

Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo
Roy H. Williams
Thousands of people are starting their workweeks with smiles of invigoration as they log on to their computers to find their Monday Morning Memo just waiting to be devoured. Straight from the middle-of-the-night keystrokes of Roy H. Williams, the MMMemo is an insightful and provocative series of well-crafted thoughts about the life of business and the business of life.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Aug 28, 2006 • 2min
Avoiding Ad Speak
Contrary to popular belief, Americans don't hate advertising.We just hate ads that sound like ads.Do your ads sound like ads? Are you guilty of Ad-speak?Ad-speak is filled with polished words and filtered phrases that deliver no information and have no relevance. Ambiguous claims give Ad-speak a hollow sound.Do your ads mention your superior service, your friendly staff, or name the number of years you've been in business?Let me know how that works out for you.A meaningless statement remains meaningless no matter how often it's heard. Repetition has become a blunt instrument. Top of Mind Awareness isn't enough anymore. Today's customer expects meaningful information and lots of details.Have you heard of this new thing called the internet? It's giving people new expectations. It's allowing them to become their own expert. Knowledge lies anxious at their fingertips. Gloss over the truth in your advertising and you'll quickly be dismissed as a poser.I apologize if that last paragraph seemed hateful or rude, but the truth is I'm exhausted, bone-weary from wrestling with advertisers who have no real message and want to compensate for it by “targeting the right customer.”Writing good ads is easy when you have something to say. Do you have something to say? Something we don't already know? Something that matters?We're only 8 months into it, but 2006 has already marked itself as a pivotal year, a year we'll never forget. With ever-increasing frequency, we're seeing ad campaigns stumble and fail because they carry no real news to the customer.But advertisers whose ads brim with things that matter are enjoying record growth.Time is currency. Information is power.Don't ask the public to give you their time and and then give them nothing in return. Pay them for their time by giving them relevant information in your ads.The future of your business depends on it.Roy H. Williams

Aug 21, 2006 • 4min
7 Diagnostic Tools for Marketing
Do you feel that something might be wrong with your business but you're not quite sure what it is?Solving the problem is the easy part. The tricky part is getting clarity on exactly what the problem is.Careless doctors treat symptoms. They don't worry about why your head is hurting, they just give you a painkiller. “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.” But good doctors identify the cause of the pain, knowing that if they treat the root, the symptoms will disappear on their own.Short-term marketing is like aspirin. It temporarily takes away the pain without ever addressing the disease. But when the gravity of pain becomes too strong to be overcome with a discount event or a celebrity appearance, the sucking spiral begins. Deeper and tighter, the same scenery showing up again and again, the water grows cold and the darkness sets in. “When will this bad dream end?”Good doctors use diagnostic tools to shine a bright light on your problem. Sure it's embarrassing for a moment. But now you get to breathe again.Here are a few diagnostic tools developed by my partners and me that you can use for free:1. The Advertising Performance Equation will help you identify your problem. Use the equation and have confidence that you've looked in every corner of your business where a solution might be found.2. How to Calculate an Ad Budget is a free download at Wizard AcademyPress.com. It will tell you… well… how to calculate an ad budget.3. How to Measure the Strength of a Brand is another download in the Freebies section at WizardAcademyPress.com4. Is your advertising copy, email message, or website text focused too much on you instead of your customer? Hook into Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg's Customer Focus Calculator and your message will be instantly evaluated… for free.5. Have you been defining your customer too narrowly? Answer the four short questions within the Eisenberg's Complexogram and you'll instantly see how you can subtly change your message to appeal to twice as many people.6. Have you seen the new TV ads where the Macintosh meets the PC? Strong brands have personalities like characters in a movie. Do you want to refine your brand personality? Acadgrad David Freeman is a successful author, a world renowned screenwriting coach and the inventor of Emotioneering. And he's got a free download for you: Refining