Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

I recently sent you two memos about our need for positive hope. “Hollywood’s Broken Angel”  was the true story of a woman who desperately needed a friend to encourage her. “Hope and a Future”  explained how easy it is to recharge the emotional batteries of a friend whose light has dimmed. Positive hope crackles with the vibrant energy of life itself. It radiates honesty, openness, forgiv...

Fifty years ago, I was a teenager with an unreliable automobile. But that’s never a problem for an Oklahoma boy who has knowledge, tools, and daylight. My knowledge and tools were always with me, but the daylight disappeared at the worst possible time, no matter how badly I needed it. Cell phones had not yet been invented. When the batteries in my flashlight died, nothing could be seen but the des...

Her name was Lillian Millicent Entwistle, “Peg” to her friends. She was born in 1908. At the age of 19, Peg married Robert Keith, 10 years older than she. Then she discovered that he had been married before and had a 6 year-old son. The couple was soon divorced. “I’ll move to a new place and get a new start,” she thought. “Goodbye, New York. Hello, L.A. I’m going to become an actress.” But hopes a...

I asked Google, “What are thoughts made of?” Google said, “According to current scientific understanding, thoughts are essentially made up of electrical signals generated by the firing of neurons in the brain, which communicate with each other through chemical messengers called neurotransmitters; essentially, a thought is a complex pattern of neural activity within the brain, triggered by sen...

The Wizard Academy tower sits on a plateau 900 feet above the city of Austin. The view from the stardeck is stunning. When you attend our  free public seminar  on the afternoon of March 17, you will be in Tuscan Hall just 500 feet from the tower. If you have some extra time on campus, perhaps Dave Young will be willing to press the button that lifts you from the underground art gallery u...

Your heart tells you who you are. Your heart contains all your beliefs. PowerSelling radiates outward from the pulsating fact that people don’t bond with companies; people bond with people; personalities that share their beliefs. Your company needs a personality if you want your customers to feel a connection to it. Does your company have a personality? Are you communicating that personality in yo...

Curiosity is a beagle running through the forest with its nose to the ground. Curiosity is the cure for boredom. There is no cure for curiosity. Curious, I asked, “How did the Kardashians become famous?” I wish I hadn’t. “Through different ventures, several members of the family have assets of over $1 billion.  Kim Kardashian  became a celebrity in 2007, after selling a  pornographi...

Last week’s Monday Morning Memo  included a photograph of a diamond pendant and the promise of a $1,000 cash prize to whoever could use AI to write the 60-second radio ad that would sell the largest number of that pendant for Valentine’s Day. I was given that photo by a jewelry client. In a moment we will look at the 60-second radio ad I wrote for the client before I issued the AI prompter ch...

The  General Social Survey  has been conducted every second year since 1972 and the most recent one contained both good and bad news about us.   GOOD NEWS:  Our bonds with our families and friends are as strong as ever. BAD NEWS:  The bridges we once extended to strangers have collapsed. Jesus talks about a socially unacceptable “Samaritan” man who sacrificed his time, ene...

John Steinbeck wrote a letter to Carlton Sheffield about a conversation he’d had with his wife, Elaine. “Once I said to her, ‘I don’t want the barbarity of funeral for myself.’ And she said, ‘Don’t be silly. A funeral isn’t for the dead. You’ll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival, maybe. And besides, you won’t even be there.'” – Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p 829 Henry Fonda – one of the...

The future is unknowable. The past is unrecoverable. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. Don’t live your life in an imaginary tomorrow. Find joy while it is still today. If you are depressed, you are living in the past. Escaping the past is easy. The hard part is choosing to start over. Let me give you The Seven Secrets to Crystal Days: Do not let the perfect become the enemy of the...

My observation during the past 40+ years as an ad writer has been that television and radio professionals spend so much time trying to sell television and radio ads, they have no time to learn how to make those ads work. When you know how to make ads work, and can prove it, television and radio are incredibly easy to sell. Instead of asking a salesperson to help you with your ads, let me tell you...

