation. They are offended by the very suggestion of it. But the truth is that most of us need these things deeply.I met a man a year ago who paid me to give him advice for a day. We spent that day talking about several companies he owned. At the end of the day he asked if I might be willing to write ads for these companies and I – for a variety of reasons – declined. A few months later I received a long email from him telling me about a troubled company he had acquired that had lost two-thirds of all its customers, a loss of about 20 million dollars in annual revenues. I wrote back and told him that I would write ads for this troubled company, but not for the others.The first ad I wrote shares a bittersweet, true story from the childhood of the man who hired me. It’s about something that happened to him when he was 10 years old and it’s why he bought the troubled company. Upon receiving the ad, he called six different people and read it to them. Each of them got tears in their eyes.Not because the story was about him, but because it was about them, too. The story in the ad is about a certain kind of magic that each of us guards deep in our heart like buried treasure. Even you.I have every confidence that the ad campaign will recover those lost customers and lift this once-troubled company into a sunlit sky.To write an explosive explanatory ad, you must choose:How to end.Where to begin.What to leave out.You must include specific details in your ad or it won’t have credibility: “a year ago… two thirds… 20 million dollars… 10 years old.”But you must also leave something out of your ad or it won’t trigger curiosity: “…a certain kind of magic that each of us guards deep in our heart like buried treasure.”You really want to read that ad now, don’t you?For obvious reasons I won’t be sharing that ad in the Monday Morning Memo and I’ve instructed Indy...

The hardest decisions in life occur when we must choose between two good things:Honesty or Loyalty?Justice or Mercy?Frugality or Generosity?These often come into conflict, do they not?If one could remove the vitriol from political debates, these are the six beautiful sisters we would see in a magnificent tug-of-war: Honesty, Justice and Frugality on one side ——– Loyalty, Mercy and Generosity on the other.Let us hope neither side ever wins.A person not doing anything is often exactly what they seem.If you want to get something done, ask a busy person.Rick Sorenson, one of my partners, tells of the day he decided to plunge headlong into the riptide of life. His moment of truth arrived when he saw himself dead and buried. On the tombstone six feet above him appeared these tragic words: He Had Potential.Sorenson read those words and immediately leaped into the churning sea of life.Do the storms ever cease on that sea?A ship in harbor is safe – but that is not what ships are for.”– John A. Shedd“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”– Mark TwainYou are busy because you do things.You are getting things done.You are having Mark Twain’s adventure.You are not torn between two beautiful things.You are torn between three: Work and Rest and Play.Which of these three have you sat in the corner with her face turned to the wall?Why have you chosen just two of these when all three are required for happiness?I have given you many things to think about today.I will think about them, too.Roy H. Williams

You’ve been told, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” But it’s a misquote. What Wolfgang Köhler said more than a hundred years ago – in 1910 to be exact – is that “the whole is different from the sum of its parts.”Kohler was famously irritated for the next 57 years by the insistence of writers to turn his statement into something different than what he was saying.But he shouldn’t have been surprised. As a psychologist, Köhler knew that we collect sensory data from verbal and nonverbal sources and then add it up into an “impression” that may or may not be accurate.The reason our impressions are so often wrong is because few of us ever studied a language that wasn’t a language of words or numbers.You didn’t realize that numbers are a language? There are things that can be said in the language of math that can be translated into no other. If you want to learn advanced mathematics, just think of it as a foreign language and you’ll be able to learn it much more quickly.Benjamin Zander delivers a charming and funny and profound TED talk about The Transformative Power of Classical Music. He begins with a short segment on the piano from Chopin, then pauses to explain the relationship between two of the principal notes in the sequence.So let’s see what’s really going on here. We have a B. This is a B. (plays the note) The next note is a C. (plays the note) And the job of the C is to make the B sad. And it does, doesn’t it? (Laughter) Composers know that. If they want sad music, they just play those two notes. (plays more notes, ending with B-C-C-C-C) But basically, it’s just a B, with four sads. (Laughter)”This is the moment when we realize that Zander has just taught us a two-syllable word. In the language of music, “sad” is spelled B-C.Zander then says,I’ve one last request before I play this piece all the way through. Would you think of somebody who you adore, who’s no longer there? A beloved grandmother, a lover — somebody in your life who you love with all your heart, but that person is no longer with you. Bring that person into your mind, and at the same time, follow the line all the way from B to E, and you’ll hear everything that Chopin had to say.”You listen for exactly 107 seconds as the music written by Chopin triggers detailed memories of specific times. You understand perfectly what Chopin was trying to say.This is when it really hits you that music is a language. And if you control the music, you control the mood of the room.Color, too, is a language.Symbols are a language.Motion is a language.I believe there are exactly 12 languages of the mind and they’re self-referential. This means you will find them embedded within each other and they can be added together to create distinct artifacts.Tempo is the Motion component within Music.Symbol plus Motion equals Ritual.Anger plus Joy equals Cruelty.1Sadness plus Surprise equals Disappointment.1These are just a few of the equations you’ll be taught when you look into Portals and the 12 Languages of the Mind. I’m not sure when we’ll be teaching it again, but if you’d like to receive an advance notice from Vice-Chancellor Whittington before he publicly posts it on the schedule, just ping [email protected] students attended last week’s class and none of them were writers. But I think you’ll be impressed with the things they wrote during a brief exercise on the second day of class.You’ll find 13 of their compositions in today’s rabbit hole. We’re editing a video of the 14th student that we’ll post in a week or two.Fascinating.Roy H. Williams