Your Brand Personality.7. A new tool that will be unveiled at the Wizard Academy reunion in October is the ICUBU Customer Experience Index. Spelled “I see you be you,” the ICUBU index will measure scientifically the tactile, Personal Experience Factors that are being measured unconsciously by your customers every day. Your business will be scored in 100 different touchpoints with each score compared against the national average for your business category. The ICUBU Customer Experience Index will tell you exactly where you excel, where you're falling short, and precisely what to do to raise your score in each touchpoint.The first step in exceeding your customer's expectations is to know those expectations. This is what the ICUBU will tell you. And then it will tell you exactly where and how you're falling short.Business Diagnostics lift you up to the next level; the one that has been just beyond your grasp.Are you ready to go that high?Let us know if you need a hand.Roy H. Williams

Aug 14, 2006 • 4min
Pioneers and Settlers
I was planning to write When Marketing is a Mirage, but that's going to have to wait. Because today I'm hearing the voice of John Steinbeck as he mumbles to his poodle, Charley, and ambles toward his pickup truck:“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.”Have you ever felt that Steinbeckian restlessness?John's jitters are fully upon me today. I can think of several reasons why this might be, but none of them really matter. I only know that I am to go, and I shall do my best to take you with me. Are you willing to come?In one of his Paradigm videos, Joel Barker explains how Pioneers differ from Settlers. According to Joel, Pioneers are they who plunge ahead into uncharted wilderness and blaze trails for the more cautious settlers to follow. Wisely waiting in the security of town, the Settlers watch from a distance until the destination is reached, the enemies are subdued, and the beckoning trail sparkles westward in the morning light. The sensible Settlers raise cupped hands to their mouths and call down the trail, “Is it safe out there?” And the Pioneers call back, “Yes! It's wonderful. Come on.”Then the Settlers in their canvas-covered wagons follow the trail cut through the wilderness by the Pioneers.There is much wisdom in being a Settler. A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether.Let me tell you plainly, friend, the money is in being a Settler.But the fun is in being a Pioneer.Mark Fox tells our students at Wizard Academy, “If you have a truly new idea and people don't hate it, they weren't listening.” Mark prepares us to be successful Pioneers, going to new places in the mind, discovering new answers, finding new ways to communicate all the things in life worth saying.Takagi Masakatsu is a young Pioneer in Kyoto, Japan. Richard Minsky is a Pioneer from upstate New York. Pioneer Scott McCloud is wandering the highways of America in the footsteps of Steinbeck and Charley. I'm hoping to bring them all to the Academy. They'll tell us what they've seen in their parts of the wilderness, and we'll share what we've seen in ours.I hope you can be here. We'll want to hear what's happening in your part of the woods, as well.Who is coming… when they'll arrive… and what they are coming to do. Just keep an eye on WizardAcademy.org.Roy H. Williams

Aug 7, 2006 • 4min
That Glowing Bridge to the Unknown
To go from one state of consciousness to another…To move from an old opinion to a new…To travel from ignorance to insightand darkness to light…requires a portal.A portal is a transitionary device of sight or sound that functions as a sort of third gravitating body between the this and the that, pulling us toward itself, allowing us to bridge into the unknown from the known.Persuasion, in all its forms, requires a portal. If your goal is to educate, motivate, evangelize or sell, you're going to need a portal to succeed. Without a series of known portals at your disposal, you're just talking to yourself in the dark. A portal allows you to connect to the need being felt in the heart of your student, your employee, your convert, your customer.Portals can be colors, shapes, symbols, rituals, words, or music. The Cognoscenti will remember that I talk about portals for about 10 short minutes during the 3-day experience known as The Magical Worlds Communications Workshop.Portals in literature include the red pill that takes Neo into the Matrix, the tornado that takes Dorothy into the Land of Oz, the wardrobe that takes the children into Narnia, and the rabbit hole that takes us into Wonderland.We look deeply into these and dozens of other portals – visual, literary, and musical portals – during one of the 90-minute sessions in the newest class at Wizard Academy, Advanced Thought Particles and Third Gravitating Bodies.I'll also be sharing this 90-minute