Once a month my partners and I have a videoconference. We solve problems together and I share a few stories of things I learned the hard way. Craig Arthur, director of Wizard of Ads – Australia, tells me these stories are his favorite parts of our time together. Listening to my silly stories, he sees how to sidestep predictable problems. Many years ago my friend John Young said to me, “Roy, do you know the difference between a smart man and a wise man?”“Say on, John.”“A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. A wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid that mistake altogether.”I play the role of smart man for my partners so that they can be better wise men. (Wise man. Wise-ard. Wisard. Wizard. You’ll find it in the Oxford English Dictionary. Hence, Wizards of Ads.)Solomon said,“There was a man all alone; he had neither son nor brother. There was no end to his toil, yet his eyes were not content with his wealth… Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”– Ecclesiastes, chapter 4The job of the consultant begins with an inventory of the client’s Limiting Factors. “What are the impediments that are tripping my client up and holding him back?”The client will always tell you the problem is “Not enough traffic. Not enough phone calls. Not enough selling opportunities.” But these are not Limiting Factors. A shortage of selling opportunities is merely the symptom of a Limiting Factor. The real question is, “Why do we have a shortage of selling opportunities?”A consultant probing for Limiting Factors is a bit like a doctor poking, prodding and asking, “Does this hurt?”About 20 years ago I was hired by a retailer who occupied a landmark location in his small town. His grandfather had opened that store 105 years earlier. My client’s problem was “not enough traffic.” My job, of course, was to increase traffic. But a question hovered in the air between us. That question quivered and glowed and throbbed until I finally blurted it out. “The people who don’t buy from us; is it because they don’t know about us? Or is it because they do?” That store had a reputation for being expensive. We solved the problem. The store began to thrive again. We did not lower prices.Sometimes the Limiting Factor isn’t the reputation but the Competitive Environment. This might be the high cost of media, a low-visibility location, the wrong inventory, or a strong competitor.When a business owner has a capable, highly motivated competitor, he or she will usually explain this Limiting Factor in one of 3 ways: 1.    “We don’t think about them. I believe we should focus on what we’re doing, not on what our competitors are doing.”2.    “Yes, they’re big, all right, but that’s not my customer. They sell to the type of customer we don’t really want. You can’t be all things to all people.” 3.   “They’re dishonest. Horrible liars and cheats. You just wouldn’t believe some of the things they do.”Every business owner has a blind spot. Do you know yours?That was a trick question. Of course you don’t know your blind...

For Traditional Retail and Service Businesses I feel a bit like the boy in the Hans Christian Andersen tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes, though I’m not nearly so brave as he. You remember, don’t you? Two weavers promise an Emperor a new suit of clothes that will be invisible to those unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. When the Emperor parades before his subjects in his new clothes, a boy cries out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”The Internet is the parade we’re watching and Facebook is its emperor. I’ve seen “naked” and this emperor sure looks it, but I hesitate to shout it out loud because this would be tantamount to a confession of professional incompetence.Let’s face it. Those weavers have spun a pretty loud buzz with “Facebook and Twitter.”The first Internet buzzword was “eyeballs.” Any site that could generate a high number of unique visitors and page views was said to be overflowing with eyeballs and its creator was considered a genius. But eyeballs didn’t translate into dollars unless you delivered a message to the brain behind those eyeballs that was judged to be highly relevant and sufficiently credible.Next it was about “going viral.” My office was deluged with a river of advertisers asking, “How can we take our message viral? We want to go viral. Do you know the secret of going viral?” I told these advertisers, “Going viral is what happens when traditional word-of-mouth is empowered by digital technology. Do you have a relevant, credible message that contains at least one of the essential three word-of-mouth triggers?”“Eyeballs” and “going viral” faded away due to a lack of success stories. I breathed a sigh of relief.Now it’s “Facebook and Twitter.”Internet acolytes say “Facebook and Twitter” in hushed tones like they’re intoning a holy mantra. Gregarious extraverts say “Facebook and Twitter” like they’re sharing the location of a keg party. Hungry business owners say “Facebook and Twitter” like they’re asking for directions on a road trip. Aspiring young consultants say “Facebook and Twitter” with an air of condescension, as though it were “Checkmate” in a chess match.This time I’m letting Lee Iacocca handle it:“Talk is cheap. Where I come from, in the auto industry, you were held brutally accountable for your programs and products. The response to any idea was, ‘Show me where it’s working.’”– Lee Iacocca, Where Have All the Leaders Gone? ch. 3 (2007)Lee is right, kids. Talk is cheap. Show me where it’s working. Google “Facebook success stories.” I did. Prepare to be underwhelmed.Facebook promises hypertargeting but this has been the promise of every media since the invention of advertising. Newspapers have been divided into sections for nearly a century. “Do you want to target men in the Sports section, women in the Lifestyle section, or businesspeople in the Business section?” Magazines were invented to allow us to target micro-groups that shared a common interest. Television and radio stations promise psychographic targeting through specific programming. Billboards promise tightly controlled geographic targeting. And each of these media is hampered by the same limiting factor as Facebook and Twitter. It is an inescapable truth: Response to your message will be dictated by its relevance and credibility, not by the vehicle of its delivery.There is benefit to be had through a presence on Facebook. Twitter is a quick way to blurt 140 characters to whomever will give you a moment’s attention. If you enjoy these things, do them. Your business will certainly derive some benefit.But they are not the highest and...

1. You have something to sell and2. You want to tell the world about it.These are my first questions:1. Are people already looking for it?2. Can you deliver your message in 8 words or less?If the answer to both questions is yes,Put up a big, intrusive sign.The world may be a little uglier for it, but you’ll sell a lot of stuff. For the record, 8 is the number of words a driver can read before they feel compelled to look back at the road. Put more than 8 words on a sign and you’ll be advertising to the passenger seat.A high-visibility location for your business is usually the cheapest advertising you can buy. But don’t be fooled by traffic numbers. High traffic doesn’t always mean high visibility. These are the pivotal questions:1. How many people drive past here each day?2. Are they mostly the same people each day driving to and from work, or is this a twice-a-month artery for a much larger population?3. Could a person drive past here and not notice this business? If the answer is, “No, they would definitely notice it,” then acquire the location. It’s a landmark that will serve you faithfully for many years to come.The Internet is electronic print, instantly updatable and deliverable on demand. As such, it has effectively replaced the newspaper, the telephone book, the encyclopedia and the dictionary and it is rapidly replacing the bookstore. Product brochures and catalogues are becoming “virtual,” existing only as backlit images on a screen. Lost your instruction manual? Go online. You can download it as a pdf file.Slash your Yellow Page budget and get serious about your web presence. Are your business hours and phone number easy to find on your home page? Jeffrey Eisenberg told me recently that a high percentage of visitors to the web sites of local businesses are looking for exactly that information. Don’t frustrate these customers. Put your phone number and your store hours on your home page. Do it.To think of the Internet as electronic media like television and radio is a huge mistake. Online streaming video was popularized by Youtube but the experience of it requires continual decision-making and physical participation, much like a video game. Television, on the other hand, is passive. Sit and stare. The biggest threat to the effectiveness of television commercials isn’t the Internet, but the DVR.  Gone are the days when television networks could corner us and force us to watch a sales pitch. God bless TiVo.My friend “Other Roy” Laughlin is piercingly insightful when it comes to our consumption of media. “What’s the difference between a country club and a municipal golf course?” he asked. He looked at my blank face a moment then answered his question, “The price of admission. Traditional broadcast TV commercials won’t away, they’ll just reach people who can’t afford DVRs. People with money use technology to shield themselves from commercials.” These observations might seem self-evident today but Other Roy said these things 7 years ago, back when dinosaurs roamed the land. Like I said, he’s piercingly insightful.Texting while driving is more dangerous than a loaded gun. It’s more dangerous than drugs, tobacco and alcohol combined. Your car’s lack of a built-in, hands-free device for listening to the internet is what keeps internet radio from being an immediate threat to broadcast radio.*Few people listened to FM radio until auto manufacturers began installing FM receivers as standard equipment in the 1970s. The trickle-down of new cars to used car buyers takes almost 7 years, so we’re at least that

I’ve never met a business owner whose advertising failed because they were reaching the wrong people.Let me say that again. I’ve never met a business owner whose advertising failed because they were reaching the wrong people.Advertising fails when people have   1. no knowledge of the offer. The ad is easily ignored.   2. no interest in the offer. The offer is (A.) irrelevant or (B.) misunderstood.   3. no trust in the offer. The claims made in the ad are not credible.These problems can be solved by   1. getting the attention of the people with words and phrases that are new, surprising and different.   2. offering the people what they want to buy (instead of trying to convince them to buy what you’d like to sell.)   3. supporting your claims with examples that agree with the experiences of your prospective customers.“But wait a minute, Mr. so-called Wizard of Ads. Your second point was that ads sometimes fail because the people who were reached had ‘no interest in the offer.’ Because I am an honorable advertising salesperson, I always begin by asking the advertiser, ‘Who is your customer?’  Now if I can offer this advertiser a higher concentration of those people, isn’t that a better value?”The foundation of your sales pitch rests on the assumption that an advertiser should be able to articulate their customer profile as a demographic cell. While this premise may seem reasonable to both you and the business owner, it’s almost never true.Let’s put this to the test. I will ask the questions. You will answer them honestly:   1. Do your friends tend to be male or female?   2. Do your friends tend to be under 30, 30 to 44, 45 to 59, or over 60?   3. Do your friends tend to be married or single?   4. Do your friends tend to be Republicans, Democrats, or Independents?These questions are perfectly reasonable, but you know in your heart that you have lots of male and female friends of all ages, married and single, and with political affiliations than span the spectrum. Am I right? But all of them bought the same product: you.If you say, “My friends tend to be male, 30 to 44, Republican and married,” the truth is this description fits no more than thirty percent of your friends. (Realistically, that number is probably closer to 20 percent.) Welcome to the world of demographic targeting.There is something deep in each of us that knows there has to be a right customer and that wishes we could find more of these “right people.”I believe that right customers exist. I do not believe they can be targeted according to income or demographic profile. If you target a demographic cell, it’s because you believe in your heart that persons of the same age, sex and marital status all think alike.Target the ‘right customer’ through your ad copy, not your media selection. Reach as many people as your budget will let you reach repetitiously, regardless of their age, sex, or income bracket. Choose words, phrases and points-of-view that will resonate with them. Do this and you will be amazed at how many different people suddenly become ‘your customer.’Next week I’ll tell you how to select your message delivery vehicle. If discussions about advertising bore you, next week’s memo will be a good one...

We stay too busy to think big thoughts. This frantic busyness, this voluntary slavery to the merely urgent is preferred, I think, because big thoughts make us realize that we are much smaller creatures than we like to pretend.“We often talk about Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 in terms of failures: failures of intelligence, failures of planning, failures of communication. But these catastrophes were first and foremost failures of imagination. Did we know that a major hurricane could destroy New Orleans? Yes: it was even part of the tour guides’ spiel. Did we know terrorists wanted to bring down the World Trade Center? Yes: they made a credible attempt in 1993. And what did we do with what we knew? Nothing. Some disasters, I think, are so big and so awful they are literally beyond our power to conceive. So, we dismiss them out of hand, retreat to the ‘knowledge’ that a thing can’t happen because, well, it just can’t.”– Leonard Pitts, July 6, 2006 America’s largest mortgage companies and accounting firms were engaged in fraud; such massive fraud that it nearly toppled our national economy; but the Justice Department and the SEC chose to look the other way and pretend that everything was fine.British Petroleum drilled deeper in the ocean than they could control and our safety inspectors just crossed their fingers and joined in the pretense that nothing would go wrong.A Japanese power company built a nuclear reactor on a known geological fault and their safety inspectors crossed their fingers as well.I agree with Leonard Pitts. We’re often foolish children, crossing our fingers and retreating to the ‘knowledge’ that a thing can’t happen because, well, “It just can’t.”When authorities tell us we’re being reckless, we cry out against “government interference” and vote the bastards out of office. Then, when finger crossing doesn’t shield us from disaster, we blame the government agency that “failed to do its job.”But those aren’t big thoughts. Those are just some of the little emergencies we talk about to avoid thinking big thoughts.Buckminster Fuller was a thinker of big thoughts. He called our planet Spaceship Earth because he was fully aware that seven billion of us are crammed on a tiny speck of dust circling an 11,000-degree fireball that flies at 252 times the speed of a bullet through a limitless vacuum. Bucky muttered, “Sometimes I think we’re alone (in the universe.) Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is staggering.”Bucky spoke truly. Intelligent life exists beyond our little planet or it does not. And either way, the thought is staggering.Will you take a few moments to be staggered by that thought or will you just turn up the volume of the television?Another big thought is the thought of God. If Charlie Darwin was right, our species resulted from the biological equivalent of spontaneous combustion. But Aiden Wilson Tozer pondered the same big thought and muttered, “All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together and at once, would be nothing compared with the overwhelming problem of God: That He is; what He is like; and what we as moral beings must do about Him.”Darwin was right or Tozer was right. Either way, the thought is staggering.Thousands of you are annoyed with me right now for bringing up these big thoughts.But in my defense I offer one last question: Doesn’t this annoyance prove my opening paragraph?Last week I wrote about me. This week, as promised, I wrote about you.Perhaps next week I’ll write about business and it will be valuable enough that you’ll choose to overlook the fact that I occasionally seem to have no feel for the boundaries of polite...

See it. Believe it. Say it.These are the first steps.But be prepared; most people will think you’re an idiot. Or delusional.Or full of yourself. Maybe they’re right. The outcome is all that separates confidence from hubris.You saw it in your mind. You believed it could happen. You spoke about it as though it were, in fact, going to happen. People laughed at you, made fun of you, sneered at you.But then it happened.  And now everyone talks about your confidence, your vision, your dream come true. The possibility of failure exists, even when you pretend it doesn’t. FAILURE: Because sometimes “your very best” just isn’t good enough.You saw it in your mind. You believed it could happen. You spoke about it as though it were, in fact, going to happen. And it never happened.And now people talk about where you went wrong. They think of you as delusional, egotistical, full of yourself. “Who did you think you were?”Can you live with that egg on your face?Count the cost, dreamer. Are you willing to pay the price? You are? Read on!“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”– Lawrence of Arabia (1888-1935)“Every man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds… Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”– Mark Twain (1835-1910)“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.”– Earl Nightingale  A person would have to be pretty dense not to realize that today’s memo is the result of my contemplating the past 7 years of campus construction and the recent opening of our landmark tower.You can be sure there have been many times during these past 7 years when I thought, “You can keep the cheese. Just let me out of the trap.” But somehow we endured. You have Pennie to thank for that.As I contemplate the existence of this campus for dreamers, entrepreneurs and business owners, I cannot help but think of another tower many years ago: “But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the LORD said, Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.” – Genesis, chapter 11In that original tower story, God scattered the tower builders from Babel because they had forgotten Him. They turned their thoughts toward other things and their project was abandoned.Each reader will take something different from that tale. Some will see it as a warning of impending doom for Wizard Academy. Others will see it as a fairy tale. I am of two reactions: the dark, earthy part of me remembers the words of Edward Gorey:“Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. It almost never does; that’s what makes it so boring.”Simultaneously, the better, more spiritual part of me sings the lyrics of a song made famous in 1978:“He didn’t bring us this far to leave us.He didn’t teach us to swim to let us drown.He didn’t build His home in us to...