If you can’t tell funny stories about embarrassing mistakes you’ve made, you’re not taking enough chances.Are you letting the fear of failure turn you into a narrow guardian of the status quo?Good judgment comes from experience.Experience comes from bad judgment.I met a woman when I was a boy – I promise I’m not making this up – who had the power to change the future. She taught me how to do it, too.Shall I teach you?The past was written by the choices of yesterday.The future is written by the choices you make today.The key is to do things that matter.You spent your day yesterday. You invested your time. But did you make a difference? Did you bring anyone joy? Did you matter? Or did you play it safe because you were worried that you might make a mistake?I’m not suggesting that you try something new all the time, just 5% of the time.The time to try something new is when:1. you feel itchy that there’s room for improvement,2. you’ve counted the cost,3. you can afford to fail.That’s when you should take a chance. Follow your instinct.Few things turn out as well as we had hoped or as badly as we had feared.You learn a little from small mistakes. You learn a lot from big ones. You learn nothing at all from mediocrity.Failure is never a waste of time. Mediocrity always is. The fear of failure is what keeps you average. Success is the result of taking chances.America is plagued by mediocre primary schools, subpar infrastructure, and dysfunctional government. But somehow, this country manages to get at least one big, important thing right: innovation. That’s the deep magic of the world’s leading economy.”– James Pethokoukis, May 9, 2014Innovation occurs when you take a chance that you might be wrong.We want to encourage greatness in men. We want to encourage ambition. We believe that nobody wants to be sort of gray-normal. Often, the definition of normal is ‘average.’ We live, it seems to us, in an age under the curse of normalcy, characterized by the elevation of the mediocre.”– Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine“When you worry about what ‘might’ happen, you’re living in the shattered wreckage of your future.”– Teresa ShapiroPennie and I will spend April in Paris with the woman who taught me how to change the future.She married my father before I was born.Roy H. Williams

What are you trying to make happen?Is your goal actionable, or is it ambiguous and vague?Do you have an empirical method for measuring daily progress?Empirical: adjective, based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation rather than theory or pure logic.I’ll admit that I’m on a bit of a rant today and that the perspective I’m about to share may be nothing more than a quirky, personal preference.But I don’t think so.I’ve never been a big fan of what most people call “goal setting.” This isn’t because I have no goals. It’s just that I believe what most people call goals are little more than aspirations, hopes and dreams: wishful thinking. My goal is to be a millionaire by the time I’m thirty.”“My goal is to run a Fortune 500 company.”“My goal is to write a bestseller.”I don’t consider these to be goals but outcomes, by-products, consequences.I promise I’m not trying to rile you.I believe every honest goal:1: has an explicit action plan embedded within it.2: can have its progress monitored and measured by observers.3: will manifest itself in daily action, even if that action is occasionally limited to just few moments; a telephone call, an email, a note written to yourself on the back of a cash register receipt during lunch and then tucked into your wallet.My goal is to build a free wedding chapel that hosts more than 1,000 weddings a year for couples who travel to reach it from every continent on earth.”Chapel Dulcinea hosted 960 weddings in 2014 but we have not yet had guests from Antarctica. We hosted 824 weddings in 2013.A meaningful goal requires that you touch it each day and take action to move it forward, even if that action is microscopic. If you’re not taking action each day, you don’t have a goal. You have a delusion, a wish, a fantasy, a dream.Student: My goal is to be a published author.Me: Show me what you wrote yesterday.Student: Well, I haven’t actually started writing yet, it’s just my goal.Me: Do you really want to write, or do you want to have written? Is there a chance that what you actually want is just to have a book in print?”Make no mistake: I am a fan and an advocate and a steady imbiber of delusions, wishes, fantasies and dreams; but these are entertainment, comfort, and the sometimes-necessary components of a healthy self-image.But they are not goals.Roy H. Williams

