Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

There is a mysterious camera in your brain that will click and capture a poignant scene from time to time. You know what I’m talking about: random moments that you can vividly recall, but you’re not sure why. My awareness of that camera has been heightened and brightened in recent days as I feel a chapter of my life coming to an end and a new chapter about to begin. I’ve sure you have felt what I’...

Every company has  Untold Story  assets that are hiding in plain sight, and every company has  Limiting Factors  that are holding them back. This is how you lift a company to new heights: 1. Uncover the Untold Stories. 2. Devise a plan to overcome the Limiting Factors. Untold Stories and Limiting Factors are not always related. Limiting Factors usually stem from (A.) Company Cu...

How to Shear a Sheep by Barbara Kingsolver Walk to the barn before dawn. Take off your clothes. Cast everything on the ground: your nylon jacket, wool socks and all. Throw away the cutting tools, the shears that bite like teeth at the skin when hooves flail and your elbow comes up hard under a panting throat: no more of that. Sing to them instead. Stand naked in the morning with your entreaty. Ask...

The dew lies softly on the green grass and the sunrise is golden in the early morning sky. I come upon an unspoiled mirror of water. A smooth pebble leaves my fingertips. Yes! I land my pebble perfectly in the bullseye! I watch a concentric circle of ripples reach the edge of the pool and bounce back to the middle where they collide. I wander on. Who knows why we do what we do? I was contemplating...

You look at life from a unique point of view. I do, too. Each of us is trapped in our own perceptual reality. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” You and I may look at the same thing but see it differently. And that little girl over there, yes, that one, sees things differently than either of us. The woman standing next to that little girl has experienced things you and I will never experi...

A weak ad attempts to make too many points, and none of them very powerfully. A weak ad is a bloated little porcupine. A great ad drives a single point through one side of your house and out the other with all the momentum of a freight train. A powerful ad is a charging rhinoceros. The world is covered in porcupine ads. They waddle slowly across your television screen. They crawl out of your radio...

Efficiency experts say you must plan your work and work your plan. And you must have written goals and a budget and a schedule. A detailed plan is the key to success when you are doing something small, but you cannot have a detailed plan when you are doing something big and new and untried. You know a project is small when all the variables can be known in advance. When you do something big and ne...

A germ is a tiny thing, but it can divide and become two germs, then four. Four becomes eight and after only 28 more cycles you find yourself handcuffed in the sad darkness of more than one billion germs. One billion, seventy-three million, seven hundred and forty-one thousand, eight hundred and twenty-four germs, to be exact. And they are all trying to kill you. Unlike the more beautiful forms of...

“The thing about the systematic reduction of a woman down to her parts is that she doesn’t always know it’s happening while it’s going on. Just one day she wakes up and realizes that all she was, was a face, a line of cleavage, two legs, a couple of hands, the swivel of her pelvis, the swell of her breast. We were just the disembodied parts in the display cases. One day we wake up to find out that...

I don’t know if he was was an American Patriot or a British Loyalist. All I know is that he owned a 1726 edition of “The Gentleman Angler,” a leather bound book on fly fishing. That book was 50 years old when Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence. Speaking of Jefferson, that same fly-fisherman bought a first edition of the complete, 4-volume leather bound set of “Memoir, Correspo...

Irwin Michnick,  the Brooklyn-born son of a Jewish furrier from Ukraine, was a jazz musician who wrote radio commercials and advertising jingles for companies like L & M cigarettes and Ken-L Ration dog food. Bob Levenson  was a copywriter at Doyle Dane Bernbach who needed a tune to go with the words, “Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.” Irwin Michnick...

Back in 2012, Ze Frank recorded a video I’ve contemplated for 11 years. “What was it about?” The hero and the clown. “What made it so interesting that you’ve contemplated it for so long?” The hero and the clown are the same person. “You’re going to need to explain that to me.” Here’s the transcript. Read it: “Once I was lucky enough to take a class with the great clown teacher Giovanni Fusetti and...

