Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

People are being caught off guard by the quirky tale of Sunshine and Poobah. Evidently, reading it cover-to-cover is a much different experience than reading it one chapter at a time. This funny little book is rapidly gaining a life of its own. This is the backstory of how – like Frosty the Snowman – it came to life. Jeffrey Eisenberg gave you the beginning of the backstory on the final pages...

Boring, ineffective ad campaigns are almost always the result of data-worship. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman famously said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” He was talking about using data to make predictions. Amos Tversky, one half of the Nobel Prize-winning duo* of Kahneman and Tver...

According to all the cognitive neuroscientists, the essential gift of the human race is our ability to attach complex meanings to sounds. Here’s a shocker for you: the written language was developed only to make the spoken language permanent. In fact, the written word has no meaning until it has been translated into the spoken word it represents. This is why it takes the average rea...

England, 1890 –  Barely 5 feet tall on his tiptoes, 30 year-old Jimmy was a pen pal of 40 year-old Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous author of  Treasure Island,  during the final years of Stevenson’s life when he lived on the island of Samoa. The two never met, but if they had, they would doubtless have played cricket together in the little village of Stanway in Gloucestershire. In...

What do you value? Are there things for which you would be willing to suffer humiliation, rejection, and financial loss? These are your deep core values, your  non-negotiables.  It’s important that you know what they are. A person without non-negotiables is a person without passion. But it’s also important to know your  negotiables. A person without negotiables is hard-headed, self-...

On the day he died, long ago, a man said, “In this world you will have trouble.” I’ve never had reason to doubt him. Money trouble Work trouble Relationship trouble Legal trouble Health trouble Family trouble Tax trouble You don’t get to choose whether or not you will have trouble. But you do get to choose whether or not you will let it dominate your thoughts and control your mood. I find it inter...

Our nation is changing, of course. Things aren’t like they used to be. Famous clothing brands are at historic lows and major retailers are closing hundreds of stores. In 2016, 2,056 stores closed their doors. The worst year on record is 2008, when 6,163 stores shut down. Brokerage firm  Credit Suisse says  in a just-released research report, “Barely a quarter into 2017, ye...

Michael Jordan wasn’t a perfectionist; he was an improvisationist. That’s why he was hard to stop. A perfectionist knows exactly what he’s going to do. He plans his work and works his plan. The only problem is that because he knows, the defender knows, too. It’s easy to anticipate what a perfectionist is going to do. He’s predictable. But no one knew what Michael was going to do,  becaus...

Ask a businessperson or a marketing professional, “What is branding?” Go ahead. Go do it. I’ll wait… Did they mention the importance of a having a logo? Did they talk about the consistent use of a chosen group of “brand” colors and a particular font and layout and look and feel? Have you done what they told you? Congratulations! You now have a  visual style guide. And so does every...

People read books for the strangest of reasons. I recently read a book about a female aviator in Africa in the 1930s. I have no interest in aviation. I have no interest in Africa. But it was a great book. I began reading it after I stumbled onto something Ernest Hemingway wrote in a 1942 letter to his friend, Maxwell Perkins. “Did you read Beryl Markham’s book,  West with the Night?...

Business Personality Disorder (BPD) is characterized by at least two distinct identities or dissociated personality states that show up in a company’s behavior. BPD emerges when unrelated teams work independently in the areas of (1.) Advertising (2.) Web Presence (3.) Sales Training. If a person encounters your ads, then visits your website, then comes to your place of business, will they feel the...

There are two kinds of advertising. The goal of the first is to make yours the company the customer thinks of immediately and feels the best about when they – or any of their friends – need what you sell. This is called a  “relational”  ad campaign. It works better and better with each passing year. The goal of the second kind of advertising is to cause the reader/listener/viewer to...

Four words have echoed in my head for several days. “Not everyone. Not always.” Why do such thoughts leap sparkling like swordfish from the dark waters of the mind? I can’t be sure, but I suspect my heart is responding to all those authoritative voices making silly statements about “the customer” with misguided certainty. They whisper to us from websites, blogs and business books. How can the...