The ground moved beneath our feet.There. It did it again.That first tremor was the growing reality of gender equality.The second was the shrinking of mass media.These trends aren’t connected, but they’re both significant.Gender equality is changing the nature of romance. Don’t believe me? Watch any romantic movie from 20 years ago and count the anachronisms, those interactions that belong to the past and do not seem to fit the present.Gender equality also affects advertising and marketing in ways you might not expect.Not many years ago, it was assumed that lovers would marry and buy a home and establish a life together. But then an entire generation of women was taught not to depend on a man, but to establish a career and a life on their own.I’m not being critical. If Pennie and I had daughters instead of sons, this is probably what we would have urged them to do.That advice to young women changed the landscape in marketing. A study published by Pew Research Center indicates that in 1970, 84% of U.S.-born 30-to 44-year-olds were married. By 2007 that number had declined to just 60% and if we extrapolate the trend into 2015, the percentage of married 30-to-44-year-olds is currently at 54.8% and falling. We went from 16% single to 46% single in just one generation.A once-proud nation of families is evolving into a proud nation of individuals.The motivations that drive husbands and fathers and wives and mothers are different from the motivations that drive individuals who have no one depending on them but themselves. Consequently, the language and logic of ad copy must be altered to connect with this altered audience.The trend toward singleness is sociological.The erosion of mass media is technological.Each trend accelerates the other.If the majority of a nation is watching the same TV shows at the same time, listening to the same hit songs at the same time, and receiving similar news from similar sources simultaneously, we can expect that nation to think and feel in similar ways.Mass media ruled America in 1970. Radio was a rock station, a country station, a talk station, an easy listening station and an instrumental format called “beautiful music.” Then you had ABC, CBS and NBC TV. Ted Turner wouldn’t create the first cable network until 1976 and FOX didn’t appear until 1986. When a movie left the theaters, it would go to the drive-in theaters where it would be shown for a reduced price, then appear on network television for free about a year later. DVRs, DVDs and videotapes did not exist. You either had to be where a movie was showing at exactly the right time or you missed it. This forced us to gather together at specific times for entertainment where we all heard the same commercials.Mass media brought us together physically and it united us psychologically. It also gave advertisers a platform for telling their stories.Advertising was easy in those days.Today’s technology allows us to opt-out of mass media. This is good for the individual but it presents a significant challenge to the advertiser. The advertising opportunities created by new technology are highly targetable but they’re also shockingly expensive. The most efficient thing we’ve found so far costs 4 times as much per person as broadcast radio. And although the digital product gives us the ability to pinpoint target a specific audience, that advantage doesn’t deliver anywhere near enough benefit to justify the inflated cost. This is not theoretical. We’ve learned these things through testing.I’ll bring this to a conclusion:We’re approaching the end of a golden time when courageous advertisers can invest money in mass media and see their businesses grow

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

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

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

Roughly 10 percent of the American population is worried about having enough money to pay the rent and enough food in the pantry to make it until payday. A good day is when their biggest fear is whether or not the car will start and get them to work. This is called living “hand-to-mouth.”I did it for years. Perhaps you’ve done it, too.Another 10 percent of America has these basic needs met but a dysfunctional household – or perhaps a troubled neighborhood – keeps them from feeling safe. These unhappy souls wear the dark handcuffs of fear and dread as they walk silently through what David called, “the valley of the shadow of death.”I don’t pretend to have a solution.At the other end of the spectrum are the 15 percent whose biggest concern is whether or not they’re getting sufficient recognition from the people whose opinions matter to them.And then there are the rest of us, the 65 percent in the middle who are “figuring-it-out-as-we-go.” Usually, our greatest need is that we’re searching for where we belong. Each of us is looking for the mirror tribe who will finally see us and know us and value us and miss us when we are absent.Pennie and I spent the last 15 years building a place for that tribe to meet. These Monday Morning Memos are a sort of homing beacon…Okay, I’m back now. I had to wipe a tear from my cheek as the gushing memory of a friend flooded my mind. I wasn’t thinking of him when I began this piece, but the words “homing beacon” burst the dam of a memory I’ve decided to let flow.More than a dozen years ago I decided to teach a class about unleashing your Intuition. We called it “Free the Beagle.” As is my custom, I opened that class by having each of the 30 students stand up and tell us their names and a little bit about themselves. The last person to stand was a white-haired man sitting in the far corner of the back row.My name’s Keith Miller.” He stopped and his stern gaze swept the room. “As I sat here and listened to you introduce yourselves, I realized that never in my life have I been surrounded by so many weirdos… misfits… mavericks… renegades… rebels and rule breakers.” The room went silent as a tomb. “It’s almost as if the wizard sent out the mating call of the albino monkey and this is the strange group that answered that call.” Then he shouted with happy joy, “And I just can’t tell you what a privilege it is to be counted here among you!” The room exploded with laughter and applause.When I saw how masterfully he had handled the room without telling us anything about himself, I wondered, “Could this be that Keith Miller?”During the first break, I slipped into my library and pulled out a hardback, The Taste of New Wine, a monumental book that sold more than 4 million copies when it was released in 1965. I handed it to Keith privately and said, “Could I convince you to sign that?”His eyes fell and he frowned a little. He had hoped he would not be discovered.I chose not to inquire about the sequence of events that led Keith to seek the shadows of oblivion. That’s one of the markers of our tribe; we don’t hold you accountable for your past. We know you only by the future you’re trying to create. Keith’s enthusiastic involvement in the academy for the next 10 years made it clear he had found a home. He passed away in 2012 at the age of 84.God, I miss him.Each of us needs to know we belong.If you believe traditional wisdom is often more tradition than wisdom…If you can happily embrace...

