Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

1. Never promise everything you plan to deliver. Leave something to become the delight factor. That unexpected, extra bit you deliver “because we love you” will go a long way toward helping the customer forgive and forget any areas where you may have fallen short. Great ads are written in three steps:  (1.) How to End.  What will be the Last Mental Image your ad presents to your cus...

I am reminded of what Michel Eyquem De Montaigne said with tongue in cheek during the French Renaissance 450 years ago, “My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.” As expected, we received a firestorm of email 2 weeks ago as a result of the Monday Morning Memo of March 2 in which I said I had chosen not to be fearful about the future. It seems that a lot of pe...

8,000 years before Stonehenge and the PyramidsThe rocks of Gobekli Tepe (pronounced Go-beckly Tepp-ay) are a curiosity, and curiosity  rocks. Travel with me to that ancient land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southeastern Turkey. A shepherd wandering on the hillside where grows a solitary Mulberry tree, spies the top of an oblong rock that appears to have been shaped by...

The Beagle Sings with Buble My staff can hardly get any work done. It seems the whole world is calling to ask what I think will happen with our economy. The President of the United States made a primetime speech last week.  The press is an interesting animal. The Chicago Tribune predicted the president’s speech would “live among the annals of man,” while its competitor, the Chicago Times...

of the Wizard of Ads Ten years ago I taught you how to create relational ads that target the right hemisphere of the customer’s brain. Advertisers who learned this technique made a lot of money. Five years ago I taught you that 2008 would be the final year in a series of 40-year cycles and that the position and direction of society’s pendulum meant 2009 would likely be 1929 all over agai...

Magic Words to Penetrate the Filter, Erase Suspicion and Lower the Guard  It was exactly 10 years ago. I was on the telephone with an 87 year-old man I had been hunting for several weeks. I needed this man’s permission to publish a private letter he had written to America’s Chief of Naval Operations back in 1963. The man’s name was William Lederer. “Where you calling from young man?” “Austin,...

America, I think, is not a place. If another people lived here, the geography would be the same but it would not be our nation. America, I think, is not a government. Our pendulum swings from one extreme to the other and our politics are not unique. America, I think, is not an economy. Free markets exist in other nations and we hold no patent on capitalism. America is a people,&nbsp...

How to Advertise in a Recession “If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you.” –  Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature Ah, the power of details. Every ad has style and substance, cheese and meat...

As We Look at the Business Climate of 2009: A new generation of entrepreneurs is emerging from the shadows. None of these is well funded but they are focused, relevant, and in step with the public. Some of them will grow to become business icons by mid-2012. (Three and a half years from now I’ll give you a hyperlink back to this column so that you can see how right I was.) Yes, I know that sounded...

Change is inevitable. Growth is optional. *We’re living in a time of tumultuous change. A misinformed president declares a war. The value of homes – which were never supposed to fall – fell. The SEC can’t make Wall Street color between the lines and 700 billion dollars goes missing. A 50 billion-dollar Ponzi scheme is perpetrated by one of the most respected men on Wall Street. A governor tri...

Turn It Upside Down. Do It Backwards. TRIZ is the Russian acronym for a string of words that mean “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving,” an innovation matrix of the late Genrich Altshuller, a Soviet scientist who proved: 1. there are only about 1,500 basic problems in life and 2. implementing one or more of 40 archetypal answers can solve each of these problems. These “archetypal answers” are...

Tiny, Reliable Indicators are Clockwork Angels A successful consultant uses small indicators to make big decisions. If he explains his methods to data-worshippers, he sounds like an idiot. When it later turns out that he was right, the doubters claim he was lucky, saying, “You can’t possibly extrapolate that outcome from that data.” Consider the following: A large group of 4-year old children are...

Albert Schweitzer.  In background, clockwise from lower left: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ann Radcliffe, Horace Mann, J.M. Barrie, Marian Wright Edelman, Anne Frank Albert Schweitzer was a musician and physician who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. This is the message he left for us when he died: “I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who wil...

