There are two kinds of advertising.The goal of the first is to make yours the company the customer thinks of immediately and feels the best about when they – or any of their friends – need what you sell. This is called a “relational” ad campaign. It works better and better with each passing year.The goal of the second kind of advertising is to cause the reader/listener/viewer to buy something from you immediately. I began my career writing these “transactional” ads. I was good at it. This type of campaign is called “direct response.” Transactional ads work less and less well the longer you run them.Today I write only the first kind.If you have the staying power to build a relational ad campaign, you’re going to need to remember your origins. You’re going to have to write your Genesis Story.There are two kinds of staying power. The first is financial.Here’s my advice: Don’t launch a relational ad campaign so big that you would not be able to sustain it indefinitely. If you say, “I can fund this for 6 months, but by then it needs to be self-supporting,” then you’re spending more than you can afford. It’s impossible to predict the moment of breakthrough, that moment when all your previously fruitless efforts will begin to radiate results like a newborn sun.This is why you have to have the second kind of staying power: emotional staying power. Three or four months into your campaign, you’re going to begin to panic. But the only thing worse than never launching a relational ad campaign is to launch one and then abandon it.Relational ad campaigns are never about having the lowest price. A customer who switches to you for reasons of price alone will just as quickly switch from you for the same reason. And there is nothing that some other company can’t do a little worse and sell a little cheaper.People don’t bond with companies so easily as they bond with people. We bond with people we like, people we feel good about, people we think we know.Here are three examples of well-told stories of origin:“My Dad was a house painter. He taught me to sand and scrape old paint until my fingers were aching and raw. But I wanted to make him proud, so I always worked hard. I’ll never forget the day we opened our brown bags at lunchtime and he said, “Son. I’m proud of how hard you work, but I hope that someday you’ll get a job where you can wear a tie.” And because I wanted to make him proud, I decided to open a jewelry store. I watched as my Dad took his last seven hundred dollars out of his sock drawer to help me get started. But he never got to see that store. He died just before it was open. I lived on wieners and beans for the next 11 years until I finally figured it out:  Lose the tie… And be a regular guy just like your Dad. That’s when things turned around for me. I’ve been sharing the story of that 700 dollars with young entrepreneurs in High Schools and Colleges for years. America’s newest and best Kesslers Diamonds is about to open in front of Cabela’s next to the Rivertown Mall in Grandville. I’m Richard Kessler, and I’m hoping to become your jeweler.”Your origin story doesn’t have to be your first ad. Some of the most successful stories of origin have been introduced after the advertiser had already become a household word.Tom Heflin was a railroad conductor. His wife had a sister. That sister had two little boys. One day she took those boys on a train to Winslow, Arizona to spend a few days with them. Tom took those...

Four words have echoed in my head for several days.“Not everyone. Not always.”Why do such thoughts leapsparkling like swordfishfrom the dark watersof the mind?I can’t be sure, but I suspect my heart is responding to all those authoritative voices making silly statements about “the customer” with misguided certainty. They whisper to us from websites, blogs and business books.How can they teach us about “the customer” when every person has two different customers inside them?When you are in “Transactional” shopping mode, youare thinking short-term.care only about today’s transaction.look forward to the process of shopping.fear only paying too much.plan to become expert through extensive research.are willing to spend lots of time investigating.are highly focused on price.When you are in “Relational” shopping mode, youare thinking long-term, hoping to find a permanent solution provider.consider today’s transaction to be one in a series of many.aren’t in the mood to comparison shop or negotiate.fear only making a poor choice, “buying the wrong one.”hope to find an expert you feel you can trust.consider your time spent shopping to be part of the purchase price.are likely to become a repeat customer.“Time and money are interchangeable.You can always save one by spending more of the other.”– Princess Pennie WilliamsA person in transactional shopping mode is more willing to spend time than money. A person in relational shopping mode is more willing to spend money than time.Customers in transactional shopping mode make high demands on your staff and on your time. Transactional customers are the source of about 80 percent of all your problems.Customers in relational shopping mode go straight to the provider they think of immediately and feel the best about. If this provider has a reasonable solution to their problem, they purchase it and are done. None of the competitors to this provider were ever given a chance to make the sale. In fact, they were never even aware this customer was in the market to buy. Relational customers are the source of about 80 percent of all gross profits, even though they represent only 50 percent of the shoppers in any given category on any given day.You buy the cheapest eggs because “eggs are eggs.” The grocer makes very little profit on this sale. But 3 seconds later you reach into the milk case and happily pay double the price of the cheapest milk because this particular brand of milk combines a unique set of production circumstances that you offer consequential benefits. No Bovine Growth Hormones!The person behind you buys the cheapest milk because “milk is milk.” The grocer makes very little profit on this sale. But 3 seconds later, they reach for eggs and happily pay double the price of the cheapest eggs because THESE eggs were laid by free-roaming, never caged, vegetarian hens that deliver higher levels of B12, B2, A, and B5, plus selenium and folate! And these yolks are a deep golden yellow!Each customer bought one item transactionally, one item relationally.You have a transactional mode of shopping and a relational mode of shopping and so does everyone else.Now this is the part that might stick in your throat a bit: I’ve never found a product or service category in which the ratio of customers in transactional mode versus relational mode wasn’t approximately 50/50. This holds true even for groceries and new cars, although grocers and new car dealers have a difficult time swallowing it. The problem, you see, is that customers in transactional mode are the vocal ones up in your face, making threats and demands, while the relational customer slips invisibly in and out, leaving only...

Hi, everyone! My name is _____________________.Because Wizard Academy appreciates your generous donation to help keep Chapel Dulcinea open, free and beautiful, I’m going to take you on a 4-minute walk to Wizard’s Tower, where we’ll enter the underground art gallery, then go straight up to the Star Deck where I’ll tell you a 2-minute story, then you’ll have 15 more minutes to take photos and enjoy the view from nearly 1,000 feet above downtown Austin. Follow me, please.[Start walking.][Pausing at The Old Man and the Sea…]AThis is Ernest Hemingway’s“The Old Man and the Sea”by Jane DeDecker.If you remember that Nobel prize-winning novel, you’ll remember how the old man fought the giant fish – and then the sharks – for 3 days and 3 nights before sailing home.[Pointing now at the statue above the art gallery as you walk toward it…] The counterpoint to this symbol of the heroic, masculine struggle is Jane DeDecker’s symbol of feminine determination – “Into the Wind” – a living figurehead on the bow of a ship sailing above the art gallery. We’ll take a closer look in a moment.[Stopping briefly at the bronze plaque with the footprints on it….]bThis is the Laughlin Stone. If you place your feet on those footprints at night[Pointing now at the sword at the top of the tower….]you’ll see the North Star hovering just above the hilt of that sword. Since the North Star is positioned directly above the axis of the earth, it’s the only star that doesn’t move across the sky during the night…The Star Deck – just behind it ­­– is where we’re headed.[Begin walking again toward the tower….]rThe famous psychologist, Carl Jung, believed that life is a journey on water. Above the waterline is the conscious mind. Below the waterline is the unconscious, a shadowland of nonverbal symbols and music and mysteries.[Point up at “Into the Wind”….]You’ll notice as we enter the tower that we’re directly beneath the ship of “Into the Wind.” If the old man and his fish are on a beach – and that ship above us is sailing on the ocean, we are now 12 feet underwater, which is where we’ll find the art gallery, the wine cellar and the musical instruments of Wizard Academy, since each of these speaks to the unconscious mind.[Enter the art gallery.]iWizard Academy teaches advertising, marketing and communication to businesses across America and around the world. Our students include Nobel Prize-winning scientists, university professors and best-selling authors, as well as executives at companies like Procter & Gamble, Kellogg, and IBM. But mostly they are the owners of America’s 5.91 million companies that have fewer than 100 employees. Wizard Academy is where these people – people like you – come to learn big things fast, in an environment that feels like summer camp for grown-ups.[Give the group instructions about staying together and NOT going up the stairs.] e[When everyone has arrived on the Star Deck, ring the bronze bell near the stairwell door, then point at the statue of the boy on the paper airplane as you begin walking toward the sword.]If you look behind the base of that statue, you’ll see a little boy reading...

I’m experimenting with radio in a way that, for me, is new and different.Many of those who understand what I’m doing won’t agree with the fundamental premise of my experiment. But that’s not what worries me.I’m concerned about those who will agree and then attempt it – and fail. I believe they’ll fail because they won’t do it right.Here’s what’s happening: I’m airing a 5-second ad every hour, 24 hours a day, for 365 days, on each station in a broadcast group in a major city. The result will be 51% reach (18+) with a weekly frequency of 10.4. This means that 51% of the total population in that region will hear one of my ads an average of 10.4 times each week, 52 weeks in a row.That’s right. One 5-second ad per hour, 24 hours a day, on each station in the broadcast group.You can run, but you can’t hide.Here’s why I fear people who attempt this experiment will likely screw it up:They’ll buy too little frequency.“Well, I think a spot an hour is overkill, so I’m just going to buy a 5-frequency instead of a 10+ frequency each week.”They’ll rotate too few ads.I’ll be producing 12 new 5-second ads every 6 weeks. Consequently, even though I have a 10.4 frequency each week, the typical listener is likely to hear 10 different ads, one time each.Their ads won’t say anything worth remembering.The key to success is to make a different, memorable statement in each 5-second ad. You can then open, or close, each ad with a single word that identifies the company. Only one or two ads in every series of twelve will feature the contact info of the company.Here’s what I like about this plan:Reach is double what I used to get for the same money.Frequency is triple what I used to get for the same money.With a 10.4 weekly frequency, I can safely expect a listener to unconsciously “connect and combine” each of my brandable chunks, nuggets and factoids to create a coherent mental image much bigger than the information found in a single ad. In fact, I expect that within a few months a large percentage of that city will be able to recite meaningful amounts of information about my client.The 5-second format – combined with 12 new ads in rotation every 6 weeks – will allow me to dodge the audience burn-out bullet.What will happen if my experiment proves successful?I’ll finally have a way to help advertisers with small budgets in big cities.Give me a schedule of 1 spot per hour, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year on the smallest station in town and it won’t be long before my client is on a second station, then a third.Get enough advertisers to do this and Radio will become happy again.Even if you believe that “a unit is a unit, no matter the length,” you can’t argue with the fact that airing twenty-four 5-second ads would mean only a 2-minute commercial load per hour. This would mean that a listener tuning in to your station would be greeted by a commercial – instead of music – just once in every 30 visits to your dial position, compared to the current 1 in 4.Even if radio stations began airing 36 ads per hour – more than double the number they’re currently airing – I’m fairly certain that listeners would be delighted with just 3 minutes of ads per hour.A radio station with 4 commercial breaks of NINE, 5-second ads each hour would have rollicking, rock-and-roll commercial breaks of just 45 seconds each and I’m convinced listeners would retain a higher percentage of those messages.The weakness of this plan is that...

We encounter “meta” most often in the word metaphor.We create metaphors when we see the same pattern in two, unrelated things.Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”But Shakespeare wasn’t the first to see the similarity between the world and a stage. Seneca the Younger – sixteen hundred years before Shakespeare – wrote, “Life is like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.”In his marvelous new book, Metaphors Be With You, Dr. Mardy Grothe reveals the importance of metaphors in everyday communication:“Metaphor is the energy charge that leaps between images, revealing their connections.” ­– Robin Morgan“Effective metaphor does more than shed light on the two things being compared. It actually brings to the mind’s eye something that has never before been seen.”–Rebecca McClanahanThe poet Robert Frost said, “An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.”“Metaphor isn’t just for poets; it’s in ordinary language and is the principal way we have of conceptualizing abstract concepts like life, death, and time.”– More Than Cool Reason, George Lakoff and Mark Turner“Meta” has recently evolved a second meaning.It now refers to things that are self-referential. Ben Zimmer tells of a librarian named Lauren Dodd who recently tweeted, “Just saw a librarian shush other librarians at a library conference.”(Indy Beagle is chuckling his signature, “Heh, heh, heh,” after reading that over my shoulder.)Educational psychologist Jerome Bruner talks about “how to get students to reflect, to turn around on themselves, to go ‘meta,’ to think about their ways of thinking.”Yep, “to think about your ways of thinking” would definitely qualify as self-referential.In his book, Tilting Cervantes, my friend Bruce Burningham says,“We delight in the notion of a stand-up comedian named Jerry Seinfeld who creates a sitcom on NBC in which he plays a stand-up comedian named Jerry Seinfeld who eventually creates a sitcom on NBC in which he plays a stand-up comedian named Jerry Seinfeld.”If triple-meta were a recognized designation, I believe Bruce Burningham’s sentence would qualify.To understand a thing that is new and different, you need only search for what it is like.Monkfish is the poor man’s lobster.Success is a bastard with many fathers, but failure is an orphan.America is a melting pot.You are my sunshine.He drowned in a sea of grief.Every new concept, invention, innovation or idea reflects an established pattern.That pattern has just never been used in this application before.Contemplate a metaphor. See the pattern. Consider how it might be used as a solution to your problem. Do this again and again and your spinning brain will soon be flinging ideas like a grinding wheel throwing sparks at the darkness.Perhaps you’ll discover a miraculous solution. Perhaps you’ll just have fun.Give it a try and see.As Indy walked away just now, he called to me over his shoulder, “Anything you can do, I can do meta.”I’m going to have to ponder that one awhile.Roy H. Williams

If you don’t understand the title of today’s memo, just ask a 12 year-old boy. (If you didn’t grow up in the South, your 12 year-olds may be more familiar with “He who smelt it, dealt it.”)With a title like “The Smeller’s the Feller,” does it surprise you that today’s memo is about a tried-and-true management tool?A couple of days ago, my partner Tim Miles made a brilliant suggestion about how we might begin the 3-day Business Growth class we’re having in March. (Sorry, completely full.)I first heard about Tim’s idea when I got a funding inquiry from the Wizard of Ads group director. Tim had suggested something really awesome. Expensive, but awesome.I sent Tim an email. “Fantastic idea, Tim! You’re in charge.”TIP: Always assign responsibility for follow-through to the person who had the idea. Give the fun of chasing the rabbit to the dog who sniffed it out of hiding. (In essence, the smeller’s the feller.) AHERE’S WHY:1. No other person will have quite the same vision in their mind or enthusiasm in their heart.2. No one has more to gain – or lose – than the person who had the idea.BONUS BENEFIT: Word will spread, and it will slow people down from coming up with so many things “YOU” ought to do.When we were constructing the buildings at Wizard Academy and a group of people would arrive on campus, at least one of them would pull me aside and say with excitement, “Here’s what you ought to do…”PROBLEM: I was already as busy as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest, as stressed out as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs and as uptight as a frog on a freeway with his hopper stuck. So one day I impulsively shook the hand of the person who had made the suggestion and said, “Great idea! You’re in charge!”They asked how much money they could spend and I said, “As much as you can raise.”Amazingly, they raised the money, refined the idea and brought it to full execution.When I saw how well their idea turned out, I said to myself, “Make a note: do that more often.”When my partner Tim got my email, he replied tongue-in-cheek, “Man, as long as I’ve been around, I really should have seen that coming.”I say “tongue-in-cheek” because Tim has made numerous suggestions over the years, and he’s always been willing to take full responsibility for implementation.“Great idea! You’re in charge!”  is one of the guiding principles of the Wizard of Ads partners. It has also become a tradition at Wizard Academy.I suggest that you test this technique within your own company.It’s the perfect way to determine if you’re surrounded by the right kind of people.Roy H. Williams

