Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

Day after day, business owners tell ad writers, “We just need more sales opportunities. It’s a numbers game. If you double our traffic, we’ll double our sales. Now show me what you can do.” These business owners don’t understand that today’s  close rate  dictates tomorrow’s sales opportunities. Some businesses will run customers off faster than a good ad writer can bring them in. But sti...

Is your bandwidth keeping you from fulfilling your purpose? Do you have too much to do and too little time? Your bandwidth is limited by: 1. the number of hours in a day. 2. your physical stamina and capacity. 3. your mental and emotional limits as a human being. 4. your inability to juggle the number of desires, needs, demands, and emergencies hurtling toward you. No matter how hard you try to ov...

Ten days ago, at the annual meeting of the most innovative and successful small business owners in America,* I was handed a series of questions to answer during the problem-solving session. Most of the questions had to do with recurrent frustrations in business. When I saw the group excitedly taking notes, I was a little bit surprised. Then it hit me, “I’m a lot older than most of these people, so...

Responsibility limits your Freedom, and freedom is a good thing. So is responsibility wrong and evil? Sigh. The only hard choice in life is the choice between two good things. Justice and Mercy are at opposite ends of a teeter-totter. Honesty and Loyalty wrestle in your heart, do they not? Opportunity and Security are inversely proportionate. One will decrease as the other increases. The...

“Facts tell, stories sell,” is a principle known to every top-tier ad writer. Stories change people while statistics give them something to argue about. People remember stories long after bullet-points are forgotten. Tom Robbins said, “I mean we are all, as human beings, caught up in a web of narration, this great narrative web, and we have always defined ourselves, human beings, through narration...

Seek the teacher who is a mentor to apprentices. She will give you expert advice and examples, then evaluate your ability to do as she has taught. Her name is Wisdom and you should always listen to her voice. But Wisdom’s teacher allowed young Wisdom to follow any path she chose! Wisdom learned her lessons from Consequences, the greatest teacher of all. Wisdom can give you interesting examples bec...

Competition can be entertaining, but I do not consider it to be “play.” Is than un-American of me? Play, for me, can have no objective; no element of strategy or combat or debate. Writing for  The New Yorker  on Nov.14, 2011, John McPhee shares an anecdote about George Hartzog, a man who understood my kind of play, and Tony Buford, a man who did not. “It was Hartzog who took a set of pla...

The strangeness of our world is demonstrated by the things we take for granted. I bought a used book. The previous owner’s name was Mary Lou. I know this because she used the stub of her boarding pass as a book marker. A few years ago, Mary Lou took United Airlines flight 5409 from San Diego to Los Angeles on New Year’s Day. She sat in seat 10C. No big deal, right? You can read all that on the stu...

The feminine ideal was different a hundred years ago. Less sex, more charm. It was her charm that attracted us to young Anastasia Romanov, the daughter of Czar Nicholas II of Russia. This is why we refused to believe it when she was murdered in 1918 following the Bolshevik Revolution. For the next 50 years we embraced every impostor who claimed to be her. Elegant, effortless charm remained a femin...

Do you have favorite books and movies? Are there songs you love and stories that captivate you? Is there art that speaks to your heart? Paintings and plays, movies and music, stories and sculptures: art is valuable to the degree that it triggers emotion.  But it isn’t always the art, itself, that triggers the emotion.  Sometimes the art is merely a point-of-contact with an idea – or an i...

You walk out the door. A person raises a forefinger and says, “Quick question.” And then they tie you up for the next 30 minutes. Have you ever been ambushed this way? Quick questions don’t always have quick answers and you can’t give 30 minutes to every person who raises a forefinger, so the next time you’re ambushed, smile as you continue walking and say, “Walk with me.” The questioner will...

“He knew how to lead by listening and teaching.” – Erwin C. Hargrove, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, writing in 1998 about a leader he much admired. I, too, have known brilliant leaders like that; men and women who lead by listening and teaching. Brian Scudamore, Lori Barr, Richard Kessler, Cathy Thorpe, Erik Church, Sarah Casebier, David Rehr, Michele Miller, Bria...