You open your mailbox and grab a handful of paper. How long does it take you to sort that mail? Do you open each envelope and consider its message, or do some of them get tossed into the trashcan unopened? More than 71 billion dollars were spent on direct mail marketing last year according to the US Postal Service and each of these dollars was spent in the hope that:1. your attention would be gained by the advertiser’s message and2. you would spend time – at least a moment – considering it. Less than one fourth the amount spent on direct mail – 17.3 billion dollars to be exact – was spent on radio advertising in 2010 according to the Radio Advertising Bureau and each of these dollars was spent in the hope that:1. your attention would be gained by the advertiser’s message and2. you would spend time – at least a moment – considering it. More than 131 billion dollars was spent on television advertising in 2010 – not quite twice the amount spent on direct mail, but nearly 8 times as much as was spent on radio – and each of these dollars was spent in the hope that:1. your attention would be gained by the advertiser’s message and2. you would spend time – at least a moment – considering it. Business owners are excited about Facebook and Twitter because these social media outlets offer them potential access to – wait for it – your time and attention.Are you beginning to see a pattern here?Time and attention are currency. Shoppers today are confronted with an unprecedented number of possibilities. Welcome to the 21st century, where shoppers carry the world in their pockets, giving them instant access to everything they want to know. Now what were you saying?A 1978 consumer behavior study by Yankelovich indicated the average American of that time was confronted by more than 2,000 selling messages per day. These “selling messages” included the signage in front of strip centers, posters in windows, point-of-purchase displays in convenience stores, product packaging on shelves, stickers on gas pumps and all the major media, of course. Yankelovich revisited that study in 2008: today’s shopper is confronted by more than 5,000 selling messages per day.Shoppers don’t buy things until they know about them. And they have far too little time to consider all their options. This is why the value of time and attention has risen to unprecedented heights.And it’s also why clarity is the new creativity.If today’s advertisers want to ring the bell, win the prize and cash the check, they must:1. Gain attention2. Speak with impact and3. Prove what they say4. In the fewest possible words. A few final thoughts:1. Radio has weathered the techno-storm better than any other media.2. Following a brief flirtation with the iPod, Americans returned en masse to broadcast radio for exposure to new music and breaking news.3. You can close your eyes, but you cannot close your ears.4. How many hours a week do you spend driving?5. World-class radio ads are cheap to produce.6. It costs big bucks to look good on TV.7. A modest budget for a national advertiser to produce a 30-second TV ad is $350,000. Your TV ads, by comparison, will always look “homemade.”8. But national...

Brands are extensions of belief systems. You are attracted to a brand when it stands for something you believe in.We buy what we buy – most of it, anyway –1. to remind ourselves and2. tell the world around us    who we are.Brands are identity reinforcement, just like art and architecture and music. Brands are a way of shouting “This is me!”Does it make you uncomfortable for me to suggest that we are such shallow and uncertain creatures that we feel the need to anchor our identities through purchases and acquisitions?I’m sorry. I’ll change the subject.Let’s talk about art.Art is a language. When you control the art in a room, you lead its viewers to where you want them to go in their minds.Have you ever noticed the high percentage of wall posters that celebrate cultural icons? Marilyn Monroe, The Statue of Liberty, Jimi Hendrix, Corvette.Cultural icons are modern archetypes. Each of them stands for something we believe in. They’re just another way of shouting, “This is what I believe in! This is me.”But art communicates a belief system even when it contains no cultural icon.A painting of cows grazing contentedly on a hillside, or of small fishing boats floating quietly offshore whispers to the viewer, “I believe in tranquility, nature, and the outdoors.”A painting of Renaissance royalty or of a castle on a mountaintop says, “I believe in pageantry and romance and I’m intrigued by the grand adventure of privilege.”A painting of young girls frolicking at a picnic says, “I believe in innocence and happiness and the togetherness of friendship.”The same person could own all three paintings, of course. Each of us wears many faces. Art is easy to sell when you understand that it’s never really about the artist, (although the artist often believes otherwise.) Art is ultimately about the person who buys it.You buy art when it looks you directly in the eye and says, “I echo something important that you hide in your heart. I am an extension of the real you.”Richard Grosbard, Richard Minsky and I were looking for a cab in Manhattan one night when Minsky muttered something so insightful that I scribbled it on the back of a receipt in my wallet:“Art has image, metaphor and surface.Image: What’s it a picture of?Metaphor: What does the picture stand for? What does it mean?Surface: What materials were used and how skillful was the artist’s execution?”“Decorative art is image first, metaphor second, and the surface doesn’t really matter. A poster is the same image and metaphor as the original painting but the surface is different.”“Fine art is surface first, metaphor second, and the image doesn’t really matter. Fine art is all about the skill of execution. It doesn’t really matter too much what it’s a picture of.”The thing Richard said next is something every artist needs to know if they want to sell a lot of art:“Commercial art is metaphor first: what does it say? Image second: what’s in the picture? Get these two things right and the skill of the artist doesn’t really matter.”Most of us buy art because we believe in what the art says.But then again, that’s what I was saying about brands, isn’t it?We seem to have gone full circle and now we’re back to where we started. I think I’ll jump off this merry-go-round and go see what Pennie is doing.Ciao for Niao,Roy H. Williams

You Can't Quit Knowing What You Know“My name is Natsu and I’ll be serving you today.”Pennie said, “Natsu… What a pretty name!”“Thank you. I was named after my grandmother. It means ‘summer’ in Japanese.”Thirty seconds earlier, Natsu had looked like any other waitress. But now that we knew her grandmother was Japanese, we couldn’t help but see the obvious signs of Japanese heritage in her face.“Obvious” knowledge such as this is the reason business owners are uniquely unqualified to write their own ads. Business owners are unable to put themselves in the shoes of their uninformed customers because they can’t quit knowing what they know.Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist, conducted an experiment on this “curse of knowledge” while working on her doctorate at Stanford in 1990. She gave one set of people, called “tappers,” a list of commonly known songs from which to choose. Their task was to rap their knuckles on a tabletop to the rhythm of the chosen tune as they thought about it in their heads. A second set of people, called “listeners,” were asked to name the songs.Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs tapped out, or 2.5 percent.The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how could the listeners not “hear” it in their taps?– Janet Rae-Dupree, The New York Times, Dec. 30, 2007Experts always answer questions that no one was asking. This is why they come across as tedious, boring and obsessed. When ads are written at the level of the public’s understanding and interest, business owners complain, “But I can’t say that! It’s not accurate!”No, the statement is accurate enough. It just feels woefully incomplete to a person who knows as much as you. But guess what? The public doesn’t know as much as you.And they don’t want to know as much as you. Here’s a 30-second radio ad created for a client of the Wizard of Ads office in Australia:MALE: Sometimes, bigger is better.FEMALE: Sometimes, bigger is definitely better.MALE: Electricity bills are an exception.FEMALE: No one needs big electricity bills.MALE: Sunshine is free.FEMALE: Sunshine is happy.MALE: Sunshine is natural.FEMALE: Country Solar turns sunshine into free electricity.MALE: Talk to Country Solar. No pressure, no commitment,FEMALE: just free electricity.MALE: Free electricity.FEMALE: Get your free electricity at Country Solar dot com dot au.If you knew a little too much about this subject, your ad would sound like this:Save money and save the planet! The wind doesn’t always blow, but the sun ALWAYS shines. This is why a solar energy solution from Lester’s Alternative Energy Systems is superior to wind energy. And a solar energy solution from Lester’s has no moving parts. More than 12,000 beautiful Australian birds are killed each year by the spinning blades of wind turbines. Be a friend to the birds! Be a friend to...

Ken and Barbie are perfect.Ken and Barbie are plastic.Ken and Barbie are hollow.I do not prefer them.True friends are flawed in endearing ways. Quirky.I’ll never forget the morning when I asked a roomful of newly arrived Wizard Academy students to tell a little about themselves. The last to stand was a tall, silver-haired patriarch who said, “As I sat and listened to you people, I couldn’t help but think, ‘Never in my life have I been surrounded by as many weirdos, misfits, mavericks and renegades.’”The silence throbbed as the old gentleman slowly surveyed the room, meeting the eyes of every student, “It’s as if the Wizard sent out the mating call of the albino monkey, and this room contains the rag-tag rabble who answered.”No one was breathing.“I just can’t tell you what an honor it is to be counted here among you!” The walls flexed outward from the shockwaves of spontaneous, thunderous applause.That patrician gentleman was Keith Miller, the bestselling author of The Taste of New Wine, a revolution-triggering book that sold multiple millions of copies as it rocked religious America back in 1965.Interesting people are nonconformists, swimming tirelessly against the flow of the cultural norm.Only dead fish go with the current. “We all know bad things are happening to our political and social universe; we know that business is colonizing ever larger chunks of American culture; and we know that advertising tells lies. We are all sick to death of the consumer culture. We all want to resist conformity. We all want to be our own dog.”– Thomas Frank, Conglomerates and the Media, 1997A few months ago, Pink wrote an anthem to nonconformity, a paean to society’s outcasts, weirdos, mavericks and renegades:“Raise your glass if you are wrong in all the right ways, all my underdogs!”Raise Your Glass rocketed to the top of the charts. But we shouldn’t have been surprised. Pink’s song recalls the original American anthem found at the foot of a statue that raises not a glass, but a torch. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”“We will never be, never be anything but loud and nitty-gritty, dirty little freaks.”– Pink, Raise Your Glass, Oct. 2010Have you done any traveling lately? During their 40-year reign as the king and queen of American culture, Ken and Barbie littered our nation with identical power centers hosting the same tenants in every village, town and city.Come to Austin and we’ll proudly show you 6th Street, a few blocks in our city that are unique to our wonderful town. New Orleans has the French Quarter. Atlanta has Buckhead. Your town has its special district, too. You know where it is.But outside these highly-prized districts where we enshrine the last shreds of our uniqueness, your town and mine have precisely the same stores and restaurants as every other; perfect, plastic, and hollow.Does that make you angry? Do you want shake things up a little? Are you eager for your business to fire a shot that will be heard around the world?[I’m whispering now.] Go to Wizard Academy. You’ve got people there.Roy H. Williams

As you do or don’t know, I make my living as an advertising consultant. My income is directly tied to the growth of my clients’ businesses, so you can be sure I keep a close eye on their income trends.Although my office works with only a few dozen of America’s 5.91 million businesses, these small business clients are spread across the US and Canada and span several retail and service categories. Additionally, my Wizard of Ads partner offices work with dozens of scattered clients, as well.We keep our finger on the pulse of small business America.The media keeps its finger on the pulse of big business America and unemployment statistics and the value of the dollar and a variety of other things they like to package as news about the economy.Don’t be fooled by it.  Big business is affected by Wall Street, an insular world of fast-walking men and women who live in Manhattan and wear formal business attire and pretend they know far more than they do.Meet these people. Spend time with them. You’ll soon quit taking them seriously. This is the same crowd who thought Bernie Madoff was a profoundly insightful financial guru, remember? They even made him chairman of Nasdaq.Big business is subject to Wall Street.Wall Street is subject to the mood of traders who buy and sell a lot of securities. Small businesses like yours are subject only to the mood of the public.I’ve known for years that the mood of the public is not directly linked to Wall Street. Trends in small business America don’t always mirror the trends in big business America.The American public began to relax a bit in October. We saw it across every business category in every state. The news media didn’t seem to notice. We saw this trend continue through November and December. Most of our clients finished the 4th quarter 10 percent ahead of the same quarter the previous year.This uptick continued through January and February; not a sweeping “whoosh” back into prosperity, but an obvious collective decision among regular Americans to start spending a bit of money again. The deep fear is gone.My friend Jeff Haley is the CEO of the Radio Advertising Bureau, a vital trade association of America’s 11,000 commercial radio stations, each of whom sells advertising to several hundred local businesses. When Jeff came to visit recently, he said he’d noticed the same thing my partners and I had noticed. During the first 3 quarters of 2010, ad spending among local advertisers was dead flat against the previous year. No change. Then it jumped by exactly 10 percent in the 4th quarter.The American public relaxed a little and America’s local advertisers did, too.Donations to Wizard Academy rebounded, classes started selling out again and the weddings at Chapel Dulcinea are more lavish and festive than we’ve seen in a couple of years.The light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter. Grass is greening, birds are flirting, spring is here.Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.Roy H. Williams

Most people believe advertising is scalable. These people are right.And they are wrong.SCALABLE: When a large-scale problem can be solved by the straight-line, linear expansion of a small-scale solution, that solution is scalable. Example: You want to put a box of loose snapshots into photo albums. One album holds exactly 50 snapshots. This problem is scalable. Count the snapshots, divide by fifty, then buy that many photo albums. Direct Response ads – those high-impact ads crafted to hit a target with maximum impact and trigger a purchase with a single exposure – are scalable. Reach 10 times as many targets and you’ll make 10 times as many sales. But most ads are not scalable, due to the vagaries of relevance, sleep and time. Non-scalable ads must be repeated until you reach a threshold called “breakthrough.” BREAKTHROUGH: The best way to understand breakthrough and how it differs from scalability is to consider the following statistic: There will be exactly 20 traffic fatalities for each 100 cars that try to navigate a particular corner at 100 MPH. We have the data. It is conclusive. Numbers don’t lie. Apply scalability to this data and you’ll wrongly predict there will be 2 fatalities for each 100 cars that try to navigate the corner at 10 MPH. Breakthrough is best understood as the speed-threshold at which a car becomes dangerously unstable in the corner. Breakthrough is that moment when the rules of the equation change dramatically. Q: “So how long will it be before my advertising reaches breakthrough? How many repetitions will be required before my customer finally takes action?”A: Your moment of breakthrough will be determined by 2 variables. The first of these is relevance.RELEVANCE: Does the target need the product or can a desire be stimulated for it? Direct response ads perform poorly for categories that have “moments of need” that are well defined. It’s hard to sell an engagement ring to a person who has no interest in getting engaged. Likewise, how do you convince a person to buy new tires when the car simply doesn’t need them, or a new hot water heater when the old one is working fine? When your product or service category doesn’t have the requisites for direct response marketing, your best option is to become the solution-provider the customer remembers immediately when their moment of need finally arises. “Sounds great. But how much time is that going to take?” We can answer that question only after we’ve answered this one: How memorable was your message? We’re back to that issue of relevance again.Involuntary, automatic recall is known as procedural memory among cognitive neuroscientists and the rules of its creation are simple: Relevance x Repetition = Procedural Memory. In other words, the amount of repetition your message will need will be determined by its relevance and one last thing… SLEEP: the second variable. Sleep erases advertising. This is why 12 repetitions spread over 12 months don’t have the same effect as 12 repetitions in 1 month. Becoming a household word in the mind of your public is like climbing a muddy mountain. Three steps forward and you slide 2 steps back during the night. Three steps forward, two steps back. But don’t despair. Breakthrough is on the horizon. Can you see it sparkling there in the distance? Cross that threshold and everything around you will come alive. You can do it. I have faith in you.Need some help?Come to Wizard...