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

Do you sometimes identify with Don Quixote, the self-appointed knight-errant who set out on his horse, Rocinante, along with his friend Sancho Panza on a donkey, to right the world’s wrongs and change the course of history?He was a delusional, but happy old fart.You and I are not the first to identify with him.John Steinbeck saw Don Quixote as a symbol of himself. Thus, he traveled to Spain and La Mancha in 1954 out of a special affinity for the place, and began his journey to rediscover the soul of America in a camper he affectionately christened Rocinante. The fruits of his journey – Operation Windmill as he called it – eventually found expression in Travels with Charley.”– Stephen K. George,  A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia, p. 55Travels with Charley, Steinbeck’s diary of his journey to see America with his dog, was published in 1962. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature later that year.Steinbeck’s 1960 GMC pickup with camper is on display at the Steinbeck center in Salinas, California.I decided that you and I should have our own Rocinante to park beneath the trees along the path to Engelbrecht House.We’ll run electricity to it so that it can be heated and cooled and offer it as a room on campus for any adventurous alumni who wants to travel with Steinbeck and Charley.”Vice-Chancellor Panza, I mean Whittington, agreed with me and we enthusiastically set out to find our truck.As it turns out, most of the 1960 GMC trucks we found online had already been sold, many of them more than a year ago. And the trucks that were available needed vast amounts of restoration. Uh-oh. This was going to be harder than we thought. But we couldn’t give up because a group of Wizard Academy alumni had already donated more than $6,000 toward the effort.Two weeks ago Pennie showed me 17 photographs of what can only be described as a 1-in-300,000,000 unicorn. Seriously, what are the odds that a professional mechanic would buy the same pickup and camper as John Steinbeck – brand new – and then keep it in his garage for more than 50 years?He ran the engine periodically, but drove the truck only once a year on a hunting trip with his son. That truck has only 20,000 original miles. Certified. It looks like it just drove off the showroom floor and it runs like the day it was born. What are the odds of this truck actually existing?I promise I’m not making this up. The old mechanic passed away and his son is selling the truck.Do you want to go along on this adventure?Photos of the proposed truck and camper can be found in the rabbit hole. Just follow Indiana Beagle at the top of this page. A click is all it takes.Three more bits of extremely, very excellent news:(1.) A romantic, Valentine’s Retreat, February 13-14 (Fri-Sat.) Stay on the Wizard Academy campus with your special someone for 2 days and 3 nights. Good food, new friends, and fabulous sessions with our beloved Dr. Richard D. Grant and Chairman of the Board, Jean Backus. This is going to be magical, especially the music, the insights, and the dress-up banquet. Laugh and snuggle and be happy. And with 2,000 bottles of wine in the cellar, I doubt that we’ll run out. Discount Code: Type “alumni” and save 50 percent.(2.)We’ve made big progress on Secrets of the Wizard Academy...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The silent workings of my mind are of little interest to anyone but me, yet occasionally I feel the need to chronicle some small discovery; to write it down so that it might continue to exist after I have been forgotten.Once a year I write a Monday Morning Memothat is more for methan it is for youand this is that one.If you quit reading now, I’ll understand.In Cervantes’ book of 1605, Don Quixote never meets Dulcinea. She exists only in his mind. Psychologist Carl Jung would call her Quixote’s “anima,” the imaginary woman that represents the innermost heart of a man.But in Man of La Mancha, the 1966 Broadway play by Dale Wasserman, Dulcinea is an actual woman, a reluctant prostitute in whom Don Quixote sees only purity, beauty and grace. That play won 5 Tony Awards and ran for 2,328 performances. In 1972, it was made into a major motion picture starring Peter O’Toole as Don Quixote and Sophia Loren as Dulcinea.Dale Wasserman got the credit, but the character relationships and narrative arc of Man of La Mancha belong entirely to John Steinbeck.Follow my trail of breadcrumbs and I will tell you what I know.1952: The prologue to East of Eden tells us that Steinbeck was familiar with Cervantes and Don Quixote. In it, he speaks to his editor and close friend, Pat Covici:Miguel Cervantes invented the modern novel and with his Don Quixote set a mark high and bright. In his prologue, he said best what writers feel—the gladness and the terror.“Idling reader,” Cervantes wrote, “you may believe me when I tell you that I should have liked this book, which is the child of my brain, to be the fairest, the sprightliest and the cleverest that could be imagined, but I have not been able to contravene the law of nature which would have it that like begets like—”And so it is with me, Pat……Cervantes ends his prologue with a lovely line. I want to use it, Pat, and then I will be done. He says to the reader: “May God give you health—and may He be not unmindful of me, as well.”John Steinbeck1953: Ernie Martin, the Broadway producer of Guys and Dolls, asks Steinbeck to write a sequel to Cannery Row so that it might be made into a play.I have in my possession the Christmas gift John Steinbeck sent Ernie Martin later that year, just as Steinbeck was beginning to write Sweet Thursday. It’s a copy of the 1949 edition of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha. Inscribed on the front endpaper of that book is a note written and signed by John Steinbeck.Dear Ernie -:This is required preparation for Project X.John Steinbeck,Xmas 19531954: John Steinbeck publishes Sweet Thursday, a love story between “Doc” of Cannery Row and Suzy, a reluctant prostitute from the Bear Flag Hotel. Steinbeck’s note to Ernie Martin makes it clear that Suzy is Dulcinea.1955: Sweet Thursday becomes a Broadway play called Pipe Dream with a musical score by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The play receives the largest advance ticket sales in Broadway history to that point, $1.2 million, and is nominated for 9 Tony Awards.I think it would be safe to say that Dale Wasserman, a lifelong playwright, would have been very much aware of Pipe Dream in 1955.1957: John Steinbeck writes 114 pages of Don Kehan—The Marshall of Manchon, but he abandons...

