Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

“The rest of my life has passed quite suddenly. Around ten or twelve I fell into the inevitable logarithms of time. It seems to go faster and faster. I wonder now why we have to have Christmas so often.” – Kary Mullis Our friend Kary Mullis died on Aug. 7, 2019, at the age of 74. His first trip to Wizard Academy with Nancy was more than 15 years ago. They were in the same class as (L to R) Chris L...

Each of us creates our own reality from our interpretations of the things we observe. A systematic pattern of interpretations is called a cognitive bias. This is how a cognitive bias works: If you believe that elves cause rain, then every occurrence of rain is proof of elves. Cognitive biases can be miniscule or massive. Wikipedia has 192 of the most common of them organized alphabetically in...

Karl Marx famously said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” No, let’s be more accurate. What he actually said was, “Die religion ist das opium des volkes.” Before I continue, let me say that my belief in God is a choice not based on argument or evidence. I freely admit that I choose to believe. Those, like Karl, who choose not to believe, often say that my belief in an immortal soul and...

(A.) “It was hot outside.” (B.) “The angry sun glared down at me.” Which of those sentences do you feel was more interesting? Personification is a technique used by writers and speakers to excite the imaginations of their readers and listeners. Personification gives human attributes to non-human things. Twenty-five years ago I wrote, “As Edmund Hillary surveyed the horizon from the peak...

I grew up believing that everyone had equal opportunity, and what we made of that opportunity was up to us. I believed I was the product of my choices, and you were the product of yours. People struggled only because they made bad choices. I continue to believe in the vital importance of individual choice. But we are not offered the same choices. These days, when I look at my own modest accomplish...

The Eye of the Storm in the tower at Wizard Academy, under construction in 2009. We are feeling unsettled again. And when I say we, I don’t mean me, I mean all of us. Unsettled feelings are ominous. We are acting as though we have heard the four notes of the  Dies irae,  that ominous musical phrase* that has signaled impending tragedy for the past 800 years. Being thus unsettled, we are...

We eat food every day and we drive cars every day. But food purchases happen on a short purchase cycle and car purchases happen on a longer one. How often does the average citizen purchase the product or service you sell? The purchase cycle of your product determines how quickly your ads will start working. Food and entertainment have short purchase cycles. This is why ads selling food and enterta...

“You train them, remind them, and incentivize them, but they still don’t do what you trained them to do.” This is what business owners say to each other about employees. Can you relate to it? Frances Frei is a famous professor at Harvard Business School who advises senior executives who are embarking on large-scale change initiatives in the hopes of achieving organizational transformation. Profess...

For more insightful comics visit xkcd.com My strange education was purchased with tens of millions of dollars of other people’s money. This is how it happened. When I turned 20, I spent the next 2 years asking business owners 3 questions: “Have you ever done any advertising that you felt really worked? Tell me about it.” “Have you ever been excited about an advertising plan that you later felt was...

I’ve had a special relationship with California since 1992. The basis of our relationship is this: I keep not deserving parking tickets and California keeps giving them to me anyway. One of my goals during last week’s excursion with my grandson was to return from California –­ for the first time ever – without a parking ticket. I almost made it home. My transgression was that I drove through an em...

Twenty-five years ago, I did three important things. The second-most-important of these was the launching of the Monday Morning Memo, even though no one can remember what it’s called. “I’ve been reading your Monday thing for more than 10 years,” is the opening line to my favorite song. I never get tired of hearing it. The third-most-important thing I did in 1994 was fall asleep on a motorcycle and...

Sometimes we buy online to save time. Other times we buy online to save money. So what, exactly, is the “one big thing,” the unique selling proposition of online business? When we can’t wait the day or two for Amazon Prime, we buy from brick-and-mortar companies to save time. And when those stores are having a price-driven event, we buy from them to save money. So what is the “one big thing,” the...

Most non-fiction books are written as reputation builders. We write them because we want to be seen as experts. We want more speaking opportunities, more customers, more recognition. These “how to” books appear to be about the subject matter, but they are really about the author. This sort of reputation-building was the motive behind my  Wizard of Ads  trilogy. There is a second, le...