What makes us America?If you were to name a single incident in American history that you feel was America’s finest hour, what would it be?Would it be a moment of patriotic sacrifice? “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”– Nathan Hale, [Sept. 22, 1776]A moment of relentless determination?“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”– Admiral David Farragut [Aug. 5, 1864]A moment of far-flung vision, an impossible dream?“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”– JFK [May 25, 1961] “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”– MLK, Jr. [Aug. 28, 1963]A moment of come-from-behind-to-win?“…twenty-eight seconds. The crowd going insane. Kharlamov. Shooting it into the American end again. Morrow is back there. Now Johnson. Nineteen seconds. Johnson over to Ramsey. Bilyaletdinov gets checked by Ramsey. McClanahan is there. The puck is still loose. Eleven seconds. You’ve got ten seconds. The countdown going on right now. Morrow up to Silk. Five seconds left in the game. Do you believe in miracles?Yes!”– Al Michaels, [Feb. 22, 1980]Pennie and I were having lunch with our friend Rich Mann when he made a casual comment that sent such tremors through me that I wondered if Austin was having an earthquake. I never told Rich about the impact of his 4 littlewords on me that day, but he opened my eyes to an American greatness that had previously been hiding in my blind spot.The moment that defines America for me – the moment I’ll be proud of forever – was December 12, 2000, when no one started shooting.Remember The Month of the Hanging Chads? Al Gore won the popular vote of the nation on November 7, 2000, but George W. Bush won Florida’s 25 electoral votes by a storybook-thin margin to gain the Presidency, 271 votes to 266. But the state laws of Florida required a recount due to the microscopic margin of victory.On November 26, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris certified Florida’s voting results, declaring Bush to have won the state of Florida by 537 votes.Many people were upset by this because Katherine Harris had also served as co-chair of Bush’s election campaign.Gore’s team won a court hearing to challenge the Katherine Harris results. The American people were confused, nervous and anxious.On December 1, fully 3 weeks after Election Day, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments over whether the Florida Supreme Court had overstepped its authority in managing the recount. A week later, Florida’s high court upheld their previous position.Bush argued. Gore argued. And the leadership of our nation hung in the balance.Finally, on December 12, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount, effectively declaring Bush to be the winner. That Supreme Court vote was 5 to 4.And no one in America started shooting.How many nations on this earth can rest in the knowledge that there will be a peaceful transfer of power, even in moments of heated disagreement? “No one started shooting.” – Rich Mann, Shogun Sushi, Austin, TX [Feb. 2001]God Bless...

“Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will stand before kings.”– Proverbs, ch. 22 Stand before kings? Sounds great! But how does one get “skilled in his work?” American children were taught for 100 years that all we had to do to be successful was listen, take notes, remember what we were told and repeat it accurately when asked. Americans call this silliness “education” and we guard the concept fiercely, obstinately and ridiculously.  “You’ve got the grades to get into college…”“Smart enough to get a scholarship…”“The first of my family to go to college…”“College educated…” The worship of college runs deep in American families. To question college or to criticize it is to brand yourself a heretic. But college is no longer a religion among employers. A comprehensive study released by the Harvard Graduate School of Education on February 2, 2011, suggests that America’s “college for all” mindset may be doing more harm than good. According to the study, Americans place too much emphasis on 4-year degree programs when 2-year occupational programs would better prepare students for today’s job market. Fifty years ago 30 percent of the jobs in America were “white collar.” The white collars enjoyed more prestige, had more opportunity and made more money than the 70 percent who were “blue collar” laborers. College, we were told, was the difference. Flash forward half a century; 30 percent of the jobs in America today are “white collar,” just as before. But only 15 percent of today’s jobs are “blue collar.” The remaining 50 percent are jobs that didn’t exist half a century ago; jobs that require specialized training but not a 4-year degree. And since there aren’t enough people trained to do these jobs, our skilled “no collars” are paid wonderfully high salaries because employers are begging to hire them. The no collars make higher salaries, in fact, than two-thirds of the 30 percent whose collars are white. “Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will stand before kings.” And he will do it without a collar.Meanwhile, our universities graduate exactly 10 times more psychology majors each year than there are jobs for psychology majors. But these bright-eyed innocents are never told, “There will be a job for only 1 in every 10 of you. The rest of you will have to find some other way to make a living.” I’m betting you know at least a dozen young adults with college degrees who are struggling to find work today. Am I right? But the problem isn’t that there aren’t any jobs. There are plenty of jobs for people with the right skills. These “educated unemployed” simply chose a course of study for which there is no demand in today’s workplace. James Michener grew up poor, joined the Navy, earned more than 100 million dollars as a writer, was lavished with honorary degrees by the world’s most prestigious colleges and universities, then left us with a singular piercing observation shortly before he died in 1997: “If our military capacities were in as much peril as are our intellectual capacities, the nation would be taking gigantic and immediate steps to repair the deficiencies. It is scandalous that we are not taking equally huge steps to reverse the decline in our basic educational adequacy.” – This Noble Land, p. 99, (1996) But Michener wasn’t referring to traditional education. Michener understood what it takes to become “skilled in your work:” “I feel almost a blood relationship with all the artists in all the mediums, for I find that we face the same...

If you’re reading this sentence, it’s because the headline (A.) startled you by its intrusive, personal nature, (B.) irritated you by its assumption that God exists, (C.) intrigued you because you never really thought about it, or (D.) touched a pre-existing suspicion or belief that hides in your heart.Headlines – including the subject lines of emails and the opening sentences of speeches, sermons and radio ads – are vitally important. David Ogilvy said it best, “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” The headline that pulled you into this story is interesting because it:1. is taboo, (by virtue of introducing the subject of deity.)2. is a question for which there is no “obvious” answer. You realize that I just taught you two techniques for creating good opening lines, right? (1.) Tickle a taboo. (2.) Ask a question with no obvious answer. Here’s another good headline:Four Out of Five People Think the Fifth is an Idiot That one is interesting because it:3. is funny4. says far more than it says.5. reminds you of things you already know about foolish statistics, public opinion polls and prejudices disguised as research, “Me and all my friends…” Fifteen years ago when I first began writing for Radio Ink magazine, Eric Rhoads said, “Make your readers want to cheer your name or make them want to tear you limb from limb, but never let them be bored.” That’s another useful tidbit:6. People would rather be angry than bored. One last thing about headlines:7. Never promise something in a headline that you don’t deliver in the story. Readers aren’t quick to forgive a bait-and-switch. So in the spirit of delivering what I promised in the headline, I’ll share with you the following thoughts: It is easy to believe God loves us. It is somewhat harder to believe that He likes us. You have certain people in your life that you love because they are “family.” But do you really like them? Even you-know-who? Would you have chosen that person to be your friend – the loved one you’re seeing in your mind right now – if they had not been thrust upon you by the genetic lottery? Wow. There’s #1 again. Taboo. “Do I really like all the people I love? What a question! How dare you! Have you no sense of propriety?”Calm down. Love requires a commitment that runs deeper than your feelings. This irrational, wonderful, life-giving commitment makes it possible for us to love people we don’t really like; people we would never have chosen for rational reasons.Love isn’t a feeling, it‘s something you do. Love is action. Love rolls up its sleeves and wades into messes it did not make. This is how we can love people we don’t like.But just for the record, God likes you. He actually likes you. I asked him if he was sure. He said, “Yeah, I’m sure.” Go figure. Roy H. Williams

How does one reconcile these two famous proverbs?“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”That first platitude would argue that pre-emptive action is a waste of time and resources; “Leave well-enough alone.” The second platitude says quite the opposite; “A stitch in time, saves nine.”Which is true?Stanislaw Lec said, “Proverbs contradict each other. That is the wisdom of a people.”George Santayana said it more plainly. “Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”Nobel prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr said this isn’t just true in philosophy and art, but is true in science as well: “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”It would seem that every great truth in our universe has its opposite. Little ideas can be right or wrong but big ideas are both right and wrong.Is your mind broad enough to hear the beauty of birdsong in the land of your enemy?Homophobes criticize me when I quote Oscar Wilde, “He was a homosexual, you know.”Religious people criticize me when I quote Voltaire, “He was an atheist, you know.”Republicans squint at me suspiciously when I say I like Obama.Democrats’ eyebrows jump when I say I admired Ronald Reagan.“According to our present conceptions, an atom of an element is built up of a nucleus that has a positive electrical charge… together with a number of electrons, all having the same negative charge….”– Niels Bohr, from his Nobel Prize acceptance speechOur universe exists because these equal-but-opposite bits – protons and electrons – come together and interact in a strained, divine tension. The important thing, for me, is that neither of these particles is compromised by the other. Protons are no less positively-charged because of their interaction with electrons, and electrons are never corrupted because of their close proximity to protons.If electrons and protons were ever to become alike, our universe would cease to exist. The solution is never “somewhere in the middle” as is constantly suggested by dullards and cowards and lovers of gray and beige. These flaccid proponents of “the middle ground” are like wet toilet paper.And I mean that, of course, in a spirit of love.Reality – indeed, the entirety of our physical universe – requires equals-but-opposites in their purest forms, forever attracting and repelling each other as they dance the dance of creation.“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”– F. Scott FitzgeraldDo you have a first-rate intelligence?I could easily craft a compelling counter-argument against everything I’ve written today and I know that you could, too.But I won’t. Because today I am feeling neither gray nor beige.Roy H. Williams

A Brief Examination Into the Health of Your MarketingSTEP 1: What percentage of your sales volume comes from repeat or referral customers? These customers are driven to you by past satisfaction.Don’t read any further until you’ve decided on a percentage. Give it your best guess.STEP 2: What percentage of your sales volume is triggered by your location and its exterior signage? These customers come to you because of your visibility.Again, write down a percentage, your best guess.STEP 3: Add those two percentages together, then deduct from 100.The remaining percentage is your “advertising driven” traffic, new customers who come to you solely because of your ads.I’m betting this percentage is a lot lower than you would have guessed. Am I right?STEP 4: How many unique customers have you served in the past 12 months? Write down a specific number. You’ll probably need to consult your records.STEP 5: Apply your “ad-driven traffic” percentage to the total number of unique customers you’ve sold in the past 12 months. This will tell you exactly how many new customers you’ve served in the past 12 months who came to you solely because of your advertising. [If your ad-driven traffic was 20 percent and your Unique Customer Count was 5,000, then you had 1,000 ad-driven customers.]STEP 6: Divide that number into your annual ad budget.The result of that division – the quotient – is your Cost of Customer Acquisition. It’s how much you’re spending on advertising to bring one new customer through your doors. (You may notice that our equation didn’t calculate the cost of referral customers. This is because referral customers don’t come at a direct cost, as do ad-driven customers, but at the indirect costs of customer service and relationship management.)STEP 7: Write your Cost of Customer Acquisition – the number of dollars you’re paying to bring one new customer into your business – LARGE on a sheet of paper, or put it on your computer screen in a 72-point font.Stare at it for a moment.Here are the obvious questions:1. With the cost of new customer acquisition so high, why advertise at all? 2. How can we drive this Cost of Customer Acquisition way, way down?Let’s answer the first question first:If a prospective customer doesn’t give you a chance to sell them, there can only be two possible reasons:A: They haven’t heard about you. (This problem can be solved by advertising.)B: They have heard about you and they don’t like what they’ve heard. These customers – based on information given to them by others – have made the decision not to do business with you. A good ad will give them new information that may lead them to a new decision. You may also need to invest more energy in customer service and relationship management.“With the cost of new customer acquisition so high, why advertise at all?The primary goal of advertising is to acquire new customers. Your future repeat and referral business depends on it. Good customers move to other towns, or die, and you never see them again. It happens to every business and it happens every year. Additionally, new people move into your town and have no idea where to shop. Approximately 20 percent of the average American community didn’t live there 1 year ago. How are you reaching out to these newbies? Are you crossing your fingers and hoping they’ll meet one of your loyal customers?

