Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

“I did all the right things. I touched all the bases in exactly the right order and I was highly rewarded for it. If you had done what I did, you would have been rewarded, too.” Abel didn’t say it, but Cain heard it. And in his rage, Cain sent his brother to the other side of that open door through which we all must exit. Do you remember the Nashville man who blew himself up inside his motorhome i...

When you list “features and benefits” in your ads, you are speaking to the customer who is currently, consciously in the market for your product. What percentage of the public do you suppose that might be? One percent? I doubt it. In most categories, it is only a tiny fraction of one percent. But what about the remaining 99.9 percent? When they aren’t in the market for your product, they have no i...

Jeffrey Eisenberg and I had lunch in a Japanese restaurant on April 28, 2007. I know this because he said something I quickly wrote down and later added to my Random Quotes database: “Marketers are paid to make promises that businesses have no intention of keeping.” Jeffrey wasn’t talking about marketing; he was talking about company culture, that invisible component that causes businesses to rise...

The illustration at the top of today’s Monday Morning Memo features Indy Beagle wearing a yarmulke as he says, “The  FBI  just released its hate crime statistics for 2020.  Are you ready?  36% of victims were attacked for being black, 10% were attacked for being white, and 9% were attacked for being Jewish. Of all hate crimes motivated by hatred of the victims due to their reli...

Did anyone besides me grow up reading the King James Bible? Shakespeare was 40 years old when King James commissioned a new translation of the Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek Bible into English, and he was 47 when it was published in 1611. During those 7 years, Shakespeare wrote a dozen plays including  Othello, All’s Well That Ends Well, King Lear, Macbeth,  and  The Tempest.  So if the...

A snapshot is a message in a bottle floating on the ocean of time. We had “picture day” at school when I was growing up. Is that still a thing? Our 8th grade yearbooks were delivered to Sequoyah Junior High the following summer, just before we started the 9th grade. There was no internet, no email back then, just letters in our mailboxes telling us to come to the school and pick up our yearbooks o...

You are too young to remember when there were no search engines. Sit. Relax. I’ll tell you about it. In the days before the dawning of the internet and the Age of Aquarius, every household was given a fat telephone book, and in the White Pages of that book, the names of companies and individuals were listed alphabetically. To find a company’s contact info, all you needed to know was their name. Br...

A branded keyword  is one in which the name of your company appears. When a customer types the name of your company into a search string, they are looking for you, they believe in you. A friend might have recommended you, but usually it was your advertising that won them over. Either way, you have done well. Unbranded keywords  include phrases like “air conditioning repair” and “diamond...

A verb avalanche is a highly engaging description that causes you to see, hear, and feel action all around you. You dodge each tumbling word-boulder only to leap, jump, roll and scramble to dodge the mountainside of word-boulders that follow close behind it. causes, see, hear, feel, dodge, tumbling, leap, jump, roll, scramble, dodge, follow That example included 12 verbs among 43 total words.&nbsp...

Isaac Newton discovered that force –  impact  ­– is the result of mass x acceleration. This is why the impact of any statement you make = the size of the idea x the speed of successfully transferring it from your mind to the mind of your customer. Newton also discovered, “For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.” The faster an advertised offer produces big results, the l...

Edwin Twitmyer failed to close a loophole and it cost him the Nobel Prize. Twitmyer was working on his doctorate in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation was on  The Effect of Emotions on the Patellar Reflex, or Knee Jerk. To make his research possible, Twitmyer built an elevated chair with a remote-controlled rubber hammer that would strike the person’s patellar tend...

My friend Brian Scudamore shared a story with me last week. Today I’m sharing it with you. Ted Leonsis was on a little commuter airplane that lost the ability to use its wing flaps and landing gear. Face-to-face with the possibility of imminent death, Ted wrote a list of 101 things that he promised himself he would do if he lived. Start to finish, that list took 20 minutes. By May 27, 2021, Ted ha...