Successful advertising touches the hungers, wants and needs of a person. My job as a professional ad writer is to identify these needs and speak to them.If you have a heart beating in your chest, you have hungers, wants and needs.We can intellectualize our conscious needs, but we cannot intellectualize our unconscious ones.All your friends, all your neighbors, all America, all the world has an unconscious need for encouragement right now.The reason history repeats itself is because we pay too little attention the first time.When people are frustrated, frightened or angry, they elevate a strongman to become their leader. We smile in memory of England’s blustering Winston Churchill, a devoted servant of his nation, and our own thundering Teddy Roosevelt, a devoted servant of our own. And who can forget the swaggering Douglas MacArthur wading to shore in the Philippines? Or steely-eyed George S. Patton who encouraged his men, his allies and his nation when he said, “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”We are encouraged by the swagger of the strongman.But not all strongmen are good.Russia was frustrated, frightened and angry when she turned to Josef Stalin in 1929.Germany was frustrated, frightened and angry when a strongman overturned their democracy in 1933.Japan was frustrated, frightened and angry when the boy they believed to be a god sent airplanes to bomb Pearl Harbor.Frustrated, frightened and angry people gave power to Manuel Noriega of Panama, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Uganda’s Idi Amin.It seems that everyone, everywhere today is frustrated, frightened and angry; the people across the street and around the corner; the people across the sea and around the world.January 27, 2017: Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union, said, “It looks as if the world is preparing for war.”The antidote for frustration and fear is encouragement.The antidote for anger is to listen, smile, and extend a hand.I’ve decided to make this my year of encouragement.I believe it’s what people need right now.Will you join me?I’m going to be unreasonably optimistic, ridiculously cheerful and oblivious to fear. Or at least that’s my plan. And I’m going to hand out sincere and honest compliments everywhere I go.Encouragement can be conjured from the scantiest of materials.If you do this with me, I can assure you that people will say we’re being foolish and naive and many of them will accuse us of seeing the world through rose-colored lenses. They will tell us we’re not being reasonable.“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard ShawYes, they’ll tell us we’re being unreasonable.I’m okay with that.Are you?Roy H. Williams

Some lessons we never learn.For me, the familiar face of failure hangs like a Royal Portrait above the grand staircase of my social behavior.Lest my meaning be obscured by that flowery metaphor, I am simply stating for the record – before God, the world and you – that my greatest recurring mistake is that I often disappoint my friends.Not my casual friends. No, never those. I disappoint the friends I care about the most.This happens because I allow the merely urgent to displace the truly important.In fact, I’m doing it right now. I should be answering emails sent to me by Garrett and Dan and a friend I’ve called “Other Roy” for more than 25 happy years. But this is the day the trash service comes, so I’ve got to wheel our trash and recycling carts to the curb right now so Princess Pennie won’t worry that we’ll miss the truck. After I do that, I’ll write thoughtful and well-crafted responses to Garrett and Dan and Other Roy… as soon as I write the four ads I promised to have to my client by 8AM. But just before I do that – just to get them out of the way – I’ll pop off a few 5-word and 12-word answers to 26 other emails that really don’t matter at all.You can see where this is headed, right?I’ve had “Email Garrett” near the top of my to-do list for exactly 21 days. “Email Dan” has been just above it for 63 days. And I’ve put off responding to so many of “Other Roy’s” emails that I’m surprised he’s still speaking to me. And those are just 3 of the names on a list that stretches the full length of our grand staircase.I don’t want to give half-baked “quickie” answers to these good friends, so they wind up getting no answers from me at all.I speak recklessly but I write carefully. Much too recklessly and a little too carefully, if we’re being altogether honest. So people who know me through my writing have met me at my highest and best, and people who know me through my speaking have met me at my lowest and worst. I judge myself by my writing. I suppose this is why I am reluctant to write quickly to the people I care about the most. I don’t want them to read a poor representation of me, so I delay responding and trust they will forgive.I’m hoping someday to outgrow these bad habits. (Indy is laughing as he reads this over my shoulder because he knows we’ll soon be celebrating the 29th anniversary of my 30th birthday.)Oh, well. That’s me.What about you? Do you have a recurrent shortcoming, a familiar face of failure?Send it to [email protected] would tell you to send it to mebut we already know how that would turn out. ARoy H. Williams

“Don’t need a Buddha head.” What are those 5 words telling us?Are we being warned that “need” is the antithesis of Zen? Are we being told that a desire to think like Buddha is the opposite of thinking like Buddha? “Don’t need a Buddha head?”Or are those 5 words a repudiation of Buddhist beliefs? Are we being told of someone’s inspection and rejection of Buddhism? “Don’t need a Buddha head.”We often seek meaning where there is no meaning.This is the foundation of all fine art and the fundamental premise of Gestalt Theory.The real truth is that Pennie and I were scrolling through an auction catalog on our computers when she said, “Look at 296.” So I did. It was an antique piece of garden statuary, a carved sandstone Buddha head.I said, “Don’t need a Buddha head.”Hearing the rhythm of those syllables and the obstruent d and t of “Don’t,” the d of “need,” the b and d of “Buddha” and the d of “head,” I smiled and said it again. “Don’t need a Buddha head.”A moment later it became a chant. “Don’t need a Buddha head. Don’t need a Buddha head. Don’t need a Buddha head. Don’t need a Buddha head.”Pennie just smiled and kept scrolling through the catalog.We see a face in the shadows on the moon.We equate a minor key with sadness.We want to dance to songs with 120 beats per minute.And we find deep symbolic meanings in phrases that, on the surface, are nonsense.If only one of us did that, he or she would be crazy. But since a majority of us do it, we call it art. We call it beautiful. We call it subtle. We call it deep.Song writers, Ad writers and Poets depend on this.Wichita Lineman, Galveston, and By the Time I Get to Phoenix made Glen Campbell rich and famous.But all 3 of those songs were written by Jimmy Webb.Up, Up and Away is the song that made The Fifth Dimension rich and famous.But it was written by Jimmy Webb.Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park lifted an actor named Richard Harris to the top of the Billboard music charts. Ten years later Donna Summer sang it to the top of the charts again. It has been recorded by Frank Sinatra, Waylon Jennings, Andy Williams, The Four Tops, Glen Campbell and Maynard Ferguson. It’s been played countless thousands of times and heard by hundreds of millions of people.The lyrics of MacArthur Park are often called stupid and ridiculous, “the worst song lyrics ever written.” And I have no argument with that.“Spring was never waiting for us, girl. It ran one step ahead as we followed in the dance between the parted pages and were pressed in love’s hot, fevered iron like a striped pair of pants. MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark, all the sweet, green icing flowing down. Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don’t think that I can take it, ’cause it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have that recipe again. Oh no! I recall the yellow cotton dress foaming like a wave on the ground around your knees, the birds, like tender babies in your hands, and the old men playing checkers by the trees…”In an October 2014 interview with Newsday, Jimmy Webb explained, “The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw… Back then I was kind of like an emotional machine, like whatever was going on inside me would bubble out of the piano and onto paper.”His wife, Savini, a Public Television host, says, “When people see he’s my husband, that’s always the first

I was in the middle of a storm at sea last week when my lover, wife and partner of 40 years spoke some wisdom into my life. She said, “Tell me what happened, step-by-step, play-by-play.”So I did.She said, “Honey sometimes when you’re talking with someone face-to-face, you think you’re being clear when you’re really not.”And then she gave me some examples.And then she asked the questions that my adversary should have asked. She said, “Roy, you slammed the door on that relationship pretty hard. So what are the odds of this being worked out? Is there any chance at all? Give me some numbers.”I said, “His odds are about 50/50.”She said, “That’s what you need to tell him, immediately, the next time you talk.”And then she asked me several more questions and demanded detailed, specific answers. And in every case, she said, “He deserves to have that information. Trust me. You’re much harder to read than you think you are.”Forty years is a long time. You’re sort of required to listen to a person who has shared the majority of your waking moments with you since Richard Nixon was President. Pennie and I have been together through Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And 4 of those guys served 8 years each.In the end, I had a follow-up conversation with my friend and everything is fine now. But we agreed to use a code language as a form of insurance.When both people know the code, all a person has to do is ask, “How strong are your feelings about that?”People deserve to know when they’re walking into a minefield.The code was taught to me 36 years ago by my friend Richard Exley. I should use it more often than I do. Would you like me to teach it to you?It all comes down to assigning a number to the strength of your feelings.ONE: “No emotional attachment.”TWO: “I have an opinion.”THREE: “I have feelings on this subject that cannot be changed, so be very, very careful.”When two people know the code, at any point in a conversation a person might say, “I’m at about a 1.5 on this. Where are you?”The other party might then say, “I’m at like 1.0.”In that exchange, the first person said, “I don’t really have an opinion that I’m willing to defend. In fact, this whole subject doesn’t really matter much to me at all. I’m just sharing some things that are popping into my head.”And the second party – the one who had a 1.0 – basically said, “I’m just trying to hold up my end of the conversation. In reality, I have no feelings on this subject whatsoever, so I’m fully prepared to let someone else make the decision.” In this instance, the code helped both parties understand they were discussing something that neither of them cared about.If both parties tell the truth, the system saves a lot of time and it helps to reduce misunderstandings.When you say you have a “number one,” you are saying, “You can ignore this completely. You can laugh at it, mock it or kick it to the curb, just please don’t judge me by it because I haven’t put any thought into it whatsoever. In fact, it may actually be a really stupid idea.”When you say, “This is a number two,” you’re saying, “I need you to take this seriously and not just blow it off. I have an opinion and I have some feelings attached to it, but I’m open to hearing your thoughts. I believe this needs to be discussed.”I’ve never heard anyone say, “That’s a number three with me,” because to have a true number three is to say, “I have a loaded pistol aimed at your head with the hammer cocked. If you so much as blink, this relationship is over. So if you care at all about remaining my friend, you won’t say another word.”I’ve had people tell me they were at a 2.8 or a 2.9, but no one has ever said, “Number...

Bad ads are about you, your company, your product, your service.Good ads are about the customer and how their sun will shine brighter, the air around them will glitter with magic, and the stars in their darkness will twinkle more richly if they choose to bring you into their world.I’m going to hire an assistant.Hundreds of Millennials have applied for this job and sent me an ad.But not one of them realized that was what they were sending me.They thought it was a cover letter attached to their resume.Hey, Millennial. Here are some examples of the kinds of ads your competitors are sending to employers. (This is extremely GOOD NEWS for you!)“I’m looking for a position where I can grow and continue to learn. My ideal job is somewhere I enjoy working, and enjoying my surroundings.”– Briana“I want to attain a position at your company to enhance my experiencein the medical industry while working towards my degree, andprovide your company with positive energy and improve productivity.”– Leanna“I am a hardworking and self-driven individual looking for full-time employment.”– Jose“I was a cheerleader for basically my whole life so yes! I’m cheerful and a happy person. I love talking and meeting new people.”– Alexis“Working in multiple places of customer service, I have gained key communication skills. Through achieving my bachelors degree I have also develyoped excellent writing, research and organizational skills that are necessary to be successful in this position.”– TreverI promise I didn’t make any of those up. In fact, I gave Trevor ­– the young man who develyoped excellent writing skills – a second chance. Did I mention that he also misspelled his own damn name? (I checked.)Those examples are 5 of the first 10 applications I randomly pulled up from a field of several hundred. Obviously, I’m offering a desirable job. Every person who has served in this position for at least 4 years is now making more than $150,000 a year.So, my Millennial friend, the bar you need to jump is very low indeed. You should be wiggling like a puppy!“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” is a saying you may have heard before.Here’s all you need to do to stand apart from your competitors.This is how to become King in the land of the blind:TIP 1: Send out fewer resumes. Getting a job is not a numbers game. Select a small number of companies and send each of them a cover letter crafted exclusively for that company.TIP 2: There is no such thing as an attention span. The applicant that wins more of the employer’s time than his or her competitors is the one most likely to win the job. So write an interesting cover letter. Long isn’t dangerous. Boring is dangerous. Predictable is dangerous. Orthodox is dangerous. Stand apart.TIP 3: Take a chance. Dustin Hoffman is considered to be one of the most versatile actors of his generation. According to the Goog, he’s made about $50,000,000 since the day in 1967 when he played Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. The problem is that his performance as a button-down college graduate and track star was so convincing that most critics and directors assumed that Dustin had not, in fact, been acting. The prevailing opinion was that his acting range was limited to only that single type of character. And John Schlesinger, the director of Midnight Cowboy, knew the lead character in his film – Ratso Rizzo – was to be precisely the opposite kind of character.This was Dustin Hoffman’s pivotal moment – the big decision – that launched him as one of...

