Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

If you are going to communicate effectively with a person, you need to know something about their beliefs. Most writers assume their readers see and believe as they do. And when they knowingly write to people who believe differently, their writing often takes the tone of an argument, leaning heavily on evidence and examples, with undertones of disparagement and mischaracterization. Such...

Every book is an island that exists only in the mind of its writer, and the hope of every writer is that you will visit their island and be glad you did. But in  The Faraway Nearby,  her book about how we make our lives out of stories, and how we are connected by empathy, narrative and imagination, Rebecca Solnit says, “The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, l...

I was 24 and Phil was 60 and he was a most unusual man. Articulate but quiet, passionate but calm, and possibly the world’s greatest listener. By the age of 60, Phil had traveled to more than 40 countries, published stories, articles, and poems in more than 50 magazines, and assembled a personal library of books that overflowed the small rooms of his modest home. It occurs to me as I write this th...

I sit with a bag of popcorn and watch the frantic climbers of the ladder of success. The climbers who capture my interest are the ones who consider themselves to be “clever.” But look closely and you’ll see their only “cleverness” is that they are uncommitted and disloyal. Every person is a steppingstone for them and every relationship is transactional. I ask them about this and they say with prid...

These are the basic principles of Chaotic Ad Writing as taught by Wizard Academy: 1.  Approach your subject from an unexpected angle. 2.  Tell two stories at once, using the relationship between two things as a pattern to reveal the relationship between two other things. 3.  Allow the listener to arrive at their own conclusion. In the New Testament, stories like these are known as&n...

Robert Frost died when I was four, so we never met face to face, but throughout my formative years I spent an hour with him every night before I fell asleep. Robert Frost taught me how to write. If you will write like Robert Frost, you must approach your subject from an unexpected angle. Few things capture the attention like the unexpected. When your reader or listener has chosen to follow you on...

Above ground, in the sunlight, grain silos provide much of our daily sustenance. Below ground, in the darkness, hides another kind of silo. But it is not the missile silo that is killing us. People are disappearing into the bone-dry quicksand of grain silos in less than 5 seconds. “Once entrapment begins, it happens very quickly due to the suction-like action of the grain; Researchers in Germany f...

You are flying your small airplane on a beautiful day. There is a tiny speck on your windshield. Like the North Star, it doesn’t move. This is why it escapes your notice. Had that speck begun moving across your windshield, you would have recognized it as another airplane. The fact that it doesn’t move means that you and that speck will soon intersect unless one of you changes direction. That speck...

Few things are as annoying as unsolicited advice, for within it lies the assumption of superior wisdom. (So when you tell a person your PLAN for what THEY should do, always be aware that they secretly want to punch you in the mouth.) Uh-oh. Did I just give you some unsolicited advice? Heavyweight Champion Mike Tyson was listening to a reporter tell him how his opponent planned to beat him in their...

Notice that title. It does not say, “How  to  Write Scripts for TV Ads,” but, “How I Write…” I have my own weird way of doing it. TV writers use a split-page approach: Camera instructions in the left column. Audio in the right column. I chose not to do it that way. Back when the world was young, Radio people told me that Radio scripts SHOULD ALWAYS BE TYPED IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. I chos...

457 BC  – In the 7th chapter of the Old Testament Book of Ezra, King Artaxerxes of Persia issues a decree to rebuild Jerusalem which results in the rebuilding of that city under Nehemiah. Go west from Jerusalem across the Mediterranean, west across the Atlantic, then halfway across the landmass of North America and you’re in Central Texas. It was there, sometime between the decree o...

I lived in Muskogee, Oklahoma for 3 years before Merle Haggard released his hit song, “I’m Proud to be an Okie from Muskogee.” Even though I was only 12 at the time, I realized Brother Haggard’s song contained more corn than the whole state of Iowa. I laugh about being an Okie, but in truth, I am proud of the resourcefulness of my tribe. An Okie can build a rocket ship while he is flying it. Walk...

When it is time to write an ad, and there is no felt need in the heart of the customer to which you can speak, make a paper cigar. Teddy Roosevelt was a man of improvisation. He knew his paper cigars. This allowed him to explain the process of making them in the fewest possible words: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” The slow weeks before and after peak season are called the s...