If you’re a man, you will definitely have a midlife crisis. When it happens – and it can happen a number of times – you can let it lift you to the next level, or you can let it unravel your life. Wizard Academy’s Dr. Richard D. Grant, a clinical psychologist, was chatting with a group of adult students one day while his microphone was still recording. I transcribed a bit of what he said because it explains for me the relationship between Don Quixote and Dulcinea, the common village girl Quixote admired from afar.(In the book, Don Quixote never meets Dulcinea; she’s never even aware of his existence, though she has a profound effect on his life.)Here’s what Dr. Grant said that day:“One of the big things that Jung talked about that becomes more and more operative as a guy gets older is that he comes into contact with the deeper parts of himself which we call the unconscious. The trap door to the unconscious is actually a gate that is feminine.”“The feminine part of a man’s personality is called the anima, the Latin word for soul. It leads him to growth and assumes many faces.”“We should pay very close attention to what we find attractive, men, at mid-life, because that’s the roadmap of where we’re going to grow next. This is, a man’s encounters with females, especially at mid-life, tell him what he needs to connect with in himself to have more life. That is what the anima experience is all about.”“This is very important for guys to know because at mid-life they get re-sensitized to females, deeply, and it doesn’t have to do with their committed relationships. And it’s very confusing for many men, and they think that they’re supposed to question their committed relationships and that life itself is in a strand of that person’s hair that they would follow.”“Actually that person is a symbol, mirroring this profound feminine part of the man that is the gateway to what lies ahead for him. And the function of the anima – the internal feminine – is to lead the man to the next part of his life.”“The rules of relationship to the unconscious are the rules of chivalry, ‘pure and chaste from afar.’ If you decide to totally get engrossed in the idealized imagery of the feminine, you’ll lose yourself. There’s danger in that. But if you have a conscious relationship – feeling the power of that, but not getting seduced by it – you will come to awareness; you’ll learn things.”“That might sound wild but chastity is really the ability to relate to a female human being, for a man, and to the anima in all its power at the same time and in the right respect, both at once, without confounding the two.”“If you attribute to a woman the goddess-like qualities of the anima, a man just melts in front of her. But if you keep them separate – you know, one’s for growth and one is to have relationship with, in all the benefits of monogamy and commitment – then you can benefit from it. Chastity is the ability to do both at once and not confuse them. That is what chastity is, not wimpy abstinence.”“If you want to see the four parts of the masculine counterpart to this for a woman – the animus – go watch The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy has four masculine figures she deals with when she goes on an adventure into a different land, learns all kinds of lessons and then comes home after her journey. So that’s an alternative story…” Right now I find myself noticing women who are lighthearted and carefree. Thanks to Dr. Grant’s...

The Key to Getting Attention.A Guaranteed Cure for Writer's Block.In an over-communicated society, predictability is the enemy of effective writing. A recent Yankelovich study tells us that Americans are confronted by more than 5,000 selling messages per day – radio and television and magazines and newspapers and billboards floating on an ocean of store signage, posters, point-of-purchase displays and product packaging – each one hoping to gain our eyes, ears and attention.No wonder we’ve become so adept at filtering ads from our consciousness. Those time-consuming piranhas are out to eat us alive. And they do it so painfully predictably. I’m troubled when writers tell me they want to learn to “think outside the box.” I always want to ask, “Why do you climb into the box to begin with?”The box is a self-focused perspective. Predictable ads are spawned when you sit inside the box and begin asking predictable questions: “What makes us different and better than our competitors? What makes us special?” Having focused your approach inward, on yourself, instead of outward, on your customers, your thoughts will accelerate in an ever-tightening spiral as you circle the drain. Predictable opening statements are born inside the box. I have a love/hate relationship with a certain bit of stagecraft I use when speaking publicly. The bit is always a crowd pleaser; that’s the part I love. But most of the audience misses the point; that’s the part I hate. They gasp and laugh and clap and I say to them, “This looks like a magic trick, I know, but it’s really very easy. You can do it, I promise. Just give it a try.” But they never believe me. The stagecraft begins when I ask everyone in the room to write a statement that would catch the ear of any person who overheard it. “The statement doesn’t have to make sense,” I say, “It just needs to be larger than life, evocative, difficult to ignore. The kind of statement that would make a passing stranger turn and say, ‘Huh?’” I then ask 6 volunteers to bring their statements onto the stage. “I’m now going to craft real ads for real businesses using the statements written on those papers as theopening lines for the ads. Do I have any business owners in the room?” Six business owners take the stage. I randomly pair them up with the colorful statement-holders. I have no idea what businesses are on stage or what statements are written on those papers. I owe Tom Robbins (not to be confused with Tony) for this little bit of stagecraft. In a magazine interview that accompanied the release of his novel, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, Tom said, “Everything in the universe is connected, of course. It’s a matter of using imagination to discover the links, and language to expand and enliven them.” “Business owner number one. Tell me about your business.”“I have a plumbing company.”“Name a profit center you’d like to improve.”“I’d like to get more calls for our 24-hour emergency service.”“Crazy person number one. What did you write on your paper?”“I came home and the dog was bald.” The room roars with laughter as I walk to the front of the stage and balance there – my toes hanging over the edge – as 2,000 people hold their breath.“I came home and the dog was bald. I haven’t been that surprised since I woke up at 2AM to pee and stepped out of bed into an inch of water. Thank god Martindale Plumbing never goes to sleep. At 2AM they were just sittin’ there, hoping someone would call. They fixed the problem while I made coffee. Great guys. Thank god...

Why America Needs Wizard AcademyAccording to the U.S. Census, our nation is home to 5.91 million business owners whose businesses have fewer than 100 employees. If the American dream is to survive, these small businesses must thrive. The success of Wal-Mart and Google is not enough. Wizard Academy is a business school – not for big corporations – but for companies operated by their owners. Can you name another? On 1/3/11 6:59 AM, <[email protected]> wrote:Roy,May I be one of the first to speak up about your “Sponsorship Opportunities?” Enough already.  Yes, it’s a good idea to have people buy in to your ideas and write checks to help build things at the Academy.  A light fixture here, some paving bricks there.  But it may be time to give it a rest.  What will we be asked to buy next, a box of paper clips? Please don’t lower yourself to standing on the streets of Austin with a pencil cup.  It would be a humbling experience but it’s unbecoming of you. Need more money? Do what the Doobies suggested and Take It to The Street.  Get back on the lecture circuit for $25K+ per day plus expenses.  There are people out here who would pay big bucks for a Roy appearance.  Heck, if Glenn Beck can do it, you can too.XXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX, VA “Get back on the lecture circuit”? Friend, you seem to think I’m raising money to build Roy-Town. You are mistaken. My goal in seeking sponsorships is to transfer psychological ownership of this school to the people for whom it is being built. The public already owns Wizard Academy legally. Now I need them to own it in their hearts. When a person donates money to fund a permanent, physical attribute of this school, his or her relationship with it is made more permanent and physical as well. I will soon pass off the scene. I’m not speaking of my death, but of my joyful departure to pursue the hands-on, face-to-face growth of small businesses across the land. If the public has not fully seized hold of this school, it will fail shortly after I walk away.I am sorry you were annoyed. I promise not to let it happen again. To make doubly sure that my tacky, lowbrow behavior no longer offends your sensitive nature, I’ve instructed Barry Skidmore to remove your name from our subscriber list. (Just out of curiosity, I checked to see if you’ve ever made a donation or paid to attend a class. No on both counts. But I did notice that you’ve been quick to fly from Virginia to attend Academy events that are free.) So with a wink and a smile and a snappy salute good-bye, I leave you to the wisdom of Glenn Beck.Roy H. Williams “No man, who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed, but has been well-nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man…” – Elbert Hubbard, A Message to Garcia, 1899 (More than 100 million copies of this booklet have been distributed in the past 112 years.) You, reader, as a believer in this school for small business, are not “the average man” spoken of by Elbert Hubbard. You are generous, gracious and intelligent. You are insightful, creative and committed. You and your continuing success are the reasons this school exists. I look forward to spending these moments with you each week. Roy H. Williams

I look at Vivian Maier and remember Jane Hathaway, Mr. Drysdale’s scholarly secretary on The Beverly Hillbillies. Vivian was born in France in 1926. We don’t know how or when Vivian came to America, but at age 11 she began working in a New York sweatshop. She learned English by sitting in movie theaters, alone in the dark. Alone in the dark. That pretty much describes Vivian’s life except for 1959, the year she turned 33 and found just enough money to travel abroad to strange and exotic places; Egypt, Thailand, Vietnam, France, Italy, Indonesia, Taiwan. Highly unusual for a woman of her time, Vivian journeyed alone. Even more unusual, she often wore a man’s bulky jacket, ugly and awkward men’s shoes and a large, floppy hat. And she constantly took photographs that she never showed anyone. It appears that Vivian escaped the sweatshops by moving to Chicago in the early 1950’s and taking work as a nanny to three young boys: Matthew, Lane and John are now old men but remember Vivian as “peculiar, our own Mary Poppins. One time she brought home a dead snake to show us, another time she convinced the milkman to drive us all to school in his delivery truck. But in the 10 years she worked for our family, she never once received a phone call.” When the 3 boys were raised, Vivian became unemployed. The next half-century saw her shift from family to family, always caring for children who were not her own. One employer hired Vivian to care for his disabled daughter. “But first thing in the morning on her day off, that camera would be around her neck and we wouldn’t see her again until late at night. I remember her as a private person but one who had very strong opinions about movies and politics.” Vivian was born a French Catholic but according to her employers she died an anti-Catholic, Socialist, Feminist movie critic who hated American movies but loved foreign films. At age 83, still in Chicago, she slipped on the ice and hit her head and died. But on the other side of Chicago, alone in the dark, sat 100,000 photo negatives and more than 1,000 rolls of undeveloped film in a public storage facility. When Vivian didn’t show up to pay her storage fees, the contents of her space were turned over to an auction house. Vivian’s features remind me of Jane Hathaway but her life reminds me of Emily Dickinson. No one knew Emily was a writer until after the funeral when they cleaned out her chest-of-drawers and found more than 1,500 of the finest poems ever written in the English language. Likewise, the buyer of Vivian’s negatives was stunned by what he found. And though John Maloof has scanned only 30,000 of Vivian’s 100,000 photo negatives, Finding Vivian Maier is currently the featured exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center. A book and a documentary movie are in the works. As a longtime collector of black-and-white photography (and the publisher of Accidental Magic, a coffee-table photo book,) I believe we’ll soon see Vivian Maier photographs featured at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. From a storage locker in suburban Chicago to the finest auction houses in the world, I believe the second journey of Vivian Maier has only just begun. ARoy H. Williams

Uptight vs. Anything Goes “Proverbs contradict each other. That is the wisdom of a people.”– Stanislaw Lec EXAMPLE 1. “Win the heart and the mind will follow. The intellect can always find logic to justify what the heart has already decided.” In other words, speak to the right brain – the heart – if you will persuade.EXAMPLE 2. “Specifics are more believable than generalities.” In other words, speak to the left brain – the mind – if you will persuade. “If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, novelist, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature The conscious and the unconscious – left brain and right – struggle in a perpetual tug-of-war. Neurologist Richard Cytowic says, “Not everything we are capable of knowing and doing is accessible to, or expressible in, language. This means that some of our personal knowledge is off limits even to our own inner thoughts! Perhaps this is why humans are so often at odds with themselves, because there is more going on in our minds than we can ever consciously know.” Psychologist Carl Jung compared this “unconscious” to swimming in the silent and weightless world underwater: above the waterline exists the sunlit world of the conscious mind filled with air, birds, trees and people. But below the waterline, in the unconscious mind, is a timeless world of twilight and shadows, symbols and beauty, metaphors and music.But there are monsters in the deep. The intellect rescues us from our emotions, to be sure. But just as surely do the emotions provide escape from the cold, hard jail of the intellect. “We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.” – Tom Robbins, novelistDr. Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his discovery that humans don’t have a brain divided into halves as much as we have two separate, competing brains that perceive radically different information. The left brain gathers objective data to facilitate rational, logical, sequential, deductive reasoning. “Zoom in close and get all the details,” the left brain seeks to forecast a result. Our language functions exist in the left brain, allowing us to communicate specific details with accuracy. The left brain puts us in touch with the world that IS. The left is intellect. The left is logic. The colorful, musical right brain exists primarily for pattern recognition, observing and cataloging recurrent series of shapes and colors and musical notes and symbols and events and behaviors. Although it has no ability to interpret spoken or written languages, the right brain does interpret tone of voice as just one of the many, meaningful patterns it observes. The right brain puts you in touch with worlds that could be, should be, ought to be, might be someday. The right brain is heart, not mind. The right brain is intuition. The engineer stereotype mocks the “touchy-feely” world of the artist while the artist stereotype mocks the cold and sterile world of the engineer. Each of these stereotypes – the engineer and the artist – is a fool. Robert Frost said,“Young poets forget that poetry must include the mind as well as the emotions. Too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous and must be left in.”  When Robert Frost spoke that truth about poetry, he spoke the...

But the Sun Shows Us the Way.“Success is a snowflake,” she said. I was talking to the princess of my world, doing my best to ignore the day that waited impatiently outside our door. I had shown her the photo of Jane DeDecker’s Old Man and the Sea and told her the back story of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous statement, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” In Hemingway’s Nobel Prize-winning story, the old man, Santiago, tries valiantly, suffers mightily, makes all the right decisions and catches the magnificent fish… only to see it eaten by sharks before he can get it home. Did he succeed or fail? Santiago saw the snowflake. Hemingway saw the snowflake. Roosevelt saw the snowflake. Success is that snowflake: beautiful, perfect and gone too soon, leaving only spots that dance before your eyes from the bright flashbulb of Life’s photographer. “Is it over? Did I win?” Yes. Now go home. Tomorrow is another day, my friend, and you are not yet dead.We live in a culture that pretends the snowflake will last forever. “The most popular books are manuals: how to become a millionaire in ten easy lessons, how to lose fifteen pounds a week, how to recover from your divorce, and so on. People always go around looking for shortcuts and ways to escape anything they consider unpleasant: ugliness, old age, weight, illness, poverty, and failure in any of its aspects.” – Isabel Allende, My Invented Country Failure is not a flashbulb but the sun, lighting the way, revealing our mistakes, a loving teacher that causes the snowflake to sparkle beautifully as it falls. Have you been afraid of Failure? Don’t be. Tom Peters, that Dean of Worldwide Business Consultants, says, “Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.” Think of risky undertakings as “experiments.” Regardless of whether your experiment succeeds or fails, you’re going to learn something useful. And as Life’s photographer told you, “Tomorrow is another day, my friend, and you are not yet dead.”Roy H. Williams

Ray,I agree with what you said. Determination must be fed or it will fade.Commitment, on the other hand, is settled, secure, irrevocable. Costs are no longer counted.You’ve heard me say many times that one of our society’s most costly mistakes is this misbegotten belief that passion produces commitment. America’s high divorce rate testifies to our error.Commitment, I believe, produces passion. I often meet people who sigh, “I just can’t find my passion.” To them I say, “Make a commitment. Fling yourself into it. Passion will make its debut soon after.”When a commitment is fully settled in the heart, all concerns about time and money are erased; “It will take as long as it takes and it will cost what it costs.” When the objective is clear and your commitment is absolute, schedules and budgets no longer apply.Our society admires the clever, the quick, the connected and the beautiful. We even admire the brash and the reckless. We have Hollywood to thank for that. But in my 30-year observation of American small business, it is the committed owner that is most likely to succeed. I continue to believe in exponential little bits: the relentless march of a colony of ants, the mathematical magic of compound interest, the ability of rain to erode a rock.Wizard Academy exists to help committed people achieve their impossible dreams. This is not a school for gimmick mongers, multilevel marketers or twitchy little bastards.You’ve heard it said, I’m sure, “The chicken is involved in a ham-and-eggs breakfast, but the pig is truly committed.” This is a school for the pig, not the chicken.Committed people are outsiders in a society that is barely skin deep.According to the most recent US Census, our nation has 5.91 million businesses with fewer than 100 employees. These people need help if our nation is to survive.The American Dream has always been an impossible dream. God bless the travelers who follow a star, those relentless ones whose vision allows them to see past the obstacles that stand so ominously in their way.Thank You, Ray, for the vital role you have played since 1997. Thank you for the wisdom you continue to share.Yours,Roy H. Williams

