Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

Andy Warhol’s greatest work of art was Andy Warhol. Other artists first make their art and then celebrity comes from it. Andy reversed this. For me the Factory was a place of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, for some of the others it was: from ferment comes art.” – Nat Finkelstein,  Andy Warhol: The Factory Years, 1964-1967 The son of a Coney Island cab driver, Nat Finkelstein was a Brooklyn...

You can hope the value of a stock will rise, but when you invest money in that stock, your hope becomes faith. Did you make a foolish commitment? Time will tell. We believe the sun will rise because we’ve seen it rise day after day. It is a repeatable observation. We believe what we have seen. We believe it will rise. Belief is not faith. Belief is rational. Faith is irrational. Belief is bas...

You don’t need to go to college to become successful. What Americans call education is usually just the passing along of traditional wisdom, which, when you think about it, is essentially a deepening of the status quo: conformity, indoctrination, groupthink. When students can imitate their teachers perfectly, we claim they have achieved excellence. But aren’t they just imitating the norm, the aver...

The Grand Illusion of Advertising December 15, 2014 Listen A You own a business. You sell a product or a service. Your growth is limited by one of two things: The right people haven’t heard about you. Because if they had, they would surely be buying from you. The right people have heard about you. They just didn’t care. The grand illusion of advertising – perpetuated by every seller of ads – is th...

Since the year 2000, the cognoscenti of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop have happily endured the fanfare and pageantry of my 3-day explanation of Third Gravitating Bodies. It remains the most highly attended class at Wizard Academy. For the uninitiated, a Third Gravitating Body with a high degree of divergence and an explicit moment of convergence is the single common characteristic sha...

In 1879, Ferdinand Cheval was a postman in France who tripped on a strangely shaped stone and stumbled awkwardly forward. He was 43 years old. This would not normally be news but Cheval continued to stumble awkwardly forward each day for 33 more years. His was not the 10,000 hours to excellence championed by Malcolm Gladwell. Cheval stumbled forward for more than 10,000  days.  The mirac...

I made the decision 20 years ago that the Monday Morning Memo would rarely be about news or current events. I chose to leave the singing of fleeting facts to a chorus of professional reporters. It is a choir that does not need my voice. But today I’m making an exception. There are four things I’m betting you’ve noticed. Perhaps they’ve raised an eyebrow. I want you to know that you’re not alone. S...

Phil was nearly 70 when I met him 30 years ago. He’ll be 100 soon. Phil doesn’t know it, but I think of him as one of the people who speaks wisdom into my life. Do you have a favorite word? Phil’s favorite word is balance. Most of us are out of balance and suffering for it. We think we’re in danger from bad things but those bad things rarely materialize. Our problem is that we’re pulled out of bal...

I’m talking with a man about his happy future. There will be decisions to make and risks to take, but it’s a future that can definitely be his. And then he says, “I don’t want to get my hopes up.” The air leaves my body and I want to cry. And then I want to slap him, wake him up, shout the question that screams its own answer: “Do you know what happens when you don’t get your hopes up? Nothing! No...

The silent workings of my mind are of little interest to anyone but me, yet occasionally I feel the need to chronicle some small discovery; to write it down so that it might continue to exist after I have been forgotten. Once a year I write a Monday Morning Memo that is more for me than it is for you and this is that one. If you quit reading now, I’ll understand. In Cervantes’ book of 1605, Don Qu...

The problem with most websites is that they’re built inside out. It’s an easy trap to fall into, almost inevitable, in fact. You’re on the  inside  of your company,  looking out  at your customer. She’s on the outside, looking in. Your website is built from your perspective, not hers. But let’s be fair: your website tells her everything she needs to know to make an informed dec...

When you write ads for a living, you learn that the truth is often the opposite of what people believe. Most people believe an ad will work if people like it, and an ad won’t work if people hate it. But that’s just not true. And we’re wrong about far more important things than that. Take marriage, for instance. You’ve heard it said countless times, “Marriage is just a piece of paper.” But the data...

