Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

You’re reading this and I’m honored, because you delete far more emails than you open. Which others do you open? I know, of course, that you read emails from your closest friends and family. But are there any newsletters, blog posts or subscriptions that you open more often than not? Can you pick a single favorite you’d be willing to share? I was crafting an altogether different Mon...

What Do You See In Your Mind? The goal of the batter is to hit the baseball. This is why every kid who holds a bat is told, “Don’t take your eye off the ball.” Later, when endurance is needed, we say, “Keep your eye on the prize.” Can you name the ball you’re trying to hit? Can you name the prize? As a consultant to business owners for more than 30 years, I can tell you without...

This will be the smartest thing I’ve done in years or it will be the stupidest. And I’m going to do it openly so the whole world can watch to see what happens as these next few months unfold. The promotion of Wizard Academy is about to be turned over to someone else. Mark Fox  said, “Roy, instead of hiring someone to do what you do badly, why not hire someone to do what you do...

These are the 5 questions you must answer before you can know how soon your ads will start working: Q. 1:  What percentage of the noise made in your category – in all the different media combined – is being made by you? This is your  Share of Voice. Q. 2:  What percentage of the population will  actively  be in the market for your product or service thi...

If History, Indeed, Repeats Itself  “There is a holy mistaken zeal in politics as well as in religion.” –  The Letters of Junius,  1769 – 1771 “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to bed in the streets, and to steal bread.” – Anatole France, 1844 – 1924  “Men who believe themselves to be good, who do not search their o...

Relevance has always been an important part of effective communication but never so much as today.   The appalling dropout rate in High Schools and the sharp decline in church attendance are just two of the indicators of an accelerated demand by people for  relevance.   “Why should I? Will it make me happier? Is it really going to make a difference or is it just a was...

A 20 year-old kid walks the streets in Oklahoma. Married. No money. Works construction by day, changes tapes in an automated radio station from 1AM to 11AM each Saturday morning for $3.35 an hour. No microphone. No one will know if he’s doing a good job because station management is at home fast asleep. Frankly, the kid is a goober. The broken-down little radio station is ranked dea...

Once a year I allow myself to ramble a bit in the insane delusion that someone out there might actually want to know what’s happening in my life. Deep in my heart I know the only people who really care about my private trivia are my wife and my mom. My wife, of course, lives with me so I’ll address the rest of today’s Memo to my mom. You can eavesdrop if you like. Dear Mom, The tower is...

Chronic problems in business are usually the result of binary thinking. “It’s either this way or that way. It can’t be both.” Strangely, the answer is almost always “both.” “Should I try to attract the price-driven (transactional) customer, or should I go for the (relational) customer who cares about something other than price?” Both.  Create and schedule ads that speak co...

PROVED: Technique Beats Inspiration  Wizard Academy completed an experiment last Thursday and we’re prepared to share the results of it. Amateur musicians were gathered from across North America. We refused to allow them to create music in the manner they preferred. Instead, we showed them video clips of Bob Dylan, Elton John, Richard Carpenter and other musicians explaining the tri...

How to Become Self-Selected, Part Two Monday Morning, One Week Ago  – “Honey, I liked this week’s memo but you never really told us how to become self-selected. You just gave us examples of other people who have done it.” I took another look at that memo and said, “You’re right, Princess. I intended the reader to read the line that says, ‘The self-selected are those who take action,...

he Secret of Peter, James and John  Dewey Jenkins is a self-made man, the sort of person every parent hopes their child will become.   Like many of us, Dewey started with nothing, nada, zip, zero. He worked hard, was focused and patient, always tried to do the right thing, accepted his setbacks with grace and his victories with humility. In this, he is not unique. You and I hav...

Curves are difficult to create in bodies, buildings and furniture. But they always attract attention. Curves are good. All the best stories have them. Good movies, plays and books curve one way then another, taking us in directions we did not anticipate. We can never see what’s around the corner. Curves are the mark of a master. Only a true craftsman can build furniture with el...