A Look at Personification and Brandable ChunksGold, for thousands of years, has been the world’s only truly secure investment. The economy ebbs and flows, like the tide. It always has. It always will. But gold is like the Rock of Gibraltar. Safe. Secure. Indestructible.If all the gold in the world were melted into a single cube, that cube would be only 22 yards per side. Gold is astoundingly rare.As an investment, gold is liquid.Its value and desirability are international.Gold laughs at stocks and bonds.Gold is beautiful.Gold, in all its forms, is the thing to own.Come and meet your gold at Austin Rare Coins & Bullion.Do you remember the October 11th MondayMorningMemo about new words? One “new word” definition I gave you was: Brandable chunks: vivid, recurring phrases used by an advertiser to help position and define the brand. Slogans and taglines are out. Brandable chunks are in.In return for their donation of $500 to help build the tower at Wizard Academy, Austin Rare Coins and Bullion received the 106 words that opened today’s memo. Arranged as they are, those 106 words could be used as an email, a 60-second radio ad, or the text of a magazine ad. Those 106 words contain exactly 8 brandable chunks linked together like the cars of a freight train carrying radioactive moonbeams.Each of the eight brandable chunks can be used independently of the other seven. There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar. In how many situations and combinations do you suppose these eight brandable chunks might be used?1.   1. Gold, for thousands of years, has been the world’s only truly secure investment.2.   2. The economy ebbs and flows, like the tide. It always has. It always will. But gold is like the Rock of Gibraltar. Safe. Secure. Indestructible.3.   3. If all the gold in the world were melted into a single cube, that cube would be only 22 yards per side. Gold is astoundingly rare.4.   4. As an investment, gold is liquid. Its value and desirability are international.5.   5. Gold laughs at stocks and bonds.6.   6. Gold is beautiful.7.   7. Gold, in all its forms, is the thing to own.8.   8. Come and meet your gold.The eternal and omnipotent Webster, that thundering god of the English language, declares personification to be “attribution of personal qualities; especially: representation of a thing or abstraction as a person.”When you give human characteristics to inanimate objects, you fling open the doors of imagination as surely as if you had said, “Once upon a time.”Gold laughs at stocks and bonds.But don’t get carried away. Overuse of personification just makes you sound like a nut.Roy H. Williams

The single biggest mistake made in face-to-face selling is the seller’s reluctance to name the price. When your customer asks, “How much?” the next syllable to leave your lips should be the first digit of a number.“But you don’t understand. That’s just not possible in my business. We have to gather some information before we can name a price.”Piffle and pooh. This is not true.“Okay then, Smarty-pants, ‘How much is a 1-carat diamond?’”Twenty thousand dollars is the most I’ve ever heard of anyone paying for a flawless, colorless, ideal-cut, 1-carat diamond but I can also get you a highly-flawed 1-carat diamond for about a thousand dollars but I doubt you’re looking for either of those. A truly beautiful 1-carat diamond – the kind you can really be proud of – usually costs between 29 hundred and 39 hundred dollars depending on the specific combination of color, clarity and cut you choose. Some shoppers fixate on color, others on clarity, others on cut, some try to balance all three. Have you made any hard-and-fast decisions about color, clarity and cut, or are you open to a couple of suggestions?See how easy that was?If you want to:1.     reduce your customer’s anxiety and2.     increase your customer’s confidence in you and3.     elevate their attention and4.     make them feel comfortable and in control,just train yourself to listen for the price question and then, when you hear it,1.     be sure no sound leaves your lips before you2.     take a breath and3.     spit out the price.The reason you take a breath is because you aren’t going to pause before you explain all the cool stuff that’s included at no extra charge.  Once a price is on the table, customer anxiety is eliminated and the longer you list things included in that price, the cheaper the price becomes.“What do you mean, ‘customer anxiety is eliminated?’”Customers feel a bit anxious when they ask the price because that’s usually the salesperson’s cue to launch into attack-and-destroy mode. “Here, step into my office and fill out this customer information sheet. Tell us a little about yourself so we can serve you better. And be sure to include your email address and cell phone number.”“We don’t do anything like that. We just want to list all the features and benefits before we name the price.”So I’m assuming your customer asks, “How much is the mobile home next to the road?” and you say, “What a good eye you have! That’s an authentic Northfield mobile home with 6-inch stud walls, wood burning fireplace, vaulted ceilings, color coordinated draperies, built-in appliances and wall-to-wall carpeting. That mobile home is fully air-conditioned, has an R-40 insulation value, comes with a 5-year limited warranty and…” Something like that?“Yeah, sort of.”When you leave the price question dangling in the air like that – twisting in the wind like a man hanged for stealing chickens – the customer won’t hear anything you say until you finally cut that hanged man down by naming a price. The longer you talk before you finally name a number, the more your customer thinks, “These clowns have a horrible price and they know it or they would answer my question.”“Well, okay, but how about those times when the customer knows exactly which make and model they want and prices are easily compared but your company adds a bunch of intangibles and you need to make sure the customer recognizes the value of those intangibles? If you name the price right away, they’ll just say, ‘Thank you,’ and walk away and you’ll never have the chance to explain why your price is higher than the price of that...

a peek, a glimpse, a conclusionIt is dangerous to write sentences that require the reader to think. Frankly, you would be safer to blindfold yourself and walk in front of a Taliban firing squad wearing a Jesus Loves You T-shirt.Here’s an example of dangerous writing:“Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is – and still not caring.”A surprising number of people will read those three sentences and say, “I don’t get it,” and then, rather than think about it for seven seconds, send a condescending email to the author.Yes, zombies are real. The dead walk among us and they know how to use computers. Need proof? Read Twitter.Extremely dangerous writing doesn’t just require a reader to think; it assumes the reader to already know a vital tidbit of trivia:“Does koala bear poop smell like cough drops?”In this case, the writer assumes the reader already knows that koalas eat nothing but eucalyptus leaves.Could such a brazen writer succeed? Evidently yes, since both of the quotes in question come from the novels of Tom Robbins, one of America’s most beloved writers. Tom Robbins doesn’t fear the Taliban. Most of us, however, avoid doing anything that might bring us to the attention of narrow-minded legalists who have no appreciation of whimsy and adventure. But these fears aren’t new. Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree offered the following advice more than 100 years ago:“Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humor. He will always use it in evidence against you.”Sir Herbert, it would seem, had felt the lash of the Taliban.I write today’s message for two reasons:1.    To remind you that most ads aren’t written to persuade; they’re written not to offend. This is why most ads are boring. We are terrified by the prospect of criticism.2.    To warn you that the Monday Morning Memo is returning to its roots, flying the Jolly Roger once again, wandering whithersoever the winds of Curiosity blow us, chasing the scent of Wonder like a beagle, scrambling with slippery feet up the mountain called Incredible, leaping from its pinnacle to grab a beam of light from the star that hovers above the Impossible Dream, using it as a zip-line to fly us into the next adventure.When the white-collar criminals of Wall Street shook consumer confidence with the subprime earthquake of 2007, I decided to focus the majority of these Monday Morning Memos on subjects that small business owners would find clearly useful and imminently practical. Three years later, I’ve grown weary of my own writing.Messages that are clearly useful and imminently practical rarely contain words like “euphoria,” “ecstasy,” “zombies,” “zip-lines” “Jesus Loves You” and “koala bear poop.”Have no fear. I will continue to write useful tips about business matters. You need to grow your business and I want to help. Your business booms. The economy thrives. The world is made better. Generally speaking though, I’m elevating my assumptions about the level of your intelligence and the breadth of your interests and knowledge. In other words, I will always assume you know what koala bears eat.Thank you for not being the Taliban.Roy H. Williams

Adolphe Monticelli has been forgotten by all but the most devoted art historians, but his legacy will live eternal through the work of Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and a whole generation of French Impressionists.Monticelli may rightfully be called,”The World’s Most Influential Painter That No One Has Ever Heard Of.”Thomas Jefferson was alive when Monticelli was born and Teddy Roosevelt had just entered politics when Monticelli died in 1886. Although he lived an obscure life in deep poverty, Monticelli left behind nearly 3,500 paintings.Confronted with criticism of his unpopular style in 1860, Monticelli remarked, “I paint for thirty years from now.” When Vincent Van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886, he discovered the paintings Monticelli had created 30 years earlier. Immediately upon seeing these works, Van Gogh adopted a brighter palette and a bolder attack and later remarked, “I sometimes think I am really continuing that man.” When Van Gogh’s new style was praised by an art critic in the newspaper, he replied,“Dear Monsieur Aurier: Many thanks for your article in the Mercure de France, which greatly surprised me. I like it very much as a work of art in itself, in my opinion your words produce colour. In short, I rediscover my canvases in your article, but better than they are, richer, more full of meaning. However, I feel uneasy in my mind because I know that what you say is due to others rather than myself. For example, Monticelli in particular. Saying as you do: “As far as I know, he [Van Gogh] is the only painter to perceive the chromatism of things with such intensity, with such a metallic, gem-like lustre…” Please be so kind as to go and see a certain bouquet by Monticelli at my brother’s – then you will see what I want to say.” – Vincent Van Gogh to G. Albert Aurier, February 1890Nine years after Monticelli died, Oscar Wilde moaned of his bankruptcy in a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, “That all my charming things were to be sold: my Burne-Jones drawings: my Whistler drawings: my Monticelli: my Simeon Solomons: my china: my Library…”Finally, more than 100 years after his death, Monticelli’s paintings hang in the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in London. One painting by Monticelli was recently auctioned at Christie’s for $608,000.The Monticelli at the top of this page is on its way from Luxembourg to Austin where it will hang in the tower at Wizard Academy, on loan from Pennie and myself. Would you like to have a limited edition print of the painting? If things go as planned, we should be able to get your print to you by Christmas. No copies of this glowing Christmas image have ever been made. You’ll own one of only a very few copies of this Monticelli image in all the world.May his light shine forever.Roy H. Williams

“Thoughts are the threads that bind us to deeds.Deeds are the ropes that bind us to habits.Habits are the chains that bind us to destiny.“– Inscription carved on the West Wall at the Palace in Maygassa My friend Don Kuhl says, “All change is self change” and the first things we must change are our thoughts. Harvard’s beloved Frances Frei echoes Don Kuhl, “To change a person’s behavior (deeds) you must first change their beliefs.” Frances Frei’s friend and Harvard colleague, Youngme Moon, takes this discussion of habits even further in her new book, Different. (I’m notorious for not reading business books, but Frances Frei promises this is NOT a business book, so I’ve ordered a copy from Jeff Bezos. He doesn’t read business books either.)Want to see a really cool video about the book?The wonderfully insightful and irreverent Ms. Moon also gives us this marvelousAntiCreativity Checklist“For People Who Want Nothing To Do with Pie-In-The-Sky Innovation, Crazy Flights of Imagination, or any of that wacky,Out-of-The-Box Thinking.”1.     Play it safeListen to that inner voice. “Why should I stick my neck out?” “I’m not going to go out on a limb…” “Safer to let someone else champion that.” 2.     Know your limitations: Don’t be afraid to pigeonhole yourself.“I’m not an artist.” “I’m not creative.” “I’m not an innovator.” 3.     Remind yourself: It’s just a job.“I don’t get paid to come up with ideas.” “I’m keeping my mouth shut.” “There’s nothing in it for me.” “When’s lunch?” 4.     Show you’re the smartest guy in the room: make Skepticism your middle name.“Here’s why that idea won’t work.” “You won’t be able to execute on that.” “Our organization’s not set up for that.” 5.     Be the tough guy: Demand to see the data.“What does the market research say?” “There’s no evidence it’s going to work.” “That didn’t come out of the focus group.” “Show me the spreadsheet.” 6.     Respect history: Always give the past the benefit of the doubt.“We’ve always done it this way.” “If it’s such a good idea, why hasn’t anyone thought of it yet?” “That wasn’t part of the original plan.” 7.     Stop the madness before it can get started: Crush early-stage ideas with your business savvy.“You haven’t made the business case.” “I don’t buy your assumptions.” “There’s no immediate R.O.I.” 8.     Been there, done that: Use experience as a weapon.“We tried that a few years ago and it didn’t work.” “You haven’t been around long enough to know how things work.” “Let’s not reinvent the wheel, guys.” 9.     Keep your eyes closed. Your mind, too.“The world isn’t changing. The media just wants us to think it is.” “I...

