Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

Clarity and Brevity are the highest creativity. But “clear and brief” does not mean simple and predictable. One the most talented writers of advertising in the world would be surprised to hear me call him that.  Jonathan Edward Durham is a novelist.  He recently posted this random thought. “‘Why am I so sad today?’ I ask myself after staring at my little handheld sadness machine and clic...

January 18, 1604:  King James, a Protestant, announces that he will commission an English translation of the Bible. January 16, 1605:  Miguel de Cervantes’  Don Quixote  is published in Spain. It is considered to be the first modern novel. Every sophisticated storytelling device used by the best writers today made its initial debut in  Don Quixote. February 28, 1605: &nbsp...

I was whining to Clay Cary about the interest rate the bank was going to charge me to fund a real estate investment. I felt the percentage was way too high. Clay asked, “Is the deal you’re about to make a good deal? How much money will you make from it?” I answered his question conservatively. He said, “Now let’s calculate the total amount of interest that you will pay on the loan that makes this...

Pain is a signal that something is wrong. Pain whispers, shouts, and screams, “Pay attention. Be careful. Something is wrong.” Jean Marzollo wrote  a children’s poem  in 1948 that romanticized Christopher Columbus. It inspired a generation of children during the Captain Kangaroo years. Her proud poem begins, “In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue” Bill Bryson wrot...

You want to succeed. But will you recognize success when it happens? What will be its indicators? How will you measure it? Most importantly, how long are you willing to pursue it? You probably overestimate what you can accomplish in a year, and underestimate what you can accomplish in ten years. How many years have you been pursuing your dream? Experience is the name you are allowed give to your m...

The Muses of Greek mythology were nine goddesses associated with the arts, sciences, and memory. They were the source of inspiration for artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. They were the goddesses of knowledge, embodying the wisdom and creative power found in poetry, songs, and myths. This is the point: a muse is never an actual woman. When a man chooses a flesh-and-blo...

The Muses of Greek mythology were nine goddesses associated with the arts, sciences, and memory. They were the source of inspiration for artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. They were the goddesses of knowledge, embodying the wisdom and creative power found in poetry, songs, and myths. This is the point: a muse is never an actual woman. When a man chooses a flesh-and-blo...

The greatest companies are the ones with the happiest customers. To create happy customers, you need to be customer-centric. Every company believes they are customer-centric. But while a great company keeps the happiness of their customer in the center of their thoughts, the average company puts their customer in the center of the cross-hairs of a rifle scope. Great companies ask,  “How can w...

The strongest brands are the ones with the most distinctive personalities. But even a weak and faded personality is better than none at all. A brand with a personality is an imaginary character in the minds of the customers of that brand. It is similar to the characters in syndicated television shows, bestselling novels, and big movie franchises. Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, and Robin Williams are...

“Around the swimming beagles, bright stars danced on rippling waters like a thousand little fishes of light scurrying in a sea of darkness. Can there be a more beautiful sight than when sky meets ocean in the black of night?” The lawyer whispered to himself, the beagles, and the sea as the soft blanket of summer wrapped them all in her warm embrace. Night is a time of reflection. Not of stars in w...

Pennie and I had a difficult week a long way from home. It began with a piece of gravel that cracked her windshield. Looking back, we should have just lived with it. But we didn’t know that at the time. We dropped her car off at the appointed time on the appointed day. When Pennie picked it up, the upper-left corner of her new windshield whistled loudly at speeds above 30mph. She called the windsh...

“If people were paid according to how hard they work, the richest people on earth would be the ones digging ditches with a shovel in the hot summertime.” That’s what my mother told me when I was a boy. When she saw the puzzled look on my face, she continued. “People who make a lot of money are paid according to the weight of the responsibility they carry and the quality of the decisions they make....

