Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

Your assumptions about the intelligence of your customer will colorize and slant your ad writing in ways of which you are not even aware. Is the customer stupid? The writer of the 139th Psalm did not believe that customers are stupid. He said to God, “I will praise you; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Harvard University Medical School made a 3-minute film that illustrates the idea t...

When a person assumes they have superior wisdom, they will offer you their advice. This is an unmistakable sign they think you are an idiot. I smile when a person says to me, “Can I offer you some friendly advice?” They instinctively use the word “friendly” as a qualifier because, deep in their guts, they know what they are about to say isn’t friendly at all. They want to give me their critique, t...

Bad ads waddle like a porcupine and make lots of little points. Good ads charge like a rhinoceros and make a single point powerfully. This is true regardless of your choice of media. Ad budgets are like that, too. When universities ask me to address their Advertising & Marketing majors just prior to graduation, I always warn those young “advertising experts” never to give advice to friends or...

Brian, good thoughts! The  Neuroscience of Behavior Change  link you sent was a great explanation of what Dr. Alan Baddeley calls “Procedural Memory.” You will recall this from The Magical Worlds Communications Workshop at Wizard Academy. Working Memory  is consciousness, imagination, the thought you are thinking NOW. Semantic Declarative Memory  contains things you can remembe...

1492:  An Italian, funded by the Queen of Spain, sailed west to find the east, discovered a small island in the Caribbean, decided it was India, and sailed home to share the happy news. Ponce de León, Balboa, Cordoba, Cortés, Coronado and 24 other conquistadors were sent from Spain to bring home whatever they could find. 1562:  France sent Laudonnière on 3 expeditions to South Carol...

Hollywood has been feeding us romanticized history ever since  Birth of a Nation  splattered across the silver screen in 1915. Romanticized history is a lie. People will always believe lies that reinforce their worldview. Hollywood feeds us romanticized history because we love it, and the fictions we love best are those heroic stories of pioneers and settlers and cowboys during the years...

They did  not  do it because they thought it would be funny. Four members of the Jamaica Defense Force did it as a statement of pride and determination. Dudley Stokes, Devon Harris, Michael White and Caswell Allen traveled from their tropical island to snowy Canada hoping to make it into the 1988 Winter Olympics. Miraculously, they qualified. When Caswell Allen was injured...

“Giving a microphone to every human being is the worst mistake we have made in human history.” ME:  Are you saying social media was a mistake? “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.” ­– Dale Carnegie ME:  But doesn’t everyone deserve to be heard?...

We were sitting in my backyard sharing a $600 bottle of wine he had brought. He said, “I got all 250 of my employees together on a Zoom call and told them, ‘You can disagree passionately and share your opinion while we are in the discussion phase, but when a decision has been made, you need to  commit  to the successful implementation of that decision as though it had been your own. To d...

If one were to assume that a blank sheet of paper – complete freedom – is the best way to coax maximum creativity from the human mind, one would be wrong. The highest levels of creativity are launched from the tightest constraints. Consider this request made a couple of weeks ago by a student in  our monthly webcast. Hi Roy, I work with a micro-distillery in our province who recently develope...

I have long been fascinated by twilight. In fact, I often use that word to describe flavors that are complex and muted. But what is twilight, really? “Twilight is the illumination of the lower atmosphere when the Sun is not directly visible because it is below the horizon. Twilight is produced by sunlight scattering in the upper atmosphere, illuminating...

The 2021 we’ve been waiting for has not yet begun. I was reminded of this when I received a meme from a friend. It said, “Omg, what’s the first thing you’re gonna do when YOU get the vaccine shot?? You’re gonna go back home, wait a month, get your second shot, go back home, wait 14 days for antibodies, then keep wearing a mask and social distancing until community transmission reduction. That’s wh...

We live in a nation that has mistaken pleasure for happiness. Pleasure can be pursued directly, but not happiness. Think of the times you have felt truly happy. In each of those moments, you were feeling grateful for something; a special moment with a special person, a beautiful sunset, the arrival of good news… Happiness is the warm glow of gratitude, and the happiest people in the world are...