And It All Comes TogetherWe love that moment when a divergent anomaly becomes the missing piece of the puzzle.The key that unlocks a mystery.The “Eureka!” of an inventor.The punch line of a joke.We hunger to see disparate elements resolve into a coherent pattern.Tedious teachers tell us the answers. Astounding teachers make us see the answers for ourselves; Click! Snap! The light comes on and we are filled with the electricity of life.Divergence: How much does it not belong?Convergence: How well does it fit?Divergence x Convergence = FascinationMost people do what obviously makes sense. This is why most people are boring. The key to holding the attention of the world is to do what indirectly makes sense. This is a simple, yet practical application of Chaos Theory. (Chaos, in science, does not speak of randomness, but rather the opposite. Chaos is a higher level of organization than is immediately apparent.)There can be no delight without an element of surprise. We notice the disparate element and think, “This doesn’t make any sense. I must be missing something.” Wait for it… wait for it… wait for it… then it all comes together in an implosion of understanding and we are submerged in a new reality.Three elements are all it takes. But each of the three must be sufficiently divergent from the other two. If the divergence is insufficient, there will be no surprise when they come together.You must also have an explicit moment of convergence. If your three divergent elements fail to converge into a clearly coherent pattern, you will have merely created randomness.In the Bev Doolittle painting at the top of this page we see:1. A forest of birch trees in winter2. A red fox3. A horse, carrying an Indian.You may have noticed these in rapid succession but you did not notice them simultaneously. The three are connected chaotically.Please don’t assume this technique to be limited to visual chaos alone. It is equally applied to words, music, mathematical equations and sequences of events. Just ask any cognoscenti of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop and they’ll tell you that Alice always finds the bottom of the rabbit hole on Day Three.Randomness is irritating.Chaos is thrilling.Be chaotic.(Or be boring. It’s your choice.)Roy H. Williams

Today’s memo was recorded 12 years ago. Paul Compton had a wife and four daughters, and in later years, a fourteen-year-old son added himself to the dinner table. That son was me. My own mother was a great cook and she loved me like crazy, but Mom had to work full time and there was a lot to do in the evenings, so I fell into the habit of showing up at Paul’s house every night around suppertime.Paul Compton is the kindest and best man I’ve ever known. Paul understands the difference between “doing” and “being,” so he never once asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Paul felt he knew who I was going to be, and for Paul, that was enough.Many nights after dinner, Paul’s youngest daughter and I would get up from the table and leave on separate dates, but after our dates we would often seek one another’s advice. Over the next four years, she had a long string of boyfriends and I had a long string of girlfriends, but when she wasn’t on a date with a boyfriend and I wasn’t on a date with a girlfriend, Paul’s daughter and I were most likely together, usually about five nights a week.I know it sounds insane, but Paul’s daughter and I went at least a thousand places together without it ever crossing my mind to hold her hand as we were walking.Somewhere near the end of our senior year, as she and I returned from buying a root beer across town, I turned off the ignition, looked at her, and said, “I recently realized that I enjoy being with you more than anyone else in the world, and that makes it difficult for us to be friends anymore, because it would be torture for me to keep seeing you every night if I thought there was ever a chance it would end.” I had never once kissed Paul’s daughter good night. Six months later we were married.A whole generation of American kids grew up being asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” as though it would be the most important question we would ever face. It wasn’t. We learned we could easily and painlessly change careers throughout the course of our lives. Not one of my childhood pals is currently involved in the career for which he studied. Now that I have boys of my own, I’ve elected not to quiz them about what they would like to be.Should any person ever ask my sons what is important to their father, I’ll wager that my boys will be able to recite it verbatim. “Boys, when you’re ready to marry, don’t marry a person who has high and lofty expectations of you. Don’t marry the girl you’ve struggled to impress. Marry the girl you always thought of as a sister, the one who knows you as you really are. Marry the girl who has seen your every fault and weakness but likes to be with you just the same. Boys, when you’re ready to get married, I hope you’ll marry your best friend.”Roy H. Williams

One Bad, Two GoodAds are(1.) category-focused, (2.) product-focused, or (3.) client-focused.The good thing about category-focused ads is that they’re portable; anyone in the category can use them.  The bad thing about category-focused ads is that they don’t distinguish you from your competitors, because anyone in the category can use them. I’ve been told there are some good category-focused ads out there, but I’ve never encountered one personally.Here’s an example of a category-focused script for TV or radio. Prepare to be underwhelmed. It’s really a very bad ad:MALE: I used to hate going to the dentist, but then a friend told me about Dr. _________, ‘the gentle dentist with the healing touch.’FEMALE ONE: I love Dr. __________. I wouldn’t go anywhere else.FEMALE TWO: So you recommend Dr. _____________?MALE: No question about it.FEMALE ONE: Absolutely! He’s ‘the gentle dentist with the healing touch.’FEMALE TWO: I’ve had some bad experiences at the dentist office. Dentists scare me.FEMALE ONE: Not Dr. ______________! He (she) is truly concerned about his (her) patients. He (she) really cares. And his (her) friendly staff will even fill out your insurance papers for you.FEMALE TWO: Does he (she) charge extra for that?MALE: No! It’s a free service that Dr.____________ extends to all his (her) patients.FEMALE ONE: I’d be willing to pay twice as much to go to Dr. ____________ because he (she) has the healing touch, but he (she) doesn’t charge a penny more than those other dentists!FEMALE TWO: I’m convinced! Do you have Dr.______________’s number handy?MALE: I have an appointment card here in my wallet. [short pause] Dr. ______________’s number is XXX-XXXX.FEMALE TWO: Was that XXX-XXXX?MALE: Yes, XXX-XXXX.ANNOUNCER: Dr. _________________ . The gentle dentist with the healing touch. Call today for your appointment. XXX-XXXXFEMALE ONE: XXX-XXXX. The gentle dentist…MALE: …with the healing touch. I’ll bet you’re glad that’s over, right? Like category-focused ads, product-focused ads are portable. Anyone who sells the product can use the ad. Butunlike category-focused ads, product-focused ads can be hugely effective.Are your flower beds lifeless? Fruits and vegetables suffering? This summer has been hell on Idaho gardens. But I’m going to help you resurrect it as the Garden of Eden. This is John Crook of Town and Country Gardens and I’ve found a miracle I want to share. It’s called Save-A-Tree, but don’t let that name fool you – Save-A-Tree was invented by a gardening genius who knows all about plants but next to nothing about marketing. Flowers spring back to life and look beautiful again, fruits grow sweet and ripe and luscious, and vegetables get bigger and tastier than you’ve ever had before. And it’s all natural so it’s almost impossible to burn your plants with it. Our customers are raving about Save-A-Tree because it works. Don’t give up on those plants! Give’em the gift of NEW LIFE.  Save-A-Tree is available exclusively at Town and Country Gardens. It’s truly a...

BONUS: The Wizard’s Prediction of What’s About to HappenIs there any part of your business you’d like to improve?Listen to me: You won’t improve what you don’t measure.Here’s how to get the ball rolling:Step One: Identify, clearly, what you’re trying to make happen.Step Two: Determine how progress might be measured. (This is the hardest step by far.)Step Three: Measure current performance – prior to making any changes – to create a baseline. Step Four: Implement a change you believe will alter the outcome.Step Five:  Measure again, and compare the results to your baseline measurement.Repeat steps Four and Five until satisfied.You’ve heard of “consumer confidence,” right? But did you know Reuters News Service and the University of Michigan established the original Consumer Confidence Index by(1.) measuring the mood of the American public in December, 1964, and(2.) arbitrarily assigning that mood a value of 100?So in effect, when someone says, “Consumer Confidence is up,” or “Consumer Confidence is down,” what they’re really saying is, “Here’s how Americans are feeling compared to December, 1964.”I’ll bet you considered the Consumer Confidence Index to be more authoritative than that, didn’t you?The Index was later revised to use 1985 as the new baseline because it was a year without peaks or troughs. The Federal Reserve looks at the CCI when determining interest rate changes, and it also affects stock market prices. That’s powerful stuff.Here’s my point: Someone – let’s call him RALPHIE – got up one morning and said, “We should monitor the mood of the public.” Step One was completed in that single sentence. An objective had been clearly identified.Now it was time for Step Two:FRIEND: “How are we gonna do that?”RALPHIE: “I dunno.”FRIEND: “Wanna just forget about it and go have a beer?”RALPHIE: “No, let’s ask around. Maybe someone will have an idea.”FRIEND: “Okay.”They bumped into someone who said, “The government’s already measuring the Gross Domestic Product, so why don’t you just compare that to how much Americans are spending each month?”RALPHIE: “Sounds good to me.”And then a person who overheard all this said, “You could ask people their opinion of current economic conditions.”RALPHIE: “Okay. We’ll add that in.”FRIEND: “And while we’ve got them on the phone, we’ll ask them what they think the economy is about to do!”RALPHIE: “Okay, here’s what we’ll do: We’ll look at that Gross Domestic thing that first dude mentioned and then factor in people’s answers to our two questions.”FRIEND: “Do we give both questions equal weight?”   RALPHIE: “No, we’ll give their opinion about the future 50 percent more weight that their opinion of current conditions.”FRIEND: “That sounds complicated.”RALPHIE: “I think it’s just a 60/40 thing but we’ll ask someone down at the university.”FRIEND: “Well, 60 is 50 percent more than 40, but we should go ahead and ask the university dudes because that’ll give us credibility.”RALPHIE: “Now all we need is a really official name.”FRIEND: “You mean like ‘The Better Business Bureau?’”RALPHIE: “Exactly. Bureau is a power word. It makes’em seem official.”FRIEND: “Maybe we could call our thing an ‘Index.’”RALPHIE: “Ralphie’s Index?”FRIEND: “No, but we’ll think of something.”RALPHIE: “Yeah, we’ll think of something.”There are...

Old ideas are carried by old words.New ideas are carried by new words.Old words keep you inside the box.New words help you escape it.If you want to remain inside the box and fall behind the pack, just keep talking about target customers, demographics, gross impressions and unique selling propositions.Do you want to keep up with the times, get ahead of the curve? Grasp the new ideas. Learn the new words.These are the new ideas. These are the new words:Felt need: A desire in the heart of the customer. To speak to an unfelt need is to answer a question that no one was asking.Relevance: A message has relevance to the degree it speaks to a felt need.Credibility: A message has credibility to the degree it is believed.Impact quotient: Relevance + Credibility.Competitive environment: an objective assessment of (A.) the market and (B.) your place in it. Your strengths and weaknesses compared to the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, including location, reputation, selection, product lines, unaided recall (brand awareness,) etc.Limiting factor: anything that’s holding you back.Unleveraged asset: an ace you forgot you had up your sleeve.Core competence: what you’re all about, really.Market potential: the total dollars available in your business category in your marketplace. Easily measured if you know your NAICS code.Share of voice: An advertiser’s percentage of all the advertising done in their category. Location visibility, signage, word-of-mouth, etc. are included in this metric.Share of mind: The mental real estate an advertiser owns in the mind of the public. Share of voice x impact quotient = share of mindShare of market: An advertiser’s percentage of the total business volume done in their category.Authenticity: Being what you say you are.Transparency: showing your dirty laundry; admitting a downside rather than ignoring it. Transparency increases credibility.Personal Experience Factor: Buzz is triggered by personal experience. If the experience of your customer – the word on the street – does not line up with your message, your message has no credibility. Unscripted, unedited, unpolished testimonials have credibility because they carry the credentials of personal experience and the markings of authenticity.Ad-speak: Cliché’s, empty phrases, unsubstantiated claims and hyperbole – the language of yesterday’s advertising. Words without weight, having neither relevance nor credibility.Curse of knowledge: The blinders that come with expertise.Brandable chunks: vivid, recurring phrases used by an advertiser to help position and define the brand. Slogans and taglines are out. Brandable chunks are in.Black words: empty words that fail to contribute to a colorful mental image. The objective of every good writer is to remove the black words so that the others shine more brightly. Were you waiting for me to discuss metrics, unique visitors, page views and the other jargon of digital media? No need. Those things are already being discussed as much as they need to be.The 4...

from our correspondent in St. Petersburg, RussiaARoy, Ogilvy’s St P. office is a client of ours, only there are a tonne of project managers there, and we had really only one contact person, with a few other managers who knew vaguely about us. I was chatting to the lovely Katya, my contact person, on skype one day. Joked something about her using our corporate plane if she needed it; she said she hadn’t time, but couldn’t we send our pilot to Paris early one morning to pick up some croissants and deliver them to her?Well, needless to say we don’t have a corporate plane, let alone a pilot, but the idea took seed, and a few weeks later, costumes hired, boxes specially made, 65 croissants ordered, we barged into the Ogilvy offices mid-morning and distributed to an amazed team of advertising and PR professionals a load of fresh croissants.The initial silence was followed by the odd “WTF?”, and then a huge round of applause, posing for photos, and many grins all around. Followed numerous thanks emails, and lots of comments on the facebook photos. Plus everyone I know and work with in St P, and further afield, saw the pictures too. For an outlay of about 350 USD, that was some awesome publicity in itself. But the best bit was the orders that followed. We’ve seen a huge surge in translation and interpreting orders from them since, so the costs were covered within a month. Result!I was wondering about popping in to WA in Jan, but so far no details on courses for then. Saw another of my missives in a rabbit hole the other week – thanks.William.William,Well done! You’re doing amazing things.This latest was a perfect example of Buzz Snatching.  Take a look. https://wizardacademy.org/scripts/prodList.asp?idCategory=362February 2nd.Yours,Roy H. WilliamsRoy,That sounds delightful, thanks. I’ll see if I can tie it in.Quick question: listening to Moondance by Van Morrison, I suddenly wondered whether hit songs by artists who continually pump out hit songs also depend on 3rd Grav Bods for their success? I ask because I couldn’t identify one in the song, and then I remembered that we only looked at one-hit wonders in the example. So I figured perhaps there was a different formula for repeat successes?William. The Answer to the question posed by William Hackett-Jones can be found in the rabbit hole. Do you know how to get in?Aroo.Roy H. Williams

I was talking to an old friend. He asked the usual questions.“Family okay?”“Everyone is great.”“Business good?”“Busier than ever.”“But are you having fun?”He asked the question as any child of the ‘60s would ask it. The anthem we sang as young men was, “If It Feels Good, Do It.” Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. Life is kicks, fun, adrenaline: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Dylan Thomas, Anna Nicole, Paris Hilton.I wasn’t sure how to answer his question.At the root of every misunderstanding is a lack of definition of terms.“Fun” is a term that screams for definition:Late at night, ask a weary mother nursing a sick child, “Are you having any fun?”Ask Mohandas Gandhi on the 20th day of a hunger strike, “Are you having any fun?”Ask Martin Luther King in Birmingham City Jail, “Are you having any fun?”Each of these saw a change that was needed and happily paid the price to bring that change to pass. But change never happens quickly.“The North Americans’ sense of time is very special. They are short on patience. Everything must be quick, including food and sex, which the rest of the world treats ceremoniously. Gringos invented two terms that are untranslatable into most languages: ‘snack’ and ‘quickie,’ to refer to eating standing up and loving on the run … that, too, sometimes standing up. The most popular books are manuals: how to become a millionaire in ten easy lessons, how to lose fifteen pounds a week, how to recover from your divorce, and so on. People always go around looking for shortcuts and ways to escape anything they consider unpleasant: ugliness, old age, weight, illness, poverty, and failure in any of its aspects.”– Isabel Allende, My Invented CountryMy friend Don Kuhl is one of the world’s leading experts on how change happens. A couple of weeks ago Don said something on the telephone that I hastily scribbled down: “Change is not an event. It’s a tiny decision made over and over again. Change isn’t once. It’s daily.”I recorded Don’s words because I heard in them an echo of the note my father scribbled to my sister and I as he struggled for one last breath in his final 60 seconds: “All the little things in life add up to your life. If you don’t get it right, nothing else matters.”If you define fun as reckless, heady abandon spiraling upwards to climax in an intoxicating sense of personal freedom and power, then no, I’m not having any.But if you define fun as the little things in life that add up to your life, nursing a child, doing without, paying the price for what you believe, then I would have to say that I’m having quite a time.The time of my life.Roy H. Williams