session with all our guests at the Academy Reunion on October 21. It's an avalanche of knowledge, illustrated by examples in sight and sound certain to make you dizzy.The red pill is strong, the tornado is terrifying, the wardrobe is inexplicable and the rabbit hole is deep.And there are monsters in the deep. Are you sure you're ready for Wonderland?Advanced Thought Particles and Third Gravitating Bodies picks up exactly where the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop leaves off. Both classes are selling out faster than ever.The Wizard Academy Campus has nine buildings scattered across its Campus in various stages of construction and seven of them will be complete by the time you get here in October for the Wizard Academy reunion.The bad news is that seating limitations allow us to accept only the first 200 registrants.You snooze, you lose. You study long, you study wrong. The early bird gets the worm. Doubtless there are other platitudes and euphemisms that would be appropriate, but I'm sure you get the idea.For more information, visit WizardAcademy.org.We'll see you when you get here.Roy H. Williams

Jul 31, 2006 • 4min
String Theology
Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are both accepted as scientific fact even though they’re mutually exclusive. Albert Einstein spent the second half of his life searching for a unifying truth that would reconcile the two.Einstein was searching for String Theory. It not only reconciles General Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, but it reconciles Science and the Bible as well.Listen to a group of physicists talk about String Theory and it will slowly dawn on you that they’re explaining the entire universe as nothing but the quivering, dancing echo of the voice of God. “Let there be light.”String Theory describes energy and matter as being composed of tiny, wiggling strands of energy that look like strings. And the pitch of a string’s vibration determines the nature of its effect.In essence, String Theory describes space and time, matter and energy, gravity and light, indeed all of God’s creation… as music.Strings of gravity vibrate at a different frequency than strings of light. The strings that make up protons vibrate at a different pitch than the strings that make up electrons. Strings composing the strong nuclear force vibrate differently than the strings composing the weak nuclear force. And electromagnetism vibrates at its own unique frequency as well.We’ve known for a while that matter is made of protons, neutrons and electrons – which are themselves made of quarks. Now String Theory comes along to whisper in our ear that quarks are made of vibrating, wiggling strings of energy that are unimaginably small. According to Brian Greene, a Columbia University physicist educated at Harvard and Oxford, “If an atom were enlarged to the size of the solar system, a string would only be as large as a tree.”Greene goes on to say, “Just as different vibrational patterns or frequencies of a single cello string create what we hear as different musical notes, the different way that strings vibrate give particles their unique properties, such as mass and charge. For example, the only difference between the particles making up you and me – and the particles that transmit gravity and the other forces – is the way these tiny strings vibrate. Composed of an enormous number of these oscillating strings, the universe can be thought of as a grand, cosmic symphony.”According to String Theory, what appears to be empty space is actually a tumultuous ocean of strings vibrating at the precise frequencies that create the 4 dimensions you and I call height, width, depth and time. We live in these 4 dimensions and know them well. But String Theory (M-Theory) describes an additional 7 dimensions beyond our ability to perceive.Suddenly the idea of an invisible world isn’t quite so hard to believe.Physicist David Gross of the University of California in Santa Barbara says, “It’s as if we’ve stumbled in the dark into a house which we thought was a 2-bedroom apartment and now we’re discovering there’s a 19-room mansion at least, and maybe it’s got a thousand rooms and we’re just beginning our journey.”So what can String Theory teach us about art and advertising, journalism and truth, persuasion and seduction?Come to the inaugural session of Wizard Academy’s new class on Advanced Thought Particles and Third Gravitating Bodies and we’ll do our best to open your eyes to a whole new way of looking at communication.Read the details at WizardAcademy.org.Roy H. Williams

Jul 24, 2006 • 4min
Doing My Happy Dance