Bad marketing is about you, your company, your product, your service. “I, me, my, we, our…” Good marketing is about the customer, and how your product or service can elevate their happiness. “You, you, you, you, your…” With every purchase we make, we shout to the world who we are. We are attracted to products and services and brands and celebrities and organizations and friends because we see a re...

Peter Raible was born in 1929 and he died in 2004. Of all the interesting things he said, this is perhaps my favorite: “We build on foundations we did not lay. We warm ourselves by fires we did not light. We sit in the shade of trees we did not plant. We drink from wells we did not dig. We profit from persons we did not know. This is as it should be. Together we are more than a...

It is 3AM on a Thursday morning and I haven’t yet written the MondayMorningMemo. In fact, I haven’t even started it. The fact that you are reading it right now means that I did, in the end, get it done, such as it is. Reading is a form of transportation that takes you to a different place and time. You are with me at 3AM as I try to think of something that might entertain you. I keep asking you wh...

You choose a frame every time you look through the lens of a camera, sketch an image with a pencil, or write words with a pen. But today you’re going to start choosing your frames consciously, rather than unconsciously. The job of the ad writer is to introduce a new perspective and trigger a new belief. The best ads make people think and feel differently. When you look through the lens of a camera...

A small chapel was built in Spain in the year 1150. Its name translates into English as, “Our Lady of the High Grasses,” because a religious icon was lost and then found in the high grasses or “tocha” nearby. For nearly 1,000 years, this chapel of  Nuestra Señora de Atocha  has been standing in the center of Madrid, with the life of the city revolving around it. Well, not exact...

Your ability to speak and understand words is a function of the logical, rational, sequential, deductive-reasoning left hemisphere of your brain. Your left-brain hungers for accuracy and seeks to forecast a result.1 But the other half of your brain – the wordless right hemisphere – is wired for pattern recognition.2 The right hemisphere has no morals, no discretion, and doesn’t care whether a...

My friend Brian Scudamore said something so insightful that Starbucks printed it on 10 million coffee cups: “It’s difficult for people to get rid of junk. They get attached to things and let them define who they are. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this business, it’s that you are what you can’t let go of.” Brian was talking about physical junk and mental junk as well. What is the junk you ne...

You lead the world in client attraction, client acquisition, and client retention. A prospective client has made an appointment with you. I am invited to watch and take notes. These are those notes: In your first meeting with a prospective client, always have a white board or a pad of those giant “stickie notes” to write on. Bring your own colored markers. If you are in their facility instead of y...

At the bottom of last week’s Monday Morning Memo, I asked, “Does it surprise you that the multibillion-dollar investment funds that used to buy manufacturing companies and mortgages are now bidding to buy successful home service companies at record-setting prices?” Immediately following my publishing of that comment, a client of my partner Ryan Chute asked him for any insights he might be able to...

Have you noticed that 2-day deliveries are taking 4 to 5 days to arrive? Shipping companies can’t hire enough warehouse workers and delivery drivers. Have you noticed how long it takes to get the food you ordered? Restaurants can’t hire enough kitchen workers and wait-staff to serve their customers. Service companies nationwide are seeing just 3 or 4 job applicants respond to online recruitment ad...

An overwhelming force enters the marketplace. A train is coming. You wish it wasn’t. 1. Will you stand on the track with your back to the train and deny its existence? This business owner is saying, “Their customer is not our customer. They will not affect us.” He is doomed by his delusion. 2. Will you denounce the train to everyone who will listen? This second business owner says to sta...

Information can be objectively true but have no relevance to you personally. This is the difference between objective reality and perceptual reality. The opposite is true, as well. You can perceive a person to be beautiful when that person is objectively average. You can also perceive information to be important when in truth, it is not. But in perceptual reality, that person is beautiful. In perc...

“Don’t look where you don’t want to go.” Every mountain climber knows this rule, and I want you to know it, too. Your mind has conscious and unconscious power over your actions. When you imagine something, you begin bringing it to pass. What is the mountain you’re trying to climb? If you want a happy and joyful marriage, imagine what that would look like. Not just from your own perspective, but fr...