Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

I was 16 during the winter of 1974. Ted was 52. We worked together in a steel fabrication shop in Oklahoma. I was known as “Schoolboy.” Standing near the heat of the coffee pot waiting for the horn to signal the end of our break, Ted would tell stories about World War II. Those stories might as well have been about cave men and dinosaurs because Pearl Harbor had happened 35 years earlier and I was...

When Kermit Roosevelt was fifteen, he shared a book of poems he admired with his father, the President of the United States. As an encouragement to Kermit, his father sent a lengthy review of that book to  The Outlook,  an important publication of the time, saying, “There is an undoubted touch of genius in the poems collected in this volume…” Theodore Roosevelt had six children: Alice th...

1. Use Words that have Specific Meanings. “The bug moved along the ground, deciding which way it should go.” “The ant crawled between the blades of grass, peeking left and right at every intersection.” Bug is nonspecific. Ant is specific. “…moved along the ground” is mildly specific, but not vivid. “…crawled between the blades of grass” is specific and vivid. 2. Don’t Tell. Show. “…deciding which...

Your life is a singular journey; a generation is a collective journey. We’re circling an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet. If this dirt-covered rock we occupy was the size of a standard schoolroom globe covered with a coat of varnish, the thickness of that varnish would represent the air we breathe. Like it or not, we’re all in...

You bought it for 50 cents. You sold it for a dollar. You made 50 cents. What was your percentage of profit? You could say “100 percent” because the 50-cent profit you made is equal to your original investment of 50 cents. But if we look at it from the basis of your selling price, you sold it for a dollar and only 50% of that was profit. So did you make 100% or was it 50%? There is a valid argumen...

Do you sell a product or service that is reassuringly expensive? Ronny is selling $700 vacuum cleaners through a  direct-response television campaign  he created after attending, “How to Sell Upscale Products and Services” at Wizard Academy. That ad campaign began as a $100,000 experiment. Ronny told me he’s currently spending nearly a million dollars a week on national advertising and m...

A couple of weeks ago I spent an hour and a half on television speaking to a nationwide audience of several million viewers. They wanted me to talk about  Pendulum,  the book we published in 2012. Specifically, they wanted me to explain how we knew four years ago  exactly  what would be happening right now. I chose not to mention Wizard Academy. Does that surprise you? Pennie a...

It seems to be a fundamental law of the universe that a thing cannot exist without its opposite. Negatively charged electrons revolve around positively charged protons. Male and female. Inhale and exhale. Extend and contract. Seedtime and harvest. Every good thing exists in a state of  duality. A voice spoke into the darkness, “Let there be light,” and the first duality was born. Darkness did...

The statesman, according to Wikipedia, “who is often regarded as the father of modern conservatism,” was Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797). I was unaware of this until I stumbled upon it while searching for the origin of the famous statement, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” A worthy counterpart to Edmund Burke might be George Bernard Shaw, widely considered to...

Science is the study of objective reality. Art is the study of subjective reality. Subjective reality is perception through filters. It is interpreted reality, romanticized reality, imagined reality. It is your own personal fiction. We’ve spoken of this before, but I think we need a refresher: Electromagnetic waves exist regardless of whether you perceive them. They are nonfiction. But colors...

Norman Rockwell was an illustrator of fiction. He never showed us America as it really was, but America as it could have been, should have been, might have been. His images caused an entire generation to vividly remember experiences we never had. Rockwell showed my generation a fictional America and we believed in it. I don’t want to mention client names and I’m sure you’ll understand why, but my...

September 17, 1787:  When George Washington saw the Constitution of the United States of America finally adopted after four months of intense debate in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania State House, he immediately went to a bookseller and paid 22 shillings, six pence for a copy of  Don Quixote de La Mancha. 1 According to MountVernon.org, “this seventeenth-century Spanish allegory does seem a...

