Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

James Lipton asked Barbra Streisand the secret of her success. She responded by saying, “At the moment of commitment, the Universe conspires to assist you.” – September 8, 2003, while recording an episode of  Inside the Actor’s Studio  that would air on March 21, 2004 Streisand was summarizing a quote usually attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-18...

I love Garrison Keillor’s  Lake Wobegon  for the same reason I love Norman Rockwell. The people in those worlds are quirky but loveable, flawed but happy, sincere but imaginary. When you think about it,  Lake Wobegon  is a lot like Andy Griffith’s  Mayberry,  where the children are mischievous but good-hearted, racial tension is nonexistent and all the women are homes...

“Two heads are better than one,” is often quoted but horribly wrong.  Trust me, I know. Anything with two heads is a monster. “Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anyth...

A brief summary of this episode

Media Buying Lesson Number One I’ve never seen a business fail because they were reaching the wrong customer. But I’ve seen hundreds fail because they were saying the wrong things.   Most ads answer questions no one was asking. How did we Americans become so fixated on “targeting the right customer” in our advertising? That question has two answers. The first is, “because...

People today are different, less naïve, less gullible, less open to suggestion than in the past. Christopher Isherwood describes this difference perfectly:   “To live sanely in Los Angeles or, I suppose, in any other large American city, you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movie...

1845:  This is the year Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman will plant his final apple tree. Mark Twain is 10 years old, living the boyhood that will bring us Tom Sawyer. Florida will be added to the U.S. this year, raising the total number of states to 27. We think of life as being simpler, more idyllic back then, don’t we? The American Revolution was more recent to them than World War II is to...

America contained about two and a half million people when we declared our independence in 1776. Today’s Portland, Oregon is bigger than that. The Constitution (1787) empowered every citizen who was white, male and a landowner. Minorities, women and poor people? Not so much. America was unlike Europe in that we didn’t divide our population into nobles and peasants. We divided our pe...

A Barely Explicable Collection of Moments Every person is a collector, I think. Businesspeople collect money. Travelers collect places. Competitors collect shining moments. Insecure people collect conquests, panties hanging from the bedpost. My own collection consists of curiosities, tokens of moments nearly forgotten; captured glimpses of interesting lives. I’m not c...

I’m a Merry Christmas person. Does that make me bad? “Happy Holidays” doesn’t carry quite the same exuberance for me as “Merry Christmas.” And I must shamefully confess that deep in my heart I still think of Navajos, Cherokees and Apaches as Indians. My publisher tells me there is no such place as the Orient anymore! So are the boundaries of Asia the same as they were back when I was in schoo...

Do Creative People Have to be Self-Destructive?   New York Times  writer Samuel G. Freedman asks, “Can the forces that make you creative also kill you?” “Can you live with control and yet create free of restraint?” “Can you live enough of the dark side to tell the tale without becoming a casualty?” Freedman’s curiosity is well founded. History is littered with the corpses of cr...

“Added value” is the popular name for what’s included at no extra charge. But we are entering a time when it will no longer be sufficient to tell the world what you include and what you stand for. To hold the attention of the public in 2012 and beyond, you must identify what you leave out and what you stand against. Organic fruit and vegetable growers leave out the fertilizer and pe...

Man of La Mancha  rocked Broadway in 1965 with its thundering theme song,  The Impossible Dream.  You remember that song, don’t you? It opens in soft reflection, “To dream the impossible dream… To fight the unbeatable foe…” but then it defies mortal gravity to rise heavenward on a column of fury like an old Apollo rocket from Cape Canaveral: This is my Quest: to follow that sta...

Most people see life as a linear progression, a canoe ride on the river of time. The scenery passes. The sun rises and sets. Occasionally there is a storm. It’s a tempting metaphor because we often think of time flowing like a river and to see ourselves as passengers on that river is a natural extension. But my life hasn’t been like that and I’ll bet yours hasn’t either. I see us as boul...

Our system of education is built on the belief that learning is best achieved by bringing the best of the past forward through expert advice and clear example. Consequently, educators rise through the ranks like officers in the military:  through compliance and conformity to the norm.  But in this era of quantum change, are we really best served by imitating the past?  Let...

Storytelling is gaining momentum.  Open-mic nights are the hot ticket in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit and New York with people lining up two hours before show time to hear storytellers tell stories. Let’s look at the reasons why: “Storytelling is human connection at its most primal form,” says Catherine Burns, artistic director for the storytelling broadcast,  The Moth, &...

Pearl was a bit of a whore. We never kept her in a fence So she had puppies at least once a year. She was a good mother. Abandoned in the country, starving, We found her when I was in third grade. She knew she was my dog immediately. God help you if you got mad at me. A blur of fur and teeth and little-dog roaring Awaited you halfway to me. No one ever called Pearl’s bluff because they knew she wa...

Your brain is hardwired to notice the exception, the incongruity, the discrepancy, the disturbance, that thing – no matter how small – that doesn’t belong.    “Something of the sense of holiness on islands comes, I think, from this strange, elastic geography. Islands are made larger, paradoxically, by the scale of the sea that surrounds them. The element which might reduce them...

Anxious anticipation, nervous trepidation, heart palpitation and a tingling sensation are the smells and bells of adventure.   Paul Tournier was a 3 year-old orphan in Switzerland when Teddy Roosevelt became President of the United States.  Paul grew up to become a doctor.   He did a lot of thinking and he wrote a few books.   Paul Tournier was nearly 70&nbs...

Style Guides and Audio Signatures: Part Three Words shine like a movie projector on the screen of imagination, creating lifelike images in the mind. 1: Which actors will you place on the screen?  Will your voice be first person “I,” second person “you,” or third person “they?” 2. What will be your time perspective? Will your verbs be past tense “was,” present tense “am,” or future tense...

The boys were born on the same day in the same year: February 12, 1809. Both were intensely private. Each boy lost his mother in early childhood. Neither was close to his father. The two never met but together they tipped the world on its axis and made it wobble for 100 years. You know the story of the first one; born in a log cabin, taught himself to read by the light of the firepl...

But Not Their Own Facts   “If you’ve read about social media or been to any marketing conferences, you’ve probably heard tons of advice like love your customers, engage in the conversation, be yourself, and make friends. I call this unicorns-and-rainbows advice. Take a couple of time-honored adages, add in the unquestioning awe of an unaware audience, and pretty soon you’ve got an entire...

Eleven million copies of  Tuesdays with Morrie  have been sold.   But one hundred years before Mitch Albom began spending the-day-after-Monday with Morrie, a previous Tuesday gathering had already left its mark upon the earth and walked triumphantly into the pages of history.   You are cordially invited to the home of Stéphane Mallarmé 89 Rue de Rome, Paris Tuesdays,...

Style Guides and Audio Signatures: Part Two  THE OUTER YOU: The best ad campaigns have a style guide. Implicit or explicit, the style guide is always there. A visual style guide determines the look and feel of visual ads, signage and décor. Audio Signatures (distinctive enunciations, sound effects, special effects, unusual voices, rhythms, delivery styles, etc.) are the primary elem...

Ad Campaign: a series of ads bound together by a set of distinctive identifiers. Can you name the identifiers that mark your campaign? Okay, there’s the font you use for your company name and the color scheme you use on your business cards, letterhead and signage.  But the world overflows with fonts and colors.  What other distinctive identifiers cause your readers, listen...