Last Thursday the Wall Street Journal published a story about a new book written by two of our faculty members, hinting strongly that if the biggest advertising agencies on Madison Avenue would just buy a copy and read it, they would find the answers to all the questions that have eluded them. That story was a very big deal. On Friday the Wall Street Journal bestseller list revealed Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg's Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? to be the top-ranked business book in America.Six years ago, Jeff and Bryan were regular folks. Struggling. Hopeful. Doing the best they could with limited resources.Sound familiar?Jeff came alone his first visit to Austin because the brothers had only enough money for one plane ticket. He sat in the small meeting room of our old facility with a couple dozen other people who had come for a free public seminar. Jeff and I spoke briefly that day. He shared his dream and I encouraged him. A couple of months later, Jeff was back for a 3-day class and he brought his younger brother, Bryan. They obviously grasped the essence of what Wizard Academy was teaching, so when they asked permission to expand my work and apply it to the Internet, I said, “Delighted to see you do it.” They smiled. I smiled. And in that moment I was sure of something. “Someday your company is going to be a whole lot bigger than mine,” I said. They had no company at the time.When Pennie and I launched Wizard Academy Press, the Eisenbrothers turned in a manuscript called Persuasive Online Copywriting. We published it, sold some copies on Amazon.com and kept our fingers crossed that a real publisher might take an interest and give the book brick-and-mortar distribution. It never happened.When I flew to New York to visit them in their cramped little office in the basement of an old house in Brooklyn, they showed me their fancy new coffee maker. They were really proud of it. I sipped a cup and talked about how all their hard work would someday pay off. Soon their strange, new methods began paying big dividends for clients and thousands of people began to lean forward with their hands cupped behind their ears. The Wizards of Web curriculum was born when the brothers presented us with a fabulous syllabus for a course on Internet marketing.Their second Wizard Academy Press book, Call to Action, made the bestseller lists a year ago in spite of the fact that it also had no brick-and-mortar distribution. Finally, the brick-and-mortar publishers began to take an interest. Last week's trumpeting of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, published by Thomas Nelson, couldn't possibly have made Wizard Academy more proud. Today Jeff and Bryan's client list includes many of the largest companies in the world.Craig Arthur, Chris Maddock, Michele Miller, Mike Dandridge, David Freeman, Dave Young, Holly Buchanan, Juan Tornoe, Thomas Tucker, Mark Fox, Walter Koschnitzke, Lisa Davis, Steve Rae, Jeff Sexton, Sonja Howle, Steve Clark, Michael Drew, Chuck McKay, Peter Nevland, Ron Love, Paul Finley, Clay Campbell, Sean McNally, Tim Miles, Greg Farrell and others have graduated from Wizard Academy, pursued independent research in an area of interest, created something for Wizard Academy Press, then gone on to become extremely successful.Wizard Academy throws gas on the fire and Wizard Academy Press fans the flames, but you've to provide the spark.Have you got a little fire that burns within you? If so, you, too may someday own a fancy coffee maker.And then we'll have a cup.Roy H. Williams

Jul 17, 2006 • 3min
How Often Should I Change My Ads?
About 15 years ago I concluded that a medium-impact broadcast ad should be replaced only after the typical listener has heard it at least 12 times, and a low-impact ad should be replaced after achieving a frequency of 20. I arrived at these conclusions by carefully monitoring the results of radio campaigns of clients around the country.But the times have changed, and so have you and I. It appears that the media filters we carry in our heads are like computers: they've been forced to get faster in order to keep up with the demands our high-speed society puts on them.My most current research clearly indicates that today's moderate-impact broadcast ad begins to show diminishing returns after achieving a frequency of only 8 to 10. Let a listener hear the same ad 12 times or more and you'll see clearly diminished effectiveness after achieving a frequency of 8 to 10. It appears that our brains have learned to more quickly recognize what we've heard before, and to subconsciously tune it out.Dang. This is means we've got to write 20 to 50 percent more ads in every 52-week campaign if we're going to keep our message at maximum effectiveness.One thing that hasn't changed, though, is that we still have to hear the new ad 2 or 3 times before it begins to affect us, even when we're already familiar with the advertiser in question and have a positive opinion of them. What this means is that the first week of every new series of ads will continue