People would rather be angry than bored.Anger is a form of excitement.That explains a lot of behavior, doesn’t it?But if you can choose, choose laughter.“Man is the laughing animal…” 1Anger is dangerous and crying is much less fun.I’m talking about storytelling and communication.I’m talking about books and movies.I’m talking about television and music.I’m talking about romantic attraction.I’m talking about successful ads.If you hope to move people, you must make them laugh, cry or get angry.You ask, “What about fear?”Fear is never the end-game.Fear is merely a fuel that will move you to submission (crying) or defiance (anger.)There is a fourth state of elevated awareness, however, more seductive even than laughter: wonder, mystery, that magical glimpse of a thing too big for us.Wonder is the fabric of religious devotion and romantic attraction.It is the highest goal of any communicator.“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed.”– Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies (1931)You stood in wonder at the cliff’s edge of 2016, looking forward into a vast unknown.“The gift of flight is reserved only for those who leap.”So you did.Happy New Year.May you walk in fields of gold.Roy H. Williams

Henri Poincaré did not discover Chaos Theory but he clearly heard its footsteps in 1887 when he published The Three Body Problem.His math is still used by NASA today.In astrophysics, stars and planets are “gravitating bodies” because they attract and hold mass and alter the orbits of one another.Gravity is a useful innovation model for professional ad writers since our goal is to attract and hold the attention of potential customers and perhaps, even, to alter their orbits.A Gravitating Body is anything that tugs at your attention.Two gravitating bodies with a high degree of divergence are known as Paired Opposites. Employ them and you’ll get attention.But when you add a third gravitating body – something highly divergent from each of the first two – and it fits – you are about to see things get exponential.Its degree of divergence is determined by how unexpected the thing is.Its power of convergence is determined by how well it fits.First Gravitating Body:A musical about the Founding FathersSecond Gravitating Body:George Washington is black and most of the other “white” characters are played by minorities.Third Gravitating Body:The dialogue is delivered in rap music, with each character having their own cadence and style.A third gravitating body with a high degree of divergence and powerful convergence is the ever-present secret of widespread, mass appeal success. Hit songs, blockbuster movies, bestselling novels and the signature dishes of gourmet chefs always have them.A successful third gravitating body doesn’t belong… but it fits.Three gravitating bodies are also the secret of successful ad campaigns. This is a formula is known to every Cognoscenti of Magical Worlds.We can easily imagine a play about the Founding Fathers. But a musical?Be honest. If you were told that a play was to feature ethnic minorities as the Founding Fathers of the United States, you would assume the play to be:(A) a satire(B) a comedy(C) an alternate history about the America we “might have been.”But Hamilton is none of these.The play’s dialogue in rap is divergent because rap didn’t exist during the time of the Founding Fathers. And it’s not the style of speech we associate with venerated historical figures. Rap is associated with passionate, creative people who are downtrodden, overlooked, abused and angry.Wait a minute. The Founding Fathers were all those things. Hamilton’s rap is divergent – highly unexpected – but convergent as well – it makes perfect sense as it brings together all the other divergent elements.Third gravitating bodies seem out of sequence to the brain’s linear, sequential, deductive-reasoning left hemisphere but they feel perfectly elegant to the pattern-recognizing, big-picture right.We are rarely conscious of third gravitating bodies because they always make sense. This is why we don’t realize how much they don’t belong.If you want your business to go exponential, you have to do something unexpected; something that doesn’t belong, but fits.Do you want to make 2017 a bigger year than 2016?The first step is to visit the rabbit hole where Indiana Beagle will tell...

I still call it Christmas.I’m told you’re not supposed to do that any more.You’re not supposed to do a lot of things.Forget the religion called Christianity for a moment.Ignore the historical blunders of Christians.I’m talking about Christmas.Those opening few sentences are going to land me in real trouble unless you judge me by my motives.1. I still call it Christmas because, according to Luke’s telling1, the angels didn’t appear to government officials or religious leaders. They chose instead to illuminate the darkness of lonely people working the night shift for minimum wage. They appeared to sack-lunch shepherds guarding defenseless sheep.I think that’s cool.The message of those angels was essentially this, “Good news! God likes you and he has a plan to rescue you – and everyone else on this planet – out of this crazy mess you’re in.”Even if you consider these stories to be fairy tales, they’re worth a look. Christmas is our biggest holiday.2. John’s Christmas story2 skips Bethlehem altogether, choosing instead to connect the birth of Jesus to that chapter in Genesis3 where God speaks our universe into existence:“In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God. The Word was in the beginning with God. All things were made by the Word; without Him was not any thing made that was made… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”Wow.3. Matthew4 doesn’t mention the shepherds of Luke or connect the pre-incarnate Jesus to the creation of the universe like John, but his is the only Christmas story that mentions the wise men, the magi. They didn’t see any angels and we’re not told why they chose to follow that star. We know only that they made an extremely difficult journey and never gave up hope. They were foreigners who believed in something the locals no longer believed in.I have an abiding fascination with these wise men, the magi. So did Chesterton.“The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.”– G.K. Chesterton, Christendom in Dublin, Ch.3 (1933)4. I believe magi still walk among us today.Following a bright star of hope, they continue to make difficult journeys.They’re not looking for someone to “make America great again.”They think America – for all its flaws – is pretty great already.They still believe in the American Dream.And if you are wise,you believe in it, too.One day,many years ago,a good person said to your ancestors,“Merry Christmas, immigrants.Welcome to America.”She was a statue on an island, a gift from France.And the poem at her feet whispers to all the earth,“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled massesyearning to breathe free. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”Roy H. Williams

I was 16 during the winter of 1974.Ted was 52.We worked together in a steel fabrication shop in Oklahoma.I was known as “Schoolboy.”Standing near the heat of the coffee pot waiting for the horn to signal the end of our break, Ted would tell stories about World War II. Those stories might as well have been about cave men and dinosaurs because Pearl Harbor had happened 35 years earlier and I was only 16.The story I’m about to tell you happened 42 years ago.It seems like yesterday.ADo you remember Bluto from the old Popeye cartoons? In 1974 his name was Harold and he was 32 years old. Muscular and angry, Harold got what he wanted through intimidation.One day I called his bluff. I told Harold “no.”But Harold wasn’t bluffing.I regained consciousness at the base of the storage racks where we kept the 6-foot aluminum fan blades. Ted told me Harold’s lightning blow lifted me off my feet and landed me 2 yards from where I had been standing. When I went home at the end of my shift my neck was so stiff I couldn’t turn my head.My mother knew immediately what had happened.When I got out of school the next day, Ted was waiting for me in the parking lot at work. He told me not to go inside. Two policemen had led Harold out in handcuffs earlier and his buddies were planning revenge.NOTE: Never hit a minor when he’s being raised by a single mother. Angry moms fight differently than men do.I worked in that steel shop for 2 more years.One day Ted said, “Schoolboy, every person you meet has something they can teach you. Your job is to figure out what their skill is and then get them to share it with you.”Ted, as usual, was right. When you assume that everyone you meet has a valuable skill, you begin to look at them differently.Harold was a different person when he came back to work. Crushing legal bills and the humiliation of jail gave him a beating far worse than he had given me. With Ted’s advice fresh in my mind, I asked Harold the secret of knocking a man off his feet.Harold’s answer surprised me because his technique had little to do with physical strength.A few years later I learned that success in business has little to do with intelligence and success in selling has little to do with being talkative and success in advertising has little to do with the product.Business isn’t about knowing, it’s about doing.Selling isn’t about talking, it’s about listening.Advertising isn’t about the product, it’s about the customer.And knocking a man down isn’t about your fists, it’s about your feet.The next time you’re at Wizard Academy I’ll show you.But only if you want to know.Roy

When Kermit Roosevelt was fifteen, he shared a book of poems he admired with his father, the President of the United States. As an encouragement to Kermit, his father sent a lengthy review of that book to The Outlook, an important publication of the time, saying, “There is an undoubted touch of genius in the poems collected in this volume…”Theodore Roosevelt had six children: Alice the mischievous, Ted Jr. the hero, Kermit the writer, Ethel the visionary, Archie the warrior and Quentin the colorful.Unexpectedly, it was Kermit, the writer, who always appeared at his father’s side when the old President needed a protector. When 51 year-old Theodore walked away from the White House and announced he was going to disappear into the jungles of Africa on a yearlong safari, Kermit dropped out of Harvard to accompany him.Four years later, when Theodore announced he was going to vanish into the jungles of South America to chart the unexplored River of Doubt, Kermit quit his job and left his fiancé to make sure his father remained safe.Had it not been for Kermit, Theodore Roosevelt would not have come home alive.This is not a speculation.Flowing from the mountains of Peru to where it joins the mighty Amazon deep in the jungles of Brazil, the River of Doubt was a mystery. Its length and course were not listed on any map. The only things known for certain were that its shores were lined with cannibals and its waters were full of man-eating piranha, fifteen-foot aquatic lizards and anaconda snakes as long as school busses.Frank Chapman, the curator for the American Museum of Natural History, said,“It may be said with confidence… that in all South America there is not a more difficult or dangerous journey than down the River of Doubt.”Natural History Museum director Henry Osborn wrote to Roosevelt several times pleading with him to abandon his plan.Roosevelt responded to Osborn in a letter to Frank Chapman:“Tell Osborn I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know; I have had my full share, and if it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite prepared to do so.”Fortunately for Theodore, his son Kermit was not prepared that he should do so.After they arrived in South America, the expedition had to cross 400 miles of wilderness before they reached the River of Doubt. But then they plunged into the jungle.“Most of the men were veteran outdoorsmen, and many of them considered themselves masters of nature. They were stealthy hunters, crack shots, and experienced survivalists, and given the right tools, they believed that they would never find themselves in a situation in the wild that they could not control. But as they struggled to make their way along the shores of the River of Doubt, any basis for such confidence was quickly slipping away. Compared with the creatures of the Amazon, including the Indians whose territory they were invading, they were all – from the lowliest camarada to the former president of the United States – clumsy, conspicuous prey.”–The River of Doubt by Candice MillardThe expedition avoided the whitewater rapids by guiding their canoes through them with ropes as they walked along the banks of the river. But when the jungle was heaviest upon them, two canoes broke loose and most of their supplies were lost. The men were forced to stop for several days to build new ones. In an effort to make up lost time they resorted to running the rapids in their canoes. When two canoes got jammed in the rocks in a section of wicked whitewater, Theodore Roosevelt jumped in to free them and slipped, opening a large gash in his thigh.An infection set in that night and for the next several days, he drifted in and out of consciousness, utterly unable to walk. In a moment of clear thinking,...

1. Use Words that have Specific Meanings.“The bug moved along the ground, deciding which way it should go.”“The ant crawled between the blades of grass, peeking left and right at every intersection.”Bug is nonspecific. Ant is specific.“…moved along the ground” is mildly specific, but not vivid.“…crawled between the blades of grass” is specific and vivid.2. Don’t Tell. Show.“…deciding which way it should go,” tells you what the ant was doing.“…peeking left and right at every intersection,” shows you the ant and leads you to conclude that the ant is deciding which way to go. You are, for a moment, seeing through the eyes of the ant. Giving human motives to inanimate objects is a powerful tool known as personification. “Your Rolex is waiting patiently for you to come and pick it up at Shreve and Company.”3. Write Tight and Clean.Short Sentences Hit Harder than Long Ones.Adjectives and adverbs don’t accelerate communication. They slow it down. Use them with restraint.What I’m doing now is giving you an example of a long sentence, (in essence, the kind of sentence often written by persons who are trying to sound educated, although in truth, sentences like this one just make you sound full of yourself,) for the purpose of demonstrating that complex sentences full of commas and parenthetic statements and verbose, multi-word, adjective-stacked descriptions have a much diminished impact and are not nearly so pleasant to read as short, clear statements like the 6-word sentence and the two 4-word sentences that preceded this horrific construction of 135 pompous, tedious and wearisome words that keep going on and on for so very long that by the time you get to the final point, you have forgotten several of the previous ones that were made.4. Let the Subject of the Sentence Take the Action.Passive Voice is a Bad Choice.You speak in passive voice when the subject of the sentence is acted upon: “Wizard Academy is attended by interesting people.”You speak in active voice when the subject of the sentence takes the action: “Interesting people attend Wizard Academy.”Passive voice is noncommittal: “It got lost.”Active voice is confident and clear. “I lost it.”5. Feed Your Pen Surprising Combinations of Interesting WordsIf you inform without persuading, you are hearing a newscast when you write. The goal of the journalist is to inform, not to persuade.If you entertain without persuading, you are hearing creative writing as you write. The goal of the creative writer is to entertain, not to persuade.The poet leads you to think and feel differently. The goal of the poet is to persuade. And the best ones do it in a brief, tight economy of words.I’m not talking about rhyming.I beg you not to rhyme.I’m talking about using surprising combinations of vivid words to trigger assumptions and conclusions in the minds of those who hear you.Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote Richard Cory in 1897. This was when “clean favored” meant good-looking, and how you were dressed is how you were “arrayed.”Richard CoryWhenever Richard Cory went down town,We people on the pavement looked at him:He was a gentleman from sole to crown,Clean favored, and imperially slim.And he was always quietly arrayed,And he was always human when he talked;But still he fluttered pulses when he said,“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—And admirably schooled in every grace:In short, we thought that he was everythingTo make us wish that we were in his place.So on we worked, and waited for the light,And went without the meat, and cursed the...

Your life is a singular journey; a generation is a collective journey.We’re circling an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet.If this dirt-covered rock we occupy was the size of a standard schoolroom globe covered with a coat of varnish, the thickness of that varnish would represent the air we breathe.Like it or not, we’re all in this together.All seven and a half billion of us.When it gets dark tonight, look up at the stars. You’ll be looking out the window of our spaceship.If we could aim our 11,000-degree fireball at the nearest of its siblings – those things we call the stars – it would take us 63,000 years to get there even though we would be shooting through space at 52 times the speed of an 865 mph bullet.1Right now you think I’m going to talk to you about cultural tolerance or global warming or world peace or some other big idea.But you’re wrong.My goal today is to teach you how to use metaphors to make your data more interesting so that you can persuade more people.I borrowed the metaphor of the earth being a spaceship from Buckminster Fuller and the varnish on the globe came from Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth.A metaphor relates the unfamiliar to the familiar, the unknown to the known, effectively translating your data into a language your listener can understand.A good metaphor sharpens the point of your data.Once you’ve chosen your metaphor, your second challenge will be to select nouns and verbs that carry the voltage of mild surprise.I might have said, “The earth orbits the sun as it moves through space at 0.0004842454 au. (astronomical units).” But I chose instead to say, “We’re circling an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet.”“We’re circling” causes you to see yourself in the story. This is the first step toward reader engagement.“11,000-degree fireball” is more vivid than “the sun,”“shoots through a limitless vacuum” is more exciting than “moves through space,”and “52 times the speed of a rifle bullet” packs more of a wallop than “astronomical units.”Brilliant communication isn’t a product of wit or charm or even talent.Preparation is what it takes to click the brightness of your message up to high beam so that it pierces the darkness like a lighthouse at midnight. In the words of Alec Nevala-Lee, “A good surprise demands methodical work in advance. Like any form of sleight of hand, it hinges on making the result of careful preparation seem casual, even miraculous.”“Like a lighthouse at midnight” wasn’t technically a metaphor, by the way. It was a simile. Metaphor: The earth is a spaceship. Simile: The earth is like a spaceship. A simile feels like a metaphor and can be used to accomplish the same effect.Write down what you want to say. Don’t overthink it. Just get some words on paper.Find a metaphor that relates your information to an idea that your audience already understands.Now look at what you wrote and replace the weary, dull words with energetic, bright ones.Want to know a secret? There’s really no such thing as good writing. There’s only good rewriting.Ernest Hemingway won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Each time he came to a place where the words weren’t flowing, he would set his work aside and answer some correspondence so that he could take a break from, “the awful responsibility of writing” — or, as he sometimes called it, “the responsibility of awful writing.” 2  In a letter to 22 year-old Arnold Samuelson in 1934, Hemingway...