Hi, everyone! My name is _____________________. Because Wizard Academy appreciates  your generous donation  to help keep  Chapel Dulcinea  open, free and beautiful, I’m going to take you on a 4-minute walk to  Wizard’s Tower,  where we’ll enter the underground art gallery, then go straight up to the  Star Deck  where I’ll tell you a 2-minute story, then...

I’m experimenting with radio in a way that, for me, is new and different. Many of those who understand what I’m doing won’t agree with the fundamental premise of my experiment. But that’s not what worries me. I’m concerned about those who will agree and then attempt it – and fail. I believe they’ll fail because they won’t do it right. Here’s what’s happening: I’m airing a 5-second ad every hour, 2...

We encounter “meta” most often in the word  metaphor. We create metaphors when we see the same pattern in two, unrelated things. Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.” But Shakespeare wasn’t the first to see the similarity between the world and a stage. Se...

If you don’t understand the title of today’s memo, just ask a 12 year-old boy. (If you didn’t grow up in the South, your 12 year-olds may be more familiar with “He who smelt it, dealt it.”) With a title like “The Smeller’s the Feller,” does it surprise you that today’s memo is about a tried-and-true management tool? A couple of days ago, my partner Tim Miles made a brilliant su...

Successful advertising touches the hungers, wants and needs of a person. My job as a professional ad writer is to identify these needs and speak to them. If you have a heart beating in your chest, you have hungers, wants and needs. We can intellectualize our conscious needs, but we cannot intellectualize our unconscious ones. All your friends, all your neighbors, all America, all the world ha...

Some lessons we never learn. For me, the familiar face of failure hangs like a Royal Portrait above the grand staircase of my social behavior. Lest my meaning be obscured by that flowery metaphor, I am simply stating for the record – before God, the world and you – that my greatest recurring mistake is that I often disappoint my friends. Not my casual friends. No, never those. I dis...

“Don’t need a Buddha head.” What are those 5 words telling us? Are we being warned that “need” is the antithesis of Zen? Are we being told that a desire to think like Buddha is the opposite of thinking like Buddha? “Don’t  need  a Buddha head?” Or are those 5 words a repudiation of Buddhist beliefs? Are we being told of someone’s inspection and rejection of Buddhism? “Don’t need a&n...

I was in the middle of a storm at sea last week when my lover, wife and partner of 40 years spoke some wisdom into my life. She said, “Tell me what happened, step-by-step, play-by-play.” So I did. She said, “Honey sometimes when you’re talking with someone face-to-face, you think you’re being clear when you’re really not.” And then she gave me some examples. And then she asked the questions that m...

Bad ads are about you, your company, your product, your service. Good ads are about the customer and how their sun will shine brighter, the air around them will glitter with magic, and the stars in their darkness will twinkle more richly if they choose to bring you into their world. I’m going to hire an assistant. Hundreds of Millennials have applied for this job and sent me an ad. But not one of...

People would rather be angry than bored. Anger is a form of excitement. That explains a lot of behavior, doesn’t it? But if you can choose, choose laughter. “Man is the laughing animal…” 1 Anger is dangerous and crying is much less fun. I’m talking about storytelling and communication. I’m talking about books and movies. I’m talking about television and music. I’m talking about romantic...

Henri Poincaré did not discover Chaos Theory but he clearly heard its footsteps in 1887 when he published  The Three Body Problem. His math is still used by NASA today. In astrophysics, stars and planets are “gravitating bodies” because they attract and hold mass and alter the orbits of one another. Gravity is a useful innovation model for professional ad writers since our goal is to attract...

I still call it Christmas. I’m told you’re not supposed to do that any more. You’re not supposed to do a lot of things. Forget the religion called Christianity for a moment. Ignore the historical blunders of Christians. I’m talking about Christmas. Those opening few sentences are going to land me in real trouble unless you judge me by my motives. 1.  I still call it Christmas because, ac...