Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

The comedian Mark Russell said you can judge a generation by its magazines. Life  magazine was first published in 1883. It was followed by People  in 1974, which was followed by Us,  which was followed by Self. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803, just a few weeks before the Louisiana Purchase was announced to the American people by President Thomas Jefferson. Emerson was 23 when J...

I have a friend who is a famous online marketer. Last week he sent me an observation I found interesting. It occurred to me that you might find it interesting as well. “Now that targeting is pretty much dead on Facebook and Instagram, I have a theory that the rules of reach and frequency that have always applied to radio will also apply to social platforms as they shift away from micro-targeting a...

I meet with dozens of people each year who tell me how they grew their companies to an impressive size, but then the growth slowed down. And then it stopped. They can see a lot more business out there; they just can’t figure out how to get it. I used to call this, “hitting the glass ceiling,” but I don’t call it that anymore. Now I say, “You need to add more steps to your ladder.” Here are a few t...

I often share memories of wise old men who gave me good advice. I have a grandchild turning 17 today, so I will play the part of the old man. The person I am advising is you. Always deliver the negative truth while the sale hangs in the balance. If you smile and make the sale and keep quiet until that predictable moment of crisis arrives, the truth will no longer ring true. It will just sound like...

The first half of what I’m about to tell you, I have told you before. But you will understand why I chose to repeat it when you read the second half. – RHW The average person has 5 senses. We can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. We also have the ability to interpret magical little constructs called “words,” sequences of letters that allow us to see things that are not there and have experiences...

Everything I’m about to share with you happened in England and France during the lifetime of Thomas Jefferson, while America still had its  “new baby” smell. The English poet Samuel Taylor  Coleridge  gave us “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in 1798, while Napoleon sailed to Egypt to fight the Battle of the Pyramids and famously discover the Rosetta Stone. Coleridge died of heart f...

You cannot suffer the past or future because they do not exist. What you are suffering is your memory and your imagination. Friend, you are not a good worrier, so you might as well quit. Most of the things you worry about never come to pass. And the majority of those things that do come to pass are inconsequential, unworthy of your worry, or they cannot be changed, no matter how well you worry. Of...

When a thought knocks politely on the door of my mind, I open the door and entertain the thought. But when an unseen thought shines into my mind through a skylight, I am always startled by the mystery of how words-not-my-own came to echo in my empty skull. “What, then, is Love?” Those four words, like the feet of a proud, white goat, prance in the snowy landscape of my mind. “What, then, is Love?”...

We have a need to belong. We want to be seen and heard. We want to be missed when we are not around. We want to have genuine connection. This is the basis of relational ad writing. Never heard of it? That is because most ads are transactional, not relational. In a transactional ad, an air conditioning company might claim to be, “The Honest Air Conditioning Company.” But in a relational ad, the own...

It would appear that journalists can no longer see clearly or talk plainly. They hand you something twisted and bent and assure you that it is straight. Propaganda hangs thick in the air around us and we are weary of it. It has gotten so bad that each of the people I could count on to keep me informed have chosen to cut the umbilical and set themselves free from the pollution of newscasts. I was c...

Do you remember that scene in  Jurassic Park  when the park’s founder revealed that he had extracted the blood of a dinosaur from a mosquito trapped in fossilized tree sap? Forget the blood. Forget the dinosaur. Our interest is in that mosquito trapped in amber. I sometimes think time is the amber in which we mosquitoes are held captive. As Edwin Abbot demonstrated in his breakthrough bo...

There are places in geography. There are places in the heart. There are places in time. Where shall we start? – Indy Beagle Places in Geography: “We have thought how places are able to evoke moods, as color and line in a picture may capture and warp us to a pattern the painter intended.” – John Steinbeck,  Sea of Cortez,  p. 256 Places in the Heart: “God only knows what I’d be without yo...

She is dead now and so is he. He was a friend of mine; lean, rangy, and muscular. She was his mother. “You’re getting fat,” is what she told him, right up until the day he died. Criticism will often cause you to see yourself worse than you are. Did it ever occur to you that criticism – sometimes disguised as unsolicited advice – always springs from an assumption of superior intelligence? When a pe...

William Shakespeare, wearing the mask of an imaginary Prince of Denmark – Hamlet by name – suggested that human knowledge is limited. “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Each of us lives alone in a private, perceptual reality. We can communicate with one another only to the degree that our perceptual realities overlap. There is an objective...

“No one listens to the radio anymore. Radio is dead.” When someone says that to me, I beat them unconscious with a Portable People Meter. “Wait a minute. When you say, ‘beat them unconscious with a Portable People Meter,’ what do you mean by that?” Okay let’s role play this. Say to me, “No one listens to the radio anymore.” “No one listens to the radio anymore.” How well do you understand the scie...

You have tiny openings in your mind. When you look through one of those keyholes, you see a world that could easily become real, but only if you keep looking through that keyhole. Look through that keyhole long enough and it will expand into a window, then grow to become a door of opportunity through which you can pass into an entirely different future. Don’t look where you don’t want to go. If yo...

Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize, said, “Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.” He was speaking, of course, of DNA, the organizing pattern of every type of life on our planet. Your DNA contains the archetypal pattern of your physical body, but the world around you is bigger than...

You see a photo of a man in a blue jacket standing in front of McDonalds. That photo contains at least 3 pieces of information. Information is content. 1. Man 2. Blue Jacket 3. McDonalds Content without context is boring. That photograph was taken to encourage you and elevate your hope. Does that surprise you? It should, because you haven’t been given any context. The man in that photo, Brian Scud...

In 1947 a Norwegian became curious if it was possible for the natives of South America to have drifted on a raft 4,300 miles across the Pacific ocean to populate the islands of Polynesia. The question of who populated Polynesia wasn’t really important to anyone but Thor Heyerdahl. He opened his bestselling book in 1950 with these words, “Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You g...

My friend David Freeman gave me a tool about 20 years ago that I have used to great effect. David teaches screenwriters and novelists how to create fictional characters that draw you toward them like magnets. It is not my objective to teach you David’s technique today, nor will I teach you my simplified version of it. What I hope to do is help you understand that your business has a personality. I...

Do people under 50 know what a yoke is? I honestly don’t know. When I consider that millions of Americans don’t know how to use a rotary telephone, I can easily believe they might be unfamiliar with that wooden implement used to unite a pair of horses or mules or oxen so that they might be able to “pull together” and accomplish things that neither of them could have done alone. You have people in...

I have been in a reflective mood of late. Unplugged from my beloved routine of writing an ocean of ads in the middle of the night, I have been examining the lives of people who sharpened their skills to such fine points that they pierced the skies and found themselves embodied in golden beams of light. A larger-than-life personality saturated in dazzling talent is combustible. Give that person the...

It is naive to believe the world is a meritocracy, but it is defeatist to believe that you can’t win. Six years ago,  notacoward  wrote , “Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to...

Jeffrey Eisenberg and Dewey Jenkins don’t know each other but each of them taught me the importance of removing the friction. Dewey sings it to every person in his company, “Make it easy for customers to do business with us.” And they do. Inventing new ways to “make it easier” is the job of every person in every department. Jeffrey Eisenberg calls this “removing the friction in the buying process”...

When your advertising leans on the weak wooden crutch of discounting, it is only a matter of time before that crutch splinters and slowly pierces your heart. Discounting is a seductive drug like heroin, meth, and fentanyl. It rarely kills you quickly. It prefers to kill you slowly. Yes, I know that is an uncomfortable image, but I need you to understand how dangerous it is to discount. Discounting...