The generation of male Okies to which I belong has the inexplicable tradition of mercilessly teasing their friends. It’s a dumb tradition, I know, but these are the rules: We tease only our closest friends. To say to strangers the sorts of things that we say to our friends would be to invite a fistfight. The more outrageous and unfounded the accusation, the funnier it is. We never tease by saying...

When James Madison drafted the First Amendment, “the press” referred to the newspapers of our nation, such as the  Pennsylvania Gazette  owned by Benjamin Franklin, the most popular paper in the 13 colonies. Things rocked along swimmingly for about 200 years, then one day we walked outside to get the newspaper, sat down to read it, and realized it was yesterday’s news. Welcome...

Two weeks ago, I appeared onscreen during a business symposium in Montreal to answer a series of questions about, “How to Advertise Effectively.” Toward the end of my hour with them, a person in the audience asked, “What do you consider to be the top 3 books about Advertising?” The moderator smiled and said, “I can answer that,” and held up copies of  The Wizard of Ads, Secret Formulas of the...

You’ve heard it all your life: “Anything worth doing, is worth doing well.” This seems to be a worthy admonition on the surface. But let’s not stop at the surface. Let’s look into the heart of it. Those seven words, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing well,” assume that one has the ability to do the thing well. But what if you don’t have that ability? Is it okay to do it badly at first? I gather...

The junkyard dogs of the business community are those misfits and mavericks, renegades and rebels, innovators and improvisors who know that traditional wisdom is often more tradition than wisdom. Lee Iacocca was a junkyard dog. The son of an immigrant hot-dog vendor, Iacocca was the visionary who gave us the Ford Mustang. He was later fired by Henry Ford II, a showdog, because Henry II said he did...

The beagle who lives in the right hemisphere of your brain has an entirely different set of skills than the nerd who lives next door. The beagle in my brain is named Indy.  What is the name of the beagle in yours? Your beagle gives you impulsive intuition and instinctive insight.  Your beagle gives you romping recklessness, gut feelings and hunches. Your beagle has a bitterly sharp,...

The Genius of What Isn’t There June 1, 2020 Listen A Three friends, who have never met each other, all sent me the same advice last week. What makes this convergence particularly interesting is that there was no common trigger. Each of the three messages I received was prompted by something different. The essence of those messages? You’ve got to leave things out. Genius is rarely about what is the...

Jaguars and leopards are classified as “Big Cats”  (Pantherinae)  because they have a U-shaped hyoid apparatus in their throats which gives them the ability to roar. Cheetahs and pumas are just as big as jaguars and leopards, but they are classified as “Small Cats”  (Felinae)  because their ossified hyoid bones prohibit them from roaring. Among cats, it is your voice that...

Q:  What do Jesus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus have in common? A:  Grown-ups told us stories about them when we were children. And then one day we realized the grown-ups had been lying.  Yes, they did it because they loved us and they wanted us to be happy, but that didn’t change the fact that they were lying. Some of us were able to separate the stories...

Admiral Boulevard is the margin of the page in Tulsa. It is that place where a person can do well while doing no good. It is where discipline encounters temptation and good fortune meets bad luck. Admiral Boulevard is the margin Johnny Cash sings about in “I Walk the Line.” The Outsiders  – both the book and the movie – take place along Admiral Boulevard. The book has sold more than 14 millio...

Bart Giamatti was a professor of English Renaissance literature, the president of Yale University, and the Commissioner of Major League Baseball. In less than 3 minutes, Giamatti caused me to understand “home” in a new way. I believe his thoughts on the subject are profoundly insightful. “There is no great, long poem about baseball. It may be that baseball is itself its own great, l...

A few years ago, Yvon Chouinard was asked,   “How do you know if you’re making the right move? He said, “It’s a lot of gut instinct. If you study something to death, if you wait for the customer to tell you what he wants, you’re going to be too late, especially for an entrepreneurial company. That comes from Henry Ford: Customers didn’t want a Model T, they wanted a faster horse.” The last ti...