You bought it for 50 cents.You sold it for a dollar.You made 50 cents.What was your percentage of profit?You could say “100 percent” because the 50-cent profit you made is equal to your original investment of 50 cents.But if we look at it from the basis of your selling price, you sold it for a dollar and only 50% of that was profit.So did you make 100% or was it 50%? There is a valid argument for each perspective.It’s not my intention to lecture you today about the difference between markup and margin or to fill your ears with chatter about inventory turn or the concept of zero marginal cost.We’re talking about something bigger.We’re talking about your success.Profit is easy to identify, but tricky to measure.Success is like that, too.Does your pursuit of success ever make you feel like you’re chasing your shadow with the sun at your back; no matter how fast you run, you can never quite grasp it? Is success a forever carrot-on-a-stick, just a little further away than the length of your arm?Most of us live with the hope of accomplishing a series of goals, but rarely do I meet anyone who can tell me how they plan to measure their progress toward those goals.How will you measure success?Before you can answer that question clearly, you have to recognize that success comes in three different colors.You can make money.You can make a name.You can make a difference.If you make enough money, it will make you something of a name. But whether or not you ever make a difference is an entirely different question. Many successful people keep their money and their name clamped tightly within their fists.If you make a name for yourself, money will likely follow. But will you then care enough about others to try and make a difference in their lives?My advice to you is to first make a difference. Do what you do so very well that people take notice of it and speak highly of you. The money will quickly follow.What are you trying to make happen?How will you measure progress-to-goal?In what way will you make a difference?Roy H. Williams

Do you sell a product or service that is reassuringly expensive?Ronny is selling $700 vacuum cleaners through a direct-response television campaign he created after attending, “How to Sell Upscale Products and Services” at Wizard Academy.That ad campaign began as a $100,000 experiment.Ronny told me he’s currently spending nearly a million dollars a week on national advertising and making a marvelous return on his investment.Funny thing: we teach that class under the assumption the techniques will be used by brand builders, not direct response marketers. But Ronny proved those same techniques can also work when you have a short time horizon.We taught Ronny something.He taught us something in return.Direct response marketers usually sell products that have a short purchase cycle. They want us to make an impulse purchase. This is why the return-on-investment for direct response ads can be measured accurately and immediately.But not everything can be sold that way.Brand builders are companies whose products or services have a long purchase cycle. The goal of a brand builder is to be the provider you think of immediately and feel the best about when you finally need what they sell. It takes courage, confidence and patience but it works better and better the longer you invest in it.The essence of brand building is emotional bonding.Direct response marketing, on the other hand, is typically intellectual. Features and benefits and added value, “But wait! Order now and you’ll also receive…” It is that world of product demonstrations and money-back guarantees, limited-time offers and upsell incentives.Direct response ads don’t work better and better as time goes by. They work less and less well until you finally have to come up with something altogether new and different.Right now you’re thinking, “But hey, if I make enough money on my direct response campaign, I’ll just retire and live happily ever after.”That sounds like a good plan but I’ve never actually seen it work out that way. Most of us have the fundamental inability to quit while we’re ahead.A glittering city in Nevada is proof of it.Wizard Academy teaches powerful concepts.How you use them is entirely up to you.Ronny is winning and winning big. I like him.He’s already taught me one lesson.I’m hoping he will teach me another.Roy H. Williams

A couple of weeks ago I spent an hour and a half on television speaking to a nationwide audience of several million viewers.They wanted me to talk about Pendulum, the book we published in 2012. Specifically, they wanted me to explain how we knew four years ago exactly what would be happening right now.I chose not to mention Wizard Academy.Does that surprise you?Pennie and Vice-Chancellor Whittington and I agreed that any mention of Wizard Academy would likely flood your school with people who would be coming for all the wrong reasons.Even worse, they would be coming with all the wrong expectations.Wizard Academy uses carefully crafted content marketing delivered through indirect targeting to attract learners into a carefully designed gravity well. Our hope is to win ever-larger chunks of your time until you finally show up in person on our campus. (Sounds sinister, doesn’t it? But it’s actually quite honest and friendly. Perfect transparency inspires confidence, does it not?)Wizard Academy doesn’t consider age or income or educational attainment or gender or ethnicity or zip code or home ownership or any of the other things targeted by most advertising efforts.We want to attract a specific, self-selected tribe that shares our core beliefs:1. We believe traditional wisdom is often more tradition than wisdom.Our quirky books, memos, videos, course descriptions and public art function as marketing filters, attracting some people, repelling others.2. We believe history repeats itself only because we didn’t pay attention the first time.We use case studies to assist you in the hands-on implementation of what we teach, but larger lessons are learned by looking at the timeless, big ideas of physics, agriculture and biology, allowing you to understand and harness sequences of events that have been echoing since the birth of time. (If the study of recurrent patterns appeals to you, you’ll love it here.)3. We believe intuition is the logic of the wordless, right hemisphere of the brain.Dr. Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his documentation of brain lateralization, in essence asserting that we don’t have a single brain divided into two hemispheres so much as we have two separate, competing brains: the logical, deductive-reasoning left and the intuitive, pattern-and-sequence recognizing right.* But the right brain has no language functions. Hence, we often “know” things we can’t explain. The intuitive power of the right brain is essential to the artist, the entrepreneur, and anyone searching for a proven innovation model.4. We believe passion is a by-product of commitment.Chapel Dulcinea, our world famous free wedding chapel, is a symbol of our belief in the power of commitment to transform personal relationships, business outcomes, and destinies. (In October, Dulcinea welcomed wedding parties from France, Scotland, New Zealand, Japan and 88 other places. In 2014 she witnessed 984 weddings. In 2015 it was 999. Will this be the year she sees 1,000?)Did any of the concepts we spoke about today interest you?This Monday Morning Memo was an example of content marketing delivered through indirect targeting to attract a self-selected tribe into a gravity well.Did we affirm your values? Confirm your beliefs? Tickle your imagination? Make you want to dive a little deeper into some of...

It seems to be a fundamental law of the universe that a thing cannot exist without its opposite.Negatively charged electrons revolvearound positively charged protons.Male and female.Inhale and exhale.Extend and contract.Seedtime and harvest.Every good thing exists in a state of duality.A voice spoke into the darkness,“Let there be light,”and the first duality was born.Darkness didn’t go away; it simply met an opposing force.Whether you believe the Bible to be ancient folk wisdom or the word of God or something in between doesn’t really matter. Most of us can agree that something about it caused the Bible to be remembered for millennia.According to the first chapter of Genesis, after the voice pierced the darkness with light, it spoke five other dualities into existence and proclaimed each of the six pairs of opposites to be good.I’m not writing to you about religion.I’m writing to you about wisdom.I’m glad to see you’re still reading! I’m sneaking up on an important point. Stay with me.Good and evil are not a duality.Love and hate are not a duality.Peace and war are not a duality.The first is life and the second is death.It shouldn’t be hard to choose between them.The only difficult choices in life are the choices between two good things.Freedom and Responsibility are two good things that we must often choose between.Likewise, a tension exists between Justice and Mercy.Honesty and Loyalty are also good things.Have you ever had to choose between them?Which one is good and which one is evil?The next time you see two antagonistic groups throwing word-grenades at each other, peer beneath the emotional language and you’ll notice that one group believes in freedom while the other group believes in responsibility. Or one side is pushing for justice while the other side pushes for mercy.Niels Bohr wasn’t a touchy-feely philosopher. He was a scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Among his discoveries was this:“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”Stanislaw Lec said it this way,“Proverbs contradict each other. That is the wisdom of a people.”Then F. Scott Fitzgerald challenged you and me to step into a larger realm of living,“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.”Don’t fall into the trap of believing you have to choose one and disparage the other.Every creative person is familiar with the magnetism that exists between opposites. A skillful articulation of this energy is the secret behind hit songs, big movies, bestselling books and successful ad campaigns.A voice spoke light into the darkness and said it was good.And Niels Bohr said “Amen.”And Stanislaw Lec said “Amen.”And F. Scott Fitzgerald said “Amen.”So please tell me, if you will,What say you?Roy H. Williams

The statesman, according to Wikipedia, “who is often regarded as the father of modern conservatism,” was Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797). I was unaware of this until I stumbled upon it while searching for the origin of the famous statement, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”A worthy counterpart to Edmund Burke might be George Bernard Shaw, widely considered to be an early champion of liberal thought. Shaw wrote, “When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.” 1You’ll find both of these quotes in the random quote database at MondayMorningMemo.com because these statements cause us to think.And thinking is never a bad thing.Examine that first quote and you’ll notice it’s based on the underlying premise that some people are good while others are evil.The second quote is based on the premise that some people are stupid while others are not.But have you ever known anyone so good there was no bad in them, or anyone so bad there was no good? And who is so wise they’ve never done a stupid thing?Witold Gambrowicz was an obscure Polish writer until his private diaries were discovered after his death in 1969. According to the Paris Review, they are “widely considered his masterpiece.”One of the golden nuggets Gambrowicz left behind for us was his theory on how to write a book review:“Literary criticism is not the judging of one man by another (who gave you this right?) but the meeting of two personalities on absolutely equal terms. Therefore do not judge. Simply describe your reactions. Never write about the author or the work, only about yourself in confrontation with the work or the author. You are allowed to write about yourself.”Wow. I get it. And this idea isn’t limited to literary criticism.Instead of saying, “What you’re about to do is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of and if you do it, you’re an idiot,” one might say, “If I were about to do what you’re about to do, I would be frightened.” Then if your friend asks, “Why would you be frightened?” you can share with him your concerns.“Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage.”– Ralph Waldo EmersonI’ve never found anyone who could explain to me the difference between constructive criticism and just plain criticism.Violence may kill the body, but criticism kills the spirit. If you hope to bring about change, you must armor your soul against it.John Steinbeck reminds us that all criticism is based upon subjective, personal perceptions and that such perceptions are never universally true.“A painter, letting color and line, observed, sift into his eyes, up the nerve trunks, and mix well with his experience before it flows down his hand to the canvas, has made his painting say, ‘It might be so.’ Perhaps his critic, being not so honest and not so wise, will say, ‘It is not so. The picture is damned.’ If this critic could say, ‘It is not so with me, but that might be because my mind and experience are not identical with those of the painter,’ that critic would be a better critic for it, just as the painter is a better painter for knowing he himself is in the pigment.” 2If we want to make the world a better place, if we want to bring an end to polarized politics, if we want to make friends instead of enemies, we must remember the advice of Gambrowicz, Emerson and Steinbeck.At least it seems so to me.Does it seem so, also, to you?Roy H. Williams

Science is the study of objective reality.Art is the study of subjective reality.Subjective reality is perception through filters. It is interpreted reality, romanticized reality, imagined reality. It is your own personal fiction.We’ve spoken of this before, but I think we need a refresher:Electromagnetic waves exist regardless of whether you perceive them. They are nonfiction. But colors exist in subjective reality, as a result of transformations provided by our senses. Colors are fiction.Vibrations traveling in air or water are objective, real, nonfiction. But sound is a fiction that exists only in our mind.Likewise, chemicals dissolved in air or water exist in objective reality, nonfiction. But smells and tastes are purely subjective, fiction. Colors, sounds, smells and tastes do not exist, as such, outside our brains. And any associations we experience in connection with a color, sound, taste or smell are purely subjective as well.Each of us lives in a private world that is mostly subjective fiction.Our ability to communicate is based on the assumption that other people will interpret subjective stimuli in ways that are similar to our own. But when their reactions spring from different backgrounds and experiences, communication grows more difficult.Politics, anyone?Color, sound, smell and taste are very convincing fictions. So convincing, in fact, that we often embrace them as “reality.” This is why we have so many arguments.To “frame” a conversation is to set the stage for a fiction that is about to begin.The current style of communication in America is declarative and descriptive, leaving little room for nuance or multilayered interpretation. The impact of this declarative style is often clinical and bombastic.The heart doubts declarative statements because they tell us what to think and believe.Evocative statements pull the answers from inside us.Lead a person to an answer and they will usually discover it.Lead a person to the truth and they will cling to it.We own every truth that comes from inside us. This is why it is rare for an argument to overturn something we have realized.If you followed Indiana Beagle down the rabbit hole last week, you saw a statement by Brandon Sanderson, “The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.”Sanderson may as well have been talking about evocative statements.Look at the frontispiece of The Wizard of Ads and you’ll see The Seven Laws of the Advertising Universe. Laws 3 and 7 explain why stories are so powerfully persuasive:“Intellect and Emotion are partners who do not speak the same language. The intellect finds logic to justify what the emotions have decided. Win the hearts of the people, their minds will follow.”“Engage the Imagination, then take it where you will. Where the mind has repeatedly journeyed, the body will surely follow. People go only to places they have already been in their minds.”Well-told stories win the heart and take people on journeys in their minds.How well are you telling your stories?The best stories have a narrative arc and a character arc.Narrative Arc: a sequence of events that unfold; a continuing storyline that fascinates the mind.Character Arc: a gradual deepening of our understanding of the character’s motivations, revealed by how the character thinks, speaks, acts and sees the world. The character arc is a character’s inner journey over the course of the story.An advertising campaign is more than a...

Norman Rockwell was an illustrator of fiction.He never showed us America as it really was, but America as it could have been, should have been, might have been. His images caused an entire generation to vividly remember experiences we never had.Rockwell showed my generation a fictional America and we believed in it.I don’t want to mention client names and I’m sure you’ll understand why, but my most successful ad campaigns have been built on exactly that kind of fiction.Not lies. Fiction. There’s a difference.Fiction is romanticized reality, showing us possible futures and the best of the past, leaving out the dreary, the mundane and the forgettable. It is a powerful tool of bonding. Properly used, fictional characters attract new customers and deepen customer loyalties. But predictable characters hold no interest for us. It is conflicted characters – those with vulnerabilities, weaknesses and flaws – that fascinate us immensely.A recently published study1 in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships suggests that fictional friends may be as valuable as “real” friends, particularly when life-partners watch television shows together.“…our studies show that sharing the social connections provided by TV shows and movies can deepen intimacy and closeness. Furthermore, watching TV shows and movies together may provide couples who lack access to a shared social network of real-world friends with an alternate means of establishing this shared social identity.Previously, sharing a social world with a partner has been conceptualized in terms of sharing real-world social experiences.2 However, creating these experiences may not always be possible. Fortunately, humans are remarkably flexible in finding ways to fulfill their social needs.3 When people’s need for social connections are undermined, they turn to a variety of social surrogates that provide alternate pathways to meet this need, including comfort food,4 photos of loved ones,5 pets,6 and media like TV shows and movies.7“Recurrent characters in advertising fit into that last category of “media like TV shows and movies.”In fact, fictional characters shine so brightly in our minds that we have created a word – metafiction8 – for those moments when fictional characters become aware that they are fictional.If you doubt what I say, all you need do is suggest to Indiana Beagle that he isn’t real. You will quickly and painfully be made aware of how real a fictional character can become.It is the architecture of our brains that makes fiction so powerful.Humans are the storytelling animal.You have about 100,000 times more synapses in your brain than sensory receptors in your body. If brain synapses were strictly equal to sensory receptors – which they are not – this would mean that you and I are 100,000 times better equipped to experience a world that does not exist than a world that does. So let’s assume that a single sensory receptor is worth 1,000 brain synapses. Congratulations, you’re still 100 times better equipped to experience a world that does not exist than a world that does.This was the purpose of today’s Monday Morning Memo:Find some TV shows to watch with your life-partner. The shared experience will be good for both of you.Play with the idea of creating a fictional spokes-character for your company. (If you don’t know how, consider the online classes at AmericanSmallBusiness.org.)Take quality fiction more seriously. Logical, sequential, deductive reasoning is a...