to yield softer results than you can expect to see in weeks two and three.Neurologically, all of this happens in the phonological loop, one of the 3 functions of Working Memory just forward of Heschl's Gyrus and Broca's area in the dorsolateral prefrontal association area of the left hemisphere of your brain. Broca's area is also known as Brodmann's area 44. And just interior to it is the Nucleus Accumbens, the pleasure center of the brain.Okay, I'll admit it… I said all that just to impress you. I wonder why I do that. Do you figure perhaps I'm insecure about my lack of education? Or is it just that I like to show off? I should probably give that some thought.Oh well. That's pretty much all I've got to say today.Oh! One last thing: Wizard Academy is offering a Free, Public-Sampler Seminar on Saturday afternoon, August 19 in palatial Tuscan Hall. I'll be delivering a tantalizing series of multimedia previews and teasers about each of the new, upcoming courses at Wizard Academy. It's going to be lots of fun. We won't be starting until 2 in the afternoon, so you'll have plenty of time to fly into Austin on Saturday morning from wherever you happen to be. We'll keep going until probably 9 or 10 that night because we want you to see how magical the Wizard Academy campus becomes after dark. But don't worry, we're going to provide a nice evening meal for you. No charge. We know you'll be back to take some classes later. We just take the cost of it from our ad budget.And that, my friend, is what you call “transparency.”I hope you approve.Roy H. Williams

Jul 10, 2006 • 4min
Persona Based Selling
We buy what we buy to remind ourselves and tell the world around us who we are.“Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being.” – Bill Bernbach, legendary ad writer“I am irresistible, I say, as I put on my designer fragrance. I am a merchant banker, I say, as I climb out of my BMW. I am a juvenile lout, I say, as I down a glass of extra strong lager. I am handsome, I say, as I don my Levi’s jeans.” – John Kay, columnist for The Financial Times“In the factory we make cosmetics. In the store we sell hope.” – Charles Revson, maker of RevlonYou’ve heard it said throughout your life: “Birds of a feather flock together.” So what is the feather, what are the characteristics, of the birds who flock to your brand, your product, your company? Beyond the fact that they all chose to do business with you, what do these birds have in common? Answer that question and you’ll discover the truth of your brand and earn yourself a copy Bible, a dialogue Bible and a comprehensive brand manual.Do you want true brand power? Then you must quit writing to a particular type of customer and begin writing to specific, representative customers. In their current bestseller, Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg call this technique “writing to personas.” (Yes, the boys did it again. Their new book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? leaped onto the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists as quickly as did Call to Action, their 2005 bestseller.)According to the brothers, correctly identifying your customer personas is the foundation of Persuasion Architecture™ and the beginning of Six Sigma optimization in marketing.Sharing a glimpse of what they plan to teach at the Wizard Academy Fundraiser this November, Jeff Eisenberg says,“Anything that results in a lower level of customer satisfaction or a lost customer is a defect, a flaw in the sales process. When a person doesn’t convert, your marketing has a service defect and your processes don’t deliver on your promise to customers or to prospects. At least, that’s how you’d look at things if you applied the Six Sigma discipline to your marketing. Think of these defects as holes in a leaky bucket.When you use Persuasion Architecture™ in your marketing, you are predicting your customer’s behavior based on assumptions you’ve made about their motivation. If he or she does what you modeled, then you understood the customer’s needs. But if what they do differs from what you planned, there can be only two possible reasons:(1.) You correctly understood their motivations but your execution was bad. Correct your execution.(2.) If these changes in execution fail to improve results, then your original assumptions were probably wrong. Correct your assumptions.Either way, using Persuasion Architecture™ personas in your marketing is the best way to bring accountability to your ad budget.”Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg were among the earliest graduates of Wizard Academy and have since become important faculty members. Will you be here in November when they whisper unpublished secrets to their Wizard Academy family?Yes, we are taking over the world.Roy H. Williams

Jul 3, 2006 • 3min
Where Do They Bury the Rascals?
