Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

1. Equity I’m not sure how Google would define “equity,” but my definition of equity is “stored value.” As a homeowner, you understand home equity as the stored value that it offers you. Your equity in your home is a product of all the time, energy, and money that you have put into it, plus the value that has been added by the passage of time. Relational equity is accumulated in the same way. “Wha...

In 1958, Paul made 85 cents an hour working in a limestone quarry in Oklahoma. He was a man of character, integrity, and kindness. He was quiet, smiled a lot, and was a wonderful listener. Paul’s humility, kindness, and confidence gave him dignity and authority in the eyes of everyone who knew him. He was happily married and had three little girls. On the day his fourth little girl was born he wal...

Extremis is a Latin word that says you are in extreme circumstances, a desperate situation, a dire predicament, or the edge of death. “There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?” I’ll tell...

The best short stories leave out important information but evoke it in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections.* These are my secret rules for making that happen: Lead your listener toward a conclusion and then let them arrive at it on their own. If you state a conclusion and then try to support it with evidence, you are robbing your listener of the joy of discovery....

What? You don’t see the happy times? But they are right there! Right there inside you. Oh, I see. You have something that is keeping you from seeing and feeling and living the sparkling clear and happy times that are struggling to rise up from the depths of your soul. I see that you are worried. That’s the problem. Worry is the cork that keeps the champagne of happiness from spraying a smile on yo...

“Please Do Not Touch the Fence. You’ll Get Zapped. And the Goats Will Laugh at You.” That is the advice the banner gives. Standing behind that banner, and a little to the right, are a group of goats who are clearly encouraging you to touch the fence. You can see it in their eyes and in the smirk at the corners of their little goat mouths. All of that was in the photo that arrived with a text from...

I’ve been studying AI audio so that I can complete a couple of personal projects. The first project is an audiobook containing 18 chapters that span 75 fascinating minutes. Your MondayMorningMemo on December 22nd will contain the following invitation: The tribe encircling the campfire is about to listen to a group of old men tell “The Story of the Long Ago.” You can listen, too, if you like. That...

A society grows great when old people plant trees under whose shade they will never sit. Trees that live long do not grow quickly. It requires patience to grow a tree that will endure. The root word of patience is the Latin verb “pati.” It means “to suffer” or “to endure.” The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is today. A person with a purpose is a person on a mi...

It is easy to understand a person who is driven by their passions. Your passions take you to your happy place. I have friends who have a passion for sporting events on television. Others have a passion for gambling, and the paripatetic have a passion for traveling to all the far-flung places on this spinning rock we live upon. People who have a passion for achievement live to make things different...

A tribe is a group of people that share an identity marker. Every affinity group, every fan club, every self-selected group of insiders is a tribe. Last week we talked about Business-to-Business advertising  (B2B)  and Niche Marketing with a long purchase cycle  (Niche-L). Today we talk about Niche Marketing with a short purchase cycle  (Niche-S)  and Business-to-Consumer...

Today we’re going to do something fun. Are you ready? (Press the PLAY button to hear the audio version of today’s memo.) I will tell you how to advertise if you will tell me the nature of your business. Advertising can be broken into 6 major categories: Business-to-Business  (B2B) Niche Marketing  (Niche-S)  with a short purchase cycle Niche Marketing  (Niche-L)  with a lo...

When you understand how a person thinks, speaks, acts, and sees the world, you feel like you know that person. This is true whether you have spent time with them, or if you have spent time with them through the magic of modern media. Television, radio, and social media can be used to make sure that people know  about  you, or they can be used to make people  feel like they know you....

Jeffrey Eisenberg and I were looking though a pair of antique doors at Austin Auction Gallery when I saw a remarkable oil painting on the wall behind them and whispered in wonder, “Ozymandias.” The auction catalog described  the painting  as, “Arabian horse and handler with Egyptian sphinx, signed lower right Maksymilian Novak-Zemplinski (Polish, b.1974), dated 2000.” But I knew that pai...

Dwight D. Eisenhower was born in Denison, Texas, in 1890. He was the President of the United States when I was born in Dallas, Texas, 68 years later. People called me “Little Roy.” People called him “Ike.” I worry that we have forgotten him. Ike Eisenhower graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1915 when he was 24 years old. His superiors noticed his organizational abilities, and app...

Packaging is the art of presentation. Exciting packaging improves conversion. There are two important parts of packaging: WHAT IS IN THE PACKAGE? When package “A” and package “B” are the same price and contain the same basics, they are equal. But when package “B” contains something extra that people would love to have, the sale will always go to package “B”. Be the competitor that offers package “...

Peacocks want to be admired. Parrots repeat only what they have heard. Each of us has a little bit of Peacock in us, and perhaps a little Parrot, too. (I admit it about me. You should admit it about you.) Long ago I saw a movie in which an old Greek man says to a much younger man from England, “A wise old Turk once told me…” The young Englishman interrupts him and says, “What! A wise old Turk? I t...

There was a day when you found yourself in a strange situation and you did the best you could. Before you knew it, you were walking through it. You noticed a patch of wildflowers. You made a friend. Darkness fell. You saw an eye rise into the sky and believed it to be the moon. But now you know it was the eye of God, watching to see what you would do. With one of his eyes, he watches the world. Wi...

Icons  represent ideas that are bigger than themselves. Myths  are stories that represent ideas that are bigger than themselves. Archetypes  are symbols of recognizable patterns of behavior. Letters  of the alphabet are symbols (graphemes) that represents sounds (phonemes,) just as  notes  on a sheet of music are symbols that represent sounds. A  role model &nbsp...

The weakness of our current version of AI is that it extracts its knowledge only from what we have taught it. Things that are  rarely done  are difficult for AI to imitate. AI has confidence in things that are repeated online  ad infinitum. * Predictable ads follow the orthodox guidelines taught in every college in America. AI can find countless examples of these ads online. This is...

The advantage of being an old man is that you can remember the past. This gives you a different perspective on current events. But if that old man is foolish enough to share his thoughts, the average person will smile tolerantly and pat him on his head and tell him that he is just “a lovable old dinosaur who is out-of-touch and living in the past.” Screw it. I’m going to go ahead say what I’m thin...

Some Writers Think Life is Overrated William Shakespeare wrote, “This life… is but a walking shadow; a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Songwriter K.D. Lang put it more simply, “Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.” Some W...

Open your ads with a big, emotional idea. Save the details for your web page. Use parallel structure if you can. Parallel structure is a writing technique that uses similar grammatical constructions to express related ideas. Patterns of words, phrases, or clauses  that are repeated  show that your selected ideas are of equal importance. Parallel structure uses  clarity and rhythm &n...

Pearl had the power of 5 different breeds. She was my Megadog. The Mustang was a 1971 convertible, white with a blue interior. The car and the dog could not talk, of course, but speech is not required to show love. Pearl and I found each other in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma, when I was 8 years old. She had been abandoned by the side of the road and was starving. I was lonely and needed a frien...

“More agile than a turtle! Stronger than a mouse! Nobler than a head of lettuce! His shield is his Heart! It’s… El CHAPULIN COLORADO!” El Chapulín Colorado  – The Red Grasshopper – was a Spanish-speaking television star loved by hundreds of millions of people around the world. The Red Grasshopper would shout “¡Síganme los buenos!” and leap into action whenever a ghost, a bandit, or any other...

A troubling statement makes us want to think of exceptions to it that would prove that statement to be wrong. “Outliers are interesting, but they rarely matter,” is a troubling statement, and you may already be thinking of exceptions to it. But it remains true nonetheless. This second statement is also true. “If there were no outliers, there would be no new inventions, no innovations, no progress....