His name was Rab. He died in Bengal, the land of tigers, in 1941. On his way out the door, he said, “Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.” When Rab was sixteen, he published a book of poetry under the pseudonym  Bhānusiṃha , which means “Sun Lion.” Those poems were seized upon by literary authorities as “long-lost classics.” Where do you hurry with your bas...

Michael Dell and Shaquille O’Neal planned their work and worked their plans. Dell understood the formulas, and followed the rules, of efficiency. O’Neal understood the formulas and followed the rules of basketball. Each of them faithfully followed a Structural plan. Michael Dell invented nothing, improvised nothing, and innovated only once. But that single innovation made him a billionaire. Dell’s...

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” “Life… Liberty… and the pursuit of Happiness.” We published those words 229 years ago when we declared our independence from Britain. That document was the earliest expression of what has...

“If we train our children only to harvest, who will plant the seed?” I wrote those words after contemplating the short-sightedness of so-called, “performance marketing,” on March 11, 2010. “Performance marketing” is the new name for  direct response  advertising. It works best when it extracts the value from a well-known brand. Its objective is to bring in a lot of money quickly. That is...

I was watching a few of Evan Puschak’s “Nerdwriter” videos  when I heard my own inner voice composing a thank you note to him. In the quiet of my mind, I told Evan that I have always found his analysis of literature, movies, music, photographs, and paintings to be incisive and insightful. Incisive Insightful Those two words, back-to-back, hit me so hard that I stumbled and fell backward into...

Magical Thinking is often misunderstood. Jason Segel plays a psychologist in the Apple + TV show, “Shrinking.” He is talking to a patient with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. He looks at her. “This again?” She is holding her breath. He says, “You looked at the clock and now you have to hold your breath until the minute changes?” Holding her breath, she nods her head. He says, “Look, I know you feel...

Brian Brushwood knows how to gain and hold attention in social media. Reaching for that brass ring causes most people to lean too far off their plastic horse on the social media merry-go-round. SPLAT! They land flat on their faces with only a few hundred views. Brian has built a YouTube channel to 1.7 million subscribers, an entirely different channel to more than 2 million subscribers, and 12 day...

“Features and benefits” were once the most loudly shouted secrets of customer acquisition in  Business to Consumer  advertising (B2C). I even wrote a chapter in my first book –  The Wizard of Ads  – on the use of “which means” as a word-bridge between: 1. naming a feature of your product and 2. naming the benefit it delivers to your customer. But that was 27 years ago. When “fe...

Philip Dusenberry once said, “I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.” I can testify that Dusenberry is correct. The best ad writers make more money than the most highly paid lawyers and heart surgeons. Great advertising makes an enormous difference in the top line revenue of a company. A reputation fo...

Twenty-four thousand men were crowded into Knockaloe Interment Camp in 1914 because they had been found guilty of being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong last name. Tightly confined behind barbed wire, those men grew increasingly weak, feeble, stiff and awkward until a man named Joseph was shoved through their gate on September 12, 1915. He gave his fellow prisoners strength, s...

The biggest decisions I ever made didn’t seem big at the time. I’ll bet the same is true for you. Pivotal changes in direction seem obvious to us 10 years later, but during that tiny moment when we alter our course a little, it feels like a very small thing. Here are 4 small, pivotal moments that loom large in my mind today. Moment #1:  I was a 22-year-old advertising salesman who was rapidly...

If you believe that people today have a short attention span, you are mistaken. FACT:  We live in an over-communicated society. This is why we have learned how to quickly  filter out  messages that do not interest us. FACT:  We will happily spend several hours binge-watching shows that appeal to us. Where’s your theory about a short attention span now? If you want to get people...

Buying advertising is a lot like buying diamonds. Allow me to explain. Anyone who talks to a jeweler will be told that diamonds are graded according to the 4 C’s: Color, Clarity, Carat weight, and Cut. Customers ask the jeweler, “Which of the 4 Cs is most important?” This seems like a perfectly reasonable question, but the truth is that the 4 C’s cannot be compared to one another. There is no rubr...