In about 650 B.C. the Greek poet Archilochus wrote, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The renaissance scholar Erasmus quoted Archilochus in 1500 in his famous  Adagia , saying, “ Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum .” In 1953, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin expanded on Archilochus and Erasmus in his often-quoted essay,  The Hedgehog and the...

Have you ever casually started down a path and then the journey got a life of its own? The White Rabbit appears in chapter one, inexplicably wearing a waistcoat. So what does Alice do? She follows him down the rabbit hole. There’s just no turning back after a decision like that. The journey is alive and it’s bigger than you. At twenty, I followed a White Rabbit and became an ad writer. At for...

Pennie and I have criteria we use to judge the success of Wizard Academy. In a recent meeting of the board of directors, they asked us to share those criteria with them. I began by saying, “A non-profit educational organization would be foolish to judge its success by its revenues. And we would be equally foolish to judge our success by the number of people who attend classes. When we complete The...

When you’re in “inside” sales, customers come to you. When you’re in “outside” sales, you go looking for customers. When I was a baby ad-man in outside sales, I had the good fortune to spend a day with Gene Chamberlain. He taught me three things that day that made me a lot of money. Today I’m going to teach those things to you. A: When You’re in Outside Sales, You’ve Got to Prune Your Account...

I was bagging my groceries when the checker handed me my receipt and said, “Happy Yesterday.” Unsure of the correct response, I just smiled at him and nodded. A few moments later I realized he had said, “Happy rest-of-your-day.” But that brief exchange put my mind on an interesting track: can we choose to have a happy yesterday? Strangely, we can. According to a number of studies published since 2...

Vertical thinking is step-by-step, procedural, outcome-focused. It helps you get things done. Always asking, “What is the obvious next step?” vertical thinking leads to incremental evolution and refinement. It is a ratchet that maintains what you’ve accomplished, then “click,” gives you a little bit more. The Japanese call it  kaizen,  “continuous improvement.” Vertical knowledge is narr...

Back in those days you didn’t shoot nobody unless they really needed shootin’. So when someone showed you a gun, you knew there was a reason. You didn’t always know what that reason was, so the polite thing to do was ask. “What’s with the hog leg?” “Keeps folks from takin’ the cash box.” “I just want a watermelon. You sellin’? Or just sittin’ here showin’ em off?” The truck was a 1950 Internationa...

Amateur ad writers assume everyone makes decisions based upon the same criteria they use. This causes them to unconsciously frame their messages to reach people exactly like themselves. Professional ad writers frame their messages to speak to the felt needs of a specific consumer. People are multi-dimensional. We make decisions to purchase based on a variety of criteria, but two of the big ones ar...

The Jewish Sabbath begins each Friday at sunset because the fifth verse of Genesis reads, “And the evening and the morning were the first day.” Every beginning starts with an ending. Thirteen colonies became 13 “united states” when our fight for freedom ended and our government under a Constitution began in 1789. This was the beginning of the first America, a land of freedom and opportunity. Those...

Life is a series of unintended consequences. Things almost never turn out the way we plan. I remember this single-panel cartoon I read many years ago. Two men on a sidewalk are carrying briefcases. One of them says to the other, “Here’s an idea. Let’s buy a grocery store tabloid and bury it in the park with a copy of our 5-year plan. Then we’ll come back in 5 years and dig them both up and see whi...

My 9-year old grandson, Gideon, asked a big favor of me the other day. “Poobah, I have 11 imaginary friends who need to start staying at your house.” “Okay. Can they all sleep upstairs?” “They could, but I doubt they’ll ever all be here at the same time.” Gideon told me what I needed to know about each of them and which ones would often go out wandering for days at a time – and not to worry about...

Have you ever seen a photographer look through a rectangle of forefingers and thumbs to “frame” a potential shot? Framing is even more important when using words to capture images. Advertising, like every other kind of storytelling, should always begin with a framing sequence. From what  angle  will you approach your subject? What will be  revealed? What will be  excluded? Most...