Jerry Seinfeld is the richest actor on earth. Google it. He’s worth eight hundred and twenty million dollars. You don’t make that kind of money working as a stand-up comedian in Atlantic City. You make it when companies pay to run ads during your hit TV show. Based on the advertising revenues it generated,  Seinfeld  (1989-1998) was the most successful TV show in the history of televisio...

When we think of Romeo and Juliet, we think of Shakespeare. But Shakey didn’t create those characters. The source of Shakespeare’s 1594 play was a 3000-line poem by Arthur Brooke,  Romeus and Juliet,  published 32 years earlier in 1562. Romeo and Juliet didn’t originate with Arthur Brooke, either. He compiled it from a number of Italian Renaissance sources, the earliest of them going bac...

I’ve always been puzzled by the fact that businesspeople think of advertising and sales training and customer service as three separate departments within a company. Have you ever developed an impression of a company through their advertising and then gotten a totally different impression of that company when you met them? The external personality of your company is created thr...

Jeffrey Eisenberg sent me this 1994 Compuserve ad that talks about delivering “up to 60 messages per month” as though 60 would be the largest number of emails that any of us would ever need to send. Isn’t it interesting how our use of technology always seems to evolve differently than any of us expected to see happen? Yet we continue to be attracted to pitchmen with booming voices and bad toupees...

Before becoming a poet, a Wizard of AdsTM and a writing instructor, Peter Nevland was an engineer at Motorola. Andrew Backus is a geologist and the living embodiment of Doctor Doolittle. The number of injured animals Andrew has rescued from the roadside would overflow the San Diego Zoo. Andrew and Peter are both cognoscenti graduates of The Magical Worlds Communicatio...

Some of you are going to feel like I’ve spit on your shoe or mocked your religion or told you that your baby is ugly, so I’d like to apologize in advance for what I’m about to say. Teamwork in business is highly overrated. There, I’ve said it. I realize those 6 words are going to disturb some of you, but if my goals were merely to buy an arched eyebrow and a scornful frown and trigger an email of...

Targeting is impotent. That wasn’t a misspelling. If you want to waste a lot of money on advertising, just target exactly the right audience and then make an offer that fails to move them. Targeting isn’t the answer. Having the right message is the answer. Most ads underperform because they say, “Here’s what we do and here’s how we do it. You should buy it.” Tedious and predictable ads always talk...

If you were to ask 1000 people to name the behavior that marks 93 percent of all successful companies,  what do you suppose they would tell you? I didn’t ask 1000 people but I did ask Google, which is sort of like asking the whole world. Here’s what the whole world told me: “Successful companies focus on what they do best.” “They invest in their people.” “They’re passionate.” “They...

Thirty-one years ago, David Ogilvy wrote, “In some developing countries radio still reaches more people than television. Yet even there nobody really knows what kind of commercials make the cash register ring. Isn’t it time somebody tried to find out?” – David Ogilvy,  Ogilvy on Advertising,  1983, p. 116 Sleep well, David. We found out. And by “we,” I mean the Wizard of A...

Todays memo is a long one, but I promise you it's worth it. Advertisers are attracted to online media when they’re not entirely happy with their investments in traditional broadcast media. To understand the reasons behind their disappointments, we need only to revisit the subject of  last week’s Monday Morning Memo: “Linear, no-threshold thinking” assumes that every statistic is sca...

Reliable data tells us exactly how many motorcycle riders have died trying to navigate an S-curve at 100 miles per hour. The straightforward logic of traditional accounting, with its linear, no-threshold thinking, predicts one-tenth as many deaths at 10 miles per hour. But we know this is ridiculous. The number of riders that die at 10 or 20 miles per hour is likely to be zero. There is...

for Recommending You to Their Friends American retailers learned some interesting things last year. Although consumer confidence was higher during Christmas 2013 than it was during Christmas 2010, ShopperTrak tells us that in-store, holiday foot traffic declined by almost half during those three years. But don’t assume sales volume declined by half for those retailers or that half their custo...

Michael participates in our monthly Wizard of Ads LIVE webinar. Last week, Michael asked for a method that would let him create  fewer  leads, but  better  leads. I responded by telling Michael that broad targeting can be done geographically  by zip code, financially  by income, demographically  by age and gender, or psychographically  by targ...