“Numbers don’t lie” is what people say when they defend their faulty logic. Their math is always flawless. The problem is that they gathered the wrong numbers. But the wrong numbers always look so right. Wizard Academy teaches its students to gather different information and use it to make different decisions. This is what we mean when we say Wizard Academy is a nontraditional business school. Let me give you an example:Half the people in town live north of the river. The other half live south. People rarely drive across the river to go to a restaurant. Everyone stays on their own side. The people north of the river are better-educated and own higher value homes. In fact, 64 percent of all discretionary income resides in the pockets of people north of the river. Only 36 percent of discretionary income is to be found down south. You’re planning to open a cloth-napkin restaurant. Where will you put it? If you said, “North of the river,” you instinctively used traditional logic to come to the same conclusion as the previous 99 people who opened a new restaurant in this city. As a result, you’re 1 of 100 restaurants fighting over 64 percent of the cloth-napkin dinner dollars.If you get your fair share of the market potential, you’ll be forced to subsist on 0.64 percent of the cloth-napkin dinner dollars. Meanwhile, the 9 upscale restaurants south of the river enjoy long lines and are making huge profits. You could have been number 10 but you were seduced by the wrong information. So now you’re living on 0.64 percent of the dinner dollars in this city when you could have had a waddling 3.6 percent if you had only opened your restaurant down south. (A “waddling” profit is so fat it walks like a duck.) You assumed higher-income people buy cloth-napkin dinners more often. But you were wrong. Those people live in more expensive houses, drive more expensive cars, shop in more expensive furniture stores and pay higher taxes but they don’t buy cloth-napkin dinners any more often than we “poor” people down south. You focused on an illusory target customer when you should have been gathering data on the actual competitive environment. Instead of asking, “Where do the people with money live?” you should have asked, “Where in this city are restaurants like mine doing far more business than they should?” The answer would have rung like a bell: “Down south. Down south. Down south. Down south.”Your choice of Competitive Environment is at least 20 times more important than your selection of Target Customer.That example wasn’t imaginary, by the way. The city is Austin, Texas.  Measurement and the Mind – Oct. 12-13 – is going to be a fabulous class. Take a look at the course description and you’ll immediately see why I’m the lightweight speaker in the group. During my short session I’ll explain in detail the dangers of using traditional cost-based accounting to make decisions about marketing. Calculating the purchases of your “average” customer is always a mistake but most people do it instinctively. Come to this class and I’ll give you a much better metric to monitor. Likewise, I’ll show you the hidden dangers of calculating Gross Impressions, Gross Rating Points, Cost Per Point, and Cost Per Thousand when making marketing decisions. And no, I’m not advocating a psychographic “target customer” approach to choosing your media. I’m simply going to give you a different equation for calculating the most efficient media plan. Like I said, I’m the lightweight in this group. The other 4 speakers are power hitters who can whack the ball over the centerfield wall, completely out of the...

Two young people are given the same directive by their boss. One of them, palms upward, says, “But I don’t know how.” The second one doesn’t know how, either, but quietly thinks, “I’ll figure it out.” The first one grows up to become a manager who believes training to be the key to success. “Go to college. Learn to do things correctly. Get a good job.” The employee who won’t ask for help frustrates the manager. The second person grows up to be a leader who believes initiative to be the key to success. “Start a business. Innovate. Stay a step ahead of the pack.” The employee who won’t make an independent decision frustrates the leader. Most of us tend to think of ourselves as both manager and leader, exhibiting the qualities of each at the appropriate time. But the worldview of a manager is antithetical to the worldview of a leader. You lean one way more than you lean the other. Which is your natural inclination? Managers believe in bringing the best of the past forward. They talk about best practices and agree with Blackie Sherrod who said, “The reason history must repeat itself is because we pay too little attention the first time.” Managers believe in compliance, conformity and steady evolution. Franchises exist because the mind of a manager says, “Why reinvent the wheel?” Managers believe in “tweaking” things to reach “the next level.” They say, “One step at a time and with each step taken, move the finish line one step further away.” Managers make money. Leaders make memories and sometimes, history. They talk about sweeping change and a new day and agree with Albert Einstein who said, “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant – aside from stimulation – stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to rack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the engagement of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.” Leaders believe in vision, innovation and revolution. They say, “Set your sight on your goal and never give up.” Possibilities are the currency of a leader.Realities are the currency of a manager.Leaders create things from nothing. And then managers slowly improve those things. Which are you, leader or manager? More importantly, which are you not? It doesn’t really matter because both are equally valuable. The keys to success are: 1. to know exactly when each perspective is needed and2. to skillfully ask for help from your opposite when your own perspective isn’t paying off. Has your own perspective been paying off? Evolution and revolution are cyclical. In what part of the cycle is your business right now? Have you just completed a revolution? Is it now time to slowly evolve? Or have you been evolving too long already? Has the time come to reinvent your business for a new generation? RevoLUtion! These are just a few thoughts to think as summer gives way to autumn and cotton sweater season blusters in from the North and Santa winks a twinkling eye at us from the distant, snowy horizon. Or is that a star?Roy H. Williams  

1. No man is an island. 2. Every man is an island. John Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island” in 1624. The entire passage reads, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less… Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” – Meditation XVII But Anne Morrow Lindbergh expressed the opposite idea, “I feel we are all islands – in a common sea.” I agree with both statements even though they’re mutually exclusive, don’t you? Niels Bohr once said, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” Interesting bit of trivia: Niels Bohr wasn’t a pantywaist philosopher; he was a physicist who won the Nobel Prize.  There are Laws of Reality, it seems, that are reliable across all disciplines and specialties. I believe this equal-but-opposite Law of Duality to be among them. Actio et Reactio. “If a force acts upon a body, then an equal and opposite force must act upon another body.” – Isaac Newton The bodies involved in today’s discussion are (1.) you, and (2.) the people around you. Each of us is an island surrounded by land; an individual within a society. To the degree that you align yourself with Groupthink you trap yourself “inside the box” of Traditional Wisdom. To the degree that you isolate yourself from Groupthink you trap yourself within your own limitations as you ignore the experience of others. Wisdom is to bring the best of the past forward. Why reinvent the wheel? Wisdom is to escape the shackles of the past and embrace an entirely new perspective. “Think outside the box.” Actio et Reactio. Male and Female. Proton and electron. Left and Right. Which of these is wrong? If you can wrap your mind around this Law of Duality, you will have a gained a priceless tool in problem solving: we too often trap ourselves by labeling things as either “good” or “bad,” refusing to consider that the opposite might also be true. Few things are good or bad of themselves.In the words of Buckminster Fuller, “Don’t fight forces, use them.”What “bad” forces are you facing today? Aim them for your good.Roy H. Williams

A brief summary of this episode

I’m going to explain a sophisticated ad-writing technique to you today, but I have confidence you’ll understand it perfectly.Learn to incorporate it into your writing and your ads will produce better results, generate more comments and make people smile.Tight-asses will criticize you, of course, but hey, they’re tight-asses.We’ll begin with a couple of examples from a flyer I edited recently for a fish market that donated $500 to help finish the tower at Wizard Academy. The flyer offered a complete fish dinner for 4 for just 39.95, including gourmet salads and side dishes. When I finished my revision, the last 2 points made at the end of the meal description were these: Fresh-baked homemade bread.(Be sure you’re sitting down when you take your first bite. This bread is so amazing that people have been known to pass out from the sheer wonderfulness of it.) You got questions? We got Answers,and much better fish than you’ll find at the grocery store. No pesticides, No growth hormones, No color added. Fish so healthy you’ll live forever. The left hemisphere of the brain wants facts, details, descriptions and benefits. Lefty is all about sequential logic and deductive reasoning. Lefty looks for loopholes and discrepancies and is full of doubt. But the right hemisphere cares for none of that. The right half of the brain is where fantasy lives. And Righty doesn’t know fact from fiction.If you merely exaggerate, your customer’s left brain will shoot your claims full of holes. But if you go beyond mere exaggeration – so far beyond it that the left brain knows you’re just clowning – the right brain will happily embrace your glowing fantasy in all its positive glory. This is the technique:Open with 2 or 3 quick jabs of fact: 1. “fresh-baked” 2. “homemade bread” Then hit the right brain with everything you’ve got: “Be sure you’re sitting down when you take your first bite. This bread is so amazing that people have been known to pass out from the sheer wonderfulness of it.”Again, 2 or 3 quick jabs of fact:1. No pesticides, 2. No growth hormones, 3. No color added. Then electrify Righty with an impossible dream: “Fish so healthy you’ll live forever.” Yes, we’re speaking to the unconscious. We don’t need the customer to believe our silly, over-the-top promise. They don’t even have to think it’s cute. All they have to do is hear it. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is deep branding. One last benefit of this technique is that Right Hooks often become “word flags” that are repeated by smiling customers. As they place their orders, they’re likely to say, “Make sure you give me some of that bread that makes you pass out!” And as they lift their fish dinners off the counter and turn to leave the store, they’re likely to smile again and say, “Fish so healthy you’ll live...

Life is a journey on water. We spend our lives floating between the sunlit scenery of the conscious mind and the shadowy depths of the unconscious below. Dr. Richard D. Grant tells us our relationship to the unconscious is exactly our relationship to water.1. We need it by the cupful to survive.2. A plunge into it is refreshing. (Art speaks to the unconscious.)3. Stay under too long and we’ll drown. (A psychotic break.)4. There are monsters in the deep.When we talked about How to Spot a Wiener Dog a couple of weeks ago, you may recall that I said every product, service or idea has:1. Limiting Factors – (factors that limit it. Impediments.)2. Defining Characteristics – (characteristics that define it. Brand essence.)The same is true of you and me. You and I have Limiting Factors and Defining Characteristics.Drifters on the ocean of life define themselves by their circumstances. Pushed here and there by the winds and waves of chance, their mantra is, “whatever.”Surfers on the ocean of life define themselves by their activities. Riding the swells this way and that, they dream of the perfect wave.Drowners in the ocean of life define themselves by their limiting factors. Sad and mournful, they are professional victims, the walking wounded, an army that never heals.Navigators sailing happily on the ocean of life define themselves by their commitments. Navigators know exactly what they’re trying to make happen and they’re willing to pay the price.Do you know what you’re trying to make happen? Are you willing to pay the price?Lorian Hemingway chose not to drown in life’s ocean. In her marvelous book, Walk on Water, she speaks of childhood loneliness and a hollow stepfather who abused her alcoholic mother. But Lorian chose not to let these limiting factors become her defining characteristics. She chose instead to admire the toothless but resilient old black woman, Catfish, who cooked hamburgers at the café. Lorian was also shaped by encounters with her mother’s sister, Freda:“At the age of thirty-five Freda had had a mastectomy. The bow and arrow was her therapy, to strengthen what was left of her chest muscles. Her body had been perfect, a sculptor’s model, and she’d worn her summer shirts tied up high under her breasts, braless most of the time. She still wore her shirts knotted at the rib cage, but now they were men’s cotton pajama tops, the material thicker so you could not see through; but often when she bent forward I could see the scarred bony place where the breast had been. I never knew if she was bitter for the loss, if she stared at the deformity in the mirror and wished for a time when she’d been whole. She never said. I never asked. She was not a woman martyred by tragedy, nor was she at all acquainted with self-pity…”“Freda was a dazzle, a virtual watercolor of a woman whose moods and mannerisms were as electric as her wild black hair. Her grin alone, a flash of Ipana-white teeth, head tossed back, stopped men in their tracks, delayed them in traffic, and threatened their wives so completely even the milkman was not allowed to deliver at Freda’s house…”“She’d tried once to kill my stepfather, whom she’d always referred to by his first and last names, Bill McClain, the two words run together in her odd accent so it came out...

There’snot a lot you can learn from the Road Runner, but the Coyote knows the secret of wealth. In September, 1949, the Coyote – Carnivorous vulgaris – built a catapult. But instead of launching him toward the Road Runner, it launched him straight up into a stone outcropping. The Coyote crawled out of the hole and went back to work. In December, 1955, the Coyote – Eatibus almost anythingus – waited anxiously for the Road Runner to come around a corner, then lit the fuse of a cannon. But instead of firing the cannonball, the entire cannon – with the Coyote behind it – fired backwards into a mountain wall. Again the Coyote crawled out of the hole and went back to work. In May, 1980, the Coyote – Nemesis ridiculii– climbed aboard a rocket, aimed it toward the Road Runner on the opposite side of the canyon and lit the fuse. The fuel and nosecone of the rocket launched out of the rocket hull, leaving the Coyote sitting aboard that empty cylinder. He fell, annoyed, to the canyon floor.  The Coyote climbed out of the canyon and went back to work. Are you beginning to see a trend here?The Coyote – Inevitablius Succeedus – never gives up. The Coyote is Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea. After 84 consecutive days of not catching a fish, the old man rises before dawn and pulls steadily on the oars until he is far beyond the sight of land. The Coyote is Rowan of A Message to Garcia. Alone behind enemy lines, outnumbered thousands to one, Rowan never considers the impossibility of his mission, but doggedly attempts the ridiculous until he casually accomplishes the miraculous.The Coyote is Quixote, foolishly committed to a questionable quest, paying his pint of blood daily without complaint, never wavering in his enthusiasm, never doubting he will ultimately succeed. When we were young and fast and invincible, the Road Runner was our hero. Impervious to danger, the Road Runner ran without tiring, scooted without fear and beep-beeped coolly like a blue James Bond. But as I look down now from this creaking tower of years, I see it was the Coyote who deserved my admiration. That TV show was never about the Road Runner. It was always about the Coyote. The Coyote was determined.“Determined” is a word much misunderstood. Obstinate people are not determined. They merely suffer from too much pride. Stubborn people are not determined. Stubbornness is willful ignorance.Determination is an unblinking willingness to pay the price as often as it must be paid. Determination is never losing sight of your objective, no matter what comes along to distract you. Determination is endurance.How about you? If Failure appears without warning and throws you onto the rocks below, will you happily crawl out of that smoking crater and go back to work? Roy H. Williams 