INDY BEAGLE’S DAY OFF A Story by Indy Beagle, Written in 3 Chapters CHAPTER ONE Spraytan and Boxwine arrived in a white Cadillac convertible fringed in blondes. Boxwine slid out the passenger door and reached for the nozzle while I was filling up my new Hudson pickup on the other side of the pump. I gave him a steady stare. “What have you done?” “We’re headed to the lake. Wanna come? You can bring...

Reading the title of this essay, “What Would You Have Me Do?” might cause you to imagine me defending myself, saying in effect, “I had no choice.” But I want you to hear those words in an entirely different tone of voice. “What would you have me do?” is a quiet question that I often ask God when I am feeling conflicted or uncertain. I cannot not say I always feel him guiding my heart in answer to...

“In a bombing run over Kassel, Germany, Elmer Bendiner’s B-17 bomber was barraged by 20-millimeter shells which resulted in direct hits on their gas tanks. But none of the shells exploded. The next day, the maintenance chief found 11 shells inside the gas tanks, any one of which should have taken the plane down. When they opened the shells, all were empty, except one. In it was a hand-wr...

Do you have a deep-seated belief, but you’re not sure where it came from? I have passionately rejected the idea of goalsetting for more than 50 years, but I’ve never understood why I felt so deeply about it until just a moment ago. Welcome to Sunday morning, November 29, 2020. The word “goal” has a certain wishfulness attached to it. “Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may,...

The partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in 1979 happened because of a burned-out lightbulb. When a particular safety system was malfunctioning, that bulb would light up and the technician would alertly take care of the problem. No one anticipated a burned-out bulb. Their mistake, according to my partner Cedric, is that they were monitoring for failure instead of monitoring fo...

Works of art are made by people who have tasted one or more of the nine juices of life and they want you to taste the juice, too. This was the belief of a teacher who lived in India 2,000 years ago. His thoughts were chronicled in the  Natya Shastra  of the Hindus. According to that teacher*, these are the Nine Juices of Life: Love  heals pain and frees the ego. Your appreciation of...

This is what good marketers see when they close their eyes: Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind of the customer will always create logic to justify what their heart has already decided. We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and announce to the world around us – who we are. A tribe is a group of self-selected insiders. Identify a tribe, (an affinity group.) Develop that tribe. Marke...

Every beginning starts with an ending. This is one of the principles of Pendulum theory. And the middle is always in the middle. When our fight with King George ended in 1783, thirteen powerless colonies became “The United States.” This was the beginning of the first America; 3 million citizens clinging to the eastern edge of a vast, uncharted wilderness. Truly, “a land of opportunity.” Eighty yea...

Dr. Seuss had 1. the courage to make up new words, 2. the confidence that his readers would understand what these new words meant, and 3. he was a master of meter, the rhythm that is created when you arrange your words so that the stressed and unstressed syllables fall into patterns. There are a couple dozen types of meter, but Dr. Seuss used only one of them, anapestic meter, sometimes called gal...

Jacques Cousteau, the man who made the world care about the ocean, said, “A lot of people attack the sea. I make love to it.” But he was French. Not being French, I don’t see each day’s work as a choice between attacking or love-making. I see the future unfurl each morning as a fork in the road. Will I choose the battleground or the playground? Do you see business as a necessity of life, a battleg...

The economy, commerce, business, the stock market and free trade: all of these were built on our ability to sell things to each other. This is why the job of the ad writer is incredibly important. Television and radio, newspapers and magazines, direct mail and email, word-of-mouth and live chat, social media and outdoor, telephone calls and sales calls are just different channels of communication....

Seinfeld was “a show about nothing,” but we couldn’t get enough of it because each of us knew a George, an Elaine, and a Kramer. Rebecca Solnit’s book,  The Faraway Nearby,  reminds me of  Seinfeld.  I love this book, but I can’t really explain what it’s about. Solnit can write about nothing and keep you mesmerized. Sort of like Tom Robbins, but entirely different. Sigh. I’m no...