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

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

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

When we think of Romeo and Juliet, we think of Shakespeare. But Shakey didn’t create those characters. The source of Shakespeare’s 1594 play was a 3000-line poem by Arthur Brooke,&nbsp;Romeus and Juliet,&nbsp;published 32 years earlier in 1562.Romeo and Juliet didn’t originate with Arthur Brooke, either. He compiled it from a number of Italian Renaissance sources, the earliest of them going back to 1474, ninety years before Shakespeare was born.Brooke’s tedious treatment of&nbsp;Romeus and Juliet&nbsp;was a moralizing, cautionary tale of a young couple engaged in “lust and whoredom,” whereas Shakespeare’s&nbsp;Romeo and Juliet&nbsp;is a sad misadventure in which heartbroken young lovers die needlessly.Beginning in the 1660s, British productions of Shakespeare’s play allowed Romeo and Juliet to live on, or had Juliet wake up for a simultaneous death with Romeo. Some theatre troupes went so far as to offer the ‘tragic death’ and ‘happily-ever-after’ versions on alternating nights.I’ll bet you didn’t know any of that. I certainly didn’t. I learned it from my friend, Steve King.I spend a few minutes each day with Steve.But I’ve never met him.Steve publishes a daily newsletter called&nbsp;Today in Literature,&nbsp;“the naïve idea of an English teacher on leave from the classroom.”The contact page of his website says, “It is pleasing to think that&nbsp;Today in Literature&nbsp;helps to keep the world of books alive for so many — especially those two subscribers on Bouvet Island in the Antarctic, whoever you may be. I also live on an island— Newfoundland, Canada— where I help raise two children, amuse my wife, and run this cottage industry. It is a one-man operation and it needs your support.”This is me supporting my friend, Steve King. He has no idea I’m doing it.Interestingly, Steve’s little history lesson about Romeo and Juliet contains a valuable business tip that can save you a lot of time and make you a lot of money. This is the tip: whenever possible,&nbsp;repurpose the proven.&nbsp;Streamline and accelerate something that has worked in the past.EXAMPLE: Approach 10 people with&nbsp;fearless faces and ask each of them, “Can you name a movie directed by Oliver Stone in which Charlie Sheen plays a young man who follows a bad father figure, then turns to begin following a good father figure?” Half of them will say&nbsp;Platoon&nbsp;and the other half will say&nbsp;Wall Street.Oliver Stone discovered a winning pattern and he stuck to it, moving the story of&nbsp;Platoon&nbsp;from the green jungle of Viet Nam to the concrete jungle of Wall Street. Each of the films was a towering success.Repurpose the proven.&nbsp;Find a successful pattern and use it as a blueprint.Henry Ford became the world’s first billionaire by turning&nbsp;the overhead&nbsp;disassembly&nbsp;line of Chicago meat packers upside down to create the Detroit assembly line of the Model T. He needed a quick assembly method because he had discovered&nbsp;the miracle question.Sam Walton echoed the miracle question of Henry Ford, “At what price could I sell a huge number of these?” Like Henry before him, Sam became one of the richest men in the world.Steve Jobs followed the lead of Nike Shoes. Instead of focusing his ads on his product, he turned his camera toward the kinds of people who would buy such a product. This little “mirroring” act made him 11 billion dollars.Nike didn’t follow anybody’s lead. They just did it.No, that’s not exactly true. Nike set out to create a fashion statement that indicated an athletic lifestyle, even if the purchaser had no intention of wearing the shoes for the...

