Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

Wal-Mart is the biggest company in America, followed by 3 oil companies and then Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway, Apple Computers, General Motors, and General Electric. Yep. Apple today is bigger than both General Motors and G.E. “Yippee, Skippy, call the press. Oh, you did already? And the press said Nash-Finch is number 500? Who the hell is Nash-Finch?” The Fortune 500 are the news...

Every employee has opinions about the advertising that represents their company. This is natural I suppose because those ads, by extension, represent the employee as well. And so they tell the boss what they think, “and all of our customers think that, too.” But if the development of successful advertising were as instinctive as most people believe, a higher percentage of ads would be su...

A brief summary of this episode

You and I are aware of the superficial motives we have for the things we do, but only rarely do we consider the deeper motives that hide behind the superficial ones. Pennie and I have been discussing the future and how it revolves around you. Yes, you. Today, July 8, 2013, is the vortex of a 15-year convergence of events that began in 1998. We sit for an instant in the eye of the st...

I’ve had a handful of memorable moments. AAmong them is a meeting with Zig Ziglar in 1986. Zig stood at a whiteboard and smiled at the 20 of us staring back at him with big eyes. Zig had written several bestselling books and created America’s most popular sales training program. The 20 of us were neophyte managers, trembling with excitement at having been chosen to be in that room. Marker in hand,...

And the People Behind It   In the world of bricks-and-mortar, 1. a spectacular building, 2. good signage and 3. an excellent location are the best advertising money can buy. In the binary world where Ones are bricks and Zeroes are mortar, 1. your website is your building, 2. your masthead is your signage and 3. your domain name is your location. But that’s where the metaphor falls apart....

A person capable of creating is happiest when they are creating. Artists create visual and auditory artifacts that affect our thoughts, moods and attitudes. Riddle-solvers perform feats of engineering and invention. Teachers create new understanding in the minds of their students. Entrepreneurs create businesses that offer us new and different experiences. Communicators create stories an...

Your Spotlight of Words? A radio commercial begins, “I’m Ronald Watersdown, and I’m here to tell you about a very important opportunity that I’m sure you won’t want to miss. It’s an incredible chance for you to…” What did those twenty-nine words make you see in your mind? Not much, right? But what about these? “Owl was neither wise nor old. She was a teenage assassin whose larg...

Laid side-by-side, a stick and a rope of the same length share a similar appearance. Likewise, rules and principles look alike even though they have virtually nothing in common. Rules are like sticks. You can prod people with them. You can threaten people with them. You can beat people with them. But you cannot lead people with them. When a rule doesn’t fit the circumstance, your only choice...

The principal benefit of creative thought is hope. New possibilities are electric, and hope is the light that shines from them. Creativity is the source of hope even when your hope is in God: “I don’t see a way out of this, but I’m betting that He does.” We depend upon God’s creative thoughts to do what we cannot. I’m sorry if my mention of God annoys you. (Just for the record, He i...

The smartest thing I ever did was drop out of college on the second day. What I wanted to learn, they couldn’t teach me, so I left to figure it out on my own. That was 37 years ago. A number of years later I wrote a series of  New York Times  and  Wall Street Journal  bestselling business books and launched a school for grown-ups who are imaginative, courageous and am...

Radio Ink  magazine, published by Eric Rhoads, is the principal trade publication of the radio industry. Today we examine a feature article I wrote for that magazine recently. In it, I speak directly to the frustrations of the account executives – the salespeople – employed by America’s 10,000+ commercial radio stations and the many hundreds of stations across Canada and Australia. I’ve decid...

For I Am Exchanging a Day of My Life For It. Quixote sees the turning of the windmill as the flailing arms of a giant that must be defeated. Peter Pan will remain young only if he can escape a tick-tocking crocodile that has swallowed a clock. In 1904, old Mrs. Snow spoke of her late husband to author J.M. Barrie on the opening night of his play,  Peter Pan,  “…and he woul...