September 17, 1787: When George Washington saw the Constitution of the United States of America finally adopted after four months of intense debate in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania State House, he immediately went to a bookseller and paid 22 shillings, six pence for a copy of Don Quixote de La Mancha.1According to MountVernon.org, “this seventeenth-century Spanish allegory does seem a somewhat unusual choice for the pragmatic farmer, soldier, and statesman. An explanation for the apparently uncharacteristic purchase can be found within Washington’s correspondence.” 2We’ll look at that correspondence in a moment, but I believe a statement made by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin offers an equally insightful glimpse into the mind of George Washington in that historic moment when the Constitution was complete and our Great American Experiment had begun.“I tend to write very romantically and idealistically. So the characters that I write are going to be, kind of, quixotic. And they’re going to fail a lot and fall a lot. But, you know, there’s a romance in trying for honorable things.” 3– Aaron Sorkin, June 29, 2015Don Quixote had been a topic of conversation a few evenings earlier in the home of Benjamin Franklin. We know this because on November 9th, 1787, Washington received a Spanish copy of Don Quixote from Spanish Ambassador Diego Maria de Gardoqui with a note, “requesting you wou’d accept & give a place in your Library to the last Spanish Edition of Don Quixote which I recolectt to have hear’d you say at Dr Franklin’s that you had never seen it. I cou’d have wish’d it was in English for your particular entertainment, but it being reckoned the very best Edition of that celebrated work & one in which every thing has been manufacture in Spain induces me to request your acceptance.” 4We don’t know why they were talking about Quixote that night in the home of Benjamin Franklin, but Indy Beagle tells me it went something like this:WASHINGTON: “We are drawing near to an agreement. I believe we may have a Constitution within the week.”FRANKLIN: [shaking his head slowly as gazes down absently at the table] “I look at the future and wonder if we are victorious champions of the good, or bumbling fools who have convinced themselves they are something they are not.”SPANISH AMBASSADOR GARDOQUI: [smiling] “You have read the Quixote?”FRANKLIN: [nods yes and smiles a weak smile.]WASHINGTON: “Although Jefferson and Adams speak continuously of this book, I cannot say I have read it.”“Roy,” you’re thinking, “are you seriously expecting me to believe that our founding fathers were Quixote nuts like you?”The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia at Monticello.org says, “Don Quixote was one of the few works of fiction that Thomas Jefferson was clearly partial to. He used the text in its original language to learn Spanish, and had his children do the same. Jefferson owned a number of different editions over his lifetime.” 5Monticello.org also lists 18 pieces of Jefferson’s personal correspondence in which Quixote is mentioned during the 51 years from 1771 to 1822. 5So, yes, when a person speaks and writes about Don Quixote for 51 years, I usually print that person’s name in large letters in the “Quixote Nut” column.These are the big ideas presented in Don Quixote:1. A beautiful dream is worth believing in, even when others think you are crazy.2. A beautiful dream is worth fighting for, even when you lose.3. A beautiful dream is worth pursuing, even if it never comes true.4. The possibility remains that your beautiful dream might turn out to be folly. 6John Adams was Thomas Jefferson’s friend and nemesis and

I’m betting you’re extremely good at something, perhaps at more than just one thing.Let’s face it: you’re talented – gifted, in fact – a classic overachiever. But the odds are 7 in 10 that you find it difficult to accept and believe these compliments.I say this because 70 percent of our population suffers from Impostor Syndrome and it is most common among high achievers, especially people with graduate degrees, college professors on track for tenure, and research scientists. 1Isaac Newton, the man who changed the way we understand the universe, who discovered the laws of gravity and motion and invented calculus, suffered from Impostor Syndrome, saying, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” 2Impostor Syndrome is the blind spot that comes with talent.Harold Kushner describes Impostor Syndrome as “the feeling of many apparently successful people that their success is undeserved… For all the outward trappings of success, they feel hollow inside. They can never rest and enjoy their accomplishments… They need constant reassurance from the people around them to still the voice inside them that keeps saying, ‘If other people knew you the way I know you, they would know what a phony you are.'” 3Now here’s the good news: Impostor Syndrome is perfectly normal. What you want to avoid is the opposite, the Dunning–Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusions of superiority, mistakenly assessing their abilities as much higher than they really are. 4Everyone is messed-up and broken a little. (Impostor Syndrome)But the most messed-up are those who believe they are not. (Dunning-Kruger)Scientists Dunning and Kruger believe “the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.” 4In other words, those of us who have Impostor Syndrome see ourselves from the inside, where we stand naked in the shadow of old wounds, past failures and the knowledge of our limitations. But we see others from the outside, where they stand majestic, beautifully illuminated in the bright glory of their successes.A close friend once asked me to tell him the secret of confidence. “The key isn’t to think more highly of yourself,” I said, “but to quit thinking so highly of others.”If Dunning and Kruger’s research can be trusted, it would appear that I was right.This is what I was hoping to give you today:Encouragement.Talented people like yourself often feel they’ve just been lucky. But being in the right place at the right time doing the right thing in the right way isn’t luck, it’s talent. Most people have at least one talent. Be happy that you found yours.Normality.Seventy percent of successful people wrestle with Impostor Syndrome. See it for what it is and it will disappear.Self-acceptance.Yes, you have deficiencies, but so does everyone else. Relax.Self-awareness.I said that Impostor Syndrome is a blind spot among people with talent. Hopefully, now that you’ve seen your blind spot, it won’t be a blind spot anymore.Gratitude.Open your eyes to your talent and be glad of it. (And if you ever figure out who gave it to you, be sure to thank them for it!)Have a great week.Do great things.It’s in your nature.Roy H. Williams

Sunlight is composed of red, green and blue light waves. Combine these together and you get white light.ARemove the red from white light and you will no longer be able to see red in anything illuminated by that light. Red will no longer exist. Remove the blue and you will no longer see blue.This is the secret of propaganda.Propaganda is an emotionally charged word, so we should probably establish a definition for the purposes of this discussion:“Propaganda is a form of persuasion that refuses to consider the point of view of its opponent. Instead, propaganda will mock, vilify and demonize its opponent or ignore its opponent’s perspective completely.”Google “propaganda” and you’ll learn the term dates back to 1622, when Pope Gregory XV decided to send out missionaries to propagate – propagando – the faith. To facilitate this, he created the sacra congregatio christiano nomini propagando. The cardinal in charge of Propagando became known as the “red pope” due to the importance of his duties and the extraordinary extent of his authority. 1In 1982, Pope John Paul II renamed it the congregation for the evangelization of peoples, probably because the word “propaganda” had been given a bad name by Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany.Catholics in 1622 wanted to eliminate the Protestant perspective, which is only fair, because Protestants wanted to eliminate the Catholic perspective.This polarization caused millions to die in religious wars, but that doesn’t make religion bad. It is a polarized perspective – whether in religion or sports or anything else – that’s bad.A person can have a strong and unchangeable point of view but still retain the courtesy and breadth of vision to understand how an intelligent person might embrace the opposite point of view. 2Think of your opponent as watching a sporting event from the seat exactly opposite yours. You’re both watching the same game, but his left is your right, and your right is his left. So which of you is the liar? Which of you is the fool?200 million Muslims are Shiites.1.6 billion Muslims are Sunnis.When the Islamic Prophet Muhammad died in 632 A.D., a debate emerged about who should be his successor. Both sides agreed that Allah is the one true God and that Muhammad was his messenger, but one group (the Shiites) felt Muhammad’s successor should be someone in his bloodline, while the other (the Sunnis) felt a pious individual who would follow the Prophet’s customs would be acceptable.Both Sunnis and Shiitesread the Quran,believe the Prophet Muhammad was the messenger of Allah,fast during Ramadan,pledge to make a pilgrimage to Mecca,practice ritual prayer five times a day,give charity to the poor andpledge themselves to their faith.But rather than celebrate what they have in common and use those bonds to facilitate peace and prosperity, the Sunnis and Shiites have chosen bitter war.Democrats and Republicans seem to be making a similar choice.I, for one, want no part of it.Justice and Mercy are both important and good and true.But they exist in perpetual tension, an eternal tug-of-war.I’m sure I’ll be criticized for saying this, but it seems to me that one side wants to shine bold red light on the importance of protecting ourselves from those who would do us harm, while the other side wants to shine a soothing blue light on the pain of the struggling and the oppressed.If propagandists are successful in their attempts to eliminate the red or the blue from the light that shines from America, I fear we will learn we...

Each of us likes to think we believe what we believe because the evidence dictates it.But if that were true, wouldn’t each of us believe the same things?We call one person a romantic and another a realist, and we secretly think the realist to be more valuable, do we not?Labels are powerful things. To call someone “a realist” is to accuse his or her counterpart of believing in things that are not real.But are honor, courage, virtue and love not real?My experience has been that we become less frustrated and more likeable when we embrace the fact that belief is a choice.“If you want to believe in something, then believe in it. Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe in it… Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most: that people are basically good; that honor, courage and virtue mean everything; that power and money – money and power – mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil. And I want you to remember this; that love – true love – never dies. Remember that, boy. Remember that. It doesn’t matter if they’re true or not, a man should believe in those things because those are the things worth believing in.”– Hub McCann, played by Robert Duvall, speaking to his nephew in Secondhand LionsEvidence does not dictate belief.Belief is always a choice.This came pointedly to my attention as I was assembling my chapter for a collaborative book, Poetics of Re-accentuation: Don Quixote in film, theatre, and modern literature.The basic idea of re-accentuation is that every generation makes and remakes the image of Don Quixote to reflect their own worldview. (Indy Beagle has assembled, in the rabbit hole, a list of those of you I quoted.)I can summarize my chapter in 2 sentences.Perhaps no story has ever been changed to fit the measure of its readers so much as Don Quixote has been changed to fit 21st century businesspeople and entrepreneurs.Businesspeople tend to see Quixote as a symbol of the irrational and unyielding optimism that is essential to every visionary entrepreneur.But this interpretation of Quixote is not universal:Two of the friends who shared their thoughts and feelings with me wrote brilliantly about how the delusions of Quixote hurt everyone around him, particularly those who loved him most.One of these writers was a family counselor. The other was an accountant. (Is our career choice a reflection of how we see the world, or is our worldview shaped by our career?)I agreed with these two friends because they were entirely correct.And I agreed with all those who said the opposite.In truth, each of us is a romantic and a realist.The human brain is divided into competing halves. The realistic left and the romantic right. This is why we’re so often at odds with ourselves, torn between two ways of thinking.“Outwardly we laugh at the absurdity of a man jousting with windmills, thinking them to be giants. But inwardly we crave Quixote’s sense of mission and purpose, his dedication to a cause, his willingness to pay any price to achieve the honor of his beloved, the entirely imaginary Dulcinea.So who is the silly one? He, for seeing beyond what is, to serve a beauty that could be, should be, ought to be? Or me, for remaining trapped in a black and white world where little men hide behind technicalities?” – Roy H. Williams, (2005)This concept of multiple perspectives is easy to embrace as long as we’re talking about Don Quixote and Secondhand Lions, but what happens when the conversation grows more personal?“Given the current level of anger, we are in danger of becoming a monster in an attempt to destroy a...

Why do old songs pop into our heads? Unheard for decades – and often a song we never even liked – there it is, filling the echo chamber of the articulatory loop of working memory in the dorsolateral prefrontal association areas of our brains.“…smokin’ cigarettes and watchin’ Captain Kannnng-aroo,now don’t tell meeeeeeee I’ve nothin’ to dooooo….”I whispered everything I could remember to Google.Google whispered back, “The Statler Brothers, Flowers on the Wall, 1966. It won the Grammy for ‘Best Performance by a Vocal Group.'”To get the most out of your ad writer, send them your irrelevant and ridiculous passing thoughts.Don’t overthink it, and don’t be annoyed when most of your passing thoughts are ignored. Because occasionally, now and then, one of those passing thoughts will morph into a fabulous ad for your business.I was trying to drive “Captain Kannnng-aroo” from my mind when I heard a little email *ding* from my computer. It was Ken Goodrich, the owner of Goettl (rhymes with kettle).Crap.Ken was thinking about Captain Kangaroo, too.I turned Ken’s email into a 60-second radio ad.Captain Kangaroo is the reason I own Goettl Air Conditioning. I know that sounds weird, but it’s true. I’m Ken Goodrich. Here’s how it happened. When I was a kid, our family had a big Zenith console television that was about the size of a small hippopotamus or a pony with very short legs. Your family probably had one, too. Anyway, the Captain was always talking about Schwinn bicycles and what made them BETTER than other bicycles. Sitting there cross-legged on the floor, the Captain convinced me to always buy GOOD quality made with REAL craftsmanship because it works better, lasts longer, and saves you money. When it comes to air conditioners, that’s Goettl. But wait, it gets even weirder. I only hire technicians and installers that remind me of Mr. Green Jeans. Happy. Hard working. He just wants you to be happy.  Call Goettl. Gee Oh Ee, T-T-L. It’ll keep you cool, but it’s hard to spell. And if you see one of my technicians, ask them for a Goettl flashlight. (Contractor License #) You’ll find the phone number at Goettl.com. Gee Oh Ee, T-T-L dot com.You’ve heard me say, “Entertainment is the currency that purchases the attention of the public.” And this is an example of that.Here’s how to take a rambling email from a client and turn it into a highly entertaining ad:Open your ad from an interesting angle.This applies to opening lines as well as headlines in print and online.How can anyone not listen to an ad that opens with, “Captain Kangaroo is the reason I own Goettl Air Conditioning.”Make an entertaining pitch.Don’t entertain, then pitch. Make the whole pitch entertaining. “…a big Zenith console television that was about the size of a small hippopotamus or a pony with very short legs.”Make the reader/listener/viewer see herself in your ad.“Your family probably had one, too.”When appropriate, tell WHY you are the way you are. (Your Genesis story.)“Sitting there cross-legged on the floor, the Captain convinced me to always buy GOOD quality made with REAL craftsmanship because it works better, lasts longer, and saves you...

