Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

Your company is approaching an intersection. The light is green. Turn left and you’re headed toward Excellence. Turn right and you’re headed toward another kind of Excellence. Go straight and you’ll arrive at Mediocrity. Most companies go straight ahead because if they turn left or right they’ll be moving toward one kind of Excellence  but directly away from the other kind  and something...

Branding – as it is taught today – will at best cause people to remember you and have a mild opinion. But unlike yesterday’s branding, today’s bonding is the beginning of relationship, the essence of loyalty and the foundation of community among human beings. Bonding, when done properly, makes people feel connected to you. It is the little-known secret of marketing to millennials* and their parent...

Words ring like bells when you collide them correctly. It’s in the Bible. In the opening chapter of Genesis we read about the creation of the universe – God spoke it into existence if you can believe it – and we read about the creation of mankind. An interesting chapter, that one. The only information we’re given about God is that God said this and that and things began to spontaneously...

Some word-people feel it’s their duty to correct you when you use a word improperly. These people are pedantic, pointy-nose dogs determined to give you a posterior probe, pretending it’s for your own good. I am not that sort of word-person. The people of my tribe believe words are colored with sparkling tints of nuance and subtle shades of association. Add white to a color and the result will be a...

More than 500 people have seen the earth from space and 12 have walked on the moon. Most of these people returned home strangely altered. Their families were the first to notice. In 1987 this phenomenon got a name. “The overview effect” refers to what happens when a person sees, firsthand, the Earth as a tiny, fragile ball of life hanging in the void, shielded and nourished by...

We believe knowledge is freedom. We believe you can learn big things quickly when your instructor is experienced, passionate, organized and entertaining. We believe an expert can teach you – in less than a day – more than you can learn in 4 years of college. We believe traditional wisdom is often more tradition than wisdom. We believe in streaming video. The American Small Business Institute is th...

When each customer buys four and a half times the average amount of stuff per visit and you attract four times the average number of visitors, you make eighteen times as much profit. (4 x 4.5 = 18) If you run your convenience store according to the rules and conventions of convenience stores, you’re going to have yourself a conventional convenience store. (1.)  But if you run your conven...

You have a dream, a hope for the future. But are you willing to spend what it costs to achieve it, endure what is required of you and fight for as long as it takes? Unrelenting action is what turns starry-eyed daydreams into steely-eyed objectives. You say you have a goal. Let me look into your eyes. Now tell me what you did today. Unrelenting Action (From the Monday Morning Memo of&nbsp...

A person is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. They say, “One picture is worth a thousand words.” I say, “In 1985, after finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple Computer Human Interface Group adopted the motto,  ‘A word is worth a thousand pictures,’  and a descriptive word or phrase was added beneath all Macintosh icons. Read it for you...

I had an interesting moment a couple of weeks ago. A client came to Austin for his annual marketing retreat and brought his top lieutenants with him. His company has a couple of hundred franchisees that do about a quarter-billion dollars a year. Everyone was anxious to hear my marketing strategy for 2016. “I need you to watch carefully and say nothing for the next 10 minutes,” I told them. “When I...

You own a business. You believe in your company. You believe you deliver a better experience than your competitors. Is this confidence based on your intentions, your goals, your beliefs, your values and your personal commitment to your customer’s happiness? It is?  Uh-oh. Judging yourself by your intentions isn’t a danger among friends, because a friend knows your heart even when your actions...

Magenta. What color is that? It isn’t violet and it isn’t purple. And why isn’t it in the rainbow? Doesn’t the rainbow contain the whole color spectrum? The short answer is that magenta doesn’t actually exist. (Well, none of the colors actually exist, but we’ll get to that in a little bit. Magenta doesn’t exist in an  additional  way .  Now that’s real commitment to not ex...

“I could’ve bought that building 5 years ago for $70,000. It’s worth half a million now.” “I could’ve been his partner in that business. He’s worth a fortune now.” “I could’ve…” This went on all day. My host believed I would be impressed that he was “connected” and “in the know,” but the only thing I was hearing was his sad admission, “I don’t know when to pounce.” He had no sense of Kairos (KYE-r...