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

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

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

Some of you are going to feel like I’ve spit on your shoe or mocked your religion or told you that your baby is ugly, so I’d like to apologize in advance for what I’m about to say.Teamwork in business is highly overrated.There, I’ve said it.I realize those 6 words are going to disturb some of you, but if my goals were merely to buy an arched eyebrow and a scornful frown and trigger an email of rebuttal, I would be just another sensationalist trying to yank a reaction from his audience.But those are not my goals.My goals are to make you more productive, help you reduce your mistakes, shorten your learning curve and raise the height of your success.To do these things, we must look at what’s hiding in your blind spot.I appreciate that you’re still reading.I was at lunch recently with 3 incredibly bright businesspeoplewhen I smiled cheerfully at them and said,&nbsp;“I think teamwork in business is highly overrated.”All three of them stiffened as though I had said something truly shameful. After a moment, the business owner sitting directly across from me looked down at his plate and said quietly,&nbsp;“Well, you’re entitled to your opinion.”We had not been talking about teamwork. There was no reason for any of these people to feel personally challenged or attacked, yet that’s exactly how they reacted. The cultural myth of Teamwork is anchored deep within the American soul, beginning, I believe, with Thomas Jefferson and “We the People” and the launch of this grand experiment called Democracy.I spent the next hour swatting down every example of successful “teamwork” they could throw at me. At the end of that hour they universally agreed that “teamwork” is an illusion created when the individual components within a human system accomplish a goal that is credited to the collective, rather than to the individual efforts of the components.What might appear to be teamwork in a relay race is, in truth, just a series of individual runners, each of whom begins their effort with an advantage or a deficit that was handed to them by the previous runner. If a runner increases that advantage or shortens that deficit, he or she was successful. It is only when they are rewarded collectively that we create the illusion of a team.Individual responsibility brings out the best in us.If you remove individual responsibility, you create a committee.Every bureaucracy begins as a well-intentioned committee.Leaders and managers have different functions.A leader encourages the members of a tribe to deliver their best individual efforts.&nbsp;A manager holds each individual responsible for delivering the outcome that he or she has been assigned.Steve Jobs did not invent the Apple computer.Steve Wozniak invented the Apple computer.Although I admire the abilities of Steve Jobs, he was merely the popularizer, the face, the dynamic leader, the pitchman, the philosopher, the high priest of the Apple religion. Without Wozniak, Steve Jobs would likely have been just another California techie bouncing from company to company in sneakers and ripped blue jeans.Wozniak said,&nbsp;“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”John Steinbeck said something similar in 1952, when Wozniak was just 2 years old.&nbsp;“Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”The great David Ogilvy made

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

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

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

Todays memo is a long one, but I promise you it's worth it.Advertisers are attracted to online media&nbsp;when they’re not entirely happy with their investments in traditional broadcast media. To understand the reasons behind their disappointments, we need only to revisit the subject of&nbsp;last week’s Monday Morning Memo:“Linear, no-threshold thinking”&nbsp;assumes that every statistic is scalable. It’s what causes advertisers to assume they can “test the waters” with small investments, then increase their financial commitments if the test results are positive.If an ad needs to be encountered only once&nbsp;to trigger a sale, it’s a direct-response ad. Congratulations! You’ve successfully crafted a high-impact offer for a product with a short purchase cycle. Direct-response ads are scalable, meaning sales increase proportionately to the number of people reached. But not everything can be sold with a direct response ad. The simple truth is that most products and services require that their ads be encountered again and again.Pepsi has been a household word&nbsp;since before we were born, so why do they keep advertising? Couldn’t they reduce their mass media spending and still maintain their sales volume?In a word, no.We know this because Pepsi tried it.Bob Hoffman&nbsp;was the keynote speaker at the 2014 European conference of AdvertisingWeek:“In 2010, Pepsi cancelled all its TV advertising and its Superbowl advertising to great fanfare and bet BIG on the largest experiment in social media marketing ever attempted, ‘The Pepsi Refresh Project.”&nbsp;TIME&nbsp;magazine quoted the CEO of a New York brand consultancy, ‘This is exactly where Pepsi needs to be. These days brands need to become a movement.’ Well, they became a movement all right. I estimate The Refresh Project cost them between 50 and 100 million dollars. It got them 3.5 million Facebook likes and&nbsp;a 5% loss in market share,&nbsp;which they seem to have never recovered. That year, they dropped from the second best-selling soft drink in the US to third. Pepsi’s marketing director said, ‘The success has been overwhelming. We have more than doubled our Facebook fans. We have more than 24,000 Twitter fans.’ The L.A.Times didn’t see to agree. They called it ‘a stunning fall from grace.'”Hoffman went on to say&nbsp;that TV and Radio are best at&nbsp;creating&nbsp;demand, while the web is terrific at&nbsp;fulfilling&nbsp;demand. The interviewer then challenged Hoffman by saying,&nbsp;“But it is changing. And it’s changing fast. Ten years ago 93 percent of the public got their news from television and only 7 percent got their news online. Today it’s 26 percent online.”Hoffman’s response&nbsp;reflected his 40 years of experience directing ad campaigns for McDonald’s, Toyota, Shell, Nestle, Blue Cross, Chevrolet and Bank of America:“What we often confuse is the&nbsp;use&nbsp;of digital media with its power as a marketing or advertising entity. The fact that more people are&nbsp;using&nbsp;online for news is not a de facto proof that it’s a good advertising medium. Let me give you an example of that: the old-fashioned telephone. Everyone in the world had a telephone. It was a hugely popular means of communication. That didn’t make it a good advertising medium. It was a lousy advertising medium. The fact that people us it for communication or to get information or to have conversations doesn’t necessarily make something a good advertising medium.”Now let’s get back to the subject&nbsp;of why so many advertisers are frustrated with their TV and Radio campaigns.In last week’s memo we described motorcycles&nbsp;going out of control when...