The cognoscenti will remember two big statements glittering on the screen behind me during the opening moments of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop:“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”– Niels Bohr, physicist“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 Fitzgerald, writerWhat I’m about to say may prove to be just such a test.I’m counting on you to possess a first-rate intelligence:“People love Donald Trump.”“People hate Donald Trump.”Those two statements about Donald Trump seem to be mutually exclusive until we realize that neither statement purports to describe ALL people. Different people feel different ways. We understand this when it comes to politics.But let the discussion turn to advertising and you will soon hear voices begin speaking of Millennials and Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers as though every member of a birth cohort is somehow compelled to make their decisions based on a single, shared set of values determined by the year in which they were born.It’s like listening to people who believe in astrology. “Your fate is determined by your birthday.”The only thing weirder is listening to wholesalers and distributors speak of the men and women involved in “B to B” (Business to Business) as if they were an entirely different species. “Roy, I hear what you’re saying about using words as tools of persuasion, but my business is B to B and B to B is different. What can you tell me about selling B to B?”Blanket statements result from a belief in stereotypes.Stereotypes are attractive because they allow us to simplify complex realities.Stereotypes are false categories that allow us to feel good about stupid decisions.People are extremely different.People are all alike.Both of those statements are true.Both of those statements are false.How’s that first-rate intelligence holding up?I’m now going to make 5 true statements. Some will confirm your suspicions and beliefs. Others will stick in your throat like a fish bone, forcing you to cough and sputter.I apologize in advance.Your perfect “target customer” is probably a false category.This is one of the two reasons why your advertising is performing poorly.The first time I visited Procter & Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati, I was greeted warmly and shown the auditorium where I would be speaking. After all the equipment had been tested, my guide asked,“Do you know the unofficial slogan of our company?”I shook my head from side to side.“In God we trust. All others bring data.”In an August 9, 2016 story in the Wall Street Journal, Procter & Gamble Chief Marketing Officer Marc Pritchard announced, “We targeted too much and we went too narrow.”Example: Sales stagnated when P&G aimed Febreze ads on FaceBook at pet owners and households with large families. But sales rose when the same budget was spent reaching “anyone over 18.”P&G has been spending hundreds of million of dollars on tests like that for the past two years. The jury has now returned with a verdict: reaching influencers is just as important as reaching the decision maker.You feeling that fish bone yet?Millennials are easy to attract.According to an Aug. 5th Daily Beast article by Samantha Allen, one in three young adults is still living at home.Touchy-feely theorists say this is...

Time and Money are interchangeable.We can always save one by spending more of the other.Time and Money are interchangeable.We prize the one we feel to be in short supply.Time and Money are interchangeable.We burn them both like the wax of a candle.What is patience if not the quiet, dark burning of time?What is entertainment if not the dazzling, bright burning of time?What is play if not the warm, happy burning of time?What is freedom if not the ability to burn time in any way we choose?Do you want to attract influential people to your business?Patiently offer them entertainment, play and freedom.They will be attracted to your lightand come back with their friends.This is why an innovative marketing school teaches people how to become whiskey sommeliers.*Influential people are obligated to make money.Money, for them, is a representative product of work.What they seek is freedom, entertainment and play.What they seek is a pleasant way to spend time.Aristotle Onassis understood this.Ari was a 17 year-old Greek refugee who fled to Buenos Aires where he began working as a telephone operator in 1923. He would soon become one of the wealthiest men in the world. This, in his own words, was his secret:Make sure you are tanned, live in expensive buildings, even if you have to stay in the cellar, go out to expensive restaurants, even if you can only afford one drink.”Ari spent the money he made as a telephone operator on quality clothes, a tanning lamp and a single drink each night in the swankiest bar in Buenos Aires. Within a few months, he had become friends with all the important people of that city. And with their help, he began a tobacco importing business that made him, and them, a fortune.That’s when he began buying ships.Having learned that the Canadian National Steamship Company wanted to sell 2 ships at scrap metal prices, Ari left immediately for Canada and convinced that company to sell him not just 2, but 6 ships for $20,000 each. Within a few years Ari had amassed the world’s largest privately owned shipping fleet and became one of the world’s richest and most famous men.Seventeen year-old Aristotle Onassis instinctively knew that freedom, entertainment and play were the only things that influential people really desire. He connected with them, not through work, but through play.Ari became successful, not because he knew how to spend money, but because he knew how to spend time when time was his only asset.If you don’t have all the money you desire, I have but a single question for you:How are you spending your time?Roy H. Williams

Most people associate The Power of Myth with the 1988 PBS television series with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, or with the accompanying book of that name. But it was John F. Kennedy who spoke of the power of myth with the greatest clarity and insight. The occasion was his 1962 Commencement Address to the graduates of Yale University.As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality. For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”Erroneous preconceptions are the dangerous downside of myths.But heroes are their dangerous upside.Larger than life, highly exaggerated and always positioned in the most favorable light, a hero is a beautiful lie.We have historic heroes, folk heroes and comic book heroes. We have heroes in books and songs and movies and sport. We have heroes of morality, leadership, kindness and excellence. And nothing is so devastating to our sense of wellbeing as a badly fallen hero. Yes, heroes are dangerous things to have.The only thing more dangerous is not to have them.Heroes raise the bar we jump and hold high the standards we live by. They are ever-present tattoos on our psyche, the embodiment of all we’re striving to be.We create our heroes from our hopes and dreams. And then they attempt to create us in their own image.The saying, “The sun never sets on the British Empire” was true as recently as 1937 when tiny England did, in fact, still have possessions in each of the world’s 24 time zones.It’s widely known that the British explored, conquered and ruled much of the world for a number of years, but what isn’t widely known is what made them believe they could do it.For the first 1000 years after Christ, Greece and Rome were the only nations telling stories of heroes and champions. England was just a dreary little island of rejects, castoffs and losers.So who inspired tiny, foggy England to rise up and take over the world?A simple Welsh monk named Geoffrey – hoping to instill in his countrymen a sense of pride – assembled a history of England that gave his people a grand and glorious pedigree. Published in 1136, Geoffrey’s “History of the Kings of Britain,” was a detailed, written account of the deeds of the English people for each of the 17 centuries prior to 689 AD… and not a single word of it was true. Yet in creating heroes like King Arthur, Guinevere, Merlyn and the Knights of the Round Table from the fabric of his imagination, Geoffrey of Monmouth convinced a sad little island of rejects, castoffs and losers to begin seeing themselves as a just and magnificent nation.And not long after they began to see themselves that way in their minds, they began seeing themselves that way in the mirror.Most people assume that stories of heroes are the byproducts of great civilizations, but I’m convinced they are the cause of them. Magnificent civilizations have always been the ones with stories of heroes; larger-than-life role models that inspired ordinary citizens to rise up and do the impossible.I love imaginary heroes like King Arthur and Don Quixote.I love civilian heroes like Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King.I love political heroes like Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.But what happens when your hero is a fool?I pray we never find out.Roy H. Williams

Memories of PercyAugust 1, 2016ListenAHis gifts didn’t prove that he was rich. His gifts proved that he cared. And the smallness of his gifts proved that I could afford to care, too.My long friendship with Percy began exactly 30 years ago when I saw him on the cover of a magazine as it lay on a coffee table in a friend’s house. He was a smiling gentleman sitting on a desk stacked with bags of money. The headline read, “Why is Percy Ross Giving Away $20,000,000?”In the feature story, author Steven Kaplan explained how Percy Ross employed a small team of people to read the 4,000 letters he received each week asking him for financial help. A few of these letters got published each week – along with his response – in the 800+ newspapers that carried his syndicated column, “Thanks a Million.”Paragraph 38 quoted Percy as saying that he had engaged two large advertising firms to help him turn his column into a radio show only to be told by each of them that it wasn’t feasible.The week after I read that story, his readers had to plow through 4,001 letters because I decided to add my own letter to the pile.Mr. Ross, I don’t want or need any of your money, but I read in Robb Report magazine that you wanted to syndicate a daily radio feature. I’ve done this 4 times already, so I’m familiar with the problems your people ran into and I know the ways around all those problems. Give me a call at your convenience and I’ll tell you everything you need to know. I look forward to hearing you on the radio!”I received a phone call and a plane ticket to Minneapolis. Percy picked me up at the airport, and as we were walking shoulder-to-shoulder toward his car I said,Mr. Ross, in about an hour and a half you’re going to know absolutely everything you need to know to get “Thanks a Million” on several hundred radio stations for free. As a matter of fact, you should be able to make a few tens of thousands of dollars a month from it. What I need you to understand is that I’m fully aware that I’m about to make myself obsolete. Not only will you not need to hire me to help you, you won’t need to hire anyone else, either.“Why would you do that?” he asked.“If this was the only valuable idea that I was ever going to have, I’d do my best to monetize it. But it seems to me that each of us will encounter more valuable opportunities in a single day than we could possibly pursue in a lifetime. But today isn’t work. Today I’m just helping you help others.”Five, six, seven, eight, nine steps and still Percy hadn’t said anything. So I looked to my left.And he wasn’t there.Spinning around I saw him standing quietly in the parking lot, staring at me. He had stopped in his tracks while I was talking. We stood looking at each other a few moments, then he said,How old are you, son?”“Twenty-eight, sir.”“I was fifty years old before I figured that out.”About 90 minutes later Percy said with a smile,Roy, I’m really glad you told me what you did in the parking lot of the airport because if you hadn’t, right now I’d be thinking you were the most naive and careless young man who had ever lived. You were right! I don’t need anyone’s help to do this. Not even yours. You have given me something I tried to buy and could not. And that doesn’t happen to me very often.”Within 6 months, Percy was on 584 radio stations for free, including WNBC

The reason people write poorly is because they read too many blogs, tweets, news stories and Facebook posts.As you read, so will you write.Maxwell Rotbart. the son of roving reporter Rotbart, asked me to name 10 books he should read. When I asked the purpose of this reading, Maxwell said, “I just want to know what great writing sounds like.”“Do you want to read the best stories or do you want to read the best writing?”“I want to read the best writing.”I quickly named 7 books before I began to struggle. Dozens of others were flickering through my mind, but they were mostly examples of great storytelling, employing marvelous narrative arcs and character arcs. But my list was to be about great writing: sentence construction, word selection, vivid description and an intriguing sequencing of mental images. Every style of great writing I could think of was already represented on my list.Indiana Beagle saved me. “Wizard,” he said, “let me ask the rabbit hole tribe to name the last 3 books.”“So let it be written,” I said, “So let it be done.”Indy snickered in that way he does when he knows I’m being pompous.Anyway, here’s my list:Travels with Charley – John SteinbeckEast of Eden is a better story, but Charley will teach you more about writing. Let Steinbeck show you how to unveil a mental image from an interesting perspective, restrain yourself from saying too much, and delight your reader with unexpected observations and connections. A second example of a well written book-without-a-plot is Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, the personal letters written by John Steinbeck to his friends between 1923 and 1968.The Poetry of Robert FrostFrost communicates bigger ideas in fewer words than any other writer I have ever read. Let him teach you the power of metaphor, the magic of meter (rhythm,) and the use of the perfect word.At his simplest, his most rhythmical and cryptic, Frost is a remarkable poet. He is surely that. In other words, if you were chopping wood, that chore had some kind of universal significance to Frost. If you were picking apples, this has a general conclusive principle somewhere involved in it, or with it, in some way. This localizing way of getting generalities to reveal themselves, like universal design, original sin, love, death, fate: Frost found a way to do this, to make anything that has ever concerned mankind relate to a New England farm.”– James Dickey, Classes on Modern Poets and The Art of Poetry, p. 126One Summer: America, 1927 – Bill BrysonSome of the best advice I offer writers is this: “Take your inspiration from wherever you find it, no matter how ridiculous.” Bill Bryson is the world’s best example of this. It is impossible not to be devastated by his fascinating choices of subject matter, his deep research, obvious restraint and amazing phrasing.The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest HemingwayThis very short book put Hemingway over the top to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Let Ernest teach you how simple observations, clearly stated, have impact.Hawaii – James MichenerMichener will teach you patience and attention to detail. If objective reality and clarity are your goals as a writer, Michener and Hemingway are the voices you want echoing in your mind as you write.One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia MarquezMagical Realism isn’t fantasy or science fiction. It is the...

She stood silently on the cracked asphalt, her summer dress billowing in the breeze, the calm at the center of the storm that was spreading across the country. Around her swirled police officers and demonstrators that had blocked Airline Highway in Baton Rouge to denounce the death of Alton Sterling, shot by police outside a convenience store. Many protesters carried signs. Some shouted into bullhorns. ‘She just stood there and made her stand,’ said photographer Jonathan Bachman to Buzzfeed News. ‘I was just happy to be able to capture something like that.'” – Michael E. MillerIeshia Evans is a 28 year-old mother with a 5 year-old boy.She wanted to look her son in the eyes to tell him she fought for his freedom and rights,” says Alex Haynes, her best friend since the age of eight.This is not an unemployed troublemaker.This is an accomplished woman, a successful LPN.And this was her first protest.But young black men are dying when they should not.And her son is a young black man.When Ieshia Evans was 3 years old, Disney released a children’s movie called Beauty and the Beast.AThat movie is about a girl named Belle, the non-conforming daughter of an eccentric inventor. Belle is ostracized by her peers due to her intelligence and love of books. But when her father is imprisoned by a cold-hearted beast, Belle offers the beast her own freedom in exchange for her father’s.Does that story sound familiar? Belle was not a new character. Disney has been holding up strong, young women as role models since 1950, when Cinderella ran an entire household by herself, prepared the meals, did the laundry and fed all the livestock until she was encouraged by an older woman – her fairy godmother – to rise above her circumstances and all the haters who were trying to hold her down.Cinderella lived happily ever after as a princess in a castle.Admittedly, the vehicle of Cinderella’s escape was Prince Charming.But that was 1950.bIn 1953, Disney gave us Tinker Bell, a loyal, brave and determined pixie forever trailed by glittering pixie dust that can help humans fly if they think happy thoughts. Tinker Bell became one of Disney’s most important icons.r1964  Mary Poppins is an independent woman who knows her own worth. She demands respect at her job and stands up to her boss from the get-go.i1977 In The Rescuers, Penny is a tough little orphan girl who is kidnapped and held prisoner in Devil’s Bayou, where she faces down a pair of trained crocodiles, Brutus and Nero, and thwarts her captors entirely with the help two little mice.Thirteen years ago I wrote the following in the Monday Morning Memo for February 17, 2003.Heroes are dangerous things. Bigger than life, highly exaggerated and always positioned in the most favorable light, a hero is a beautiful lie.We have historic heroes, folk heroes and comic book heroes. We have heroes in books and songs and movies and sport. We have heroes of morality, leadership, kindness and excellence. And nothing is so devastating to our sense of wellbeing as is a badly fallen hero. Yes, heroes are dangerous things to have.The only thing more dangerous is not to have them.Heroes raise the bar we jump and hold high the standards we live by. They are ever-present tattoos on our psyche, the embodiment of all we are striving to be.We create our heroes from our hopes and dreams. And then they attempt to create us in their own image.”Through their skillful crafting of heroes for children, Disney has been telling...

