Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

I recently asked a group of 14 men to share a snapshot from their photo albums of random memory, a vivid image, unfaded, a moment inexplicable, captured forever by a long-ago click of that camera in the brain. Here’s what they handed me on scraps of paper:  “ Trish’s laugh  as she walked out of the room on the day we met.” Click. “How  my knee  bled when I crossed the line.” Cl...

Elizabeth was a young Quaker girl who fell happily in love and got married in 1929. “Morgan Vining, my husband, swept my little boat out of the shallows into the sunlit depths of life’s stream and we had almost five years together before, in a single moment, he was gone.” Car wrecks happen quickly. Elizabeth Vining was adrift. A line from the Breton Fisherman's Prayer said it best, “Oh Lord, your...

for Realtors, Used Cars and Free Puppies Real estate is a business involving mountains of money. It’s also a business in crisis. Put these together and it means ka- ching  if you know how to make the phone ring for realtors. You ought not be surprised that I know how to make phones ring.  What should surprise you is that I’m willing to tell you… for free. Here’s how to Make Magic in real...

A Monday Morning Memo of the Wizard of Ads It’s like you’ve asked him to defend his religion; the business owner who believes in growing his businesses through  exceptional service  delivered by  extraordinary people  gets testy when you ask him to name a business that has successfully employed this strategy. It’s like trying to convince a believer there is no God. I’ve encount...

A brief summary of this episodeA Post American World? Really? August 25, 2008 Listen Our American men dropped the baton in the 4×100 meter relay. It was embarrassing. Unthinkable. A few minutes later our American women did precisely the same thing. The commentators were brutal, but accurate: “You have to look at the new leadership at  USA Track and Field  and wonder if it’s been a vacuum...

Advertising salespeople are highly paid because rejection hurts. They told me to rub Zig Ziglar on it, but the sting and the ache stayed with me. I was 20 years old. The smiley seminar speaker said, “Look in the mirror each morning and repeat these affirmations.” Sorry, I’ve already got a religion and it makes me very uncomfortable with self-worship. I know there’s a God and it isn’t me. My manage...

A Monday Morning Memo for the Clients and Friends of Roy H. Williams You walk into a room, empty but for a table carved from crystal. Girdling the table are 11 other persons whose occupations are similar to yours. You place ten thousand dollars on the table, your gift to the group. Each of the other 11 does the same.  But this is a magic table.  You don’t walk away with your own ten...

and the Smell of Fresh Paint Commercially speaking, where are things happening in your town?  Move to where the action is.  Follow Best Buy, Home Depot, Starbucks and the other Big Boys who have already done the research. Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. Media costs are escalating and the public is hiding from ads. These are just two of the reasons why a great location is more importa...

It's as easy as A.B.C. You’re attracted to  art 1.  when it stands for something you believe in, 2.  when it shows you a reflection of your own core values, or 3.  gives you a glimpse of your inner face. You're drawn to a  brand  for precisely the same reasons. A  cultural icon  is a contemporary archetype, mass-appeal public art, the symbol of a worldview....

Mom’s off-white Formica table with wobbly metal legs had a charred circle on top where I once set a pan that was way too hot. Mom couldn’t afford a tablecloth to cover it, but whenever she suspected a person might have nowhere to go for Thanksgiving dinner, she’d always invite them to our house and have another hungry mouth to feed. Thanksgiving, for me, meant a house jammed with people I’d n...

(Uh oh, am I about to light an email fire I can't put out?) Traditional wisdom says, “Advertise in the newspaper. Everyone reads the newspaper. There are lots of radio stations but only one newspaper.” The problem with traditional wisdom is that it’s usually more tradition than wisdom. Take a look at the chart at the top of this page and you’ll see that the total, combined ad revenues for (1....

The Monday Morning Memo for July 7, 2008 I’ve known Richie Starkey since I was five. He turns 68 today. Richie said the only thing he wanted for his birthday was for you to pause today at noon, wherever you are in the world, make a peace sign with your fingers and say with a smile, “Peace and Love.” Will you do it? Yes, it’s ridiculous. But before you summarily dismiss his request, let me tell you...

Beauty is impossibly thin. The thinnest human hair is half a million angstroms thick. Typing paper is a million angstroms. Yet the layer of quicksilver that turns plate glass into a mirror is only 700 angstroms thick. It would take 714 such layers to equal the thickness of a hair, yet it’s this impossibly thin layer that reflects a woman’s beauty. Beauty may only be skin deep, but the reflection o...

