Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

A thing cannot exist without its opposite. This is why a positive statement – without its corresponding negative – is usually a platitude.1 Every proton has its electron. Every summer has its winter. Every Yin has its Yang. Every up, its down. Every inside, its outside. Every justice, its mercy. “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth ma...

Doubtless, they will someday say, “Inspired by Roycroft and Bohemian Grove, Pennie and Roy Williams built Wizard Academy…” But they will be wrong. Yes, the Princess and I – with the help of hundreds of good friends around the world – began constructing the Wizard Academy campus in 2004. The “wrong” part is that we were inspired by Roycroft and Bohemian Grove. This error is forgivable, however, bec...

Trouble happens to everyone. “Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without  trouble.” – Carl Jung But don’t worry about it. “Worry  is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.” – George Washington Really. Don’t worry about it. “Don’t  worry  about tomorrow. Tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough  trouble  of its...

“Radio is dying.” “Radio is dead.” “My friends and I don’t listen to the radio. We (blah, blah, blah) instead.” “No one listens to the radio anymore, especially in high-tech places like San Francisco, in the heart of Silicon Valley. That’s right, isn’t it?” Isn’t it? A few paragraphs from now, I’m going to tell you exactly how many people we’re reaching in San Francisco each week and precisely how...

1. When you need someone to faithfully implement your time-tested policies and procedures, hire a straight-A student. This is what we know about them: A. They bought into the educational system, believed its promises, and played by its rules. B. They have demonstrated obedience, compliance, and conformity. C. They have obvious respect for authority. And these are not bad things. 2. When you need t...

When you need people to respond to your ad immediately, you need to think like a reporter. These are the first two things they teach news reporters: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” “You never read about a plane that did not crash.” So why do so many direct-response ads talk about the man who got bit by a dog, or...

Technically, you don’t take a trip. It takes you. If you could take a trip, you could also put it back when you were done with it. But you can’t. Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s talk about Robert and Chris and the trip they took. It was a 1968 trip from Minneapolis to San Francisco on a 1964 Honda Superhawk with Chris riding on the back because he was only 11 years old. When that trip was ov...

We connect with people who interest us. We have fun with people who know how to have fun. We bond with people who believe what we believe. But our deepest relationships are with people who have shared our pain. Think of the people you can count on – always – to have your back. Chances are, you’ve been through hard times with them at your side. Adversity is a whirlwind that tears friends apart...

The traditional aristocracy of inherited wealth, position and influence is a false one, in my mind. You were born into an influential family. You went to the right kindergarten, the right grade school, the right college, and you party with the right people. You invented the phrase and the wink, “It’s not  what  you know, it’s  who  you know.” You are a house cat. You think desp...

CHAPTER ONE: (97 words) “Circumstances” are where you are right now. “Choices” are what you will make. “Consequences” are what will happen as a result. Sometimes your circumstances are the consequence of your choices. But not always. The circumstances of your birth and your childhood, such as your nationality and your ethnicity, and whether or not your family had money, are not the consequence of...

Life-changing decisions often seem small on the day we make them. 1978  – Everyone had gone home. I was in the warehouse alone, waiting for Pennie to come and pick me up. I had been installing guttering on houses all day. The job paid $5 an hour. We had just one car. Bored, I looked in the phone book to see if Tulsa had one of those pre-recorded “dial-a-prayer” lines I might call to pass the...

People don’t Paint-by-Number as often as they did 50 years ago. My personal theory is that we came to our senses and realized Paint-by-Number paintings are perfectly awful. But we still see and hear a lot of Advertise-by-Number and Sales-by-Number. I blame the colleges. Paint-by-number paintings employ a template. I’m not against templates. I’ve created dozens of them. The purpose of a template is...

We experience wonder when we realize our true size. On clear nights, we ride a speck of dust as it circles an 11,000-degree fireball shooting through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet. And that fireball is one of billions of fireballs in our galaxy. And our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies. Looking at the stars, we know our true size. On rainy days, we thumb through t...