Ninety percent of motorcycle riders who attempt this corner at 100 mph crash and die, so 9% of riders who attempt it at 10 mph will also crash and die, right? The fact that you answered silently ‘No’ indicates that you instinctively understand the concept of an inflection point. Somewhere between zero and 100 mph is the inflection point where crashes begin to occur, and every mile-per-hour above t...

Poetry is not limited to poets. When you 1. say more 2. in fewer words, you are being poetic. Pithy, insightful statements are poetry. Frederik Pohl was not trying to explain why we increase our purchases of ice cream, alcohol, and entertainment when we are sad, but he summarizes it perfectly in just 20 words: “What I wanted very badly was something to take my mind off all the things that were on...

Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems. “Like a flight simulator, fiction projects us into intense simulations of problems that run parallel to those we face in reality. And like a flight simulator, the main virtue of fiction is that we have a rich experience and don’t die at the end.” That was Jonathan Gottschall. This is  the stunningl...

Beautiful people know they are beautiful. Smart people know they are smart. Rich people know they are rich. You don’t need to tell them. If you speak about surface qualities, your words are superficial. If you speak about inner qualities, your words are deep. Flattery is an attempt at superficial bonding. It is the pickup line of a creep in a bar, hitting on a pretty girl. Creeps talk to women abo...

Portals are openings that lead from one place to another. The best screenwriters, novelists, poets, and ad writers use portals when they want their readers, listeners, and viewers to follow them to a new and different place. Portals can be visual, auditory, or literary. Visual Portals like windows, doors, and tunnels, are used by painters, photographers, and graphic artists. A portal makes a 2-dim...

I bought an old oil painting. It’s not a large painting or an important one, but it came from the private collection of the founder of the Whitney Museum. I bought it because I’ve always admired Cornelius Vanderbilt and his great-grandson, Willie K. Vanderbilt II, and I consider the delightful Gertude Vanderbilt-Whitney, the great-grandaughter of Cornelius, to be the third, truly interesting Vande...

It is easy to attract attention: Predictability is death. Spontaneity is life. Day and night, left and right, timid and bold, young and old, up and down, smile and frown. Start and end. Do it again. Negative and positive, effected and causative, passive and active, repulsive and attractive: Paired opposites are the essence of magnetism. You can attention now attract! But opposites quickly get old....

Most of us cheer for the little dog that doesn’t have a chance. The underdog. We like them because they need us. Underdogs are those little dogs that rise above their circumstances and overcome their disadvantages. It is the underdog we see in our mind when we say, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight that matters; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” Underdogs do the best they can. They...

My novelist friend, Brad Whittington and I share a deep and abiding love for the colorful canvases of Robertson Davies, a Canadian writer who paints pictures in the mind. "Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.... Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if...

When I was growing up, I could never change the opinion of my mother by saying, “But everyone else is doing it.” My mom had the courage and confidence to believe that Everyone Else’s mother was wrong. That’s a high level of courage and confidence. I’m hoping that you have it, too. When I speak to advertising professionals on the subject of advertising, I often find myself having to explain how cer...

Too much to do, too little time. First you are interrupted; then the interruption is interrupted. Does that ever happen to you? Me, too. Surrounded by frantic, breathless, rapid distraction, we have become characters in the video game of Life. The problem is that we are becoming habituated to it. Sensory overload is becoming the new normal. Jeff Sexton, one of my business partners, sent me an arti...

You cut a nick into a stick to mark a moment. Then, at the end of the time being measured, you make another nick. To do a thing at the last possible moment is to do it within that second nick, “in the nick of time.” Millions of us have been using this phrase since the year 1580, but very few know the story behind it. You are now one of the chosen few who possess the arcane knowledge of the nick on...

A friend rotated my brain toward the subject of fame. He aimed my eyes in a new direction when he said, “Do you remember that thing you sent me 10 or 15 years ago?” I gave him the same blank look that you would have given him. He continued, “It was that thing Leonard Pitts wrote about being ‘the Man.'” I recovered it from the Random Quotes database at MondayMorningMemo.com, handed my phone to him...