“The fundamental shortcoming of most mission statements is that everyone expects them to be highfalutin and all-encompassing. The result is a long, boring, commonplace and pointless joke. Companies are all writing the same mediocre stuff.” – Guy Kawasaki Most organizations try to define themselves by telling us what they believe in, what they stand for. But self-definition isn’t believable un...

The Wizard's Laws of the Universe, Lesson One My friend Kary Mullis once said, “Claims made by scientists… can be separated from the scientists who make them. It isn’t important to know who Isaac Newton was. He discovered that force is equal to mass times acceleration. He was an antisocial, crazy bastard who wanted to burn down his parents’ house. But force is still equal to mass times acceleratio...

The Medium is Not the Message Marshall McLuhan’s famous line, “The medium is the message,” is at best a Japanese koan (ko-ahn.) You know, “What is the sound of one hand clapping,” and all that? I’m sure I’ll get a thousand ranting emails about this, but I’ve always felt koans to be a silly attempt to sound profound. McLuhan’s koan is at the top of my list. It was originally published in his 1964 b...

MAY 14, 1990 – The cover of  Sports Illustrated  showed a pistol being shoved into the back of a high school kid. Those were the days when an alarming trend swept this land of purple mountains, majesties, above the fruited plains. Kids were killing for tennis shoes. Remember? JUNE, 2008 – Retail in America is changing. We could blame it on the current recession, but the tr...

Time travel is fun. Want to learn to do it? Follow me. The year is 1608. England buzzes with William Shakespeare. Hamlet, Macbeth,  and  King Lear  are performed to rave reviews while 44 year-old William grieves the death of his mother. A team of 47 translators works on an English translation of the Bible. Not one of them suspects their translation will remain in use 400 y...

When Samuel Langhorne Clemens began to write, he adopted the pen name  Mark Twain,  a common shout among riverboat pilots on the Mississippi river. When Sholem Rabinovich began to write, he adopted the pen name  Sholem Aleichem,  a common Yiddish greeting whose most accurate translation would be, “Peace be unto ya’ll” or “Peace be unto youse.” Mark Twain gave us Huckleberry Fin...

American education teaches a subject vertically, narrow and deep. And the deeper one plunges into the subject, the narrower it gets.  Specialization. 1a. Liberal Arts 1b. Literature 1c. Spanish Literature 1d. Spanish Literature of 1492-1681 1e. Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) 1f.  Don Quixote de La Mancha  by Cervantes (1605) 1g. Symbolism in  Don Quixote And then you write you...

I’ve never seen a business fail due to reaching the wrong people. But if you listen to advertising sales reps, “reaching the right people” will solve all your problems. And guess who has  exactly  the right people for you? The conversation usually goes something like this: the sales rep says, “Tell me, who is your customer?” “Blah, blah, blah.” “Really? That’s exactly who we reach! What...

Here's the Pattern: When times are tough and customers are scarce, business owners buckle down and try to become even better at the things they do well. They do this because they trust the Guide pattern, “This has always worked in the past.” Perhaps you're doing the same. But following the Guide pattern in a declining market won’t take you where want to go, since  staying who you are &nb...

Half your brain sees a hierarchy. Deductive reasoning is a product of this. Vertical. Sequential. Objective. Scientific. Hard facts. Details. “Be for what is.” The other half sees connectedness. Intuition is a direct result. Horizontal. Chaotic. Subjective. Relevant. Relationships. Big picture. “Recognize the pattern.” Intuition is a form of pattern recognition. Wordlessly it whispers, “...

Ten years ago, Eric Rhoads asked me to appear on the cover of  Radio Ink  in a suit of armor. Since Eric is one of my closest friends and a major supporter of Wizard Academy, I agreed to do it for him. Since 1998, my Wizard of Ads column has appeared in every issue of  Radio Ink,  more than 200 in all. The columns I write for Eric are never released to another outlet. Today I’m...

Socrates was right, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Most of us have moments when we ask, “Am I happy? Is this what I want to do? Am I making a difference? Would I be missed if I were gone?” Introspection is like medicine. It’s beneficial in small doses but an overdose will leave you self-absorbed and depressed. My policy to write about you, not me. My goal is to give you inter...