Balance is not compromise. It is a universe born when gravity meets antigravity, matter meets antimatter, Yin meets Yang, and Lennon meets McCartney. Balance is not the average between two extremes. It is the precarious midpoint between rising and falling. It is the last breath of an old man answered by the first cry of a baby. It is the electric current that leaps between positive and negative. I...

“The data is conclusive,” he told me, “our close rate is much higher when customers call us on the telephone instead of going to our website. Therefore, you need to write ads that drive customers to the telephone.” “I agree that the data is conclusive,” I told him, “and it says you need to fix your half-assed website.” The research community has embraced a new buzzword. They take great delight in...

The name  Wizard Academy  causes a lot of people to scorn our school without knowing anything about us. And that, my friend, is the primary reason we chose the name. A We don’t want uptight people coming here. When the right people – people like you – are confronted with the name  Wizard Academy,  they are filled with curiosity. And so they investigate. They visit the webs...

Didn’t Coca-Cola used to have the most wonderful TV ads? But when’s the last time you saw one on TV? Have you heard of Vitaminwater? Coke bought it for $4.1bn. Traditional soft drinks are now less than 2/3 of Coke’s business, and that percentage is likely to decline. The problem, I think, is that we fell out of love with sweet, syrupy soft drinks. Coke saw this handwriting on the wall, so they evo...

We settle for sex when we cannot find love. Likewise, we settle for the excitement of energy – adrenaline – when we cannot find oxytocin – that quiet but satisfying excitement of knowing we belong. Adrenaline and oxytocin are the neurotransmitters that make us feel our most important feelings. POW! The release of adrenaline is easy to trigger. But it takes subtlety to gently release oxyt...

Wizard Academy began with an itch and an image. I got the itch in Tulsa in 1978 when I was 20 years old. I saw the image online in 1994 when I was 36. The itch was to help little businesses succeed. The image was of a boy sitting beneath the stars with an open book in his lap. The crenels and merlons in the battlements beyond him suggested that he was sitting on the top of a castle tower. Looking...

2018 is looking to be a good year for small business. My personal definition of “a small business” is an owner-operator doing between $1M and $75M a year. I do not pretend to know the trends outside this group. The following are the small business trends that seem to be emerging in 2018: 1: Small businesses are falling out of love with social media and with SEO (Search Engine Optimization.) 2: Bro...

I am, by profession, an ad writer. I tell stories about people and products and services. You do, too. But because I get paid for it, I spend a lot of time considering – and measuring ­– the impact of stories. Some of the stories I’ve told have made people an enormous amount of money. But the most important stories I tell, by far, are the stories I tell about myself, to myself. Those stories are t...

A pleasant surprise is the beginning of delight. You surprise and delight your family by listening to them. You surprise and delight your friends by being interested in what they say. You surprise and delight your customers by giving them your full attention. That’s why everyone likes you. Ray Bard is the ringmaster of  untamed quotes, captured in the wild.  Crazy quotes you’ve...

Indy Beagle brought me an electric fan and a hammer. The fan is to blow away the smoke. The hammer is to shatter the mirrors. You hear a lot of talk these days about transparency and engagement and the Zero Moment of Truth. My friend Dewey Jenkins says the most dangerous statement a stock broker can make is, “But this time it’s different.” Dewey has been around long enough to know that ideas and c...

Fifty years ago, an 18-year old songwriter named Laura Nyro asked, “Can you surry? Can you picnic?” Laura Nyro didn’t tell us HOW to surry. She just asked if we could do it. Then she instructed us to, “Surry down to the stoned soul picnic. There’ll be lots of time and wine, red-yellow honey, sassafras and moonshine. And from the sky come the Lord and the lightning.” What? What did you say would co...

I was worried Thanksgiving dinner wouldn’t be the same this year without Uncle Alfred. Every year for as long as I can remember, when the time came for each of us to name something we were thankful for, Uncle Alfred would tell his famous  Story of the Shoes. “Your mother was six and I was nine when I had to cut the ends off my shoes to let my toes stick out. A year later, I couldn’t get my fo...