First it gets dark, then the air slaps you from every direction and the ocean falls from the sky. Laws of gravity have been repealed. Your thoughts reach up like flowers for sunlight but the sun cannot be found. I am darkness. I am the storm. And the witch rides her broomstick across my sky and is silhouetted against the moon. Swirling at your feet is the storm fear, icy poverty in iron handcuffs...

Run the following ad in any newspaper: 2006 Honda Civic DX 4dr, White, 63,000 miles, $8,100. Call 555-1212 These are the questions you’ll be asked by nearly half your callers: “What year is that Honda Civic? Is it a 2-door or 4-door? What color? How many miles on it? How much are you asking?” I know this because I bought and sold an average of 3 cars a month for the first several years P...

Ready to Play Leapfrog? The coming year will be fun, adventure-filled and profitable for people who have their wits about them. A number of small business owners are positioning themselves to overtake their much larger rivals. Will one of these companies be yours? Not many years ago, General Motors and Circuit City were the dominant players in their categories. Today they’re both on their kne...

Chapter six in John’s story about the life of Jesus tells us how he fed 5,000 people with 5 loaves and 2 small fishes. I have no problem reconciling God and science, so the miracle bit doesn’t stumble me in the least. The thing that fascinates me – the piece I woke up thinking about – is what Jesus said when the meal was over. “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.” Consider.&...

Tom Wanek believes credibility can be “purchased” by risking one or more of six currencies. The more you put at risk, the more believable your message. Currencies that Buy Credibility: 1. Material Wealth Of the six currencies, we see material wealth risked most frequently in money-back guarantees and statements like, “Find a lower price anywhere and we’ll refund the difference plus 10 percent...

Most women can tell at least one funny story about a tragic first date. In most of these stories, a misguided man spends the entire evening saying, “Here's an example of how wonderful I am…” “Let me tell you what I can do…” “…and that's what makes me special.” Although we’re rarely drawn to people who begin all their sentences with “I,” “Me,” and “My,” this first-person perspective remai...

Peter Wenders chooses stories and illustrations for children’s books. It’s 1954, and today is a day like any other; Wenders sits innocently in his office, believing that people are who they claim to be. And he assumes they’ll do what they say they’ll do. But today a man with round glasses and a large nose walks into his office wearing an overcoat and a fedora. The man offers his han...

Humility and Simplicity are the New Frontier Americans have always treasured independence and achievement. We’ve seen ourselves as fighters who stood tall after every victory, chin up, chest out, shoulders back. And to the victor go the spoils, right? Big houses, big cars, lavish vacations; these were the American dream. But we recently learned that America is not an only child. There is no A...

Part Two: If You've Got the Nerve. “The brain has three natural roadblocks that stand in the way of truly innovative thinking: 1.     flawed perception 2.     fear of failure 3.     the inability to persuade others.” – Dr. Gregory Berns, neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and Distinguished Chair of Neuroeconomics at Emory University. Need a fresh perspe...

On January 19, 1998, I wrote a Monday Morning Memo titled,  Creativity is an Inert Gas.  It was published as chapter 89 in  The Wizard of Ads.  These are a few of its paragraphs:      Moments of emotional recovery are the best times to think about problems you have not been able to solve. Great, creative insights follow times of great stress. ...

No, We're Not Talking About Advertising Today I recently had dinner with a young friend who has been married for about a year. When he said that he and his wife were hoping to have a child, I knew it was time for The Talk.  An older friend gave me The Talk twenty-eight years ago when Pennie was pregnant with Rex, our oldest. Since then, I’ve never failed to pass it along when I hear that a ma...

And Tried To Warn Us Three Years Ago I met Greg Farrell in 1999 while on a book tour promoting  Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads.  We shared a bottle of red wine at the Waldorf-Astoria’s  Bull and Bear  pub. Greg and I hit it off and we stayed in touch. I remember making the phone call in 2002. “Greg, I’ve been thinking about what you told me and I want you to write a book...