I concluded a recent Monday Morning Memo entitled “Melvin the Lion” by saying,“We won the game when we picked the wiener dogs. This is the dirty little secret of advertising: you determine the success of the campaign when you pick what you’re going to promote. Have you been settling for precision lawn chairs and lawnmowers? Repent of your sin. Demand the wiener dogs. You’ll be amazed how much better your ads work.” An old friend emailed me the next day to say, “Please forgive me for being grumpy… but in the memo you gave no explanation on how to distinguish between wiener dogs and lawnmowers.” My friend makes a good point. Not every idea is a wiener dog. Sometimes it’s just a dog. Each of us has 2 kinds of blind spots. The first blind spot is a negative trait of which you are unaware. Everyone around you sees it, but you don’t. The second blind spot is a talent or gift you assume to be common to everyone, but it isn’t. It’s your gift and yours alone. I’ve always been able to spot a wiener dog. My ability to pick the winning idea from a shuffled deck of mediocre ideas is so completely intuitive and effortless that it annoys me when other people can’t do it. Even more annoying is when they ask me to explain how I do it. “It’s a wiener dog! Can’t you see it? Open your eyes, man! It’s a freakin’ wiener dog!” The bottom line on the home page of the Wizard Academy website says,“The faculty of Wizard Academy studies what gifted people do when they’re feeling inspired so we can reverse engineer their unconscious methods. We teach you how to do consciously what a gifted person does unconsciously.” I’ve spent decades studying other people’s gifts but I never once considered I might have a gift of my own. The day after I received that email from my friend, I met Ray Bard, my publisher, for lunch. Ray immediately bopped me with the same question. “Roy, when I read the memo this week I couldn’t help but notice that you never told us how to spot the wiener dog. Why did you leave that part out?” Part of me stood up, clenched my fists and screamed in frustration. But that part of me is invisible. The visible part of me said, “Ray, you gave me the formula for spotting wiener dogs 10 years ago. Don’t you remember?” Ray looked at me quizzically, so I continued. “Puddles, Bayous, Wells and Oceans… Question 1: How widespread is the interest? Question 2: How deep is the interest?” Ray got it and smiled but I was on a roll, so I continued, “Spotting the winning idea is all about identifying(1.) Defining Characteristics and(2.) Limiting Factors.” The Defining Characteristics of the Precision Lawn Chair Drill Team idea were irrelevant because the Limiting Factor was that each team would need a talented choreographer and members who were willing to practice relentlessly. And we know that’s not gonna happen. The Precision Lawn Chair idea was a puddle. It could never trigger more than narrow, shallow interest. The Defining Characteristics of the Riding Lawnmower Races were(1.) gasoline and(2.) testosterone, so basically, it’s a poor man’s NASCAR. As such, it would trigger deep interest, but only to a narrow section of the population. Riding Lawnmower Races were a well. The Defining...

John Steinbeck began writing a novel in the summer of 1957 and abandoned it the day after Christmas.I was born 93 days later.Those two events were unconnected before today.Steinbeck wrote the first 114 pages of his novel before setting it aside. He had already completed 25 novels, including The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Of Mice and Men and Cannery Row. He was 55 years old.Steinbeck went on to publish The Winter of Our Discontent in 1961 and then Travels With Charley in 1962 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature that same year.He died in 1968, having published nothing else.I was 10.“I think he got to a point where he felt he couldn’t contribute anymore. And it was too heartbreaking to try. I mean, after awhile you get tired of being under attack. You’ve got to remember this was a man who had been under attack since he was a young man. He was under attack most of his life. When he wrote The Grapes of Wrath people thought he’d betrayed his own class.”– Thom Steinbeck, (John’s son,) Sept. 2009Thom went on to say his father was “a mythologist… He could take the broad myth and reduce it down to something you could understand and were living right next door to.”The novel John Steinbeck didn’t finish was the story of an American who watched one too many westerns on television, then put on a cowboy hat and spurs and went out into the city to correct the injustices he saw all around him.In June, 2010, CBS News announced, “John Steinbeck Archive to be Auctioned. Never-Published Works Among Letters and Manuscripts from Nobel Prize Winner’s NYC Apartment.”That CBS story included the following lines:“The writer [Steinbeck] had Ingrid Bergman in mind for Vikings, a film script adaptation of a Henrik Ibsen play that he began in 1954 but later abandoned, which Larson attributed to his restless nature and busy schedule. Another project that was later abandoned was a 1957 reworking of Don Quixote, which Steinbeck titled Don Keehan – The Marshal of Manchon. Bloomsbury’s catalog says he had high hopes for it and even considered director Elia Kazan for a movie version with [Henry] Fonda in the lead.”Have you figured it out yet? I bought the unfinished manuscript.It sat a long while in a New York bank while they tried to figure out how to insure the manuscript and transport it. They already had my money so I told’em to just shove it into a UPS envelope. But they wouldn’t hear of it.It finally arrived a few minutes ago. I got 6 pages into it, then set it aside just now to write you this note because a wild and funny thought barged into my head:Are you ready?  I’m going to finish it.“You’re going to finish reading it?”No, I’m going to finish writing it.“What! Who do you think you are?”I think I’m a ridiculous, middle-aged man who believes it would be fun to write the back half of an unfinished Steinbeck novel.“Are you comparing yourself with John Steinbeck?”No. I just think it would be fun. I like to write and this is America and I bought the manuscript.“You won’t be able to publish it.”I don’t plan to publish it.“There are hundreds of writers more qualified than you to undertake such an important task.”They should have pooled their money and bought the manuscript.“People will be outraged.”Those people stay outraged anyway.“You should leave Don Keehan unfinished out of respect for John Steinbeck.”“I plan to finish it out of respect for John Steinbeck.”“Are you really going to do this?”Yes, I’m really going to do this.“Can I read it when you’re done?”No....

“Bitter arguments often result from a lack of definition of terms.” This is one of the first lessons the Cognoscenti are taught in the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop.Cognoscenti Skip Moen – an Oxford scholar – gave me a tragic example of this during his most recent visit to Wizard Academy.“It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.” – God, speaking to Himself in the second chapter of Genesis according to the English translators of the good King James in 1611This is bad enough, but in later years “help meet for him” [help appropriate for him] became further mistranslated as “helpmate.”Stay with me. This is about to get very interesting. You will laugh, cry or get angry. You will not be unmoved.Ezer kenegdo are the Hebrew words translated as “help meet” in 1611.Ezer is used 20 more times in the Old Testament and in each instance it refers to God’s own effort to rescue and sustain his people. Ezer (pronounced ay’-zer) can be translated as “power” or “strength” or “rescue.”‘Blessed are you, O Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the LORD? He is your shield and ezer and your glorious sword.’ – Deut. 33:26‘I lift up my eyes to the hills-where does my ezer come from? My ezer comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.’ – Ps. 121:1-2‘May the LORD answer you when you are in distress; may the name of the God of Jacob protect you. May he send you ezer.’ – Ps. 20:1-2Kenegdo means “facing.” It can also mean “opposite.”Thus, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a power facing him.”“I will make him a strength opposite him.”“I will make him a rescue that looks him in the face.”Each of these translations of ezer kenegdo is imminently more accurate than “helpmate, helper or assistant.”Like I said; you will laugh, cry or get angry.Google tells me of the following passage by John & Stasi Eldredge in their book, Captivating.Remember when Arwen saves Frodo in The Lord of the Rings? Arwen is a princess, a beautiful elf maiden. She comes into the story in the nick of time to rescue Frodo just as the poisoned knife wound is about to claim him.ARWEN: He’s fading. He’s not going to last. We must get him to my father. I’ve been looking for you for two days. There are five wraiths behind you. Where the other four are, I do not know.ARAGORN: Stay with the hobbits. I’ll send horses for you.ARWEN: I’m the faster rider. I’ll take him.ARAGORN: The road is too dangerous.ARWEN: I do not fear them.ARAGORN: (relinquishing to her, he takes her hand.) Arwen, ride hard. Don’t look back.It is she, not the warrior Aragorn, who rides with glory and speed. She is Frodo’s only hope. She is the one entrusted with his life and with him, the future of all Middle Earth. She is his ezer kenegdo.If you dig deeper into the history of Ezer, you’ll find that it comes from an even more ancient word, Azar, meaning “to surround.” Azar can also mean “protect, aid, succor and give material and/or nonmaterial encouragement.” Azar often refers to aid in the form of military assistance.“Helper” and “assistant” are sounding more tragic with each passing paragraph, don’t you think? Pennie says that you and I often live...

"The winner is determined when..."A couple of weeks ago Sean Taylor attended a high-class function to receive the Melvin Jones Award on my behalf. Melvin Jones founded the Lions Club International and his award is the highest honor the club can bestow. You can’t win the MJ Award unless you’re a Lion – which I’m not – so the board of directors voted to make an exception for me.Yes, yes, it sounds like I’m boasting but I’m not. I’m making a full confession.The wiener dog races we sponsor each year in Buda, Texas (population: 2,404) made $120,000 for the Buda Lions club this year. More than 600 wiener dogs arrived from all over America to compete for our 6-foot tall, first-place trophy. Each year’s race has been bigger than the last for 12 consecutive years.My company, Wizard of Ads, Inc. comes up with a theme each year, designs the posters and T-shirts, writes and records a silly radio ad and pays for the oversized trophies. The Lions International website says, “Lions meet the needs of local communities and the world. Our more than 1.35 million members in 206 countries and geographic areas are different in many ways, but we share a core belief – community is what we make it.”Sounds good to me but I fear there’s been a horrible misunderstanding: You see, I cheated.Have you ever seen kids playing football, baseball or soccer on a playground? The winner is determined the moment the captains choose sides. Pick the right players and you win. Pick wrong and you lose.I won 12 years ago when I refused to sponsor anything but the wiener dog races.“But Truck City is sponsoring the wiener dogs.”“Sorry, it’s the wiener dogs or nothing.”“Won’t you reconsider?”“No.”“You’ll be helping a really good cause…”“Get Truck City to sponsor the precision lawn chair drill teams or the riding lawnmower races.”“Trust me, Mr. Williams, you want the riding lawnmower races. Do you remember the episode of Home Improvement when Tim-the-Toolman-Taylor was going to race riding lawnmowers with Bob Vila and Tim put a jet engine from a Chinook helicopter on his lawn mower?”“Sure.”“We’re going to have that lawnmower – the actual one from the TV show – in this year’s race. And it’s got a real jet engine.”“Sorry, but it’s the wiener dogs or nothing. Convince Truck City to sponsor the lawnmowers.”Truck City was magnanimous and changed their sponsorship to the riding lawnmowers. I wasn’t willing to risk my reputation as an ad consultant on anything but a sure bet.The lawnmower races and the lawn chair drill teams were abandoned when the wiener dogs began to gain serious national momentum.The source of the misunderstanding – and the root of my confession – is that everyone assumes we could have aimed our mighty firepower at the lawnmowers or the lawn chairs and made them just as successful. But I know it isn’t true.We won the game when we picked the wiener dogs.This is the dirty little secret of advertising: you determine the success of the campaign when you pick what you’re going to promote.Have you been settling for precision lawn chairs and lawnmowers? Repent of your sin. Demand the wiener dogs.You’ll be amazed how much better your ads work.Roy H. Williams

I was explaining to my apprentices the difference between cost-based accounting and customer-based accounting. “Cars in 1908 sold for about $2,500 apiece. Nearly 2,000 entrepreneurs became car builders between 1886 and 1908 and each of them began with the question, ‘How can I build a stronger, faster, more desirable car?’” But none of them could build and sell a car for less than $2,500. Consequently, cars sold in small numbers and only to the very rich.But Henry Ford wasn’t product-focused, he was customer-focused. Henry asked, “At what price could I sell a lot of cars… a whole lot of cars?” Henry decided upon the price of $849 and it became his non-negotiable, his North Star.Designs A through S were impossible to build and sell for $849 so those designs were scrapped. But the Model T at $849 swept America like a prairie fire on a windy day and left 15 million Americans smiling happily in the smoke of identical, black cars. (The bestselling car in the world today sells about 400,000 units per year worldwide, so 15 million is a lot of cars… a whole lot of cars.)Henry Ford developed the assembly line using the same sort of reverse logic. While visiting a large meat-packing house in Chicago, Henry was impressed with the efficiency of their disassembly line: a pig carcass hung from a hook that rolled along an overhead rail in front of a line of workers, each of whom cut off a piece of pork with a specialized knife. Whoosh. The pig was skeletonized in less than 2 minutes.“Instead of a rail overhead, I’ll have a conveyor belt underneath. And instead of taking off a piece, my workers will add a piece. Instead of ending with a skeleton, we’ll begin with a skeleton.” Whoosh. By 1920 a new Model T rolled out of the factory every 60 seconds and 1 of every 2 cars on earth was a Ford Model T.Sam Walton was Henry Ford with a different haircut. Sam taught his buyers to look at an item and ask, “At what price could I sell a lot of these… a whole lot of these?” Then if the item could be bought for less than that amount, the buyer was told to buy a trainload of them.“Roy, I can corroborate that story.” All eyes turned toward Norm, one of my apprentices. “I was with Fred Meyer in 1980 and Wal-Mart was part of our buying group. A man at the front of the room held up a rug and began explaining its features. The Wal-Mart buyer on my right leaned across to ask the Fred Meyer buyer on my left, ‘How much do you think we could sell those for?’ My buyer whispered back, ‘We don’t yet know what they cost.’ The Wal-Mart buyer cocked his head and responded, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’”Fred Meyer and Sam Walton simultaneously broke the 1 billion-dollar mark in 1980. Fred Meyer now sells 7 billion dollars a year.Wal-Mart sells that much every week.Henry Ford and Sam Walton became ecstatically wealthy because they had an instinctive understanding of Genrich Altshuller’s Answer 13: Do it backwards.Bad marketing is focused on the product. Good marketing is focused on the customer. It’s a subtle shift in perspective, but a vital one.Wizard Academy graduate Kary Mullis understands Answer 13, just like Henry and Sam. “Geneticists were looking for a needle in a haystack, so I said, ‘Why not turn the haystack into needles?’” The year was 2004. Kary was telling me how he invented Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR,) the scientific breakthrough that won him the Nobel Prize and opened the door to genetic research.Kary then showed me a scale model of a new, organic molecule and said he was using that same inverted perspective – Answer 13 again – to eliminate bioterrorism. “We know all about this powerful immuno-reaction because we’ve been suppressing it during heart-valve transplants for...