Finally, an authentic, encoded message. And you'll never guess where. The Da Vinci Code  was published in 2003, exactly 10 years ago. The book has been denounced as an attack on the Catholic church and sharply criticized for its historical and scientific inaccuracies, but that hasn’t keep it from selling more than 80 million copies in 44 languages. The story is fiction, marketed as fiction, a...

Fear is the bullet that eliminates happiness. Fear is the bullet that kills the dream. Fear is the assassin of success. Why not become bulletproof in 2 easy steps? 1. Make peace with the possibility of failure. 2. Amputate your sense of shame. “Failure is not an option” is the platitude of people who have attended one-too-many motivational seminars. Failure is al...

If you’re not being criticized today, then no one was listening when you spoke. Welcome to the time of the witch-hunt. This is that time when angry cyber-terrorists post incendiary online reviews and pretend their only motive is to protect the public. This is that time when corporate assassins take pleasure in shooting elephants from a distance; their greatest joy is to ruin the reputati...

’ve never seen a business fail due to “reaching the wrong people.” So why does every business owner instinctively believe that “reaching the right people” is the key to successful advertising? Who, exactly, do you  not  want to know about you? Who isn’t qualified to repeat the good things they’ve heard about you? And when is the best time to advertise? Solomon wrote about...

The Private Advice of Harry Connick, Jr. Chandler Canterbury is a child actor with a dazzling future. Immediately following the world premiere of  When Angels Sing,  a not-yet-released movie young Canterbury made with Willie Nelson, Connie Britton, Lyle Lovett, Fionnula Flanagan, Kris Kristofferson and Harry Connick, Jr., Harry grabbed a microphone and told a funny story about...

f I had any sense, if I had half the brains God gave an aardvark, I’d talk about politics or religion and fewer people would be annoyed. But aardvarks look at me with pity because I’m foolish. My social filter is so misaligned that I’m going to share with you my thoughts about planning. “Plan your work and work your plan.” These are the holy words of a belief system built on intuiti...

Been Read, Being Read, Will be Read Jeff says I have a confirmation bias, a strong attraction to information that reinforces my convictions and helps me prove my point. That makes sense. I’m an ad writer. Does anyone really want their ad writer to be unbiased? The job of the ad writer is to: 1. discover a persuasive perspective, and 2. develop a distinctly memorable voice...

Is it wise to protect the ones we love from the hardships that taught us all we know? Hardship is the undisputed School of the Masters, but very few students seek admission. Education begins with memorization. Having learned all the theories, steps and rules, we parry and thrust against the light in a kind of frantic swordplay with the shadows of possibilities. This is when we learn that...

I think there should be something in science called the ‘reindeer effect.’ I don’t know what it would be, but I think it’d be good to hear someone say, ‘Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.’ – Jack Handey The Reindeer Effect isn’t real. AThe Ikea Effect, however, is real enough to be the subject of a story in Harvard Business Review. The essence of...

A brief summary of this episodeTo See a Better Outcome Things depend on how you look at them. Through what lenses do you examine possibilities? The first 2 lenses are intellect and emotion. Sometimes you use one, sometimes the other. This is normal. Intellect employs hard facts and cold logic. Emotion relies on soft intuition and warm connections. Will the first impression be m...

Nothing sounds appealing. Have you ever had that feeling? You’re sort of hungry, but nothing sounds good. You want to have fun, but nothing sounds fun. So you drive to the bookstore but none of the books – not a single one of them – whispers for you to carry it to the cashier. You go home and sit. The clock ticks. You keep sitting. The clock keeps ticking. You realize the clock...

Rambling Thoughts, Spoken Plainly, Certain to Irritate Someone, Somewhere A mirage is not a hallucination, but a misinterpretation. We see the sky reflected from the ground and we assume it to be water. But it isn’t. That reflection is caused by light passing through cold air that sits on a thin layer of hot air, heated by sun-soaked sand. 1. FaceBook, for business, is a mirage. Can it successfull...