Dewey Jenkins says, “If your employees don’t look forward to company meetings, then you’re not doing it right.” Dewey has grown his company to nearly 100 times the size it was when he bought it, so I tend to listen to what he says. Dewey taught me to celebrate, not just the touchdowns, but the first downs. Dewey smiles and says, “Celebrate, Celebrate, Celebrate!” So I’m going to do that today. Vic...

Reading that Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Christian anarchist, I had an unexpected thought, so I asked Google, “What is the difference between an anarchist and a libertarian?” Six-tenths of a second later, The Goog told me – in a highly visible block at the top of the Search Engine Results Page: “An anarchist is an extreme libertarian, like a socialist is an extreme democrat, and a fasc...

The pivotal moments in our lives are rarely announced with trumpets and fanfare. But wouldn’t it be great if they were? “Hello, this is God speaking. You’re at an inflection point in your life and although you don’t suspect it, the wisdom you’re about to receive from that old man over there is going to empower you to achieve things you never imagined. So pay attention, okay? This is a really big m...

The Random Quotes database at MondayMorningMemo.com currently contains 4,376 quotes. About a third of these are quotes you can easily find online. Nearly half are delightful passages I’ve transcribed from books, movies, or TV shows, and archived for future reference. Five percent are witty and wonderful statements made by friends during lunch or in casually written emails. And exactly 455 of...

When you have nothing to say, be careful that you don’t pay money to say it. “What do you mean?” Have you ever paid a premium to target the right audience and then made an offer that failed to move them? “Everyone has paid for ads that didn’t work.” Did you realize that your message was at fault, or did you assume that you had mis-targeted? “Well, even when it doesn’t work, at least I get some nam...

They told you it was called, “reading between the lines.” But what they didn’t tell you was that the writer put it there – between the lines – for you to figure out on your own. Speak the truth and people will doubt you. But if you can tempt those people to follow you to where they can discover that truth on their own, you will have convinced them to the core of their soul. You’ve got to let...

Listen, my young apprentice, and I will release you from your chains. Every door of opportunity begins as a window in the mind. Look through that window of imagination and glimpse a world that could be, should be, ought to be someday. Keep looking… and watch it grow into a door of Opportunity through which you can pass into an entirely different future. Opportunity never knocks. It hangs thick in...

Every few months, I remind my partners of something that took me way too long to learn. I say, “When a person believes in what they’re doing – even if it’s an imperfect plan – let them keep doing it. Give them advice and try to open their eyes, but don’t fight them too hard, because, ‘A person convinced against their will, remains unconvinced, still.’ So be careful. If you finally convince a perso...

I’ve often wondered what happened to him. Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, 1979: Pennie and I had just moved into our first house. It… was built before Oklahoma became a state, had never had a mortgage on it, had been expanded 3 different times, and was now barely 800 sq. ft., had sat vacant for more than 10 years, and was sold to us for $21,500. It wasn’t an impressive neighborhood. Pennie looked out our...

Dear Radio, I’ve loved you all my life. In fact, I have more confidence in you than you have in yourself. But you have a blind spot, and it’s killing you: radio advertisers are reaching 100% of the city and convincing them 10% of the way, when they should be reaching 10% of the city and convincing them 100% of the way. You’re letting advertisers squander their money on reach without frequency. You...

Is established information or new information more likely to be true? Which is more effective, planning or improvisation? Are people essentially good, or essentially selfish? Which is more important, individual rights or collective rights? Will the future of America be better than its past? Are low-income people less intelligent than high-income people? Is the Bible true, or just a collection of a...

A lawyer and a rabbi are arguing about what it means to be kind. It is an ancient argument. The lawyer thinks a “kind” person is always polite and considerate. The rabbi thinks “politeness” is superficial, and “considerate” simply means to consider the consequences before taking any action, but that true kindness comes at a price. The rabbi believes that true kindness will take insult, inconvenien...

I began losing my hair when I was 19. By the time I was 21, I looked like I was 30. Best thing that ever happened to me. People take you seriously when you look like a grown-up, and I needed people to take me seriously. I sold advertising for the smallest radio station in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We were rock-solid at number 23 in a city of 23 radio stations. We had a 0.5 share during the Average Quarter...