Psychologist Carl Jung saw life as a journey on water. Above the waterline is the conscious mind, this place of sunshine and scenery that you and I call home. Below the waterline is the unconscious, a wet and moonlit world of symbols and meanings and metaphors on which we float like shadows along the upper edge of time, observing myriad mysteries in wordless wonder. Consciousness is a raft th...

If your sales lead is one hour old, you’re about to make a cold call. In other words,  you don’t really have a sales lead anymore.  In fact, if that sales lead was generated online, your contact rate declines by 99 percent – meaning that you’ll reach just one in one hundred at the end of 30 minutes – when compared to responding within 5 minutes.* One of the unintended...

You can choose a dragon or you can wait until a dragon chooses you, but every happy person fights one. Our dragons give us purpose. Our dragons give us adventure. The problem with adventure is that we seldom realize how much fun we’re having until it’s over. When you’re having an adventure, you wish you were safe at home. But when you’re safe at home you wish you were having an adventure. Challeng...

Dean Rotbart once told me that a person can do well without doing good. It took me a beat to grasp his meaning, but then it hit me and I’ve never forgotten it. “Doing well” is financial. It’s about you. “Doing good” is personal. It’s about others. And the difference you’ve made in their lives. Mia Erichson says success and significance are like that, too. Success is about you. It’s about the thing...

“Bonding” is falling in love with a company, a product, a spokesperson, an outlook, a belief system. This bond of love inevitably manifests itself in a tangible way. And then again. And again. A bonding ad is about the customer. A direct response ad is about the offer. Direct response ads trigger immediate action. Bonding ads do not. The results of a direct response a...

Branding – bonding with a hero or a company or other imaginary character – is merely an entangling of identity hooks. We connect because we are alike. But where do we gather these identity hooks on which hang our self-definitions? “The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start.” ― Jodi Picoult,  Sing You Home Our books and movies define us. “What makes a library...

I got some great news last week. A friend who read my  Musings of an Old Ad Writer   said to me, “You’re not old, you’re middle aged.” Woo-hoo! If he’s right, I’m going to live to be 114. During the years that I was, in fact, middle aged, I was too busy to have a midlife crisis. So I decided to have one now. A midlife crisis, as I understand it, is a ridiculous and ill-advised grab at th...

There are words used by young advertising professionals that I try desperately to avoid. Two of the most painful phrases for me are “unique selling proposition” and “branding.” When I was young, those phrases meant the same to me as they did to everyone else. But I take comfort in the words of Muhammad Ali, “The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty y...

Laughter brings escape from monotony. Sadness teaches us what is important to our heart. Commitment carries us through the dark hours, the dry places, the sad times. Enthusiasm, “God within,” opens our eyes to the possible. JP Engelbrecht says a business owner can learn a lot about managing groups of people by studying famous monarchs. “If you manage tight-to-loose” says JP, “your people...

You cannot instruct a person to have enthusiasm any more than you can instruct them to give birth to a redheaded child. The person must first be inspired. Inspiration is what you give them. Enthusiasm is what they give you. People inhale inspiration and exhale enthusiasm. They cannot give you enthusiasm until you give them inspiration. Neither is a product of instruction. There is a time to i...

Occasionally a client will send a spreadsheet of company statistics and ask me to comment on what I see. I usually look and see ambiguous statistics but I certainly don’t want to say that. Discussing business numbers with people is like discussing religion. No matter what you say, you’re unlikely to change their intrinsic beliefs, so I always approach these conversations carefully. “What do y...

Whiners, blame shifters, indignant people, people with victim mentalities, online trolls, people who demand things and cheerless givers of “constructive criticism” are all herded into one decrepit old corral in my brain. That corral is a category in my mind. As these unhappy cows moan “moooo” I walk sadly away and think “dog food.” I put them in that corral so they can’t follow me. Cows stand in t...