Colorful and interesting people surround you in life, but in a graveyard, everyone becomes boring: “John Smith. Devoted Husband, Loving Father.”That's it? That's a life remembered?Where do they bury the interesting people? Where do they bury the reckless daredevils and tender poets and seductive femmes fatale? Where can I find their stories?When Dad died a year ago, my friend Woody Justice cancelled a world of commitments to be at his funeral. Woody knew my father well. Thinking back about him, the Woodster smiled that day and said, “He was a colorful old son-of-a-bitch, wasn't he?” I looked up and smiled and nodded. “You know what I think he'd like?” Woody chuckled, “the biggest grave marker in the cemetery. And on it the words, ‘Larger Than Life, Even in Death.'”That was Dad. Always the center of attention. The kind of guy who would pay any price for any thing, as long as you could draw a big enough crowd to watch him buy it.A few months ago I shared with you the note Dad scribbled when he knew he was dying. “All the little things in life add up to your life. If you don't get it right then nothing else matters. It gets lonely in the promised land by yourself.”But no one should be remembered only for their dying regrets. So after a year of pondering, my sons and I sat down on Father's Day, 2006, to decide what to carve on my father's oversized tombstone. They give you the first 30 characters for free.We went over the limit by 1,037.We feel sure that my Dad will be the center of attention in that cemetery for as long as those carved letters remain on the face of that granite. People will shout and say, “Come and see what I've found!” They'll have their pictures taken next to him. They'll go home and tell other people about him. They'll read his stone and smile and say, “He was certainly a colorful old son-of-a-bitch, wasn't he?”And that's exactly how Dad would have wanted it.But I'm not talking just about my father today. I'm talking about you, and I'm talking about making money.Do you have a business you believe in? Would you like to see that business grow?You need to do for your business what my sons and I did for my father. You need to embrace the amazing wisdom of Bill Bernbach, the legendary ad writer who said, “I've got a great gimmick. Let's tell the truth.”Telling the truth is powerful. Telling the truth is scary. Telling the truth will always cause complaints.Don't let it bother you. Small people complain. Let them stand in the dark of your shadow.Come visit us when you can.Your colorful friend,Roy H. Williams III

Jun 26, 2006 • 5min
The Image and The Actual
Each letter of the alphabet represents a phoneme, a tiny sound that joins with other tiny sounds to make the more complex sounds we call words.Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.Numerals are images of amounts. But the amounts they represent are real.You see a person when you look in the mirror that no one sees but you. Other people see a person when they look at you, but you're not that person, either.Dulcinea was the image of feminine perfection in the mind of Don Quixote. In reality, she was a common, earthy village girl with nothing special about her.“I think the idealization of women is indigenous to men. There are various ways of idealizing women, especially sexually, based in almost every case on their inaccessibility. When a woman functions as an unobtainable love object, then she takes on a mythical quality. You can see this principle functioning as a sales device in advertising and in places like Playboy magazine. Almost every movie you see has this quality, because you can't embrace the image on the screen. Thousands of novels use this principle, because you can't embrace a printed image on a page.” – James Dickey, Self Interviews, p. 153Bible illustrator Barry Moser says, “I think when people have illustrated the Bible, most of them have been devout Christians. Because they're devout Christians they can't separate themselves from the work. They get mired in piety, so they can't see the darkness. They only see the light of salvation. But if you don't have the darkness to contrast with the light, then what are you offering but cotton candy for Sunday school children?”Moser goes on to say, “The truth I see is that the Bible is populated with people like you and me. People who are flawed and imperfect. People who have crooked teeth and bad skin. Who have stinky breath and dirty feet. Who don't always know the difference between right and wrong. Who are self-serving and capricious. People caught in the conflict and dichotomy between good and evil, between the sacred and the profane, between beauty and ugliness, and between the bright and the moronic. People who hope – and many believe – that they are made in the very image of God.”Do we tend to believe in a god whose attitude reflects our own? In her book Bird by Bird Anne Lamott speaks of a friend named Tom who said, “You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”By the way, a single copy of the deluxe edition of the Bible illustrated by Barry Moser sells for about $30,000. Want to take a look at it?In 1971, Marshall McLuhan spoke about the gap between image and reality in politics. “Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.”Whether it's women… or politicians… or God… we tend to believe in images that aren't entirely accurate.But McLuhan wasn't the first to note the fact that we Americans tend to vote for a romanticized reflection of ourselves. H. L. Mencken, writing for the Baltimore Evening Sun on July 26, 1920: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”H.L. Mencken, a journalist, wrote those words 85 years and 11 months ago.Human beings are creators, flinging powerful images into the minds of their fellow men. And all of these images are built of tiny particles of thought.Knowing how to sculpt vivid mental images from particles of thought is a very powerful thing. In reality, it's the basis of every form of art, including sculpture, photography, architecture, speechwriting, advertising, poetry, website design and all the visual arts, including filmmaking.Wizard Academy is a school of these communication arts. Advanced Thought Particles is a new class at Wizard Academy, the long-awaited sequel to the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop. Check it out at WizardAcademy.org.Roy H. Williams