Once a month my partners and I have a videoconference. We solve problems together and I share a few stories of things I learned the hard way. Craig Arthur, director of  Wizard of Ads – Australia , tells me these stories are his favorite parts of our time together. Listening to my silly stories, he sees how to sidestep predictable problems.   Many years ago my friend John Young...

For Traditional Retail and Service Businesses  I feel a bit like the boy in the Hans Christian Andersen tale of  The Emperor’s New Clothes,  though I’m not nearly so brave as he. You remember, don’t you? Two weavers promise an Emperor a new suit of clothes that will be invisible to those unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. When the Emperor parades before his subj...

1.  You have something to sell and 2.  You want to tell the world about it. These are my first questions: 1.  Are people already looking for it? 2.  Can you deliver your message in 8 words or less? If the answer to both questions is yes, Put up a big, intrusive sign. The world may be a little uglier for it, but you’ll sell a lot of stuff. For the record, 8 is the number of...

I’ve never met a business owner whose advertising failed because they were reaching the wrong people. Let me say that again.  I’ve never met a business owner whose advertising failed because they were reaching the wrong people. Advertising fails when people have     1. no knowledge  of the offer. The ad is easily ignored.     2. no interest  in the...

We stay too busy to think big thoughts. This frantic busyness, this voluntary slavery to the merely urgent is preferred, I think, because big thoughts make us realize that we are much smaller creatures than we like to pretend. “We often talk about Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 in terms of failures: failures of intelligence, failures of planning, failures of communication. But these catastro...

See it. Believe it. Say it. These are the first steps. But be prepared; most people will think you’re an idiot.  Or delusional. Or full of yourself.  Maybe they’re right.  The outcome is all that separates confidence from hubris. You saw it in your mind. You believed it could happen. You spoke about it as though it were, in fact, going to happen. People laughed at you, mad...

You open your mailbox and grab a handful of paper. How long does it take you to sort that mail? Do you open each envelope and consider its message, or do some of them get tossed into the trashcan unopened?   More than 71 billion dollars were spent on direct mail marketing last year according to the US Postal Service and each of these dollars was spent in the hope that: 1.  your...

Brands are extensions of belief systems. You are attracted to a brand when it stands for something you believe in. We buy what we buy – most of it, anyway – 1. to remind ourselves and 2. tell the world around us      who we are. Brands are identity reinforcement, just like art and architecture and music. Brands are a way of shouting “This is me!” Does it make you...

You Can't Quit Knowing What You Know “My name is Natsu and I’ll be serving you today.” Pennie said, “Natsu… What a pretty name!” “Thank you. I was named after my grandmother. It means ‘summer’ in Japanese.” Thirty seconds earlier, Natsu had looked like any other waitress. But now that we knew her grandmother was Japanese, we couldn’t help but see the obvious signs of Japanese h...

Ken and Barbie are perfect. Ken and Barbie are plastic. Ken and Barbie are hollow. I do not prefer them. True friends are flawed in endearing ways.  Quirky. I’ll never forget the morning when I asked a roomful of newly arrived Wizard Academy students to tell a little about themselves. The last to stand was a tall, silver-haired patriarch who said, “As I sat and listened to you peopl...

As you do or don’t know, I make my living as an advertising consultant. My income is directly tied to the growth of my clients’ businesses, so you can be sure I keep a close eye on their income trends. Although my office works with only a few dozen of America’s 5.91 million businesses, these small business clients are spread across the US and Canada and span several retail and service ca...

Most people believe advertising is scalable. These people are right. And they are wrong. SCALABLE: When a large-scale problem can be solved by the straight-line, linear expansion of a small-scale solution, that solution is scalable.  Example:  You want to put a box of loose snapshots into photo albums. One album holds exactly 50 snapshots. This problem is scalable. Count the sn...