I’m betting you’re extremely good at something, perhaps at more than just one thing. Let’s face it: you’re talented – gifted, in fact – a classic overachiever. But the odds are 7 in 10 that you find it difficult to accept and believe these compliments. I say this because 70 percent of our population suffers from Impostor Syndrome and it is most common among high achievers, especially peo...

Sunlight is composed of red, green and blue light waves. Combine these together and you get white light. A Remove the red from white light and you will no longer be able to see red in anything illuminated by that light. Red will no longer exist. Remove the blue and you will no longer see blue. This is the secret of propaganda. Propaganda is an emotionally charged word, so we should probably e...

Each of us likes to think we believe what we believe because the evidence dictates it. But if that were true, wouldn’t each of us believe the same things? We call one person a romantic and another a realist, and we secretly think the realist to be more valuable, do we not? Labels are powerful things. To call someone “a realist” is to accuse his or her counterpart of believing in things that are no...

Why do old songs pop into our heads? Unheard for decades – and often a song we never even liked – there it is, filling the echo chamber of the articulatory loop of working memory in the dorsolateral prefrontal association areas of our brains. “…smokin’ cigarettes and watchin’ Captain  Kannnng -aroo, now don’t tell  meeeeeeee  I’ve nothin’ to  dooooo ….” I whispered everything I...

The cognoscenti will remember two big statements glittering on the screen behind me during the opening moments of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop: “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” – Niels Bohr, physicist “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mi...

Time and Money are interchangeable. We can always save one by spending more of the other. Time and Money are interchangeable. We prize the one we feel to be in short supply. Time and Money are interchangeable. We burn them both like the wax of a candle. What is  patience  if not the quiet, dark burning of time? What is  entertainment  if not the dazzling, bright burning of...

Most people associate The Power of Myth with the 1988 PBS television series with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, or with the accompanying book of that name. But it was John F. Kennedy who spoke of the power of myth with the greatest clarity and insight. The occasion was his 1962 Commencement Address to the graduates of Yale University. As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself f...

Memories of Percy August 1, 2016 Listen A His gifts didn’t prove that he was rich. His gifts proved that he cared. And the smallness of his gifts proved that I could afford to care, too. My long friendship with Percy began exactly 30 years ago when I saw him on the cover of a magazine as it lay on a coffee table in a friend’s house. He was a smiling gentleman sitting on a desk stacked with ba...

The reason people write poorly is because they read too many blogs, tweets, news stories and Facebook posts. As you read, so will you write. Maxwell Rotbart. the son of roving reporter Rotbart, asked me to name 10 books he should read. When I asked the purpose of this reading, Maxwell said, “I just want to know what great writing sounds like.” “Do you want to read the best stories or do you w...

She stood silently on the cracked asphalt, her summer dress billowing in the breeze, the calm at the center of the storm that was spreading across the country. Around her swirled police officers and demonstrators that had blocked Airline Highway in Baton Rouge to denounce the death of Alton Sterling, shot by police outside a convenience store. Many protesters carried signs.&nbs...

Like most men, I’ve long been fascinated with women. But if we look beyond the physical differences, what is it that defines “woman”? Research reveals a series of definitions so conflicted that I believe anyone who attempts to define “woman” is certain to be criticized. But when has that ever been an impediment to a curious mind? Our examination of the mystery and magic of the feminine begins with...

People have been asking me to explain symbols lately. Symbols are a language of the unconscious mind. This is why our dreams are full of them. A person sits alone in a rowboat on the ocean at night, looking up at the stars. That symbol – whether expressed visually or in words – speaks to us of  spirituality  and  practicality ; deep thoughts and big challenges. But ho...

I scribbled my original “Twelve Most Common Mistakes in Marketing” on a hotel bar napkin in Portland, Oregon in 1997 and then presented those mistakes in a seminar the next day to 800 people. The following year it became an important chapter in my first book,  The Wizard of Ads.  Happily, that book went on to become Business Book of the Year in 1998 and it launched a trilogy of  New...