Like most men, I’ve long been fascinated with women.But if we look beyond the physical differences, what is it that defines “woman”? Research reveals a series of definitions so conflicted that I believe anyone who attempts to define “woman” is certain to be criticized.But when has that ever been an impediment to a curious mind?Our examination of the mystery and magic of the feminine begins with 7 quotes that reveal a being so perfect that she can exist only in the imagination of a man. Psychologist Carl Jung calls her the anima.“The lace on a woman’s wrist is an entirely different thing from lace in a shop. In the shop it is a piece of workmanship, on her it is the accentuation of her gentleness of character and refinement.”– Robert Henri, The Art Spirit“The girls in body-form slacks wander the High Street with locked hands while small transistor radios sit on their shoulders and whine love songs in their ears. The younger boys, bleeding with sap, sit on the stools of Tanger’s Drugstore ingesting future pimples through straws. They watch the girls with level goat-eyes and make disparaging remarks to one another while their insides whimper with longing.”– John Steinbeck“What do we know about the goddesses, those elusive female figures, stronger than human males, more dangerous than male deities, who represent not real women but the dreams of real men?”– Alice Bach, Women in the Hebrew Bible, p. 17“I think the idealization of women is indigenous to men. There are various ways of idealizing women, especially sexually, based in almost every case on their inaccessibility. When a woman functions as an unobtainable love object, then she takes on a mythical quality. You can see this principle functioning as a sales device in advertising and in places like Playboy magazine. Almost every movie you see has this quality, because you can’t embrace the image on the screen. Thousands of novels use this principle, because you can’t embrace a printed image on a page.”– James Dickey, Self Interviews, p. 153Gypsy Maiden: One day I will go to your lands and I will dance as a European.Marco Polo: They will love you.Gypsy Maiden: Will I love Venice?Marco Polo: It is magnificent, the city of bridges. Instead of roads we travel on canals in wooden boats.Gypsy Maiden: That’s absurd.Marco Polo: You wouldn’t think that if you saw it.Gypsy Maiden: If it is so magnificent, why are you here and not there?Marco Polo: You must have summoned me.Gypsy Maiden: I did no such thing.  [He tries to kiss her and she turns away.] I’m afraid.Marco Polo: Don’t be.Gypsy Maiden: I’m afraid you will fall in love with me.  All men fall in love with me because I always leave. And there is nothing men love more than the thing they cannot have.– Marco Polo, season two“Her name is Dulcinea, her kingdom, Toboso, which is in La Mancha, her condition must be that of princess, at the very least, for she is my queen and lady, and her beauty is supernatural, for in it one finds the reality of all the impossible.” – Don Quixote, (1605)“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s OwnOur journey will continue in the rabbit hole of Indiana Beagle, where we will examine two additional...

People have been asking me to explain symbols lately.Symbols are a language of the unconscious mind. This is why our dreams are full of them.A person sits alone in a rowboat on the ocean at night, looking up at the stars.That symbol – whether expressed visually or in words – speaks to us of spirituality and practicality; deep thoughts and big challenges.But how? Nowhere among those 17 words is any reference to thoughts or challenges. We are given only a person, a rowboat, water, darkness and stars.The scene is awesome, majestic and lonely.“Oh God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”President John F. Kennedy, deeply aware of the awesomeness of his responsibilities and the majesty of his position and the loneliness that comes with both, kept those 13 words forever before him as a plaque on his desk in the oval office.Ernest Hemingway animated this symbol in his novella, The Old Man and the Sea. Alone and far from shore, Santiago faces the task of landing a fish bigger than his boat and then defending it from a mob of sharks. Looking up at the stars and down into the water and fighting with all his strength for 3 days and 3 nights, Santiago’s soul-searching self-talk won Hemingway the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.Forty-seven years later, Yann Martel conjured this same image to sell more than 10,000,000 copies of The Life of Pi. In the opening line of its summary, Wikipedia says the book “explores issues of spirituality and practicality.” Go figure.I often begin the second day of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop by asking the students,“Did any of you have an interesting dream last night?”I do this because the first day of that class is filled with lots of big ideas coming at you too quickly to digest and assimilate. Dreams are a just side effect of your unconscious mind’s processing of unresolved ideas during the night.Two weeks ago, a first-time Wizard Academy student, a 65 year-old man, raised his hand and said, “I dreamed I was on a gondola in Venice, Italy, when an incredibly beautiful woman came onto the boat and seduced me.”The class laughed, of course, but then the man asked, “Why do you think I had that dream?”“Did you enjoy the day yesterday?”“Very much! It was magical.”“Would you say that you’re on a journey, in an exotic place, overwhelmed by incredibly beautiful new ideas?”The man brightened. “The woman wasn’t a woman at all! She was just a symbol of what I learned!”“Makes sense to me.”“Me, too!”This brings us to the 4 stories celebrated in the art that overflows the campus of Wizard Academy.The Christmas Story of the Magi, or Wise Men (wise-ards,) in Matthew chapter 2 is a story about a group of people who saw beauty and truth where others saw nothing at all. The Wise Men did more than talk; they took action. They counted the cost and launched an adventure. They pulled the trigger and rode the bullet. They followed a star across an ocean of sand.Don Quixote de La Mancha, (1605) is essentially the same story. “This is my quest: to follow that star. No matter how hopeless, no matter how far.” Like the wise-ards before him, Quixote sees and values things that others neither see nor value. But isn’t this a quality of every innovator and entrepreneur? Quixote is driven by his pursuit of Dulcinea, the perfect woman than exists only in the imagination of a man.1 She was recently seen stepping aboard a gondola in Venice, Italy.A Message to Garcia – Translated into every language of the...

I scribbled my original “Twelve Most Common Mistakes in Marketing” on a hotel bar napkin in Portland, Oregon in 1997 and then presented those mistakes in a seminar the next day to 800 people.The following year it became an important chapter in my first book, The Wizard of Ads. Happily, that book went on to become Business Book of the Year in 1998 and it launched a trilogy of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers for me.Even though plenty of people still make the original 12 mistakes, I believe it’s time for an update since a new group has emerged to become the 10 Most Common.Inappropriate Use of Social MediaThe whole world is on FaceBook, but is that the right place for your product or service to be advertised? To get a clear idea of the kinds of offers that are working well on FaceBook, go to the Success Stories page at FaceBook.com. Judging from this list of success stories, it would appear that FaceBook works extremely well for getting people together socially, not so well for hard goods and services. (HINT: I think there may be a reason they call it “social” media.)Overconfidence in the Value of TargetingJeffrey Eisenberg insightfully points out that, “online customers are exactly the same people as offline customers, yet advertisers tend to think of them as an entirely different species.” For the same amount of money it costs you to reach 5 tightly targeted customers online, you can reach 5 customers who have that same profile PLUS 127 of their friends by using broadcast TV or radio. Do you want your brand to be the one people think of immediately and feel the best about when they finally need what you sell?The Assumption that Every Message is RelevantWhy does every advertiser believe their product or service category to be intrinsically interesting? More than information, entertainment is the currency with which you can happily buy your prospective customer’s time and attention. But most ads have zero entertainment value.Fear of CriticismMost ads aren’t written to persuade. They’re written not to offend. But any message that has the power to move people will always move some of them in the wrong direction. When you’ve written a good ad, you must brace yourself for the negative backlash you’ll receive from people who are anxious to be offended. The only alternative is to forever settle for ads that are mushy, mundane and mediocre. Please don’t.Measuring Ad Effectiveness Too QuicklyIts claim to “instantly and accurately measure every ad’s effectiveness” is part of what makes digital marketing so appealing to advertisers. But didn’t you say you want your brand to be the one people think of immediately and feel the best about when they finally need what you sell? This requires ongoing advertising and longer measurement cycles. You cannot hold every ad immediately accountable and expect to build relationship with your customer.Unsubstantiated ClaimsAdjectives are the marks of an ad filled with empty rhetoric.Verbs are the marks of an ad that demonstrates its claims.Verbs – action words – “show” your customer what your product can do. Fluffy adjectives simply “tell” them. In the words of Christopher J. Maddock, “Show, don’t tell.”Believing that “Old” Media No Longer WorksIt is true that you need a website and that most customers are going to visit your website before making first contact with you. Therefore, it’s vital that your website be a good one. But if you believe that online marketing is the most efficient way to drive traffic to your website, you need to go back and read Most Common...

Indiana Beagle is the spirit of curiosity, exploration and adventure. His twin sister Intuition is the beagle of my Destinae trilogy and the mother of Faith and Hope.Intuition is wordless but Indy can speak.Intuition came to life in June, 2001, during some early morning laughter with Princess Pennie.There is a beagle in our brain,” I shouted in mock rage, “and it must be unleashed to go where it will!” With my fist raised in defiance to anyone who would keep their beagle tethered, I shouted, “Free the Beagle! Free the Beagle! Aroooo! Arooooo! Aroooooo!”The subject of our laughter became a Monday Morning Memo, “The Beagle in Your Brain,” the following week. Two months later it was chapter 54 in Magical Worlds of the Wizard of Ads, which quickly became a Wall Street Journal bestseller.It was only when I was writing the Destinae trilogy that I realized Intuition has a mischievous brother, Indy, who can walk into any work of art and instantly be in that place, at that time. For Indy, photos and paintings are portals, giving him entrance into other worlds.But isn’t that what photos and paintings do for all of us?Indiana doesn’t appear in the Destinae trilogy because that’s the story of his sister. Likewise, you’ll find no photo or painting of Indy on the campus of Wizard Academy in Austin. When he isn’t guiding guests through a rabbit hole, Indy lives in the art collection you’ll find in the 12 buildings, 18 courtyards, parks and gardens, and 98 uniquely decorated rooms of that place.When you’re here and a work of art intrigues you, ask Indy what it means.There’s a scene at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) that tells us where Indiana Jones got his name.SALLAH: “Please, what does it always mean, this, this ‘Junior?'”HENRY JONES: “That’s his name. ‘Henry Jones, Junior.'”INDIANA JONES: “I like Indiana.”HENRY JONES: “We named the dog Indiana.”SALLAH: “The dog? (heh-heh) You are named after the dog?” (Laughter)INDIANA JONES: (Irritated) “I’ve got a lot of fond memories of that dog.”Like I said, Indiana Beagle is the spirit of curiosity, exploration and adventure. This is why he’s the guiding spirit of the Worldwide Worthless Bastards.“You know, Lydia, I used to be a rationalist.”“What is that?”“Well, it’s sort of believing only in what you see, or hear, or feel. But lately, I’ve begun to suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than I ever dreamed in my philosophy.”“You learn much when you learn that.”– Colonel Ralph Denistoun to the gypsy woman, Lydia, in Paramount’s 1947 Movie, Golden EarringsIndy and I have enjoyed the conversations we’ve had with prospective members of the Worthless Bastards during the past several weeks.Here’s what those conversations sound like:“You should join us at the Toad and Ostrich Pub on Friday afternoons at four.”“What do you do there?”“We just talk, mostly. But you’re not allowed to discuss business, or work, or politics or sports. And you can’t complain about anything or talk about your problems.”“What is there to talk about, then?”“We sip water and tea and wine and whisky and talk about music we love or movies we’ve seen or restaurants we’ve tried or sometimes someone will do a magic trick or tell a funny story about growing up or a colorful person they used to know. It’s really amazing how interesting people can be when business and politics and sports are off the table.”Worthless Bastards are...

When I was a boy, I wanted an older brother.Not just a year or two older, but six or eight or ten years older. I wanted to be able to ask him things and trust the motives behind his answers.Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to accumulate seven older brothers who speak wisdom into my life. These brothers give me the benefit of all their experiences – their successes and their mistakes – and help me remember who I am.I’ve never told you this, but I like to think of myself as your older brother. I try to give you the benefit of my experiences, if indeed there is any benefit to be found.Today your brother needs a favor. Will you indulge me?I’ve always been proud and ashamed that I never went to college. So when a group of scholars – department heads of major universities, mostly – asked me to contribute a chapter to their book about what Don Quixote means to the average person in the 21st century, well, I jumped at the chance.And then I put off getting started.And now I need to get it done.That’s where you come in.Will you write me a sentence or two or twenty about what Don Quixote represents to you?It doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve read the book. Your thoughts and feelings will come from wherever they come from. That’s the beauty of this project. You don’t have to defend your opinion, you only have to have one.Every generation for the past 400 years has seen Don Quixote differently. How do you see him today? What do you take from the story? Who is Sancho Panza and why does he matter? Who is Dulcinea and what does she mean to you? And if you are familiar with any of the other characters and elements of the story, I’d love to hear your thoughts and interpretations of those as well.How do you see Don Quixote? Your response can be as brief or as in-depth as you choose.Twenty different Cervantes scholars will each contribute a chapter to the book. I was the nineteenth person to receive an invitation, but at least I got invited.It means a lot to me.My chapter is supposed to be 5,000 words, so I need to hear from a lot of you. And please remember to give me your first and last name and your permission to publish what you send me. Also, tell me what you do for a living.Indy has volunteered to help me by collecting your emails at [email protected] of my older brothers, Ray Bard and Don Kuhl, have already contributed their thoughts and will definitely be represented in my chapter.I’d love to see your name alongside theirs.Roy H. Williams

“Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver.” The wit of these 7 words is rooted in the fact that the second sentence is an anomaly – an unexpected intrusion into the oft-repeated idea that silence is golden. The anomaly is then brought to closure and resolved in the mind of the listener. Duct tape is, in fact, silver. You smile a little.Bad ads leave no gaps and have no anomalies. Everything is stated clearly. No questions form in the mind of the customer.Good ads intrigue the customer and arouse their curiosity. Online marketers call this “engagement.”Novelists, screenwriters and storytellers have been intriguing us for decades, yet few people in advertising ever bother to study how they do it.Good news: I am one of those few people.Good storytellers use gaps and anomalies to trick the reader/listener/viewer into supplying the information they intentionally left out.Result: engagement.But… it’s up to your reader/listener/viewer to find resolution and bring closure to your mystery. Will he or she be able to piece it together and figure it out?Here’s an example of an effective ad that uses gaps and anomalies to elevate the interest of the listener:Guy2: You heard about John and Elisabeth?Guy1: Never thought he’d do it.Guy2: I never thought she’d say YES. [both laugh]Guy1: She definitely could’ve done better.Guy2: Yeah. I think John knows that, too.Guy1: Did he go to Ramsey’s?Guy2: Yeah, he got that part right, but he was about to mess it all up.Guy1: How?Guy2: He was just gonna hand it to her like it was a box of cookies.Guy1: Who saved him?Guy2: His ring consultant at Ramsey’s asked him how he planned to propose.Guy1: Yeah, mine asked me, too.Guy2: John didn’t have a plan, so his consultant said, “Hey, you’re giving her a ring from the Heart of New Orleans collection. Why not give it to her in the Heart of New Orleans?”Guy1: Please tell me he’s gonna follow through on that.Guy2: Yeah, he’s putting together a big master plan.Guy 1: Every town should have a Ramsey’s.Guy 2: Definitely.ROY: Rrrramsey’s Diamond Jewelers, on Veterans at I-10 in Metairie and on the West Bank in Fountain Park Centre on Manhattan.Caroline: and at Ramseys dot com.How long did it take you to figure out that John had asked Elisabeth to marry him? Yet the characters never say marry, marriage, engaged, engagement or proposed. Likewise, the fact that Ramsey’s is a jewelry store was left unsaid until the announcer finally mentions it in his closing tag.Here’s another ad – written on the same day – that leaves out a different kind of information. This ad features two characters that have been in this radio campaign together 52 weeks a year for more than a dozen years.Sarah: Shopping for an engagement ring at Spence is different from every other jewelry store on earth.Sean: [doubtful.] That’s a pretty big statement. You’re going to need to back that...