Reliable data&nbsp;tells us exactly how many motorcycle riders have died trying to navigate an S-curve at 100 miles per hour. The straightforward logic of traditional accounting, with its linear, no-threshold thinking, predicts one-tenth as many deaths at 10 miles per hour.But we know this is ridiculous.&nbsp;The number of riders that die at 10 or 20 miles per hour is likely to be zero. There is a&nbsp;threshold&nbsp;speed at which the curve becomes dangerous. Any extrapolation that crosses that threshold is certain to be inaccurate.If you understand&nbsp;the concept of “extrapolations that cross the threshold,” you have the key you need to understand why financially focused businesspeople often make breathtakingly bad decisions in business.The rules of accounting&nbsp;make it counterintuitive for a financially trained person to perceive a numerical threshold at which the laws of math are suddenly altered. But keep in mind the threshold speed of the motorcycle in the S-curve: deaths at speeds&nbsp;above that numerical threshold&nbsp;will have no correlation to deaths at speeds below it. In effect, the laws of math are suddenly altered.You and I know&nbsp;that an invisible force, momentum, is affecting the motorcycle and causing it to careen out of control. Although momentum can be measured, there’s no column for it on a financial spreadsheet.Momentum in business&nbsp;can be positive or negative, pushing your company forward or back. Advertising, public relations, word-of-mouth and social media provide momentum to a business. But a threshold called “the experience of the customer” will dramatically alter these efforts, accelerating them forward or holding them back.If your typical customer’s experience&nbsp;is delightful, your communication efforts will be highly effective. But if that experience falls short of delightful, advertising, public relations, word-of-mouth and social media will no longer have the desired effect.Financial types like to&nbsp;“hold advertising accountable,” because it’s easy to blame poor advertising for every decrease in sales opportunities. But no calculation is ever made for the cumulative impact of un-wowed customers. Financial types never consider&nbsp;the threshold of disappointment&nbsp;at which once-loyal customers abandon ship.When Michael Eisner came to Disney in 1984,&nbsp;he was initially perceived as a golden boy of finance, making Disney wildly profitable during a time when its rivals were faltering. He worked his miracle by putting Disney’s greatest cinematic treasures on DVD, milking every last dollar from the rich heritage that had taken the Disney brothers half a century to build. Within a few years, video sales were providing almost all the profits for Disney’s movie division and, by 2004, Disney had raked in $6 billion from video and DVD sales. But then the Disney cow was dry.Michael Eisner looked&nbsp;at assets and opportunities through a financial lens. He had none of the whimsy of adventure, none of the imagination or commitment to excellence that had guided the Disney brothers. While busily milking the cow and making himself more than a billion dollars in the process, Eisner quietly abandoned the values and traditions of Disney.“A company without values and traditionsis a train without a track, unable to gain momentum.”– The Monday Morning Memo for July 14, 2014“In 2003, Roy E. Disney resigned&nbsp;from his positions as Disney vice chairman and chairman of Walt Disney Feature Animation, accusing Eisner of turning the Walt Disney Company into a ‘rapacious, soulless’ company (against everything Walt Disney believed in and stood for.) ‘You can’t fool all of the people all the time. Nor can you succeed by getting by on the cheap,’ said Disney, referring to his accusations that Eisner slashed spending on the Disney theme parks, leading to closed rides,...

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

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

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

1.&nbsp;Bring&nbsp;positive and negative into close proximity.2.&nbsp;Resist&nbsp;the temptation to clad them in insulation.3.&nbsp;Witness&nbsp;the flow of electricity as it leaps between the two.Speaking in 1980&nbsp;of his songwriting experience with Paul McCartney, John Lennon said, “He provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes.”– David Sheff,&nbsp;All We Are Saying“The work John initiated&nbsp;tended to be sour and weary, whereas Paul’s tended to be bright and naive. The magic came from interaction. Consider the home demo for “Help!” – an emotionally raw, aggressively confessional song John wrote while in the throes of the sort of depression that he said made him want ‘to jump out the window, you know.’ The original had a slow, plain piano tune, and feels like the moan of the blues. When Paul heard it, he suggested&nbsp;a counter-melody, a lighthearted harmony&nbsp;to be sung behind the principal lyric – and this fundamentally changed it’s nature.”– Joshua Wolf Shenk,&nbsp;The Atlantic,&nbsp;July-August 2014, ‘The Power of Two,’ p. 80We’re talking&nbsp;about the magic of duality.We’re describing&nbsp;the foundations of transformative thought.“When he began to write songs,&nbsp;Paul [McCartney] wasn’t thinking about rock and roll.&nbsp;He wanted to write for Sinatra.”– Joshua Wolf Shenk,&nbsp;The Atlantic, July-August 2014, ‘The Power of Two,’ p. 80Lennon’s McCartney was Sinatra’s Riddle.I bought&nbsp;Why Sinatra Matters&nbsp;mostly because I was curious why a bestselling novelist would write a biography. Sure, Sinatra was a great singer, but since when does a great singer really&nbsp;matter?&nbsp;And why Sinatra instead of some other singer, actor, writer or photographer?What I found&nbsp;was that Hamill’s book isn’t so much about a person, but about a time.“Frank Sinatra&nbsp;was the voice of the 20th-century American city.”– Pete Hamill,&nbsp;Why Sinatra Matters,&nbsp;p.94In the beginning,&nbsp;Sinatra was merely a teen idol, the heartthrob of teenage girls. Twice he tried to enlist as a soldier in WWII, but was rejected each time because of a punctured eardrum. As the other young men went off to boot camp or basic training there were a lot of lonely women left in the land. Sinatra was every girl’s boyfriend singing of his loneliness.“…in the music&nbsp;he professed a corrosive emptiness, an almost grieving personal unhappiness. The risk attached to his kind of singing was that it promised authenticity of emotion instead of its blithe dismissal… His singing demanded to be felt, not admired. It always revealed more than it concealed.”– Pete Hamill,&nbsp;Why Sinatra Matters,&nbsp;p.130When the soldiers&nbsp;came home from WWII, Sinatra’s career fell flat.“One thing is certain:&nbsp;for many of those who came back from WWII, the music of Frank Sinatra was no consolation for their losses. Some had lost friends. Some had lost wives and lovers. All had lost portions of their youth. More important to the Sinatra career… the girls started marrying the men who came home. Bobby socks vanished from many closets. The girls who wore them had no need anymore for imaginary lovers; they had husbands. Nothing is more embarrassing to grownups than the passions of adolescence, and for many, Frank Sinatra was the passion.”– Pete Hamill,&nbsp;Why Sinatra Matters,&nbsp;p. 133-134Sinatra became&nbsp;Sinatra&nbsp;when his Riddle arrived.“Sinatra started out&nbsp;with far more female than male fans. He ended up with more male fans. This happens to very few pop singers.”– Pete...