Billy Sunday was born in 1862, the second year of America’s Civil War. He died in 1935, during the Great Depression. Billy was a wildly flamboyant and controversial preacher, but he made an interesting observation: “More men fail through lack of purpose than lack of talent.” We’ll talk more about purpose in just a minute, but first we need to talk about possibilities. I will say it plainly: What y...

One hundred and two years ago, Benito organized a March on Rome with the intention of forcing the king of Italy to yield the government to him. It worked, and Benito was appointed prime minister. Thirty-two-year-old Antonio had a problem with that, and spoke out against Benito. Benito got tired of Antonio’s criticism and had him thrown into prison, where he died 11 years later. But while...

As you round the corner and see your destination, the inconveniences of travel evaporate from your mind. Poof. You are here now, and everything is new again. Your children will carry the joy of this place wherever they go. The adventures we have for them are unimaginable. Leave them with us. We promise they won’t miss you. Everything you see here is real. This is not a Hollywood facade. Now you un...

Calvin is looking up into a star-filled sky  when he says to his tiger friend Hobbes, “If people looked at the stars each night, I bet they’d live a lot differently. When you look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.” My friends are Calvin. I am Hobbes. Last week Hobbes was complaining to Jeffrey Eisenberg about his frustration with a co...

Rock-hard sandstone used to be just plain old sand, the kind you see at the beach. If you lie down on beach sand, you will leave your imprint on it. But if you lie down on sandstone, it will leave its imprint on you. Every person who starts a business hopes to leave their mark in the sand. If that businessperson is disciplined, committed, and consistent, their mark will become sandstone and leave...

I don’t claim to speak for anyone but myself, and maybe it’s a generational thing, but America, to my way of thinking, is less of a place and more of a belief system; a way of looking at the world and the people in it. Americans believe in opportunity and equality. Americans believe, “Treat others as you would like others to treat you.” Americans believe in defending the weak from the strong who w...

PART THREE of SEVEN SECRETS OF SALES ACTIVATION The objective of a Customer Bonding campaign is to make your name the one that people think of first and feel the best about. When you have not successfully bonded with your customer, any attempt at sales activation is simply an experiment in direct marketing. This can certainly work for awhile if you’re good at it, but it will work less and less wel...

Two thousand years ago, Confucius was as old to the people of China as Christopher Columbus is to us today. Five hundred and thirty-two years before the wise men followed their star to Bethlehem, Confucius wrote, “By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by contemplation, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” I agree wi...

Leadership = Energy + Direction Direction = Vision + Courage Therefore, leaders are people of Energy, Vision, and Courage. If you are a person of energy, vision, and courage: (1.) I have noticed that people like you often become surrounded by wanderers who are looking for a leader. It is hard to make money when you are stumbling over puppies who gather at your feet. Resist the temptation to become...

Riding this rocket toward my 67th birthday, memories of my life flicker in the twilight of my mind like shooting stars in the night. My gaze lingers on a long-ago day when I began writing ads for a jeweler. I saw the cover of a book that said, “Follow Your Passion. The Money Will Follow,” and remember thinking, “I would hate to become famous for writing ads for a product I couldn’t care less about...

You are inside your business, looking out. The customer is outside your business, looking in. Your inside-out perspective makes you blind in one eye. Confirmation bias makes you blind in the other eye. You cannot see yourself the way your customer sees you. You imagine how they see you based on your mission statement, your policies and procedures, your employee training, and your good intentions....

Every company has an inside, an outside, and an engine. This is why successful companies have a Mother, a Trumpet, and a CEO. The CEO chooses a destination and builds a machine to take us there. The Mother looks inward to the people in the company. The Trumpet makes beautiful noises for the public to hear. The Mother in your company is the person everyone goes to when they are frightened, angry, o...

The best screenwriters in Hollywood use the principles of David Freeman, as do Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning novelists and all the most effective ad writers, even if they have never heard of the man. I know David well, as he has taught a number of classes at Wizard Academy. His always-and-forever question is this: “What causes this character to think, act, speak, and see the world the way they...