If the pendulum of the West continues as it has for 3,000 years, our current “We” generation will zenith in 2023.Frankly, I’m looking forward to getting past that zenith and heading back the other way. The early part of a “Me” generation is a beautiful thing. But then again, so is the early part of a “We.”It’s as we approach a zenith that everything goes out of control.If you want to understand today’s crazy American politics, you need only to look at the pendulum.A generation – for the purposes of today’s discussion – is not a group of birth cohorts, but life cohorts, everyone who is alive at a particular moment. We’re not talking about Millennials, Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers. We’re talking about the personality-shaping values that enchanted each of these groups during their adolescence. Those same ideas and values then altered the worldview of their mothers and fathers, the birth cohorts that preceded them.I was 5 years old in 1963, the year the most recent “Me” generation began its upswing toward the zenith of 1983, when Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and shouted, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The president at the zenith of the previous “Me” (1903) was Teddy “San Juan Hill” Roosevelt and during the “Me” prior to him (1823) it was James Monroe, the president who notified European powers that America would no longer tolerate colonial expansion in our hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine effectively said to all the powers of Europe, “Step back or we’ll kick your ass.”A “Me” Generation is about individuality and self-expression, marching to the beat of a different drummer. It’s when one-of-a-kind is king, so do your own thing. A “Me” is the time of heroes.“Me” the individual, possessing unlimited potential,1. …demands freedom of expression.2. …applauds personal liberty.3. …believes one man is wiser than a million men,“A camel is a racehorse designed by a committee.”4. …wants to create a better life.5. …is about big dreams.6. …desires to be Number One. “I came, I saw, I conquered.”7. …admires confidence and is attracted to decisive persons.8. …leadership is, “Look at me. Admire me. Emulate me if you can.”9. …strengthens a society’s sense of identity as it elevates attractive heroes.10. …produces individuality and differentiation, one-of-a-kind heroes.Both “We” and “Me” are built on beautiful ideas, but we always take a good thing too far and then crave what we left behind. So we turn and face the opposite direction and do it all over again.And we’ve been doing it for 3,000 years.I was 45 at the beginning of the upswing of our current “We” generation (2003.)The driving force behind a “We” is “working together for the common good.”“We,” the group, the team, the tribe:1. …demands conformity for the common good.2. …applauds personal responsibility.3. …believes a million men are wiser than one man,“Two heads are better than one.”4. …wants to create a better world.5. …is about small actions.6. …desires to be a team member. “I came, I saw, I concurred.”7. …admires humility and is attracted to thoughtful persons.8. …leadership is, “Here’s the problem. Let’s work together to solve it.”9....

Chronic dissatisfaction is the price of progress.Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are famous for never being satisfied. Always pushing, driving, demanding, questioning, never slowing, positively perfectionist.But is it wise to look at them as role models?What’s the value of pushing and driving if you can never be satisfied?These questions occurred to me as Pennie and I drove to the new home of close friends last week to sit and mourn the death of their mother. My pocket pixie spoke to us along the way. She was the perfect navigator, telling us where to turn and how far it would be before we’d need to turn again.That drive took 49 minutes.If someone had told me 28 years ago that I would one day carry a device in my pocket that would cheerfully guide me to any place I named, I would have thought them insane. But my pocket pixie also plays any song I want and shows me TV shows and movies and gives me details about everything important that’s happening in the world. She is the catalogue of all that can be bought and the repository of all the world’s history and knowledge. Touch a button and she becomes a camera. Another touch and she records a video. You can also use her as a telephone.Oh, I forgot to mention that when she’s being a catalogue, all I have to do is touch a button and she will purchase the item, charge it to my credit card and ship it to my house by 2nd-Day air.One click.But none of this surprises you. In fact, I wearied you a little by carrying on about it for three paragraphs. Am I right?You have an iPhone or something like it and you know how to use the navigator function on Google Maps and MP3 players have been around awhile and streaming video has been global for a decade.No king or emperor, pharaoh or czar ever lived in the comfort of a modest home with central heat and air conditioning. None of them ever ate such a wide variety of delicacies or enjoyed such entertainments as you and I have at our fingertips.We live beneath a waterfall of inventions and innovations and improvements. They come at us faster than we can see. Your pocket pixie has more than 1.5 million apps available that will give her specialized powers to serve you in ways you’ve never imagined.Yet we roll our eyes as we yawn and ask, “Is that all?”Chronic dissatisfaction is the price of progress and we are the most dissatisfied generation that has ever lived.I should know. I make my living by pointing at things and promising they will make tomorrow better than yesterday.I am an American ad man.If I were to run for president, I would be a spectacle. I would speak directly to the deepest dissatisfactions and frustrations and fears of the people. I would throw accusations and blame from my fingertips with such power that people would see me as a straight-talking teller of the truth. I would be colorful and irreverent and entertaining and keep you focused only on your dissatisfaction. I would promise to fix it all.My accusations could be silly.My promises could be ridiculous.The only thing that would need be true is the dissatisfaction of the people.And we are the most dissatisfied generation that has ever lived.Let us hope I never run for president because I would be a terrible one.And all it tookfor me to realize thiswas the deathof the motherof a friend.Roy H. Williams

Hungry people look for food.Sad people look for hope.Ambitious people look for opportunity.Oppressed people look for escape.But if food is available and you are neither sad nor oppressed and your ambition is – for now at least – satisfied, you are contented.Contented people look for entertainment.The company that wins more of the customer’s time is the one most likely to win their money.What currency do you offer your customer in exchange for their time?Do you offer them information?Information holds little interest for persons who aren’t currently in the market for your product.Information is valuable only to a customer who is currently, consciously in the market for a product they haven’t already chosen in their heart. This is when the search engine optimization energy of all your competitors will wiggle and wink at your customer from 46 different directions.SEO is a last-minute, last-ditch attempt to win the affections of the undecided and uncommitted.Why not win your customer’s heart before they need your product?Great ads make customers think of you immediately – and feel good about you – when they finally need what you sell.Would you like to win your customer’s time and attention?Give them entertainment.ENTERTAINMENT: “A thing to which a person chooses to direct their attention due to the pleasure it brings them.”We direct our attention to many things each day that do not bring us pleasure: the obligations that come with employment and the ambushes that come with life; tax returns and kids in trouble, lawsuits and medical problems.Entertainment is a currency.You would be amazed at what you can buy with it.You may recall that last week’s Monday Morning Memo ended with these lines:Weirdly, Wizard Academy doesn’t advertise. The only way you’ll hear about the Academy is from an alumnus who thinks you belong.And guess what?You do belong.”I was able to say “you belong” because you were entertained enough by the subject matter to read it all the way through to the end.And now you’ve done it again.This makes me happy.It’s a clear indication that you are a self-selected member our tribe.Welcome.Roy H. Williams,with Indy Beagle andAll the Cognoscenti of Wizard Academy.

In the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”But day after day, week after week, month after month, things that are “merely urgent” keep me from doing what is truly important.What? That’s been happening to you, too?On Tuesday, Vice Chancellor Whittington and I slowed down long enough to have our first real planning session since he accepted the job 2 and 1/2 years ago.But some great strides have been made during that 2 and 1/2 years.Our online learning center – AmericanSmallBusiness.org – is gaining momentum and beginning to raise eyebrows all over the world.Whisk(e)y Sommeliers certified through our Whisk(e)y Marketing School are in high demand and every class is selling out.The campus no longer looks like a work-in-progress. Our diamond-in-the-rough is beginning to sparkle!The House of the Lost Boys (6 rooms) and Bilbo Baggins House (1 room) are in the final stages of preparation and we’re hoping to break ground on one of them before the end of the year.I’ve begun to be overshadowed by some of the other instructors. It’s not uncommon for me to greet a roomful of students only to learn that more than half of them have never heard of me! This is a good thing and important to the long-term health of the school.But this is what made last week’s planning session so important:Harvard University – established in 1636 – is organized into eleven separate academic units.Yale University – founded in 1701 – is organized into fourteen constituent schools.Wizard Academy – established in 2000 – is currently being organized into seven constituent schools.Writing SchoolThis series of classes will include the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop, Advanced Wordsmithing and Brandable Chunks, the Young Writers Workshop, Fiction and Screenwriting Workshop, and How to Write and Sell Non-Fiction.Digital Marketing SchoolThis series of classes will include Direct Response Ad Writing, Buyer Legends, Principles of Online Video, Effective Social Media Strategies, and How to Create Online Education for Customers and EmployeesScience SchoolThis series of classes will align the principles of growing and guiding a business to the universal principles of science and physics. Classes will include DaVinci and the 40 Answers, Portals and the 12 Languages of the Mind, How To Sell Upscale Products and Services, Magic School, Fundraising for Non-Profits, Music and Creativity, The Art Marketing Workshop, Reputation Management, and Branding Highway.Decision SchoolThese courses will deal with the important decisions of life such as marriage, relationships, faith and psychology. (Wizard Academy’s Wedding Chapel Dulcinea is an outward-facing public extension of Decision School.) Courses will include Selling Customers Their Way, How to Lead a Dynamic Team, Public Speaking 101, Conflict Resolution, What to Do With the Rest of Your Life, and Escape the Box.School of FinanceThese classes will deal with the money side of business, including Employee Compensation Strategies, Personal and Business Finance (a.k.a. Budgeting Sucks!) Taxes and Legal Compliance, Diversity of Income, and How to Make Awesome Sauce.Whisk(e)y Marketing SchoolA series of certification courses instructing students in the arts of storytelling and pageantry related to Bourbon Whiskey and Scotch Whisky. Our certified Whiskey Sommeliers are in high demand to...

When his classmates at Wizard Academy dared him to do it, Garrison Cox rewrote the opening section of the Declaration of Independence to make it more easily understood. According to Garrison, Thomas Jefferson’s original was written at grade level 19.5. That’s a college education plus 3-and-a-half years of grad school!Garrison wrote his first revision at grade level 10.3 and his second revision at grade level 5.2. You can read all three versions below.Frankly, I was stunned by the impact of Garrison’s playful exercise.That’s why I decided to share it with you and it’s why Pennie and I have given Wizard Academy $6,000 to award to three lucky adventurers bold enough to follow in Garrison’s footsteps.Here’s the deal: The Conversation of the Dogs is a short novella written by Miguel de Cervantes in 1613. Many scholars consider it to be his finest work next to Don Quixote, but I can find only one translation of that story into English and it sounds as high-toned as Thomas Jefferson!Cervantes work is now in the public domain, of course, so we can mess with it all we want and even publish it when we’re done. You can download that lone English version – translated from the Spanish in 1881 by Walter K. Kelley of London – in the rabbit hole. Just click the image of Dog Quixote de La Mancha at the top of this page and the download link will magically appear.The story begins with a young man in a hospital, who, through a window, sees and hears two dogs begin to speak at the stroke of midnight. The dogs, Scipio and Berganza, discuss their experiences with their human masters. Cervantes leaves the reader to determine whether or not the dogs have actually been talking or the bedridden man has imagined it.Are you up for this adventure? By entering, you agree to allow Wizard Academy to distribute your “simplified language version” to all the world. You will receive no royalties, but you will be free to distribute your work in whatever additional ways seem good to you.The goal is to tell the complete story in fewer words using simpler language. Don’t worry about the grade level of your writing. Just make it simple and fun to read and do your best to capture the wit and humor and personality of each of the characters.Send your rewritten Conversation of the Dogs to [email protected] before midnight July 4, 2016.And now here are those 3 versions of the Declaration I told you about.ORIGINAL (GRADE LEVEL 19.5):THE UNANIMOUS DECLARATION OF THE THIRTEEN UNITED STATES OF AMERICAWhen in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most...

A developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods. An environmentalist is someone who already has a house in the woods.”– Dennis MillerWe think everyone else sees what we see. How could they not?And we think everyone would believe what we believe if only we could explain it clearly.But this is almost never true.Two people stand shoulder-to-shoulder observing a scene.One person sees pain and injustice and despair.The other sees opportunity and purpose and adventure.The first person sees the second as an impractical dreamer.The second sees the first as a complaining pessimist.Every person has a schema, a belief system about how the world works. Your schema is the lens through which you see and feel the world around you. It dictates your perceptual reality. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying your schema changes the facts. It just changes how you interpret them.Twice a week for the past several weeks, Ray Bard has been sending out clusters of about 20 quotes to more than 1,000 quote judges so that we might help him score their impact. Last week, Ray told us something every ad writer knows.There’s always some surprises about which quotes score the highest. But there’s one thing that doesn’t surprise me anymore. It’s the range of opinions. For example, in the last Collection someone said: ‘Seems like you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for quotes,’ and the very next person commenting said: ‘So many great quotes. All winners for me.’”If your message has the power to move people, you can be certain that it won’t move everyone in the hoped-for direction. If you’re not prepared to smile your way through negative backlash from well-meaning friends, employees and associates, you’re never going to craft a message that will pierce the clutter of this over-communicated world.Ninety percent of all the books published each year are non-fiction. But the fiction books – the 10 percent – comprise 90 percent of all book sales. In the words of Tom Robbins, “People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.”Fictional characters in movies, novels and TV shows seem real even when we know they are not. We know fiction to be untrue, yet we treat it for a time as if it were true. We are simultaneously naïve, believing what we are told, and savvy, aware of the deception.Seven weeks ago I told you about a persuasion researcher, Maria Konnikova, whose work is being funded by two universities, Harvard and Columbia. Maria says the more a story transports us into its world, the more likely we are to believe it. The sweep of a story overcomes the facts of logic. When we are entertained by a story, we are likely to agree with the beliefs the story implies.In short: a story can reshape your schema.It is no accident that Jesus taught in parables.Most of us enjoy being pulled into a story. But some people have no taste for fiction or whimsy or wit.What you’re about to read is real and it happens all the time. My friend Jerry received this voicemail just last week:I am embarrassed for you because of your turning your business over to such a young person that has such a voice that I have to turn off the commercial. I have to go to my radio and turn it off. It hurts my ears. And the commercials are just childish. They are not professional. No, they are not professional. I would not use your company for anything. I am regretful I have used you forever. I told the world to use you. I’ve gotten you a million customers. I’m embarrassed and ashamed. And I’m sorry I have to make this phone call.”Would you like to know what triggered such heartfelt concern?[SFX – crickets, trucks driving...