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

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

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

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

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

The next time&nbsp;someone tells you an advertising success story, especially if that success was online, ask to see the ad – the content – that triggered it.Here’s a Really Big Tip for you.&nbsp;You might want to write this down:“The media doesn’t make the ad work. The ad makes the media work.”I’m spending&nbsp;a lot of time these days fielding questions about online marketing. The most fervent of these petitioners are the ones who talk about the amazing response they’ve seen on FaceBook.“Does everything you post trigger a big response?”“No, but when it does work, Wow! It’s awesome.”“Show me something you posted that triggered a lot of interest.”Guess what I’ve&nbsp;learned from these encounters? FaceBook friends pass along only those things they find to be remarkable. And it’s always the message – the content – that is remarked upon. Jeff Greenspan of&nbsp;Buzzfeed&nbsp;says it clearly:&nbsp;“Nobody wants to be a shill for your brand, but they are happy to share information and content that helps them promote their own identity.”Do you sometimes visit a website&nbsp;and then see banner ads for that same company everywhere you go for the next several days? Congratulations, you’ve been “retargeted.”Retargeting&nbsp;is the shiny new object in advertising. (Google’s version of it is called Remarketing but it’s essentially the same thing.) Retargeting reminds me of a boy who stalks a girl after a bad first date, saying,&nbsp;“Give me another chance. Give me another chance. Give me another chance. Give me another chance…”A better solution,&nbsp;in my opinion, is to not blow the first date.Spend your time&nbsp;creating a remarkable offer. When your message is right, whatever media you choose to deliver that message is going to perform like nothing you’ve ever seen.BOOM.&nbsp;Success story.You can sell&nbsp;tickets to watch the fireworks.Bruce Feiler&nbsp;in the&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;reported a few days ago that a recent study of two billion web visits found that 55 percent of readers spent fewer than 15 seconds on a page.Evidently,&nbsp;David Ogilvy’s decades-old observation remains correct:“Five times as many people&nbsp;read the headline as read the first line of body copy. So when you’ve written your headline, you’ve spent 83 percent of your ad budget.”Scan.Scan.Scan.Scan.Scan. Note. Move on.Scan.Scan.Scan. Note. Probe. Disconnect. Move on.Scan.Scan. Note. Probe. Double-check. Bingo. One-click. Here in 2 days.Ten websites&nbsp;attracted this shopper but only one of them made the sale.Q:&nbsp;What did the others do wrong?A:&nbsp;They focused too much on technology to reach the shopper and too little on what to say after they met.Advertising Doesn’t Fail.&nbsp;Ads Fail.Small business owners are drowning&nbsp;in sales pitches telling them they can “reach the perfect target” digitally. I don’t dispute that claim in the slightest. But each of the nine websites that didn’t make the sale “reached the perfect target,” didn’t they? What did it get them?That&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;story&nbsp;about 2 billion page visits goes on to say,“In the last few years,&nbsp;there has been a revolution so profound that it’s sometimes hard to miss its significance. We are awash in numbers. Data is everywhere. Old-fashioned things like words are in retreat; numbers are on the rise. Unquantifiable arenas like history, literature, religion and the arts are receding from public life, replaced by technology, statistics, science and math. Even the most elemental form of communication,&nbsp;the story,&nbsp;is being pushed aside by&nbsp;the list.”Let me say this plainly: Wizard Academy will forever...

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